Germans playing with the Polish tragedy

Obviously, the severance of relations between Moscow and the Polish government-in-exile is the most important topic on the international scene. The opinion of all [...] is unanimous: [...] this rupture signifies a total victory for German propaganda and in particular - my own success. There is admiration for the exceptional cleverness and dexterity with which we were able to make Katyń a highly political issue. This is how Joseph Goebbels assessed the effects of the first two weeks of the - as we would say today - media offensive related to the uncovering of the Katyń massacre. It might have seemed that the Reich Propaganda Minister had successfully challenged the dogma that the Allies were morally right - and he did it at the most opportune moment.

Information about the mass graves of Polish officers was made public by the Germans in April 1943, but the news had reached them much earlier. In July 1941, General Fedor von Bock's 'Middle' Army Group was deployed in the vicinity of Smolensk; one Soviet prisoner of war named Merkulov told the Germans about the executions of Poles held previously in the Kozelsk camp (the report of his interrogation bears the date 2 August 1941). These testimonials were not verified - they were deemed unhelpful.

In March 1942, Polish slave labourers from Poznan repairing railway tracks in the Gnezdovo region learned from local people about Polish
graves in the nearby Katyń Forest. The site was indicated by a certain Parfien Kiselyov; when it was dug up, corpses in Polish uniforms (with the rank of major and captain) were uncovered.
The Poles, unaware of the scale of the discovery, placed two wooden crosses there and then reported the finding to the Germans. This time, too, the issue did not receive much attention, as the Wehrmacht was pushing deeper into the Soviet Union and the German high command had more pressing matters on its agenda. The situation took a turn in January 1943 when Marsh. Friedrich Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad and the Red Army began its counter-offensive.

At the beginning of the year, several non-commissioned officers from the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP, Secret Police) received information about the executions of Polish officers from Ivan Krivoziercov, who lived near the Katyń Forest. This one, together with the aforementioned Kiselyov, led the Germans to the site of the mass burial. This time, the intelligence officer in the GA 'Middle' headquarters, Colonel Rudolf von Gersdorff, found out about the case. On 18 February he produced a report on the subject; as he later claimed, he was the first to use the term 'Katyń massacre'. The Germans started the investigation. In the second half of February, the GFP located several mass graves and questioned the local people. In March, the files of the case handled by von Gersdorff's subordinate Lt Ludwig Voss were sent to the Propaganda Department of the GA 'Middle' with a note that the collected material was suitable for propaganda purposes.

With their own eyes

Goebbels, who had been following the top-secret reports coming down from Katyń from the beginning, came to the same conclusion. At his instructions, on 9 April, the local Reich Propaganda Offices in Warsaw and Kraków put together a Polish delegation, which was sent to the site of the mass graves the following day. Its members included the director of the Main Welfare Council, Dr Edmund Seyfried, the novelist and playwright Ferdynand Goetel, the literary critic Jan Emil Skiwski, who was available to the occupation authorities, as well as publicists and photographers of the German propaganda press. 'Let them see with their own eyes,' the propaganda minister wrote in his diary, 'what awaits them if their repeatedly cherished wish that the Bolsheviks should beat the Germans should actually come true. In addition, the presence of Poles was to lend credibility to the Katyń discovery.

The delegation was welcomed by Lt. Gregor Slovenzik, propaganda desk officer at the Wehrmacht command, and Prof. Gerhard Buhtz, chief forensic physician to the head of the medical service of GA 'Middle'. They introduced the guests to the findings so far - the Germans determined the time of the victims' deaths (March - April 1940), estimated their number (10,000) and identified the place from which the officers were transported (Kozelsk). On 11 April, the Poles were taken to the Katyń Forest. The main grave stretches out ahead of us. It is pierced by a ravine dug along the layer of corpses, lying in a compact and clumped mass one on top of the other," Goetel later wrote. - An inert hand is leaning out of the wall here, legs are dangling there. Where the top layer of a corpse is uncovered, there is a figure tied with a rope. This one seems to still be living the drama of the pre-mortal struggle.

The visit was meticulously recorded: every step taken by the Poles was captured on photographic plate and film, which also captured the grotesque image of soldiers in Nazi uniforms saluting the remains of Polish officers. With the exception of the German propaganda press, the other members of the delegation were well aware that the Germans wanted to use the case for their own benefit, so they refused to give comments to the German press. Yet the propaganda machine was set in motion; the Polish delegation, incidentally, passed by a group of Berlin-accredited journalists from various European countries.

Comrades of Roosevelt and Churchill

On the same day, the German news agency Transocean broadcast an announcement about the discovery of a mass grave with the bodies of 3,000 Polish officers [...] killed in February and March 1940 by the GPU (that is, the NKVD).
On 12 April, Radio Berlin added that the victims were prisoners of the Kozelsk camp, and one day later Transocean confirmed the earlier information, only correcting the understated number of victims. Goebbels heard from officials in foreign diplomatic missions that the sensational news had made a great impression on the public so far. Pleased with this, Hitler personally allowed him to continue his propaganda campaign in the press. The printed word was the medium with the greatest power of destruction in occupied Europe. Access to radio sets was difficult at best (and banned at worst), while the press, including the Nazi-controlled press, was read by everyone, even those who did not consider it a reliable source of information.

The 'Völkischer Beobachter', the press organ of the NSDAP, was the first to write about the Katyń massacre. 'Here are the comrades of Roosevelt and Churchill - the GPU murdered 12,000 Polish officers. A mass grave of victims has been found in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk', declared the long title of an article on the front page of the 14 April 1943 issue. It was a mixture of reliable information (including the location of the crime scene, the number and dimensions of the graves and the estimated number of victims) and lies about orgies that took place in a nearby NKVD villa. The anonymous author also suggested that the crime, which was just the tip of the iceberg, was evidence of the USSR's plans for Poland and the rest of Europe. The thought was picked up by the 'Kölnischer Zeitung', which claimed that the Third Reich is the only country that could defend the continent from the terrible fate being planned for it by the Bolsheviks. This thesis was later echoed by perhaps all Nazi-controlled papers; many featured drawings in which a thug armed with a bunch of sickle-shaped keys cannot open a door with a lock bearing a swastika.

A-a-archeological discovery

On April 15, a remarkable transformation took place in the German press: the Soviet torturer gained Semitic facial features. The 'Völkischer Beobachter' assured its readers that the NKVD murderers were led by Jews, eliminating anyone who dared to stand in their way of ruling the world. The moderate reactions of the Western Allies to the USSR's accusation were the logical completion of the Katyń puzzle for German propaganda writers: the U.S. and Britain, dependent on the Jewish capital, are mere puppets in the hands of the Jews. A later caricature entitled "Proud Albion Today" depicted King George VI obediently listening to the instructions of Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maysky: Listen well, your majesty, as regards Katyń, you know nothing, you have not heard anything. Of course Maysky, nonchalantly holding his hands in his pockets, had distinctly Semitic features.

It didn't take long for the Kremlin to respond. On April 15, the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformbiuro) issued a statement bearing the headline 'Wicked fantasies of German-fascist perpetrators'. The Stalinist propaganda men beat the German ones in terms of the number of insults: The German fascist criminals do not retreat in this their new monstrous slur from the most rascally and despicable lies with which they try to hide the incredible crimes committed [...] by themselves, etc.

Playing down the accusation was not the only response to the Germans' carefully prepared propaganda campaign, which, by the way, does not give the best indication of coordination on the Soviet side. The Sovinformbiuro tried to link the graves of the Poles with the discovery of an ancient Gnezdovo tomb - indeed, the Russians were conducting archaeological work near Gnezdovo. The 'Völkischer Beobachter' has not failed to comment on this with a drawing, in which an obese Jew with a sickle and hammer sign on his shoulder (signed as a Moscow Jew-liar in a trap, just in case) is rubbing his sweaty forehead,
while turning away from the dead Poles who lie huddled and stutters: A-a-archeological discovery!

Chickens ready for a deal

The Allies found themselves in an uncomfortable situation. Not giving much faith to the vehement denials from the Soviet side, they had to act officially as if they did not take the German allegations seriously. Winston Churchill stripped away the illusions of General Władysław Sikorski, who hoped that a sense of decency would prevail over Realpolitik: Unfortunately, the German sensations are [...] perhaps true. I know what the Bolsheviks are capable of and how cruel they can be', he admitted in a conversation with him on 15 April. - However, a different strategy is impossible. For it is our duty to act in a manner that will save the fundamental objectives we have set and serve them most effectively. In view of the prospect of defeating Germany, in which millions of Russian soldiers were to play a major role, the fate of ten or twenty thousand Polish officers was pushed to the background. For the Nazi propaganda people, the Allies' attitude to Katyń was a litmus test of the superpowers' intentions towards the smaller European states that were advised to make an arrangements with the USSR. Its essence was depicted by the cartoonist of the 'Völkischer Beobachter': chickens - one or them wearing a cornet - declare their readiness to make a deal in front of a licking fox.

The German press did not hide its schadenfreude at Poland's political isolation, emphasising that the US and British governments did not hesitate to declare war because of - as the Berliner Börsen Zeitung wrote - a few square miles of some stupid corridor there, but completely disregarded the fact that the USSR had occupied the eastern part of the Republic and murdered several thousand Polish prisoners of war. At the beginning of May, the 'Ostdeutscher Beobachter' speculated that Sikorski, who was demanding an explanation for the Katyń massacre, would soon become an inconvenient burden for the coalition. It is hardly surprising that the death of the Polish Prime Minister in Gibraltar was viewed by German newspapers as the execution of a verdict that had been passed in Moscow.

As Piotr Łysakowski, an expert on the subject, notes, the Germans may have scorned the Allies for their disloyalty to Poland, but they did not make any gesture of sympathy towards the Poles. After all, they were to blame for the outbreak of war and therefore bore moral responsibility for the deaths of their fellow citizens. The Nazi-controlled press published lists of identified victims (for instance, the 'Kraków Courier' published the first few dozen names on 20 April), without taking care to correctly record the names distorted by German language, which sometimes led to dramatic mistakes.

Katyń did not bring Quisling

In the second half of 1943, the Katyń case slowly began to give way to other topics; although a volume entitled Official Materials on the Mass Murder in Katyń, published in Berlin, reopened comments for a while, it no longer brought anything new to the discussion. The interest of the Goebbels-controlled German press began to decline as, after the initial euphoria, even the originator of the campaign had to admit that it did not produce the expected results in the long run. The Minister for Propaganda wanted to play up the tragedy of the Poles to achieve a number of goals. His most important objective was to cause confusion among the Allies, to the side of which the scales of the war were just beginning to turn. However, Goebbels underestimated the determination of Churchill and Roosevelt in their endeavours to defeat Germany. Neither of them took a clear position on the Katyń case, and both successfully suppressed Sikorski's calls for clarification.

The German campaign was also aimed at the population of occupied Poland: it was intended to provoke fear of the Bolsheviks and to inspire the feeling that only the Germans could stop them. The Katyń massacre was meant to serve as a counterbalance to the Nazi terror against the Poles and to distract them from the extermination of the Jews (the Warsaw ghetto was set ablaze in April 1943), and even - by emphasising their leadership role in the NKVD apparatus - to justify it. The Germans also hoped to discredit the Polish government in exile and facilitate the recruitment of Polish manpower. This did not produce any results. On 20 August, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marian Kukiel, received a memorandum entitled 'Katyń and German Propaganda', which reported that the attitude of the Poles towards the occupying authorities could not be changed, as the errors of German policy had gone too deep. The Katyń case gave nothing to the Germans in Poland - not a single Quisling, not a soldier, not a labourer, not a break in underground activity. The Polish society believed in the guilt of the Russians, but it was also very well aware that the German involvement was intended to serve propaganda purposes that were harmful to us, aimed at masking the crimes - already committed and yet to be committed. Paradoxically, it was probably Stalin himself who benefited most from the exposure of the crimes. When, on 17 April, the deputy delegate of the Polish Red Cross in Switzerland, Stanisław Radziwiłł, and a German delegate independently submitted requests to the office of the International Committee of the Red Cross to have the massacre investigated by neutral experts, the Moscow-based 'Pravda' printed an article with the explicit title 'Hitler's Polish accomplices'. During the night of 25-26 April, the Polish ambassador to the USSR Tadeusz Romer received a note of severance of diplomatic relations. The Katyń pretext facilitated Moscow's subsequent establishment of a subordinate government on Polish lands.

Marcin Czajkowski - editor of 'Centuries Speaking'