Germany announced on April 13, 1943, that it had found mass graves of Polish officers in Katyń, near Smoleńsk. From the outset, evidence pointed to the Soviet Union, but Joseph Stalin denied responsibility and the wider world remained largely silent.
April 13 is observed in Poland as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Katyń Massacre. The date was established by parliament in 2007 to honor about 22,000 officers of the Polish army and other representatives of the Polish state, who were murdered in NKVD-organized executions.
Among the prisoners were many reserve officers called up at the outbreak of war, including doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, writers, journalists, political activists and civil servants. Clergy of several faiths were also held in the camps.
After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, the Red Army captured about 250,000 Polish soldiers and officers. Most rank-and-file soldiers were released, but officers were sent to camps in Starobelsk and Kozelsk, while police, border guards and other service personnel were held in Ostashkov.
The truth about the killings emerged by chance after the German-Soviet war began and the burial sites — including Katyń near Smoleńsk, Piatykhatky near Kharkiv and Mednoye near Tver — fell under Wehrmacht control. Poles taken to the area for forced labor learned of the graves in 1942. German authorities began exhumations in early 1943 and Radio Berlin announced the discovery on April 13.
Aware of the propaganda value of the find, Germany invited representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Polish Red Cross to Katyń. A group of forensic and criminology experts arrived on April 28.
Based on examinations of the remains, the experts concluded the killings had taken place in 1940, when Katyń was under Soviet, not German, control. The dating was also supported by analysis of young pine trees planted to conceal the crime. The dead showed signs of close-range shots to the back of the head.
The Kremlin denied responsibility, while Stalin used the request by the government of General Władysław Sikorski for an international inquiry as a pretext to break diplomatic relations.
Stalin, who with other senior Soviet leaders had signed the March 1940 decision to kill the Polish prisoners, continued to lie about their fate. Asked in 1941 about missing Polish officers, he said: “I've already given all the orders to release them. I don't know where they are. Maybe they fled to Manchuria”.
After the graves were uncovered, the Soviet Union sought to blame Germany. Following the Red Army’s recapture of the area, the Burdenko Commission declared in early 1944 that German troops had carried out the killings in September 1941. Moscow later tried to include Katyń in the Nuremberg proceedings, but withdrew when the commission’s report proved riddled with inconsistencies.
The outside world said little. Winston Churchill urged Sikorski to show restraint because, as he put it, “there are things that are better not to talk about in public”. Only after the war, when the anti-Hitler coalition no longer had to be preserved, did the position of the United States and Britain begin to change.
In communist Poland, information about Katyń was censored and the official version blamed Germany.
The Soviet authorities admitted responsibility only near the end of the USSR’s existence. On April 13, 1990, they described Katyń as “one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism”. In October 1992, key documents on the massacre were handed over to Polish President Lech Wałęsa.
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Source: PAP