Massacre of Katyń

The massacre of Katyń indicates the murder of several thousands of Polish - primarily of the personalities, the officers but also of the students (reserve officers), of the doctors and the members of the Polish elites considered hostile to the communist ideology - by the political police of the Soviet Union (NKVD) in spring 1940 in a Russian forest near to Smolensk. By extension, the expression recovers the whole of the executions of members of the Polish elite (of 15 with: 22,000 people) perpetrated in 1940 in various places of the west of the USSR. It was one of the crimes most used in the ideological war between the Nazi Germany and communist Russia, this one being supported by the Anglo-Saxons; the polemic was finally briefly started again by the the United States during the Guerre of Korea.

Origins

Following the last division of its territory in 1795 between the Prussia, the Austria and the Russia, the Poland did not have an existence as a State any more during 125 years. The Poles underwent the domination of their three authoritative neighbors. Mow of Russian oppression, they revolted in 1830 and 1863, raising a strong emotion in the European countries, but were pitilessly repressed. Whereas in 1919 Poland found its independence, Lénine, in the search of one direct access to the Germany pre-revolutionist, launched at the summer 1920 the Red Army to the conquest with Warsaw. The keen resistance of the Poles as well as the errors of the Soviets - those of Stalin (which started critical sharp in its opposition on behalf of Trotski and to the Marshal Toukhatchevski) - ruined this attempt. Peace was signed with the Traité of Riga in 1921. Stalin did not forget this affront that it made pay with all his authors and conceived a violent hatred of the Polish elites of it. Russia and the Germany, which did not accept really this Polish rebirth, agreed on a new division of its territory. It was one of the secret clauses of the Pacte germano-Soviet of August 23rd, 1939. The Poland is invaded by the German armies on September 1st, 1939 and the Red Army on September 17th, 1939. To justify this invasion, the Soviets pretexted the need for protection of the Belorusse populations and Ukrainian of the Polish territories concerned.

Programming

As of on September 19th, 1939, the police chief of the people to the Interior matters and the Safety of the State of the USSR, Lavrenti Beria, ordered with NKVD to create a “ Directorate for the Prisoners of Guerre ”, in order to deal with the Polish prisoners. The NKVD organized a network of detention centres and camps of transfer, then transferred the prisoners in the west from the USSR.

Approximately: 250000 Polish soldiers, of which: 10000 officers, were made prisoners by the Soviets. Half of them - privates - was slackened by the Red Army, the others being entrusted to the NKVD, which slackened quickly: 42400 soldiers for the majority of Ukrainian nationality or Belorusse and delivered some to the Germans: 43000 others, originating in Western Poland. At November 19th, 1939, the NKVD did not hold any more but approximately: 40000 prisoners of war of which about: 8500 officers and warrant officers. Many was employed as forced workers. In same time, from the occupied Polish zones, in order to eliminate “ the social classes hostiles ” with Communism, of the hundreds of thousands of Pole were off-set in various camps and Gulag S.

At the end of February 1940: 6192 police officers and assimilated and: 8375 officers remained always interned. These prisoners were carefully sorted. The officers, among whom many students (because the system of Conscription Polish systematically incorporated them in the reserve army), were gathered in both Concentration camps of Kozielsk and Starobielsk, the executives of the police force, the gendarmerie and scouting in that of Ostachkov. These three camps had also received members of the Polish civil elite (doctors, lawyers, professors…), in the same way moreover as seven other minor camps of the Western USSR. The distribution of the men was the following one: : 5000 in Kozielsk: 6570 in Ostachkov, and: 4000 in Starobielsk. The Christmas Day 1939, the monks of all the confessions were withdrawn from it. It is supposed that they were eliminated. All these men underwent long interrogations and a permanent internal espionage intended to locate those which would be inclined to serve Communism. The failure was total.

March 5th, 1940, the members of the Politburo - Stalin, Molotov, Vorochilov and Beria - signed the order of execution of the “ nationalists and against-révolutionnaires ” Polish, prepared by this last. Kaganovitch and Kalinine absent with the meeting did not initial the document but decided favorably.

Execution

The methods of execution already had for a long time been tested on the Soviet citizens. Condemned were transported by train to the station nearest then in the truck to the place to the execution. Daily transport was of less than one hundred people. Each individual was bound separately, then placed on the edge of the pit where one drew a ball in the nape of the neck to him. The executions were usually carried out by means of Walther guns provided by Moscow, model of German manufacture, like the balls, usually exported for the period 1920 - 1926, in particular in Estonia whose military arsenals had just been seized by the Soviets.

Between the 3 April and on May 13rd, 1940: 4404 prisoners were transported of Kozielsk, in the forest of Katyń, close to Smolensk, located at approximately 50 kilometers of the Belorusse border where they were cut down of a ball in the nape of the neck and were buried in common graves. : 3896 prisoners of Starobielsk were assassinated in the buildings of the NKVD with Kharkov and them: 6287 held men with Ostaszków killed in Kalinine (today Tver). The massacres thus concerned during these only three months more: 14400 Poles. It is necessary to add to that close to: 7800 members of resistance networks and various civils servant, not mobilized in the army, which, with the title of the decision of March 5th, 1940, were shot by the OSO (the special Council of the Police force); one counts some: 3400 in Ukraine and: 3880 in Bielorussia.

Discovered and investigations

In August 1941, therefore a few weeks only after the beginning of the invasion of the USSR by Wehrmacht, the German troops discovered in the forest of Katyn a first mass grave which contained the remainders of several hundreds of Polish officers. " Signal" , the illustrated weekly magazine of Wehrmacht published photographs showing the exhumation of the bodies: the uniforms were recognizable and the corpses were in a state of decomposition rather little avancée.
It goes without saying that the whole of the press Nazi largely exploited, at that time, the macabre discovered one.

However, it was only one preamble there. Indeed, fine 1942, of the Polish railwaymen, who drove the German trains, paid to have heard Belorusse peasants speech of Polish soldiers buried in the forest of Katyń. Thus other mass graves, much more important than that of summer 1941 were discovered.

At spring 1943, the German soldiers put at the day more: 4500 bodies of Polish officers piled up in several pits. Radio-Berlin made the discovery public on April 13rd, 1943 by showing the Soviets of the fixed price. Two days afterwards, those denied their responsibility on the waves by retorting that the Nazis had made these atrocities at the time of their advances during the year 1941.

The leaders of Reich convened an international commission of medical investigation, made up of experts coming for the majority from country under German control. They in addition asked the Croix-Rouge to send independently of the experts to Katyń, asks supported by the general Sikorski, chief of the Polish government in exile in London which had not ceased requiring Soviets of the explanations on the fate of the missing officers. Taking pretext of this position that they denounced like “a Hitler-Sikorski collusion”, the Soviets broke their relations with the Poles and launched a campaign to lead the Anglo-Saxons to recognize the government pro-Soviet of Wanda Wasilewska.

The International commission published its conclusions at the end of May: all the data collected, as well the physical traces as testimonys, contributed to place the massacre in spring 1940. The Germans made them White paper of it. The technical commission of the Red Cross ends to the same dating, but decided not to publish the conclusions of its investigation “in order not to make the play of the German propaganda” which used the discovery to insert a corner between Anglo-Saxons and Soviets, the latter instrumentalisant it to focus hatred on the “Germano-fascists”. Polish members of this commission, whose some resistant to the German occupant, however sent a report/ratio to the British government which was classified top secret and made public only in 1989, in Warsaw.

The Sikorski general, accompanied members by his government, disappeared on July 4th, 1943 on an aircraft which was crushed on the takeoff of Gibraltar. That the cause, object of polemic, were accidental or not, this disappearance was for the Anglo-Saxons a relief because the intransigence of the position held by the Polish general started to create frictions between Alliés.

Soviet commission and Anglo-Saxon notes

In 1944, having begun again the zone of Katyń, the Soviets exhumed the bodies. They reflect in place a “special subcommittee for the checking and the investigation into the execution by the invaders Nazis of the Polish officers prisoner of war in the wood of Katyń”. Being based on the fact that these officers had been killed using German balls, the Burdenko commission concluded with the assassination by the Nazis.

The same year, the president of the the United States, Roosevelt missionna the captain George Earle, her special correspondent in the Balkans, in order to compile information on this file. Earle used its contacts in Bulgaria and Romania and concludes that the culprit was the Soviet Union. The president rejected his conclusions and ordered the destruction of the report/ratio. When Earle insisted to publish it, the president him written intima the order not to do it, then assigned it to the islands Samoa. Roosevelt declared solemnly that this business anything else represented “only propaganda, a plot of the Germans” and that it “was convinced that they are not the Russians who did it”.

On their side, the British profited from the report/ratio of their ambassador near the Poles, O' Malley, which arrived at the same conclusion. What did not modify of anything the strategic line adopted by the government in order to maintain positive ratios with their ally: to make in kind “that the history records the incident of the forest of Katyń like an attempt of no importance of the Germans to delay their defeat”.

At the end of the hostilities, the Soviets declared area closed the area of Katyń, refused any investigation by international organizations and, ensured of the passive support (and, sometimes even, credit) of the Westerners, organized, using the local Communist parties, according to the tested technique of the amalgam (those which question the Soviet thesis are pro-Nazis), an international campaign to discredit the people being familiar with the case by direct experiment and to drive out of their post of teacher the members of the International commission of 1943 (Pr Naville with Geneva and Palmieri with Naples.

Polemic in Nuremberg

Presented by the Soviet charge, the Burdenko report/ratio, official document, fulfilled the requirements of article 21 of the statutes to be allowed like document with convincing value (URSS-54). From where mention of the massacre in the list of the facts likely to be allotted to the defendants, constituting the bill of indictment, the three other parts (the United States, the United Kingdom, France), although having protested, not having the legal means to be opposed to it. The German White paper of 1943 was, him, allowed with the file in accordance with article 19 i.e., like had underlined it the president of the court, equipped with a possible convincing value, granted after examination (but the course of the debates returned this valorization without object).

One of the Soviet prosecutors, Nicolaï Zoria, was found died in its bed after it expressed its opposition to handling in progress. The task of the charge was then to establish a bond between the reproached acts and the defendants. But, with the audience, the Soviet prosecutor appeared unable to name the person in charge of the execution of the massacre, as well as the culprit supposed among the defendants.

The Soviets tried despite everything to make pass in force their point of view, going until denouncing an inadequacy of the statutes of the court. This “last-ditch struggle” underlined more still the bankruptcy of the charge to charge the defendants, which materialized by the absence of mention of the massacre in the 22 verdicts constituting the judgment.

As regards the interpretation of the treatment given to the massacre by the Military Tribunal International TMI, Annette Wieviorka analyzes the absence of mention of Katyń in the judgment like “the tacit consent of the Soviet culpability”. She thus reformulates the assertion of Alexandra Kwiatkowska-Viatteau according to whom in this lawsuit “there were only two alleged murderers responsible for the crime or the USSR.

Maintained confusion

During the cold war, the USSR cultivated ambiguity by proposing the village martyr of Khatyn, in Bielorussia. In this village, 149 people were burned alives by the Nazis, on March 22nd, 1943. According to Benjamin B. Fischer of the the CIA and Norman Davies, Khatyn was selected in 1969 to build there a memorial because of the resemblance to the name of Katyn. The film of Elem Klimov of 1985, Requiem for a massacre ( Go and see ), maintained confusion. The will of Soviet to maintain confusion between the massacres Katyn and Khatyn during several tens of years was, before the consents, an indirect but solid index of the culpability of Soviet in the massacre of Katyn.

Soviet consents

The contents of the debates of Nuremberg, just like that of German White paper and the Burdenko report/ratio, not having reached the general public, the German culpability remained in the memory (collective), like a fact of public notoriety. The military public prosecutor Alexandre Savenkov enclosed ten years of instruction of the file by a withdrawal of case, qualifying the massacre of “military crime” for the assassination of: 14540 people - neither Génocide, nor Crime against humanity - what granted to him the benefit of the regulation (50 years) and that consequently there were more place to discuss on the legal level. In answer, the Polish Institut of the national Memory decided to engage its own investigation and the Polish Senate voted for a text requesting from the Russians of déclassifier the files concerned and to qualify Katyń of genocide.

In March 2005, eurodéputé of the Civic platform and member of the EPP asked Josep Borrell, then president of the the European Parliament, that the assembly observe one minute of silence in the honor of the victims. The request was refused to him with the reason which “it is not possible to devote minutes of silence to all the tragic events of the past, for which requests flow. ”

In April 2006, a complaint was deposited in front of the European Cour of the Human rights against Russia in order to make recognize the crime of Katyń like crime against humanity.

Katyń in arts

The massacre of Katyń is also the principal spring of the novel of Robert Harris, Enigma published in 1995.

In September 2007, the film Katyń of Andrzej Wajda, whose scenario was written on the basis of novel of Andrzej Mularczyk Postmortem - the novel of Katyń was projected with the public. The father of the realizer, Jacub Wajda, captain with the 72e regiment of infantry, was one of the assassinated officers with Katyn.

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