“Katyn” –or- Historic Truths

Stephan Klaschka, ,

(written in June 2004, copyrights apply)

The one „truth“

  • Napoleon is cited with the words: ”The winner writes the history.“

Looking back, this appears to be of timeless truth, as history books portrait the view on “the one truth” from the winning party’s perspective.

Hardly ever will you find there the negative impact or collateral damage, the brutality and even crimes committed by the victorious party – but more instead the malicious acts –true or not- of the overcome former enemy.

But then, even a different perspective, belief, or interpretation of events easily and often leads to different “truths” – that may never be heard again and are at risk to slip back into the muddy waters of history forgotten forever…

Katyn – an example

“Katyn” is named after Katyn Forest, located 12 miles west of Smolensk, Russia.

  • Soviet troops murdered an estimated 10,000 Polish prisoners (Polish sources speak of even 27,000 Polish soldiers killed) at Katyn in the spring of 1940, including most of the Polish officer corps. The Soviets blamed the massacre on the Germans ‑ until liberating glasnost opened the official Russian records in 1990.

The victims were Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians captured by the Red Army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. During April-May 1940, the Polish prisoners were moved from their internment camps and taken to three execution sites. The place most identified with the Soviet atrocity is Katyn Forest.

I remember coming home from school in the 1980’s just having learned about Katyn at the German-American school that I attended at that time ‑ and accused my parents of partaking or supporting Hitler’s national socialistic Germany in the German massacre. (Note that my parents were kids themselves during the Second World War (WWII) and their parents, my grandparents, were Germans but not allowed to vote in Germany as they were living outside the German Reich until their forced migration after the war.) When my parents, now becoming angry themselves, negated the accusations and emphasizing the true perpetration of the offence by the Russians, I quickly found myself caught in a conflict of whom to believe, my parents or the schoolbooks.

Today, records of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) unveil what has happened and reflect a corrected American version of the events:

Just two days after the Russian invasion in Poland began on 17 September 1940, the NKVD (Soviet secret police) took custody of Polish prisoners from the Army and began organizing a network of reception centers and transfer camps and arranging rail transport to the western USSR. The Poles were placed in “special” (concentration) camps, where, from October to February, they were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political agitation. The camps were at Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov, all three located on the grounds of former Orthodox monasteries converted into prisons.

The Poles were encouraged to believe they would be released, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to determine who would live and who would die. On 5 March 1940, Stalin signed their death warrant ‑ an NKVD order condemning 21,857 prisoners to “the supreme penalty: shooting.” They had been condemned as “hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority.”

  • The Katyn Forest massacre was a criminal act of historic proportions and enduring political implications.

In April 1943 German occupation forces discovered several mass graves and announced this publicly in a propaganda-driven global press conference. Despite the overwhelming evidence of Soviet responsibility, Moscow blamed the Germans, and for the rest of the war, Washington and London officially accepted the Soviet countercharge.

When the Polish government-in-exile in London demanded an international inquiry, Stalin used this as a pretext to break relations. The Western allies objected but eventually acquiesced. Soon thereafter, the Soviet dictator assembled a group of Polish Communists that returned to Poland with the Red Army in 1944 and formed the nucleus of the postwar government. Stalin’s experience with the Katyn affair may have convinced him that the West, grateful for the Red Army’s contribution to the Allied military effort, would find it hard to confront him over Poland after the war.

In 1944, President Roosevelt assigned Capt. George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyn. Earle did so, using contacts in Bulgaria and Romania. He too concluded that the Soviet Union was guilty. FDR rejected Earle’s conclusion, saying that he was convinced of Nazi Germany’s responsibility. The report was suppressed. When Earle requested permission to publish his findings, the President gave him a written order to desist. Earle–who had been a Roosevelt family friend–spent the rest of the war in American Samoa.

  • Nowadays the CIA evaluates the events as one of the earliest -and certainly, the most infamous- mass shootings of prisoners of war during World War II [that] did not occur in the heat of battle but was a cold-blooded act of political murder.

Sources

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