The fate of Polish prisoners of war after 17 September

Soviet figures of 300,000 Polish soldiers taken prisoner during the 'liberation march' are greatly exaggerated. It is estimated that 240,000-250,000 Polish Army soldiers, including some 15,000 officers, were taken prisoner in September 1939. The Germans and Soviets quickly began to combat any manifestations of Polish independence activity in the territories they had seized, and to cooperate in eliminating the elites of the Polish state. For this purpose, a German-Soviet training centre for the security services, was established as early as December 1939 in Zakopane, where Gestapo and NKVD officers agreed on tactics for fighting the resistance movement in the Polish territories and exchanged expertise in the use of terror methods. This suggests that the murder of almost 15,000 prisoners of war held in Soviet camps and more than 7,000 Polish civilians imprisoned in prisons in western Belarus and Ukraine in April and May 1940 did not coincide by chance with the German AB (Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion) operation against the Polish intelligentsia.

From the first days of the aggression, the Soviets meticulously carried out a plan to detain and transport Polish prisoners of war. The 'Regulations for the Treatment of Prisoners of War', which had already been drawn up before the invasion, and an agreement between the People's Commissariat of Defence and the NKVD on the transfer of all Polish military men to the security service served this purpose. The NKVD rounded them up at special assembly points, which included the westernmost stations of the Soviet broad-gauge railways. These were Orzechowie, Radoszkowice, Stolpce, Tymkowicze, Żytkowicze, Olewsko, Szepietówka, Volochska, Yarmolinets and Kamieniec Podolski. Subsequently, Polish soldiers were to be transported to camps in Kozelsk and Putywl. Ironically, the blitzkrieg campaign and weaker-than-expected resistance from Polish army units resulted in masses of prisoners of war being taken into captivity, which the Soviets initially could not cope with.

 

Special camps

As a result, as early as the beginning of the third decade of September, the Commissar of the Interior of the Belarusian SSR, Lavrenty Canava, alarmed Moscow: "A mass of thousands of soldiers fleeing the front is gathered in the western regions and filling the streets, but isolating them with the forces of an operational group is an impossibility. Units of the RKKA [Russian Rabochie Kriestianskaya Krasnaya Armia, Workers' Red Army] do not take them prisoner, so no one filters in and Polish soldiers can move freely". The solution to this situation - which was proposed by the commanders of the army groups - was to release the prisoners of war, peasants from Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, but Stalin initially refused to agree to this solution.

Instead, on 19 September Lavrenty Beria created the Board for Prisoners of War and Internees at the NKVD, which took charge of the transport of Polish prisoners of war and the operation of the special camps at Ostashkov, Juchnov, Kozelsk, Putywl, Kozelshchin, Starobelsk, Yuzhia and Oranki, where it was intended to round them up. The head of the Board was appointed Petr Soprunienko - an employee of Beria's secretariat, who had graduated from five classes of evening school and was then a student at the special department of the M. Frunze Military Academy, where candidates for leadership positions in the NKVD apparatus were trained. Regimental Commissar Semyon Nechoroshev, an experienced politician transferred from the GULag, in whose structures this new institution was placed, became political commissar of the Board.

On this occasion, Beria decided to use some of the prisoners of war to work on the construction of the Novgorod-Volyn-Rovne-Dubno-Lviv road and in the mines of the Krzyworoski Basin. It was planned that 25,000 POWs would be used for the former project, while 10,000 would be used in increasing iron ore and limestone mining.

 

Kozielsk

The first transports of Polish soldiers to the special camps of the Prisoner of War Board set off as early as 20 September. It quickly became apparent that they were unable to accommodate such a large mass of people. In the Kozelsk camp (commandant - Major Vasily Korolov), located 5 km from Kozelsk on the grounds of the "Optyńska Hermitage" monastery and the so-called "Skit", already at the beginning of October there were 8,843 Polish servicemen, including 117 officers. In November, when it became the so-called officers' camp, it held, among others, Rear Admiral Ksawery Czernicki, four generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains and 3,420 other officers. Among them was a woman - Second Lieutenant Pilot Janina Lewandowska, daughter of General Józef Dowbór-Muśnicki, who refused to be released in the spring of 1940 and shared the tragic fate of her comrades-in-arms. 

The camp at Kozielsk, prepared to accommodate up to a third of the prisoners incarcerated there, was catastrophically overcrowded. For a large proportion of the soldiers, there was not enough room on the two-storey bunks, so they had to sleep on the floor or in shifts. Literally everything was missing. There was no water, so baths and laundries did not function. The rooms were damp, dirty and cold. Hot meals were served once a day: a daily ration of 800 g of bread, 30 g of sugar, soup for lunch, groats for breakfast. Once a week officers were entitled to a ration of tea, machorka, matches and soap. Meals were occasionally varied with vegetables, meat (instead of the 75 g due, soldiers received 50 g) and fish.  A Board employee seconded to Kozelsk, Senior Lieutenant of State Security Ivan Maklarski, assessed the situation unequivocally: "In the camp a complete madhouse, incredible disorder and lack of organisation".

 

Starobielsk and Ostashkov

The situation was similar in the other camps. In Starobielsk, located in the former buildings of a women's monastery and in several buildings in the town, there were 7045 people in mid-October, including 4813 privates and non-commissioned officers, 2232 officers, 155 civil servants and gendarmes (by mid-November there were already more than 11,000 people there). For lack of space, many prisoners of war camped out in tents, cellars and dugouts. Later, some prisoners were released or relocated, but this did not improve the situation. Warm meals were issued once a day. Instead of 800 grams of bread, half was given (sometimes less) and no sugar at all. To make matters worse, the camp was infested with lice, as the authorities had not organised a bath or laundry. Senior officers were slightly better off: separate rooms for generals were even equipped with furniture, and lieutenant colonels were given two-storey beds.  

Instead, the Soviets took care of indoctrination. At the expense of the WKP(b) regional committee, party newspapers and magazines were subscribed for the camp, and political talks were held. Anti-Polish propaganda films, in which Soviet cinematography was abundant in autumn 1939, were also displayed. Loudspeakers installed in every room, from which Soviet propaganda was broadcast all day long, drove the prisoners to frenzy.

The Ostashkov camp (commandant - Major Pavel Borisovets) was located 10km from the town of Ostashkov, on Stolbnyj Island (on Lake Seliger). At the end of September, 8731 prisoners of war were assembled there, and by the end of October their number had risen to 12,235. By the end of its operation, almost 16,000 people had passed through the camp, of whom 9,413 privates and non-commissioned officers had been released or transported to the mines of the Krivorozhsky District.

 

Other camps

Due to its unfortunate location and unpreparedness, the Putywl camp (commandant - Major Nikolai Smirnov) proved to be the harshest. Located in the buildings of the Safronev monastery, 40km from Putywl, it was in the midst of swamps. As a rule, the prisoners of war were quartered in stables, pigsties and barracks, which, with the unheard-of cramped conditions (there was 0.6 sq m of space per person!) and a complete lack of water, made the sanitary situation disastrous. For the 6 tonnes of daily bread demand, local bakeries were only able to supply 2.4 tonnes.

Similarly unprepared to receive prisoners of war was the Kozelshchina camp (commandant - Lt. Col. V. Sokolov), on the outskirts of the town of Kozelshchina in the Poltava region. Here the situation was equally tragic: due to the lack of space, only half of the prisoners were accommodated in the buildings of the former monastery and on the premises of the local sovkhoz. The rest camped out in tents (11,79 people) and unwashed pigsties (1106 people). In the absence of a bakery, bread was insufficiently supplied from Poltava, and the six field kitchens were only able to marginally meet the needs of the captives.

Terrible overcrowding also prevailed in the Yuzha camp (commandant - Lieutenant Commander Aleksandr Kij), located in the town of Talitsa, 30 km from Yuzha. In October 1939, 11,640 prisoners of war were taken there (the camp was intended for 6,000). There was a shortage of water and food. Although field kitchens were quickly set up, the prisoners had to stand in long queues all day to get a hot meal.

Similar conditions prevailed in the Yuchnov and Vologda camps. The first, whose commander was Major Filipp Kadyshev, was organised in the premises of the former tuberculosis sanatorium "Pavlishchev Bor", near the village of Shchelkovo. In October, there were 8096 people there: for lack of space, most were accommodated on verandas, in stables and granaries. It was cold, food and water were in short supply. In the Vologda camp (commandant - Matveyev), located in a decommissioned orphanage 18 km from Vologda, intended for 1,500 people, there were 3,450 prisoners. Extreme overcrowding meant that 347 POWs, who arrived there in the last transport in the first decade of October, were not unloaded at all. They camped in railway cars for several days before being sent back to the German occupation zone. In the Vologda region, the Soviets organised another special camp, in Gryazovets (commandant - Lieutenant Mikhail Filippov). 3095 prisoners of war were incarcerated in a former monastery. This camp, too, was not prepared to accommodate such a large number of people.

The network of special camps for Polish prisoners of war was completed by the easternmost camp in the village of Oranki, near Bogorodsk in the Gorki region (commandant - Lt. Col. Ivan Sorokin). The prisoners were assembled in the monastery buildings - 7063 of them at the beginning of October. Conditions there were also very difficult.

 

Selection

As the Soviets were completely unprepared to take such a large number of prisoners, they decided to release the majority. Obviously, this concerned privates and non-commissioned officers from the former Eastern Borderlands of the Republic, who for class reasons were a negligible (or no) threat in the eyes of the Soviets. Only prisoners of war of Ukrainian, Belorussian and other non-Polish nationalities were to be subjected to this procedure.  In addition, 25,000 prisoners of war were to be used for the construction of the Novgorod-Volynsk-Lviv road, and 12,000 to work in enterprises of the People's Commissariat for Ferrous Metallurgy in the Krygy Rog, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhya regions.

In the first decade of October, 42,500 privates and non-commissioned officers were released. As for privates from German-occupied areas - it was decided to hold off on their release until the conclusion of negotiations with Berlin. In the end, 42,492 were handed over to the German ally on an exchange basis by 23 November (the Germans handed over 13,757 to the Soviets). Interestingly, requests from the prisoners of war - most of them communists or Jews - who declared their wish to remain in the USSR (for some this was tantamount to accepting Soviet citizenship) were refused by the authorities.

By early November, the Soviets had segregated the prisoners of war. They grouped them into three main camps. Only officers were held at Starobielsk and Kozelsk, while gendarmes, intelligence agents and officers, policemen, KOP soldiers and prison officers were held at Ostashkov.

 

In the camp

Lavrentiy Beria ordered the normalisation of the procedure and rules for the treatment of individual categories of prisoners of war (including improving living conditions for generals, officers and senior military and state officials, ensuring "good treatment" for all prisoners of war, implementing a cultural programme), taking security measures to prevent escapes and anti-Soviet activity. Counter-intelligence 'processing' was also commenced: gathering information about the prisoners' private and professional lives, their political views, foreign connections and even their knowledge of foreign languages. This was done by the special squads - their task was to verify and infiltrate the captives in order to detect among them agents of the intelligence services, activists of anti-Soviet organisations (such as the Polish Military Organisation), as well as recruitment for service in the Soviet intelligence and security organs.       

 In spite of the national tragedy of the fall of their homeland, the dire living conditions and Soviet harassment, the prisoners of war did not succumb to the camp's marasm and anti-Polish propaganda. They quickly began to organise themselves. This was facilitated by their high level of education and the variety of professions they occupied in the army or in civilian life (reserve officers). Among the POWs were doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists and university lecturers. In November, in Starobielsk, the POWs organised illegal celebrations of the Independence Day and Jozef Pilsudski's name-day, and a group of officers (Capt. Mieczysław Ewert, Maj. Ludwik Domoń, Lt. Stanisław Kwolek and Maj. Adam Sołtan) animated the activities of language learning groups, reading circles, vocational circles and others. Lectures on psychology, biology, military art, medicine or literature were held. Unfortunately, the Soviets soon caught on to the illegal activities of the Starobel captives: Ewert, Kwolek and Domoń were removed from the camp. Their fates varied: Kwolek died in one of the GULag camps, Ewert was released in the autumn of 1941 and Domoń was sent to the Yuchnov camp.

In other camps, the prisoners of war also carried out illegal self-help, educational and political activities. In Kozielsk they published the newspapers "Merkuriusz" (by the end of January four issues had come out), "Monitor" (15 issues), and prepared daily oral "live newspapers". The Soviets fiercely fought against these activities, treating them as anti-Soviet. They constantly monitored the mood of the POWs and knew full well that the Poles had not come to terms with their defeat. There was a widespread view among them that "the USSR had merged with fascism, but Poland was and would be. And if England and France take up arms against the USSR, they will have to be helped in the rear". Informants also reported that officers believed in rebuilding Poland within the 1939 borders.

As far as the three main camps were concerned, escapes were sporadic and thanks to the vigilance of the camp guards and the branching Chekist agents, they were countered.

 

NKVD operations

The investigative methods of the enkavudzists whom Moscow sent to Ostashkov and Starobielsk were not very sophisticated. They were limited to primitive psychological pressure and had little effect. The exception was the operational group under the leadership of a senior intelligence officer, Major Vasily Zarubin and Captain Aleksandrovich. Zarubin was distinguished by his erudition, spoke several languages, was polite and friendly. Compared to his colleagues, he may have appeared to be a man unsuited to Soviet realities. Prof Swaniewicz recalled him with appreciation: "The behaviour of Soviet officers at Kozelsk towards prisoners of war was more or less correct, but the 'kombryg' (Zarubin) was not only beyond reproach in this respect, but possessed the manners and distinctions of a man of higher culture". He brought with him to Kozelsk a library of 500 volumes: these were books in Russian, French, English and German, which he made available to the prisoners. Proof of their appreciation was the fact that he was the only enclave officer to whom they gave honours. But the fact was, his behaviour was a cynical game, calculated to make a characterisation of individual captives and to try to exploit even a small proportion of them. On the other hand, it is difficult to suppose that he knew what fate would befall them. In any case, it was probably him to whom the aforementioned Swaniewicz and Professor of Law Wacław Komarnicki, later Minister of Justice in General Sikorski's government, owed their lives.

 

Stalin's revenge?

By Beria's order, the investigative work was to be completed by the end of January 1940. In late January/early February, the Soviet leadership began to warm to the idea of liquidating the 'special contingent'. For the time being, mainly due to the lack of access to all the archival material from Russian archives concerning the "Katyn issue" (let us hope that the situation will change), it is difficult to specify the moment when this decision was taken, as well as the evolution of the position of the higher Soviet leadership on the issue of the fate of Polish prisoners of war. There is no doubt that Stalin, who hated Poland and the Poles for ideological and personal reasons, had the deciding vote. He believed that this bourgeois state was responsible for stopping the march of the Bolsheviks to the West and was a constant threat to the USSR. He blamed the defeat of 1920 on Tukhachevsky and the Polish officers who were now in Soviet captivity (among them were many veterans of the Polish-Bolshevik war). In this context, their physical liquidation should be seen both as Stalin's personal vendetta and possibly also as an intention to eliminate part of the Polish intellectual elite, with the prospect of facilitating his vassalisation of Poland.

It is said that the "unloading" of the camps where Polish officers and policemen were held was intended to make room for Finnish soldiers who had been taken prisoner during the Winter War of 1939-1940. The snag is that far fewer of them ended up in Soviet hands than expected - only about a thousand. In all likelihood, we can accept the thesis that the Soviets were guided by class and nationality considerations when murdering Polish officers and policemen. This would mean that the shooting of Polish prisoners of war by the Soviets in the spring of 1940 should be considered genocide.

 

Decision

What do we know of the circumstances of the Soviet leadership's decision to murder Polish prisoners of war? It was taken by Stalin and Beria during a conversation on 5 March 1939. Their consciences were further soothed by a report by the head of the NKVD. In it, he stressed that "all of them [Polish prisoners of war] are hardened enemies of Soviet power, with no prospect of improvement. [...] They are trying to continue counter-revolutionary activities, they are carrying out anti-Soviet agitation. Each of them awaits liberation in order to be given the opportunity to actively join the struggle against Soviet power. NKVD organs in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus have detected a number of counter-revolutionary insurgent organisations. In all these counter-revolutionary organisations, active leadership roles were played by former officers of the former Polish army, former policemen and gendarmes". In addition, Beria proposed that the cases of the 14,700 people from the three prisoner-of-war camps and the 11,000 arrested and imprisoned in the western oblasts of Ukraine and Belarus "should be considered under a special procedure with the application to them of the maximum penalty - execution". This 'special procedure' was to entail that the decision to execute the entire 'contingent', instead of by the Special College, was to be taken by a troika consisting of Vsevolod Merkulov, Bakhchok Kobulov and Leonid Bashtakov, without the presence of the arrested and without presenting them with an indictment. The letter, which determined the fate of the Polish prisoners, was signed by, in order: Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, and in the margins, in the place of Kalinin and Kaganovich, the paraphrasing was done by a secretary.

Linked to the decision to murder officers and policemen was another, taken three days earlier: the resettlement of 22,000 families of prisoners held in prisons in Western Ukraine and Belarus, as well as officers, policemen and others from three special camps. This was the second of the planned deportations - the first (February 1940) resulted in the deportation of almost 140,000 people from western Ukraine and Belarus deep into the USSR. Approximately 4,000 people died during the transport and in the first days at the settlement site due to the cold, lack of housing and food.