2017-04-11 18:03 update: 2018-09-26, 23:23
Exhumations of Polish officers murdered in Katyn, Russia, 1943 PAP/Archiwum
Exactly 74 years ago, on April 11, 1943, a German news agency reported on the "discovery of mass graves of 3,000 Polish officers" in Katyn, western Russia, and two days later the news was officially announced at a conference in Berlin.
Today April 13 marks the symbolic anniversary of the crime, known as the Katyn Massacre.
After the Soviet aggression on Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, about 250,000 Polish prisoners of war, including more than 10,000 officers, found themselves in Soviet captivity.
On Sept. 19, 1939, Lavrenty Beria, chief of the Soviet NKVD security service, appointed a special Board for Prisoners of War and Internees and ordered the establishment of a network of camps.
In early October 1939, the Soviet authorities decided to release some of the prisoners of war with the rank of private. At the same time, they decided to create two "officer camps" in Starobelsk and Kozelsk as well as a camp in Ostashkov, intended for police officers, border guards and prison guards.
By the end of February 1940, 6,192 policemen, border guards and prison guards had been imprisoned in these camps, in addition to 8,376 officers. Among the prisoners was a large group of reserve officers, who had been called to the army at the outbreak of the war. Most of them were members of the Polish intelligentsia at the time, including doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, writers, journalists, political activists, state and local government officials and landowners. Next to them, those held in the camps also included Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Jewish chaplains.
The decision to murder Polish prisoners of war from the camps in Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov as well as Polish people held in NKVD prisons in what was eastern Poland at the time was made at the highest level by the Soviet authorities.
The decision was made on March 5, 1940 by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party on the basis of a letter sent by the NKVD’s Beria to Stalin.
After a month of preparations, on April 3, 1940, the Soviets began making preparations to close down the Kozelsk camp, followed by the Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps two days later. Over the next six weeks, the Polish prisoners were transported from the camps to the execution sites in groups.
From Kozelsk 4,404 people were taken to Katyn and murdered with shots to the back of their heads; 3,896 POWs from Starobelsk were killed in NKVD facilities in Kharkiv, their bodies buried near the town of Piatykhatky; 6,287 people from Ostashkov were shot in an NKVD building in Kalinin, now Tver, and buried in Mednoye. In total, 14,587 people were murdered.
Under a decision of March 5, 1940, about 7,300 Poles held in various prisons in areas incorporated into the Soviet Union were also murdered: in Ukraine, 3,435 people were executed (their graves are probably located in Bykivnya near Kiev), and in Belarus about 3,800 were killed (and probably buried in Kurapaty near Minsk).
On the night of April 12, 1940, when the NKVD murdered the Polish POWs, the prisoners’ families became victims of mass deportation into the USSR. According to NKVD data, around 61,000 people were deported at the time, most of them to Kazakhstan.
Germany officially announced the news of the discovery of the Katyn mass graves at a press conference in Berlin on April 13, 1943.
On April 15, 1943, the Soviet Information Bureau replied that the Polish prisoners had been engaged in construction work west of Smolensk and "fell into the hands of German fascists in the summer of 1941 after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Smolensk."
That same day, the Polish government-in-exile instructed its representative in Switzerland to ask the International Red Cross to appoint a special commission to investigate the discovered graves.
On April 17, 1943, the Polish authorities sent an official note to the International Red Cross in Geneva on the matter. Earlier the Germans requested the Red Cross to open an investigation.
Moscow reacted very strongly to the proposed investigation.
The disclosure of the crime by the Germans was used by the Soviets as an excuse to break diplomatic relations with the London-based Polish government-in-exile.
On April 21, 1943, Stalin sent secret messages to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, accusing Polish General Wladyslaw Sikorski of having allied with Hitler to conduct a hostile campaign against the Soviet Union.
The formal breakup of diplomatic relations by Moscow with the Polish government-in-exile occurred on the night of April 25, 1943.
The Soviets claimed that the killings had been carried out by the Nazis in 1941 and denied responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the perpetration of the massacre by the NKVD.
Soviet responsibility for the Katyn killings was confirmed by an investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990-1991) and the Russian Federation (1991-2004), however Russia refused to classify them as a war crime or genocide.
In November 2010, the Russian State Duma passed a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for having personally ordained the massacre.
On September 18, 1951 the United States House of Representatives established the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, known as the Madden Committee after its chairman, Rep. Ray J. Madden of Indiana. The committee assembled records related to the massacre and its aftermath, including records from the files of the State and War Departments, in addition to hearing extensive witness testimony. Their purpose was to determine which nation was responsible for the atrocities and whether any American officials had been engaged in covering up the massacre.
The Madden Committee determined unanimously that the Soviet security agency NKVD was responsible for the executions.
The delegation led by President Lech Kaczynski whose TU-154M crashed near Smolensk on April 10, 2010 was under way to Katyn to attend events marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre. (PAP)
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