THE BACKSTAGE AND THE SCENE OF LIES. Soviet Katyń commissions

The fascist German announcements [...] leave no doubt as to the tragic fate of the former Polish prisoners of war who were located in the regions west of Smolensk in 1941 for construction works and [...] fell into the hands of the German fascist executioners in the summer of 1941, after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from the Smolensk area.

On 13 April 1943, Radio Berlin announced that bodies of Polish officers had been found near Smolensk. In reaction to this, Radio Moscow aired a statement from the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo) on 15 April 1943, in which it accused the Germans of provocation against the USSR. So was born the Soviet lie about German liability for the Katyń massacre, sustained in the USSR until 13 April 1990.

The decision on the general direction of the Soviet Union's response to the German news was probably taken at a heated meeting in the Kremlin attended by Joseph Stalin and Lavrenty Beria. On 25 April, the USSR government severed relations with the Polish government in London using the excuse of Polish involvement in a German provocation. In the following months, the Soviets had already begun overt preparations to establish a communist regime in Poland. At the same time, they developed a structure of manipulations designed to legitimise the story that the Germans had committed crimes against the Polish Army officers - in the eyes of the whole world.

The Soviets used the regained control of the Katyń forest in late September of 1943 to fabricate the 'evidence' confirming German guilt. As early as 22 September, when the Red Army was 30 - 35 km from Katyń, the head of the Propaganda and Agitation Board of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, Georgy Alexandrov, sent a letter to the Secretary of the Central Committee, Andrei Shcherbakov, signalling the need to take preparatory steps to unmask the German provocation and proposing to set up a commission. It would include representatives of the Extraordinary State Commission for Determining and Investigating the Crimes of the German-Fascists and Their Associates and the Losses Caused to Citizens, Kolkhozes, Social Organisations, State Enterprises and Institutions of the USSR (hereinafter: the Extraordinary State Commission) and the investigative bodies, namely the NKVD and the People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB), which was separated from its structures in 1941.

Aleksandrov's proposal was accepted by the party-state leadership of the USSR, but with one important correction: in the first phase of the work, it was limited to the activities of the NKVD/NKGB, which were kept secret from the public, postponing the inclusion of other institutions until a later date. Nikolai Burdenko, chief surgeon of the Red Army and member of the Extraordinary State Commission - who asked People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs and member of the Communist Party’s politburo Vyacheslav Molotov on 27 September 1943, just two days after the recapture of Smolensk from the Germans, for permission to start work at Katyń immediately - got it many weeks later.

MERKULOV AND KRUGLOV'S COMMISSION

At the turn of September and October 1943, NKGB and NKVD officers from Moscow and the NKVD Board from Smolensk, that is, the people who knew the most about the Katyń massacre, arrived in Katyń. The operational activities were led by the head of the counterintelligence department of the NKGB, General Leonid Raichman, appointed as early as 1941 to disinform Poles about the missing officers, which included contacts with General Władysław Anders and Cavalry Captain Józef Czapski.

All the Smolensk and Katyń works were supervised from Moscow and controlled on site by the deputy head of the NKVD, Sergei Kruglov, and the head of the NKGB, Vsevolod Merkulov. The latter was one of a trio of NKVD officers appointed by the politburo of the Communist Party on 5 March 1940 to carry out the Katyń 'operation'.

From October 1943 to January 1944, NKVD and NKGB officers tried to paint a false picture of the fate of the Polish prisoners of war. Of greatest importance for the cover-up was the proper preparation of the death pits and the corpses, so that later exhumations would prove the culpability of the Germans. This involved fabrication of certificates from the second half of 1940 and the first half of 1941, confirming that the prisoners of war were alive at that time. They were thrown into the pits and placed next to the bodies so that they could later be 'discovered'.

It was also the task of the NKVD/NKGB team to 'process' people in order to collect written testimonies and prepare witnesses who would confirm the German perpetration of the crime. They were intimidated and blackmailed, with threats such as being held responsible for collaborating with the occupier. To this end, the security services used the results of investigations by the Red Army's military counterintelligence Smersh, conducted in 1943 in the Katyń area, regarding charges of collaboration with the Germans against Soviet citizens.

The investigators focused in particular on people who had witnessed Soviet guilt a few months earlier, forcing them to change their testimony. At the same time, they were preparing selected people for 'live' appearances in the future. Examples include Parfien G. Kiselyov, a Russian peasant from the Katyń area, who not only revoked his testimony from the spring of 1943, but also took part in the filming of a Soviet propaganda film about Katyń, becoming a key 'reversed' witness for the Soviet side. A similar role was played by astronomer Boris Bazylevski, vice mayor of Smolensk.

The results of the works of the Merkulov/Kruglov group were contained in the 'Information on the results of the preliminary investigation into the so-called Katyń case' signed by both of them. In their final conclusions, Merkulov and Kruglov concluded that the captive Poles stayed west of Smolensk working on road construction from the spring of 1940 until June 1941, which marked the outbreak of the Soviet-German war, before being taken prisoner by the Germans and shot by them in late August and September - the autumn of 1941. This was done by an unknown German military institution. [...] This institution was headed by oberstleutnant Arnes, and his closest collaborators and assistants in this bloody crime included oberstleutnant Rekst and lieutenant Hott. Afterwards, upon instructions from Berlin, the Germans prepared an anti-Soviet provocation in April 1943. This is how the Soviet cover-up was given a concrete shape and provided with many detailed elements.

The report by Merkulov and Kruglov, due no later than 12 January 1944, was logically placed in the chronology of the fabrication of the Katyń lie. The information and materials gathered by the Soviet security apparatus would provide guidance to the official Katyń commission, which went down in history as the Burdenko commission.

THE BURDENKO COMMISSION ENTERS THE SCENE

At the Moscow meeting of the Extraordinary State Commission of 12 January 1944, more than three months after Nikolai Burdenko's first initiative, the Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Shooting of Polish Prisoners of War by the German Fascist Invaders in the Katyń Forest (near Smolensk) (hereinafter: Special Commission) was established and its composition determined. The resolution was signed by the chairman of the Extraordinary State Commission, Nikolai Shvernik, who was also a deputy member of the Politburo of the Communist Party. On 13 January 1944, the Politburo approved the resolution, which in the USSR meant that it was given the importance of an unchallengeable decision of the state.

The composition of the Special Commission was as follows: Nikolai Burdenko, physician, member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (chairman); Alexei Tolstoy, writer; Nikolai, Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev and Halych; Major General Alexander Gundorov, chairman of the All-Slavic Commission; Sergei Kolesnikov, chairman of the Executive Committee of the Council of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies; Vladimir Potiomkin, People's Commissar of Education of the RFSSR; General of the branch, Yefim Smirnov, head of the Red Army's Main Military-Sanitary Board; Rodion Melnikov, chairman of the Smolensk Regional Executive Committee of the Communist Party.

The Burdenko Commission worked for only ten days. During this period it held six meetings. The course of the opening meeting, called in Moscow on 13 January 1944, left no doubt as to the direction its actions would take. It was attended by Sergey Kruglov, co-author of the mystification of the security services, who presented the findings of his commission on Katyń. The members of the Special Commission accepted them without a single dispute.

Further work by the Burdenko commission served to sustain and elaborate a detailed version of German responsibility for the crime against the Poles. The Commission did not investigate as to who committed the crimes in Katyń, but - as its name explicitly indicated - established the circumstances of the shooting of the prisoners of war - Polish officers - by the German fascist invaders. The actual outcome of this was limited to processing the 'evidence' gathered by the Merkulov/Kruglov commission.

A decision was made at a meeting held in Smolensk on 18 January 1944 to send members of the commission to the excavation site in the Katyń Forest. In the following days, they supervised - with the participation of forensic experts Viktor Prozorovskiy and Viktor Semyonovskiy - the examination of the corpses associated with the exhumations and interviewed witnesses (there were allegedly more than 100). On 20 January 1944 Burdenko claimed: We have concluded the questioning of witnesses. [...] Our planned work is coming to an end. We should speed things up with the audio recording. You need to select the material and prepare it. This marked the end of the 'investigative' phase of the activities.

Conducting a complex investigation and reconstructing the course of the crimes against the Polish officers in a period as short as this was impossible. The NKVD/NKGB officers in charge of the so-called preliminary investigation imposed the binding version of events on the commission in advance. The activities of the Special Commission, which were secondary to the work of the Merkulov/Kruglov team, did, however, make sense as part of the logic of the Katyń lie. They did not serve to produce a false version of the events, as this was ready - instead, their purpose was to draft material for the propaganda, supported by authorities higher than the NKVD. The preparation of the announcement and expert report was the culmination of the commission's work.

The Burdenko commission presented the results of its 'research' in Smolensk on 22 January 1944 at a press conference addressed mainly to foreign correspondents. It was hosted by Potiomkin and Tolstoy and attended by Metropolitan Nikolai and Chairman Burdenko. They began by giving lengthy speeches, claiming that it was the Germans who shot the Polish prisoners of war in Kozie Gory near Katyń in the autumn of 1941. This was followed by the testimonies of witnesses drawn up by the NKVD/NKGB: Baslevsky, women employed at an NKVD dacha in the Katyń forest area, Parfien Kiselyov, and Father Aleksandr Oglobin, priest of the Orthodox church in the village of Kurpino, located in the Katyń forest area. In the end, the journalists were shown an exhibition of items excavated from the death pits. The Soviet version reached global opinion through foreign correspondents working in the USSR.

The Burdenko commission held its sixth and final meeting in Smolensk on 23 January 1944. The chairman declared that all witnesses of interest to the commission had been interviewed and that the forensic-medical report material was being compiled and needed just some editing. As a result, the work of the Smolensk commission has been finalised.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE SPECIAL COMMISSION - THE CORNERSTONE OF THE KATYŃ LIE

The Special Commission did not discuss the content of its summary message in its full composition. It was produced with the extensive participation of NKVD/NKGB officers. It was based on documents such as the 'Forensic Medical Expertise of the Katyń Graves'. Some of its conclusions had nothing to do with forensic medicine, such as the statement that the extermination of Polish captives in the Katyń Forest was performed by the aforesaid persons, in line with a directive from Berlin. The factual elements, on the other hand, were selected and interpreted to fit the story of German responsibility for the crime against the Poles. The 'announcement' was formally signed by the members of the commission in Moscow on 24 January 1944 and published on 26 January in the newspaper 'Pravda', the central press organ of the Communist Party.

In its 'General Conclusions', the Special Commission concluded:

[…] 9) The forensic-medical expertise data shows beyond any doubt that:

1941. a) the executions took place in the autumn of 1941.
1942. b) the German perpetrators, when executing Polish prisoners of war, used the same method of firing a pistol into the back of the skull that they had used in other cities, such as Orel, Voronezh, Krasnodar and in the very Smolensk.

10) The conclusions drawn from the testimony of witnesses and the forensic medical report, that the Polish prisoners of war were shot by the Germans in the autumn of 1941, are fully confirmed by the physical evidence
and documents recovered from the Katyń graves.

11) By shooting the Polish prisoners of war
in the Katyń Forest, the German fascist invaders
consistently pursued their policy of exterminating the Slavic nations.

The document of 24 January 1944 became the most important text of the Katyń lie. It presented the full Soviet version of the events related to the murder of Polish officers in Katyń, which was used in the propaganda of the Soviet Union, People's Republic of Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries and communist parties from the 1940s until the late 1980s.

The results of Burdenko's commission's work replicated the findings of the NKVD/NKGB preliminary investigation in all significant aspects. The 'announcement' was a variation of Merkulov and Kruglov's 'Information', expanded and enriched with the results of forensic-medical examinations and edited accordingly. The Special Commission did not ascertain the circumstances of the crime, but instead narrated according to a script outlined by the NKVD/NKGB, using the actors and props they had prepared. The most significant role in constructing the lie was therefore played by the team of Soviet security ministry officials, and the Burdenko commission was only its final link. Its importance stemmed from the propaganda role assigned to it from the start. But we did not learn about this until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when access to previously confidential documents was made possible.

Witold Wasilewski, historian of modern and contemporary history, employed at the Public Education Bureau of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), involved in works including the crime and lies of Katyń