Katyń Massacre

I

Introduction

Katyń Massacre, the mass killing of Polish officers captured by the Red Army during its invasion of Poland in September 1939. For decades the atrocity was a cause of tension between Poland and the USSR—the Soviet government only acknowledged responsibility 50 years after the event.

II

The Massacre

On April 13, 1943, Radio Berlin announced that graves containing the bodies of Polish officers had been discovered in the Katyń forest near Smolensk, in the German-occupied part of the USSR. The Nazis had disseminated this information in order to weaken British and US co-operation with the USSR. An international team assembled by the Germans revealed that the graves contained the bodies of 4,142 men and 1 woman, all of whom had been shot in the back of the head. It was possible to positively identify 2,815 of the victims. These had been Polish officers interned by the Red Army in September 1939 and held in camps at Kozelsk, near Smolensk, Starobelsk, near Kharkov, and Ostashkov, in the Kalinin (now Tver) region of Russia. During April and May 1940 the NKVD, the Soviet secret police (see KGB), was given responsibility for the camps and it was then that inmates were put onto trains and transported to Gnezdovo. They were then murdered and the bodies dumped in graves, which had been prepared in the Katyń forest.

III

The International Context

The German revelations in April 1943 were of critical importance because of the British and US dependence on the Soviet contribution to fighting Nazi Germany (see World War II). In June 1941 the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, had made a decision to support the Soviet Union. This led the Polish government-in-exile, of which Władysław Sikorski was the prime minister, to sign an agreement for military co-operation with the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. By 1943 relations between the Polish and Soviet authorities were strained. The Soviet government refused to make a commitment to restore Poland to its pre-September 1939 borders. This raised questions about Soviet objectives in relation to Poland. At the same time Stalin had doubts about Polish units, which were being raised in the Soviet Union. When these units left for Iran, where they came under British command, between 6,000 and 10,000 men were not accounted for. The Katyń revelations indicated their fate and that of others who were still not accounted for. The Soviet authorities strenuously denied responsibility for the Katyń massacre. Forensic evidence suggested that all had been killed in the spring of 1940 when the area was under Soviet control, whereas the Soviet authorities argued that the killings had occurred in the autumn of 1941, when Smolensk was occupied by German troops.

Churchill tried to minimize the impact of the German revelations. In public he stated that Germany had been responsible for the massacre, while in private he spoke of his conviction that the Soviet Union was responsible for the crime. The need to retain Soviet goodwill determined British handling of the revelations, then and subsequently. The Polish government sought a diplomatic solution by asking the International Red Cross to investigate. Stalin chose to interpret this as a hostile act and broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile. In July 1944, when the Red Army entered ethnically Polish territories, the Soviet authorities established a puppet Polish provisional government in the city of Lublin.

IV

International Implications

During the war both the US and British authorities chose not to raise the issue of the Katyń graves with the Soviet Union. The end of the war in Europe and Japanese surrender freed both governments from the need to avoid controversial issues. During the Nuremberg trials the Katyń massacres became a bone of contention between the Soviet and the US and British prosecutors. Britain, the US, and France tried unsuccessfully to prosecute the Soviet authorities. The Katyń graves continued to be a subject of investigations, inquiries, and publications, fuelled to some extent by the Cold War. In 1952 a US Congressional Investigation concluded that the Soviet authorities had been responsible for the Katyń killings.