Katyń massacre

Katyń massacre. During the Nazi–Soviet partition of Poland in 1939, more than 180,000 Polish prisoners-of-war fell into Red Army hands. Ordinary soldiers were sent to labour camps, officers were separated and sent to three special camps: Kozelsk (near Smolensk), Starobelsk (near Kharkov), and Ostashkov (Kalinin district). They numbered 15,000 in all and included a large number of reservists, as well as customs officers, police, prison guards, and military police. All three camps were under NKVD control and all prisoners were subjected to detailed interrogations and Soviet propaganda.

In the course of April and early May 1940 convoys of prisoners under NKVD guard left the three camps for unknown destinations. Daily lists of those who were to travel were telephoned through from the NKVD in Moscow. Rumours had previously circulated that the prisoners were going to be sent home. Those leaving Kozelsk travelled through Smolensk and were unloaded at a small town called Gniezdovo.

Once Polish–Soviet diplomatic relations were re-established in July 1941 (see Poland, 2(e)), the Polish authorities immediately began to search for officers to staff the new Polish units being formed on Soviet soil (see Anders's army). Captain Józef Czapski, a former inmate at Starobelsk, was charged with the task of locating them. Despite the personal intervention of the Polish leader, General Sikorski, the Soviet authorities denied any knowledge of the missing officers, claiming that they had been released under the general amnesty extended to Poles.

In April 1943 the Germans released the news that they had discovered a number of mass graves in the Katyń forest near Smolensk, which they believed to be those of Polish officers murdered by the NKVD. The victims had all had their hands wired behind their backs and had been shot in the back of the head. It was later confirmed that the 4,400 bodies were those of prisoners from the Kozelsk camp. The discovery of the graves led to dramatic repercussions in the diplomatic field. When the Polish government in London approached the International Red Cross in Geneva with the suggestion that an international commission examine the graves (a move earlier suggested by the Germans) the Soviet government broke off diplomatic relations with the Poles. An international team of experts found no documents on the bodies dated later than April 1940—which pointed to Soviet guilt for the crime. Moscow subsequently organized its own commission of enquiry. The Soviet line was that following the German invasion of the USSR (see BARBAROSSA) the Polish officers had fallen into the hands of the Germans, who had massacred them in the late summer of 1941.

In July 1946 those conducting the Nuremberg trials pointedly refused to apportion blame for the Katyń massacre, despite Soviet attempts to portray it as yet one more Nazi atrocity. In the west and in Poland there was a widespread belief that the NKVD had committed the crime. In April 1990, on the 50th anniversary of the date it was committed, an official Soviet announcement confirmed that the NKVD had been responsible. The prisoners from the three camps had been handed over to NKVD boards in Smolensk, Kharkov, and Kalinin for execution. In the summer of 1990 two further mass graves were found at Kharkov and Miednoye (near Kalinin). Just over two years later, in October 1992, the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, handed over documents to the Polish authorities which proved beyond doubt that the crime had been carried out under the direct orders of Stalin and the Soviet Politburo. See also atrocities and Khatin.

Keith Sword

Bibliography

Czapski, J. , The Inhuman Land (London, 1951).
Zawodny, J. K. , Death in the Forest: the Story of the Katyn Forest Massacre (London, 1971).