The crime comes to light

The families of the murdered Polish prisoners of war never even imagined that the Soviets could have been capable of such a horrific crime. Their letters to the camps came from the German occupation zone, Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, and even from distant Kazakhstan, where tens of thousands of Poles from the lands occupied by the USSR were resettled in early 1940. The answer was never to come. In an act of desperation, the closest relatives - wives, mothers, children - addressed desperate and humbled letters to the administration of the various camps and higher authorities: Board of Prisoners of War, the NKVD, senior Soviet officials and military officers, and even Stalin himself. Here are examples: Paulina Singer, who was deported from Lviv to Kokpiekty in Kazakhstan in April 1943, asked the People's Commissar of Defence of the USSR, Semyon Timoshenko, for help in finding out the whereabouts of her husband Ludwik, a military doctor and second lieutenant of the Polish Army Sanitary Officers Corps: "Dear Comrade Timoshenko! My husband Singer Ludwik, son of Emanuel, worked as a doctor in Lvov. On 6 September the former Polish authorities took him to the army. On 20 September the Red Army took him prisoner, from where he carried on correspondence with me from the village of Kozelsk, in the Smolensk region, post box 12, the last letter I received on 16 March in Lvov. I, Singer Paulina, daughter of Elias, had been working in a bank as an accountant since 1922, and on 13 April the NKVD came to me and resettled me in Kokpiekt in the Semipalatinsk region, where I live at present. I ask you, Dear Comrade Timoshenko, to allow me to find out my husband's address, if possible, so that I can have contact with him by letter (find out my husband's address). I am waiting for your favourable answer. Your servant Singer Pauline." She, like thousands of others, never lived to see a reply.... 

Amnesty

The Soviets continued their actions of resettlement of the Polish population from the territory of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, as well as of Polish prisoners of war, used to work in the mines of the Donetsk and Krzyworoski basins. In the first half of 1940, 215,000 people (54,835 families) were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Approx. 12,000 military personnel were deported to the GULag camps in the northern part of the USSR. In July 1940, 76,382 people (25,682 families) were deported deep into the USSR. Their fate was tragic: as a result of the murderous work in the camps, unprepared for the extreme living conditions that prevailed in the north of the USSR and in Kazakhstan, death took a heavy toll.

Although signals were reaching the Polish authorities in exile about the deportation of civilians and the disappearance of prisoners of war from the camps at Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobielsk, there was little they could do. After diplomatic relations broke down in September 1939, the Polish government did not maintain contact with the Soviet regime. The situation changed only after Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941. On 30 July, in London, Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief Władysław Sikorski and USSR Ambassador to the UK Iwan Majski signed a Polish-Soviet treaty on the establishment of diplomatic relations and cooperation in the struggle against the Third Reich. According to Article 4, a Polish Army was to be established on USSR territory, which was to be subordinate in operational matters to the Soviet command. An additional protocol stated that upon the restoration of diplomatic relations, the Soviet government would grant amnesty to all Polish citizens - both prisoners of war and civilians - who were imprisoned on USSR territory. On 12 August, the Soviets announced an amnesty for Poles, and two days later General Zygmunt Szyszko-Bohusz and General Aleksander Wasilewski signed a military agreement.

Missing officers

A mixed military commission was set up in Moscow to establish, among other things, the whereabouts of Polish officers interned in September 1939. The Polish side was represented on it by General Szyszko-Bohusz and General Anders, while the Soviet side was represented by General Alexei Panfilov, General Grigory Zhukov and Colonel Alexei Panfilov. The Soviets reported that they had managed to establish clusters of prisoners of war, and provided a list of 1,650 Polish officers held in captivity. When asked where the rest were (Polish military officials estimated that there should be a total of 4,000-5,000 Polish officers in Soviet captivity), Zhukov prevaricated by saying that it was difficult to determine their fate due to the war effort. Polish military officers, the Polish ambassador in Moscow, Professor Stanisław Kot, and even the Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, General Władysław Sikorski, did not relent in their efforts to ascertain the fate of the missing servicemen, policemen and officials. The NKVD and Stalin were intervened in this matter. The Soviet dictator deceived the Poles - first by claiming that the Polish officers may have fled to Manchuria, which was under Japanese occupation, and then that they may have been murdered by the Germans. Given that the NKVD was the most efficient institution in the USSR, it was hard to believe that nothing was known about the fate of the missing. It is also clear that Stalin, faced with increasingly forceful interventions (and perhaps sensing that sooner or later he would have to face the - political, of course - consequences of this crime), began to propagate the version that would later become obligatory. It is worth noting, by the way, a much more sinister incident that occurred back in October 1940. According to the account of Cavalry Captain Józef Czapski, who was General Władysław Anders' plenipotentiary for the search for missing Polish prisoners of war, a meeting took place at this time with Colonel Zygmunt Berling. The latter, because of his pro-Soviet leanings, was considered by them to be suitable for cooperation and was transferred with a group of officers gathered around him to Malakhovka to a dacha no. 20, called the "pleasure villa". At Lubianka, an interesting exchange of words took place between him and Beria and Merkulov. When Berling, obviously unaware that the Soviets had murdered most of the officer corps, proposed the creation of a Polish army in the USSR based on soldiers and officers in captivity, Beria agreed, while his deputy, as if correcting his boss, countered: "No, not them. We made a big mistake with them".   

Discovery in the Katyn forest

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1942, Polish construction workers working for the German organisation Todt near Smolensk, thanks to information from local Russians, unearthed two corpses in Polish uniforms in the Katyn forest. They informed the German authorities of their discovery, who for the time being were not interested in carrying out the exhumation - which was already almost certain - of the victims of the mass executions. The breakthrough came in the winter of 1943. After the defeat at Stalingrad, the Germans needed a theme for a high-powered propaganda campaign that could lead to the weakening, if not the break-up, of the Allied coalition. The case of finding the mysterious remains was perfectly suited to this. On 18 February, the Germans began exhumation work and by 13 April had excavated more than 400 bodies. Later that day, the Berlin radio announced that mass graves had been found in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, where it was estimated 12,000 Polish officers had been buried. Lest there be any doubt as to who was behind this horrific crime, it was emphasised that the Poles had been shot by "Jewish commissars in the spring of 1940". 

Further events unfolded like a kaleidoscope. On 16 April, the Germans approached the International Red Cross with a proposal to take part in the research and exhumation. To support their impartiality, they also proposed that representatives of the Polish side, selected by the General Welfare Council operating in the General Government, and prisoners of war, including Polish military men, could take part in the work. On 17 April, General Sikorski's government independently asked the ICC to investigate the matter. The organisation's authorities tentatively agreed to the Polish Prime Minister's proposal, but with the proviso that all interested parties, and therefore the USSR, had to ask for their help. Naturally, Stalin, sanctimoniously indignant at how anyone could believe Nazi lies, did not agree to the proposal, and on 26 April 1943 broke off diplomatic relations with Sikorski's government. As a result, Moscow's Pravda published a lying article entitled 'Hitler's Polish accomplices', in which it 'exposed' the Sikorski government's policy of driving a wedge between the USSR and its Western allies and using this for its own ends. 

Exhumation

The Germans, in turn, formed an international commission comprising eminent forensic and criminological specialists from European universities. Twelve people from countries dependent on or occupied by the Third Reich and from Switzerland were invited as observers - this included Professor F. Neville. Apart from them, a dozen Poles participated in the exhumation work (most of them only between 28 and 30 April), including writers Ferdynand Goetel and Józef Mackiewicz (arbitrarily, which later got him into trouble for alleged collaboration with the Germans - the underground authorities passed a death sentence on him, but it was not carried out), Jan Emil Skiwski, and Dr Marian Wodziński on behalf of the Polish Red Cross and the Main Welfare Council. The Polish church was represented by Father Stanisław Jasiński, canon of the Cracow Cathedral Chapter. Prisoners of war from German oflags - English, American and Polish officers, including Colonel Stefan Mossor, who claimed after the war that he had found himself there against his will - were also taken to the Katyn forest.

By 3 June, eight mass graves had been exhumed, from which more than 4,000 bodies had been retrieved, including those of two generals - Bronisław Bohatyrewicz and Mieczysław Smorawiński. Dr Wodziński, on the basis of identification materials found with the remains, identified 2,800 bodies. The work resulted in an extensive dossier detailing the manner in which the murders were carried out (during the war, the dossier was found at a forensic medicine unit in Kraków, from where it mysteriously disappeared in 1945). It was established, for example, that the murderers used German weapons and ammunition, which, due to their reliability, were on the equipment of NKVD operational units. Correspondence found with the murdered in the spring of 1940, the age of the trees planted on the graves and the state of decomposition of the corpses indicated that the crime was committed in the spring of 1940. The work was stopped due to the approaching front.

No one involved in the exhumation was in any doubt as to who was responsible for the crime. All members of the International Commission signed the German protocols. After the war - probably due to Soviet threats - Prof. Hajek and Prof. Markov - revoked their signatures.

Covering up the traces

After the recapture of the Smolensk region, the Soviets set up a "Special Commission to establish and investigate the circumstances of the shooting of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn forest by the German-Fascist invaders". It was chaired by Nikolai Burdenko, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and included the writer Alexei Tolstoy and a dignitary of the Russian Orthodox Church, Exarch of Ukraine, Metropolitan of Kiev and Halych Nikolai. The exhumation, carried out under the supervision of the NKVD, was a farce, and its aim was to prove that Polish officers at Katyn were murdered by the Germans. Supposedly 900 bodies were excavated, and the fact that it was a Nazi crime was supposedly proven by newspaper scraps, a receipt from a laundry and a postcard with a Warsaw address, sent in July 1941. The conclusion was that the crime was committed in August-September of that year by the 537th Wehrmacht sapper battalion under the command of Colonel Friedrich Ahrens (in fact, the unit did not appear in Katyn until November 1941).

After the war, the Soviet authorities tried to cover up the traces of their involvement in the Katyn crime. Although they failed to blame for it those tried at the Nuremberg Trials, by the end of the 1950s they had probably destroyed almost 22,000 personal files of the murdered. It was decided to keep only a small corpus of the main documents, which was placed in file No. 1, kept in a separate secret archive of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Henceforth, every genshek assuming power in the Kremlin was obliged to familiarise himself with its contents and pass them on, like codes for firing nuclear missiles, to his successor.

Despite the reluctance of the governments of the Western powers to pursue the matter, it was dealt with by independent researchers, including Polish historians in exile. The British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, Sir Owen O'Malley, produced a report on the crime in June 1943, confirming the Soviets' guilt, and handed it over to King George VI, Prime Minister Churchill and the War Cabinet. In contrast, American Colonel John van Vliet, who as a prisoner of war participated in the exhumation work at Katyn in April 1943, submitted the report after his release to the US military authorities, who ordered it first to be classified and then destroyed. In 1952, he reconstructed it for the US Senate committee which, at the request of the Polish American Congress, investigated the case and unsuccessfully recommended that the government present it to the United Nations and prosecute the USSR at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

After the war

With Gorbachev's perestroika in the second half of the 1980s, a favourable climate began to emerge for a full explanation of the circumstances of the Katyn massacre. In 1987, thanks to an agreement between the authorities of the Polish People's Republic and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a mixed Polish-Soviet commission was established to clarify the blanks in the history of our common relations. Its main objective was to uncover the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre. Arguably, had it not been for the erosion of the political system in the USSR and the changes in Eastern Europe that began in Poland in 1989, the commission's findings would have had to wait a long time yet. On 13 April 1990, during Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski's visit to Moscow, Gorbachev admitted that the responsibility for the Katyn massacre lay with the USSR, and in particular with the Stalinist repression apparatus headed by Beria and his associates. Moreover, Gorbachev also handed over documents that unequivocally proved Soviet culpability. Incidentally, a few months later Gorbachev, in a special decree, instructed Russian scientific research institutions, including historians from the Russian Academy of Sciences, to search for and document events in the history of Polish-Soviet relations that would incriminate Poland and counterbalance the issue of the murder of Polish prisoners of war in 1940.

The next step in revealing the circumstances of the Katyn massacre was the handing over to President Lech Wałęsa, on 14 October 1992, of copies of documents from Special File No. 1 by President Boris Yeltsin's special envoy, Russia's chief state archivist Rudolf Pichoja. At the same time, by virtue of an agreement between the directorates of the archives of both countries, further research by Polish historians in the Russian archives concerning the disclosure of the circumstances and course of the Katyn massacre became possible. Unfortunately, since the presidency of Vladimir Putin, this process has slowed down as a result of a change in the position of the Russian authorities.