Behind the scenes of the Katyń Truth

Following the discovery of the graves of Polish officers murdered in Katyń, Polish Communists residing in the USSR launched a propaganda campaign to undermine the credibility of the evidence compiled by the International Red Cross commission. It was continued after the war in the People's Republic of Poland. An outline of the campaign has been drawn up at the Ministry of Justice.

                  From the very beginning of the formation of power structures, the communists made attempts to hold accountable and punish anyone who took part in the Katyń exhumations as witnesses and experts or had any reliable information on the subject. The role of the Ministry of Justice of the People's Republic of Poland in these activities tends to be neglected or underestimated. As a matter of fact, the Ministry of Justice, headed (since 1945) by Henryk Świątkowski - a pre-war lawyer, a member of the Polish Parliament of the Second Republic, a supporter of the communist movement and, from 1948, a member of the Politburo - took a great interest in the Katyń case. In the spring of 1945, Świątkowski already offered to prosecutor Jan Sawicki to organise a show trial in Poland to blame the Germans for the crime. The Ministry closely followed developments in other countries and did not limit itself to activities within the territory of Poland. In November 1947, Stefan Kurowski, prosecutor of the Supreme National Tribunal, met François Naville, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Geneva, who had participated in the Katyń exhumation, and tried to influence him to change his opinion of 1943. Above all, he took advantage of Naville's friendly interest in the research being carried out in Kraków and offered to forward to him the opinion of Professor Jan Olbrycht, who supported the findings of the Soviet Burdenka commission. Kurowski was ready to go much further. In the meantime, it is important to gather additional information about Naville as a person, in particular - whether he is a man driven purely by the ambition of a scientist or whether he is driven by motivations of a financial nature. (Naville told me a great deal about the plight of professors in Switzerland and the miserable pension they have to live on after leaving the department)', he wrote in a memo. We do not know the final outcome of Kurowski's actions, but Prof Naville never negated the 1943 findings.

Meanwhile, the country's authorities fought against manifestations of independent discussion on Katyń using all possible methods. Private comments by citizens that did not conform to the official line of propaganda were investigated and severely punished. For example, in February 1951, the Military Court in Rzeszów convicted Mikołaj Marczyk, a worker and member of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP), who took part in the workers' delegation to Katyń in 1943. Providing any information on this subject was sanctioned either by military courts or by the Special Commission for Combating Malpractice and Economic Damage. The commission's rulings have repeated the phrase: he spread false information about the Katyń massacre, which could cause significant damage to the interests of the Polish State. And while the Commission most often sentenced people to several months in a forced labour camp under Article 22 of the Small Penal Code, anyone released after serving their sentence faced difficulties in getting a job, promotion or obtaining housing. The commission cooperated closely with the security organs, and the latter acted under a special instruction of the Ministry of Public Security of 12 March 1952, which ordered the disclosure of individuals and groups spreading defamatory stories about Katyń.

Resist the Americans

The repressions were most intense in the early 1950s, between 1951 and 1953. This was due to the activities of the committee set up on 18 September 1951 by the House of Representatives of the US Congress to investigate the circumstances of the Katyń crime. The news of the results of her work, which reached Poland by radio, generated great interest and lively discussions. The communist regime decided to fight them.

We know little about the behind-the-scenes preparations for the propaganda campaign, but the reaction of the authorities was very swift. The US Congressional Committee met for the first time on 11 October 1951, and by early December Minister Świątkowski had already drawn up a comprehensive action plan. He presented it in a secret memo to Jakub Berman, a member of the PZPR Central Committee Politburo overseeing the apparatus of violence. He claimed that it was relatively easy to undermine the testimony of the witnesses accusing the Soviet side, while it was much more difficult to fight the results of the expert examination, which is why it was necessary to focus primarily on the comprehensive German work, Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn, published in 1943, and to undermine the credibility of the evidence presented by the forensic specialists. To this end, he suggested using the opinions of Polish and foreign doctors who revoked their testimony, such as Professor František Hájek of Charles University in Prague - or who openly criticised the 1943 findings, such as the Kraków-based scholar Professor Jan Olbrycht. Finally, he suggested that attention should be paid to the further fate of the German scholars who took part in the exhumations and that Olbrycht's findings should be published in specialist journals abroad. He also declared his readiness to draw up an implementation personnel and technical plan.

It is unclear under what procedure the decision was made, but Prof Olbrycht's expert opinion was published in Belgium in 1953, and a second memo on the subject was soon presented to Berman. This time, a detailed plan was drawn up during a conference between Henryk Świątkowski, Leon Chajn and Stanisław Skrzeszewski. The first of these, also a pre-war lawyer, was an undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Justice until 1949, but, as he mentioned to Teresa Torańska, he left to join the Supreme Chamber of Control because he did not agree with the policy on law at the time. The second one was undersecretary of state at the time and later head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The note they drafted is clearly a specification of the 'technical performance' of the theses developed in the first one.

Above all, they suggested discrediting the theses contained in the German publication with Prof Olbrycht's research. The next stages would involve the collection of material that compromises the scientific and personal qualifications of the paper's authors, as well as materials that directly or indirectly confirm the Nazi provocation. A group made up of several lawyers, publicists, members of the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, headed by one person and working under the direct political supervision of a person from the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), was supposed to draw up the conclusions. Members of the team were to be authorised to use material from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Justice and Public Security, as well as the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes.

AN EDITOR KNOWN TO NO ONE

The government's declaration on the activities of the US Congressional Commission, published in the 'Trybuna Ludu' on 1 March 1952, was the slogan for the propaganda campaign. Its formation was called an atrocious provocation against the Soviet Union, supported in a servile manner by the reactionary 'London' clique of Polish emigration. The 'Trybuna Ludu' was followed by other press titles. The book by Bolesław Wójcicki, 'The Truth about Katyń', the only book on the subject officially published in People's Poland, was the culmination of these activities.

The author was so little known that his name was considered a pseudonym, but Bolesław Wójcicki did indeed exist. He was born in 1908 in Łódź. He graduated in French language and pedagogy from the University of Warsaw, then studied at the French Institute in Warsaw. He worked as a French teacher and, from 1937, as a clerk for a private company. In September 1939, he escaped to Lviv, where he taught Russian for several months. After the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, he returned to Warsaw and made a living by giving private lessons. He was wounded in the Warsaw Uprising and subsequently went into hiding in Suchedniów near Kielce. In February 1945, he returned to the capital city and began to work for 'Życie Warszawy'. He did not join the party until 1948. He must have met the expectations of the authorities, since he was very quickly promoted to deputy editor-in-chief. In the January of 1951, by a decision of the Politburo, he was appointed editor-in-chief of 'Życie Warszawy'. At this time, he was working on a book entitled 'The Truth about Katyń', which must have pleased his superiors, who reassigned him to 'Trybuna Ludu', and awarded him the Medal of the 10th Anniversary of the People's Republic of Poland (1955) for his merits in exposing imperialist machinations and popularising the peaceful foreign policy of the camp of peacemakers headed by the Soviet Union among the broadest spectrum of readers. Years later, his fellow editor Grzegorz Jaszuński, recalling those days, said that all the rubbish at the time was written by Bolesław Wójcicki. After his book on Katyń, reissued in 1953 with references to the work of the Madden Commission, Wójcicki worked for 'Trybuna Ludu' until 1974, then retired and died in 1991 in Warsaw.

THE FIRST BOLSHEVIK BOOK ON KATYŃ

'The Truth about Katyń' was published in May 1952 by the Publishing and Educational Cooperative 'Czytelnik' in the volume of 10,000 copies. The title was not new - it has been copied from the first coherent publication on Katyń produced by the Union of Polish Patriots in Moscow in 1944. One year later, this brochure was reproduced by the provincial information and propaganda offices, among them Kraków and Poznań. It is not known whether Wójcicki worked on the book alone or whether someone helped him. Given the short time to prepare the publication and the volume of sources to use, he probably had the help from the authorities.

The book met all the requirements and suggestions presented by Świątkowski to Berman. It included an analysis of the German policy during the war (one chapter had the eloquent title 'Provocation as a system'), showed the terror against prisoners of war and the propaganda use of Katyń by the Germans. A separate chapter was dedicated to the Polish government-in-exile ('The Polish Resistance Supports Goebbels'); it called the severance of Poland's diplomatic relations with the USSR an unprecedented provocation in relations between the Allies and a move entirely consistent with Beck's pro-Hitler policy of national treason.

He described the Katyń Massacre in the Light of Documents, published in London, as a vile book, filled with hatred of the Soviet Union, filhy and furiously
anti-Soviet. In the flurry of his own propaganda, he got so far ahead of himself that, quoting the content of the plaque placed by the Soviets in Katyń, he added: A Red Army soldier avenged the deaths of Polish officers and soldiers murdered by the Nazi genocidal criminals.

Whilst he wrote about the 'fabrication of evidence' by the Germans, he gave the names of people who were considered murdered and who were found after the war (e.g. Stanisław Piniński or Stanisław Kołodziejczyk), and discussed in detail the issue of the German ammunition used by the perpetrators. In line with the current line of propaganda of the socialist camp, the last chapter of the book entitled 'Goebbels plus Ku-Klux-Klan' accused the members of the Madden Commission of having pro-fascist orientation and presented its activities as a provocation targeted at the USSR.

Even a very superficial reading of the book shows that it was written according to a script outlined in the Ministry of Justice. This is evidenced by the use of the Nuremberg trial minutes as implied in Świątkowski's note, as well as Goebbels' diary, Frank's diaries, Himmler's archive and Naujocks' testimony. The book was given a layout with propaganda overtones. Photographs of 'hooded fascists' from the Ku-Klux-Klan were placed next to photographs of a masked witness testifying before the Madden Commission, and the murder of prisoners of war and civilians by German units was juxtaposed with scenes of the Korean War. The book focused on Katyń to a very limited extent, with much more space devoted to the German propaganda, the attitude of the Americans or the attempts made by Polish émigrés to publicise the Katyń crime.

As early as the beginning of June 1952, the 'work' of Wójcicki was presented to Józef Mackiewicz, described in it as a reactionary journalist known for his pro-Hitler sympathies, who immediately offered the editor-in-chief of the London News, Mieczysław Grydzewski, to write a review. I am ready to bring and show this book to you at any time if you want to see it. However, I cannot let it go because it is currently the only copy on this side of the Iron Curtain. I managed to get it using a very special route. Besides, the book is crossed out and covered with my own notes, and I need it at the moment for further study', he wrote to Grydzewski a few days later. The review had the eloquent title 'The first Bolshevik book on Katyn' and summed up Wójcicki's work unambiguously: Although the book accuses the Germans of the physical acts of murder in Katyń, it seems to imply that the Americans were in fact the spiritual inspirers of this murder.