Katyn Forest Massacre

KATYN FOREST MASSACRE

Katyn Forest, a wooded area near the village of Gneizdovo outside the Russian city of Smolensk, was the scene in early 1940 of a wholesale killing by the Soviet NKVD (Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del), or secret police, of 4,143 Polish servicemen, mostly Polish Army officers. These victims, who had been incarcerated in the Kozielsk Soviet concentration camp, constituted only part of the genocide perpetrated against Poles by the NKVD in 1939 and 1940.

The Poles fell as POWs into Soviet hands just after the Soviet Red Army occupied the eastern half of Poland under the terms of two notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop pacts: the Nazi-Soviet agreements signed between the USSR and Nazi Germany in August and September 1939. The crime, committed on Stalin's personal orders at the opening of World War II, is often referred to as the Katyn Massacre or the Katyn Forest Massacre.

The incident was not spoken of for sixty years. Even such Western leaders as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill placed little or no credence in reports of the crime at the time, despite the fact that informed Poles had provided proof. For his part, Churchill urged exiled Polish officials such as Vladislav Sikorski to keep the incident quiet lest the news upset the East-West alliance of the Soviet and Western powers fighting Nazi Germany.

These first deaths came after one of the most notorious of several repressions by the Stalin regime against Poles. In 1939, notes Robert Conquest, besides the 440,000 Polish civilians sent to Soviet concentration camps as a result of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland beginning in September, the Soviets took 200,000 POWs during the Red Army's campaign in Poland. Most of these officers and enlisted men of the Polish Army wound up in camps at Kozielsk, Starobelsk, and Ostachkov. Of these, only forty-eight were ever seen alive again. Later Stalin promised Polish officials that the Soviet government would "look into" the disappearance of these men. But Soviet officials refused to discuss the matter whenever it was again raised.

With the coming of World War II, that is, the war between Germany and the USSR after June 21, 1941, the German Army swept into eastern Poland. In 1943 the Germans, as occupiers of Poland, came across the Polish corpses at Katyn. They duly publicized their grim discovery to a skeptical world press, blamed the Soviets for the terror, and shared their find with a neutral European medical commission based in Switzerland. The members of this commission were convinced that the mass graves were the result of Soviet genocide, but they voiced their findings discreetly, sometimes refusing even to give an opinion.

In 1944, when the Red Army retook the Katyn area from the Wehrmacht, Soviet forces exhumed the Polish dead. Again they blamed the Nazis. Many people throughout the world supported the Soviet line.

It was not until near the end of communist rule in Russia in 1989 with the unfurling of the new policy of glasnost (openness) in the USSR, that partial admission of the crime was acknowledged in Russia and elsewhere. Later, after the demise of communist rule in Russia, two further sites were found where Poles, including Jews, were executed. The number of victims of the killings at all three sites totaled 25,700.

See also: soviet-polish war; stalin, josef vissarionovich; world war ii

bibliography

Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press.

Crozier, Brian. (1999). The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing.

Crozier, Brian. (2000). "Remembering Katyn." <http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest/002/crozier.html>.

Albert L. Weeks