
Katyn-Kharkiv-Mednoye memorial
The
Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn
Forest massacre ( , 'Katyń crime'), was a mass murder of thousands of Polish military
officers, policemen, intellectuals and civilian prisoners of war by Soviet
NKVD, based on a proposal from Lavrentiy Beria to execute all members of
the Polish Officer Corps. Dated
March
5,
1940, this official document was then
approved (signed) by the entire Soviet
Politburo including
Joseph Stalin and Beria. The number of victims
is estimated at about 22,000, the most commonly cited number being
21,768.
The victims were murdered in the Katyn
Forest in Russia
, the
Kalinin (Tver
) and
Kharkov
prisons and elsewhere. About 8,000 were
officer taken
prisoner during the 1939
Soviet invasion of Poland,
the rest being Poles arrested for allegedly being "
intelligence agents,
gendarmes,
saboteurs,
landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and officials." Since
Poland's
conscription system required
every unexempted university graduate to become a
reserve officer, the Soviets were able to
round up much of the Polish
intelligentsia, and the
Jewish,
Ukrainian,
Georgian and
Belarusian intelligentsia of Polish
citizenship.
The "Katyn
massacre" refers to the massacre at Katyn Forest, near the villages
of Katyn
and Gnezdovo
(ca.
19 km west of Smolensk
, Russia), of
Polish military officers in the Kozelsk
prisoner-of-war camp.
This was
the largest of the simultaneous executions of prisoners of war from
geographically distant Starobelsk and
Ostashkov
camps, and the executions of political prisoners
from West Belarus and West Ukraine, shot on Stalin's orders at Katyn Forest, at the NKVD
headquarters in Smolensk, at a Smolensk slaughterhouse, and at prisons in Kalinin
(Tver),
Kharkov
, Moscow
, and other
Soviet cities. The Belorussian and Ukrainian Katyn Lists are
NKVD lists of names of Polish prisoners to be murdered at various
locations in Belarus and Western Ukraine. The modern Polish
investigation of the Katyn Massacre, covered not just the massacre
at Katyn forest, but the other mass murders mentioned above. There
are Polish organisations such as the Katyn Committee and the
Federation of Katyn Families, which again are inclusive of victims
of the various mass murders at various locations.
Nazi Germany announced the discovery of
mass graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943.
The revelation led to
the end of diplomatic relations between Moscow and the London
-based
Polish
government-in-exile. The Soviet Union continued to deny
the massacres until 1990, when it finally acknowledged the
perpetration of the massacre by NKVD, as well as the subsequent
cover-up. An investigation by the Prosecutor's General Office of
the Russian Federation has confirmed Soviet responsibility for the
massacres, yet does not classify this action as a
war crime or an act of
genocide. This acknowledgement would have
necessitated the
prosecution of
surviving perpetrators, which is what the
Polish government had requested. In
addition, the Russian government also does not classify the dead as
victims of Stalinist repression, which bars
formal posthumous
rehabilitation.
Prelude
On 17 September, 1939, in violation of the
Polish-Soviet Non-Aggression
Pact, the
Red Army
invaded the territory of Poland from the east. This invasion
took place while Poland had already sustained serious defeats in
the wake of the
German attack on the country that started
on 1 September, 1939. Meanwhile, Great Britain and France, pledged
by the
Polish-British
Common Defence Pact and
Franco-Polish Military
Alliance to attack Germany in the case of such an invasion, did
not take any military action. This is referred to as the
Western betrayal; at the same time the
Red Army moved to invade
Polish areas annexed by
the Soviet Union in accordance with the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.In the wake
of the Red Army's quick advance, which met little resistance upon
orders not to engage Soviets, between 250,000 and 454,700
Polish
soldiers had become prisoners and were
interned by the Soviets. About 250,000 were set
free by the army almost on the spot, while 125,000 were delivered
to the internal security services (the
NKVD).
The NKVD, in turn, quickly released 42,400 soldiers. The
approximately 170,000 released were mostly soldiers of Ukrainian
and Belarusian ethnicity serving in the Polish army. The 43,000
soldiers born in West Poland, then under German control, were
transferred to the Germans.By November 19, the NKVD had about
40,000 Polish
POW: about 8,500
officers and
warrant officers, 6,500
police officers and 25,000 soldiers and
NCOs who
were still being held as POWs.
As early as September 19, the People's Commissar for Internal
Affairs and First Rank Commissar of State Security, Lavrentiy
Beria, ordered the NKVD to create the
Administration
for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees to manage Polish
prisoners. The NKVD took custody of Polish prisoners from the Red
Army, and proceeded to organise a network of reception centers and
transit camps and arrange rail transport to
prisoner-of-war camps in the western
USSR.
The
camps were at Jukhnovo (Babynino rail station), Yuzhe
(Talitsy), Kozelsk
, Kozelshchyna, Oranki,
Ostashkov
(Stolbnyi
Island
on Seliger
Lake
near Ostashkov), Tyotkino
rail station (56 mi/90 km from Putyvl
), Starobielsk, Vologda
(Zaenikevo rail station) and Gryazovets
.
Kozelsk and Starobielsk were used mainly for
military officers, while Ostashkov was used
mainly for
Boy Scout,
gendarme,
police
officers and
prison officers. Prisoners
at these camps were not exclusively military officers or members of
the other groups mentioned but also included Polish
intelligentsia. The approximate distribution
of men throughout the camps was as follows: Kozelsk, 5,000;
Ostashkov, 6,570; and Starobelsk, 4,000. They totaled 15,570
men.
Once at the camps, from October 1939 to February 1940, the Poles
were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political
agitation by NKVD officers such as
Vasily
Zarubin. The Poles were encouraged to believe they would be
released, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to
determine who would live and who would die. According to NKVD
reports, if the prisoners could not be induced to adopt a
pro-Soviet attitude, They were declared "hardened and
uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority."
On 5
March, 1940, pursuant to a note to Stalin from Beria, the members
of the Soviet Politburo — Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov and Anastas Mikoyan; signed an order to execute
25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" kept at
camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine
and Belarus
. The
reason for the massacre, according to historian
Gerhard Weinberg, is that Stalin wanted to
deprive a potential future Polish military of a large portion of
its military talent: "It has been suggested that the motive for
this terrible step [the Katyn massacre] was to reassure the Germans
as to the reality of Soviet anti-Polish policy. This explanation is
completely unconvincing in view of the care with which the Soviet
regime kept the massacre secret from the very German government it
was supposed to impress... A more likely explanation is that...
[the massacre] should be seen as looking forward to a future in
which there might again be a Poland on the Soviet Union's western
border. Since he intended to keep the eastern portion of the
country in any case, Stalin could be certain that any revived
Poland would be unfriendly. Under those circumstances, depriving it
of a large proportion of its military and technical elite would
make it weaker."
Executions
After 3 April, 1940, at least 22,436 POWs and prisoners were
executed: 15,131 POWs (most or all of them from the three camps)
and at least 7,305 prisoners in western parts of Belarus and
Ukraine. A 1956 memo from KGB chief
Alexander Shelepin to
First
Secretary Nikita Khrushchev
contains incomplete information about the personal files of 21,857
murdered POWs and prisoners. Of them 4,421 were from Kozielsk,
3,820 from Starobielsk, 6,311 from Ostashkov, and 7,305 from
Belarusian and Ukrainian prisons. Shelepin's data for prisons
should be considered a minimum, because his data for POWs is
incomplete (he mentions 14,552 personal files for POWs, while at
least 15,131 POWs "sent to NKVD" are mentioned in contemporary
documents).
Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24
colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17
naval captains, 3,420
NCO,
seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85
privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university
professors (including
Stefan
Kaczmarz); 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers,
and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as
about 200 pilots. In all, the
NKVD executed
almost half the Polish officer corps.
Altogether, during the
massacre the NKVD murdered 14 Polish generals: Leon Billewicz (ret.), Bronisław Bohatyrewicz (ret.),
Xawery Czernicki (admiral),
Stanisław Haller (ret.),
Aleksander Kowalewski (ret.),
Henryk Minkiewicz (ret.), Kazimierz Orlik-Łukoski,
Konstanty Plisowski (ret.),
Rudolf Prich (murdered in Lviv
), Franciszek Sikorski (ret.), Leonard Skierski (ret.), Piotr Skuratowicz, Mieczysław Smorawiński and
Alojzy Wir-Konas (promoted
posthumously). A mere 395 prisoners were saved from the
slaughter, among them
Stanisław Swianiewicz and
Józef Czapski. They were taken to
the Yukhnov camp and then down to Gryazovets. They were the only
ones who escaped death.
Up to 99% of the remaining prisoners were subsequently murdered.
People
from Kozelsk
were
murdered in the usual mass murder site of Smolensk
country, in
Katyn
forest; people from Starobilsk were murdered in the inner NKVD prison
of Kharkiv and the bodies were buried near Piatykhatky; and police officers from
Ostashkov
were murdered in the inner NKVD prison of Kalinin
(Tver) and buried in Miednoje
(Mednoye).Detailed information on
the executions in the Kalinin NKVD prison was given during the
hearing by
Dmitrii S.
Tokarev, former head of the Board of the
District NKVD in Kalinin
.
According to Tokarev, the shooting started in the evening and ended
at dawn. The first transport on 4 April 1940, carried 390 people,
and the executioners had a hard time killing so many people during
one night. The following transports were no greater than 250
people. The executions were usually performed with German-made
Walther PPK pistols supplied by Moscow,
but
Nagant M1895 revolvers were also
used.
Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin,
chief
executioner for the
NKVD, personally shot 6,000 of those condemned to death
over a period of 28 days in April 1940.
The killings were methodical. After the condemned's personal
information was checked, he was handcuffed and led to a cell
insulated with a felt-lined door. The sounds of the murders were
also masked by the operation of loud machines (perhaps fans)
throughout the night. After being taken into the cell, the victim
was immediately shot in the back of the head. His body was then
taken out through the opposite door and laid in one of the five or
six waiting trucks, whereupon the next condemned was taken inside.
The procedure went on every night, except for the
May Day holiday. Near Smolensk, the Poles, with
their hands tied behind their backs, were led to the graves and
shot in the neck.
After the executions, there were still more than 22,000 former
Polish soldiers in NKVD
labour camps.
According to Beria's report, by 2 November, 1940 his department had
two generals, 39 lieutenant-colonels and colonels, 222 captains and
majors, 691 lieutenants, 4022 warrant officers and NCOs and 13,321
enlisted men captured during the Polish campaign.
Additional 3,300
Polish soldiers were captured during the annexation of Lithuania
, where they were kept interned since September 1939.
Some
3,000 to 4,000 Polish inmates of Ukrainian prisons and the ones
from Belarus prisons were probably buried in Bykivnia
and in Kurapaty
respectively. Porucznik Janina
Lewandowska, daughter of Gen.
Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, was
the only woman executed during the massacre at Katyn.
Discovery

Aerial photo - The graves of
Katyn
The fate of the Polish prisoners was raised soon after the Nazi
Germans invaded the Soviet
Union in June 1941, when the
Polish government-in-exile and
the Soviet government signed the
Sikorski-Mayski Agreement to fight
Nazi Germany and form a Polish army on Soviet territory. When the
Polish general
Władysław
Anders began organising this army, he requested information
about Polish officers. During a personal meeting, Stalin assured
him and
Władysław
Sikorski, the Polish Prime Minister, that all the Poles were
freed, and that not all could be accounted because the Soviets
"lost track" of them in
Manchuria.
In 1942, Polish railroad workers found a mass grave at Katyn, and
reported it to the
Polish Secret
State; the news was ignored, as people refused to believe the
mass graves contained so many dead. The fate of the missing
prisoners remained unknown until April 1943 when the German
Wehrmacht soldiers under
Rudolf Christoph
Freiherr von Gersdorff discovered the mass grave of 4,243
Polish military reserve officers in the forest on Goat Hill near
Katyn.
Joseph Goebbels saw this
discovery as an excellent tool to drive a wedge between Poland,
Western Allies, and the Soviet Union. On 13 April,
Berlin Radio broadcast to the world that German
military forces in the Katyn forest near Smolensk had uncovered
"a ditch ... 28 metres long and 16 metres wide
[92 ft by 52 ft], in which the bodies of 3,000 Polish
officers were piled up in 12 layers." The broadcast went on to
charge the Soviets with carrying out the massacre in 1940.

One of the mass graves at Katyn
The
Germans assembled and brought in a European commission consisting
of twelve forensic experts and their staffs from Belgium
, Bulgaria
, Denmark
, Finland
, France
, Italy
, Croatia
, the Netherlands
, Romania
, Sweden
, Slovakia
, and Hungary
. After the war, all of the experts, save for
a Bulgarian and a Czech, reaffirmed their 1943 finding of Soviet
guilt. The Katyn Massacre was beneficial to Nazi Germany, which
used it to discredit the Soviet Union. Goebbels wrote in his diary
on 14 April 1943:
"We are now using the discovery of 12,000
Polish officers, murdered by the GPU, for anti-Bolshevik
propaganda on a grand style. We sent neutral journalists
and Polish intellectuals to the spot where they were found.
Their reports now reaching us from ahead are gruesome.
The Fuehrer has also given permission for us to hand out a
drastic news item to the German press. I gave instructions
to make the widest possible use of the propaganda material.
We shall be able to live on it for a couple weeks." The
Germans had succeeded in portraying the dark side of the Soviet
government to the world and briefly raised the spectre of a
communist monster rampaging across the territories of
Western civilization; moreover, General
Sikorski's unease threatened to unravel the alliance between the
Western
Allies and the Soviet
Union.
The Soviet government immediately denied the German charges and
claimed that the Polish prisoners of war had been engaged in
construction work west of Smolensk and consequently were captured
and executed by invading German units in August 1941. The Soviet
response on 15 April to the German initial broadcast of 13 April,
prepared by the
Soviet
Information Bureau, stated that
"[...]Polish
prisoners-of-war who in 1941 were engaged in country construction
work west of Smolensk and who [...] fell into the hands of the
German-Fascist hangmen [...]."
The
Allies were aware that the Nazis had found a mass grave as the
discovery transpired, via radio transmissions intercepted and
decrypted by Bletchley
Park
. German experts and the international
commission, which was invited by Germany, investigated the Katyn
corpses and soon produced physical evidence that the massacre took
place in early 1940, at a time when the area was still under Soviet
control.
In April 1943, when the Polish government-in-exile insisted on
bringing the matter to the negotiation table with the Soviets and
on an investigation by the
International Red Cross, Stalin
accused the Polish government in exile of collaborating with Nazi
Germany, broke diplomatic relations with it, and started a campaign
to get the Western Allies to recognize the
alternative Polish
pro-Soviet government in Moscow led by
Wanda Wasilewska. Sikorski, whose
uncompromising stance on that issue was beginning to create a rift
between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, died suddenly two
months later. The cause of his death is still disputed.
Soviet actions
When, in September 1943,
Goebbels was
informed that the German army had to withdraw from the Katyn area,
he entered a prediction in his diary. His entry for 29 September,
1943 reads:
"Unfortunately we have had to give up Katyn.
The Bolsheviks undoubtedly will soon 'find' that we shot 12,000
Polish officers. That episode is one that is going to
cause us quite a little trouble in the future. The Soviets
are undoubtedly going to make it their business to discover as many
mass graves as possible and then blame it on us."

German WWII propaganda poster (in
French) exploiting the massacre.
The text reads: If the Soviets should win the
war...
Katyn [will be] everywhere!
Indeed,
having retaken the Katyn area almost immediately after the Red Army
had recaptured Smolensk
, NKVD forces began a
cover-up. A cemetery the Germans had permitted the Polish
Red Cross to build was destroyed and other evidence removed. In
January 1944, the Soviet Union sent the
"Special
Commission for Determination and Investigation of the Shooting of
Polish Prisoners of War by German-Fascist Invaders in Katyn
Forest," led (at least nominally) by
Alexey Tolstoy to investigate the incidents
again. The "Burdenko Commission", headed by
Nikolai Burdenko, the President of the
Academy of
Medical Sciences of the USSR, exhumed the bodies again and
reached the conclusion that the shooting was done in 1941, when the
Katyn area was under German occupation. No foreign personnel were
allowed to join the
Burdenko Commission, whereas the Nazi
German investigation had allowed wider access to both international
press and organizations (like the Red Cross, with experts from
Finland, Denmark, Slovakia etc) and even used Polish workers, like
Józef Mackiewicz and Allied
POWs. The Soviet commission declared that all the shootings were
done by German occupation forces in autumn 1941. The final report
of the commission lists a number of items, from gold watches to
letters and icons, allegedly found on the bodies. These items were
said to have dates from November 1940 to June 1941, thus
'rebutting' the German claim of the Poles being shot by the
Soviets. The report can be found in pro-Soviet publication
Supplement to Russia at war weekly (1944); it is also
printed in Dr.Joachim Hoffmann's book
Stalin's Annihilation War
1941–1945 (original:
Stalins Vernichtungskrieg
1941–1945).
Western response
The Western Allies had an implicit, if unwilling, hand in the
cover-up in their endeavour not to antagonise a then-ally, the
Soviet Union. The resulting Polish-Soviet crisis was beginning to
threaten the vital alliance with the Soviet Union at a time when
the Poles' importance to the Allies, essential in the first years
of the war, was beginning to fade, due to the entry into the
conflict of the military and industrial giants, the Soviet Union
and the United States. In retrospective review of records, it is
clear that both
British Prime
Minister,
Winston Churchill
and
US President,
Franklin D. Roosevelt were increasingly torn
between their commitments to their Polish ally, the uncompromising
stance of Sikorski and the demands by Stalin and his
diplomats.
In private, Churchill agreed that the atrocity was likely carried
out by the Soviets. According to the notes taken by
Count Raczyński, Churchill
admitted on 15 April 1943 during a conversation with General
Sikorski:
"Alas, the German revelations are probably true.
The Bolsheviks can be very cruel." However, at the same
time, on 24 April 1943 Churchill assured the Soviets:
"We shall
certainly oppose vigorously any 'investigation' by the
International Red Cross or any other body in any territory under
German authority. Such investigation would be a fraud and
its conclusions reached by terrorism." Unofficial or
classified UK documents concluded that Soviet guilt was a "near
certainty", but the alliance with the Soviets was deemed to be more
important than moral issues, thus the official version supported
the Soviet version, up to
censoring the
contradictory accounts. Churchill's own post-war account of the
Katyn affair is laconic. In his memoirs, he quotes the 1944 Soviet
inquiry into the massacre, which predictably found that the Germans
had committed the crime, and adds,
"belief seems an act of
faith." In 1943, the
Katyn Manifesto which blamed the
Soviet Union, was published in London (in English) by the eccentric
poet
Count Geoffrey
Potocki de Montalk. He was arrested by the
Special Branch and imprisoned.
In the
United
States
, a similar line was taken, notwithstanding that two
official intelligence reports into the Katyn massacre were produced
that contradicted the official position. In 1944 Roosevelt
assigned his special emissary to the Balkans, Navy Lieutenant Commander George Earle, to compile information on Katyn,
which he did using contacts in Bulgaria
and Romania
. Earle concluded that the massacre was
committed by the Soviet Union. Having consulted with
Elmer Davis, the director of the
Office of War Information,
Roosevelt rejected the conclusion (officially), declared that he
was convinced of Nazi Germany's responsibility, and ordered that
Earle's report be suppressed. When Earle formally requested
permission to publish his findings, the President issued a written
order to desist.
Earle was reassigned and spent the rest of
the war in American
Samoa
.
A further report in 1945, supporting the same conclusion, was
produced and stifled. In 1943, two US POWs – Lt. Col.
Donald B. Stewart and Col.
John H. Van
Vliet – had been taken by Germans to Katyn for an international
news conference. Later, in 1945, Van Vliet wrote a report
concluding that the Soviets, not the Germans, were responsible. He
gave the report to Maj. Gen.
Clayton
Bissell, Gen.
George Marshall's
assistant chief of staff for intelligence, who destroyed it.
During
the 1951–1952 investigation, Bissell defended his action before
Congress, contending that it
was not in the US interest to embarrass an ally whose forces were
still needed to defeat Japan
.
Image:Katyn massacre 4.jpg|British and American
officers (POWs) brought by the Germans to view the
exhumations.Image:Katyn massacre 8.jpg|Polish
banknotes and epaulets recovered from mass
gravesImage:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-B23992, Katyn, Öffnung
der Massengräber, polnische Dienstmarke.jpg|" Military
Dog tag" and Christian
medallion recovered from the graves. The inscription
reads: "In memory of Holy Baptism, Cracow, 24 October
1909".
Katyn in judicial proceedings
From 28
December, 1945 to 4 January, 1946, seven servicemen of the German
Wehrmacht were tried by a Soviet military court in Leningrad
. One of them, Arno Diere, was charged with
helping to dig the Katyn graves during the execution. Diere, who
was accused of murder using machine-guns in Soviet villages,
confessed to having taken part in burial (though not the execution)
of 15-20 thousand Polish POWs in Katyn. For this he was spared the
execution and was given 15 years of hard labor.
His confession was
full of absurdities, and thus he was not used as a Soviet
prosecution witness during the Nuremberg trials
. In a November 29, 1954 note he recanted his
confession, claiming that he was forced to confess by the
investigators. Contrary to claims on several "revisionist" sites,
of all the accused during the Leningrad Trial, only Diere was
accused of a connection to the Katyn massacre.
At the London conference that drew up the indictments of German war
crimes prior to the Nuremberg trials, the Soviet negotiators
inserted the allegation, "In September, 1941, 925 Polish officers
who were prisoners of war were killed in the Katyn Forest near
Smolensk." The US negotiators were "embarrassed" by the inclusion
of the allegation (noting that it had been debated extensively in
the press) but concluded that it would be up to the Soviets to
sustain it. At the trials in 1946, Soviet General
Roman A. Rudenko, raised the indictment, stating
that "one of the most important criminal acts for which the major
war criminals are responsible was the mass execution of Polish
prisoners of war shot in the Katyn forest near Smolensk by the
German fascist invaders", but dropped the matter after the United
States and United Kingdom refused to support it and German lawyers
mounted an embarrassing defense. Also, it was not the purpose of
the court to determine whether Germany or the Soviet Union was
responsible for the crime, but rather to attribute the crime to at
least one of the defendants, which the court was unable to
do.
Cold War views
In 1951/52, in the background of the
Korean
War, a
U.S. Congressional investigation chaired by Rep.
Ray J. Madden and known as the Madden Committee
investigated the Katyn massacre.
It charged that the Poles had been killed
by the Soviets and recommended that the Soviets be tried before the
International Court of
Justice
. The committee was however less conclusive
on the issue of the US cover-up. The question of responsibility
remained controversial in the West as well as behind the
Iron Curtain. In the United Kingdom in the late
1970s, plans for a memorial to the victims bearing the date 1940
(rather than 1941) were condemned as provocative in the political
climate of the
Cold War.
It has been sometimes
speculated that the choice made in 1969 for the location of the
BSSR's war memorial at the former
Belarusian village named Khatyn
, a site of
a 1943 Nazi
massacre
in which
the entire village with its whole population was burned, have been
made to cause confusion with Katyn. The two names are
similar or identical in many languages, and were in fact often
confused.
In Poland, the pro-Soviet authorities covered up the matter in
concord with Soviet propaganda, deliberately censoring any sources
that might shed some light on the crime. Katyn was a forbidden
topic in
postwar
Poland. Not only did government
censorship suppress all references to it, but
even mentioning the atrocity was dangerous. Katyn became erased
from Poland's official history, but it could not be erased from
historical memory. In 1981, Polish
trade
union Solidarity erected a memorial
with the simple inscription "Katyn, 1940" but it was confiscated by
the police, to be replaced with an official monument "To the Polish
soldiers – victims of Hitlerite fascism – reposing in the soil of
Katyn".
Nevertheless, every year on Zaduszki, similar memorial crosses were erected at
Powązki
cemetery
and numerous other places in Poland, only to be
dismantled by the police overnight. Katyn remained a
political taboo in
communist Poland
until the fall of the
Eastern bloc in
1989.
Revelations
From the late 1980s, pressure was put not only on the Polish
government, but on the Soviet one as well. Polish academics tried
to include Katyn in the agenda of the 1987 joint Polish-Soviet
commission to investigate censored episodes of the Polish-Russian
history. In 1989 Soviet scholars revealed that
Joseph Stalin had indeed ordered the massacre,
and in 1990
Mikhail Gorbachev
admitted that the NKVD had executed the Poles and confirmed two
other burial sites similar to the site at Katyn: Mednoye and
Piatykhatky.
On 30 October 1989, Gorbachev allowed a delegation of several
hundred Poles, organized by a Polish association named
Families
of Katyń Victims, to visit the Katyn memorial. This group
included former U.S.
national security
advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
A
Mass was held and banners hailing
the Solidarity movement were laid. One mourner affixed a sign
reading "NKVD" on the memorial, covering the word "Nazis" in the
inscription such that it read "In memory of Polish officers
murdered by the NKVD in 1941." Several visitors scaled the fence of
a nearby KGB compound and left burning candles on the grounds.
Brzezinski commented that:
It isn't a personal pain which has brought me here, as
is the case in the majority of these people, but rather recognition
of the symbolic nature of Katyń.
Russians and Poles, tortured to death, lie here
together.
It seems very important to me that the truth should be
spoken about what took place, for only with the truth can the new
Soviet leadership distance itself from the crimes of Stalin and the
NKVD.
Only the truth can serve as the basis of true
friendship between the Soviet and the Polish peoples.
The truth will make a path for itself.
I am convinced of this by the very fact that I was able
to travel here.
Brzezinski further stated that:
The fact that the Soviet government has enabled me to
be here — and the Soviets know my views — is symbolic of the breach
with Stalinism that perestroika
represents.
His remarks were given extensive coverage on Soviet television. At
the ceremony he placed a bouquet of red roses bearing a handwritten
message penned in both Polish and English: "For the victims of
Stalin and the NKVD. Zbigniew Brzezinski."
On 13 April 1990, the forty-seventh anniversary of the discovery of
the mass graves, the USSR formally expressed "profound regret" and
admitted Soviet secret police responsibility. That day is also an
International Day of Katyn Victims Memorial (
Światowy Dzień
Pamięci Ofiar Katynia).
After Poles and Americans discovered further evidence in 1991 and
1992, Russian President
Boris Yeltsin
released the top-secret documents from the sealed "Package №1." and
transferred them to the new Polish president
Lech Wałęsa, Among the documents was a
proposal by
Lavrenty Beria dated with
5 March 1940 to execute 25,700 Poles from Kozelsk, Ostashkov and
Starobels camps, and from certain prisons of Western Ukraine and
Belarus, signed by Stalin (among others); an excerpt from the
Politburo shooting order of 5 March 1940;
and
Aleksandr Shelepin's 3 March
1959 note to
Nikita Khrushchev,
with information about the execution of 21,857 Poles and with the
proposal to destroy their personal files.
A number of Russian politicians and publicists continue to deny all
Soviet guilt, call the released documents fakes, and insist that
the original Soviet version - Polish prisoners shot by Germans in
1941 - is the correct one.
On the opposing sides there are allegations that the massacre was
part of wider action coordinated by both Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union, or that the Germans at least knew of Katyn
beforehand. These allegations cite the secret supplementary
protocol to the
German-Soviet
Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which stipulates that
"Both
parties will tolerate in their territories no Polish agitation
which affects the territories of the other party. They
will suppress in their territories all beginnings of such agitation
and inform each other concerning suitable measures for this
purpose".
They also describe a series of conferences
between NKVD and Gestapo, organised in the town of Zakopane
in 1939–1940, and claim that these conferences were
held to coordinate the killing and the deportation policy and
exchange experience. Writing in
Commentary magazine in 1981, George
Watson, a Fellow in English at St. John's College, Cambridge
suggested that the fate of Polish prisoners may have been discussed
at the April 1940 conference. This theory surfaces in Polish media,
where it is also pointed out that a similar massacre of Polish
elites (
German
AB-Aktion operation in Poland) was taking place at the same
time and with similar methods in German-occupied Poland.
In June 1998, Yeltsin and
Aleksander Kwaśniewski agreed to
construct memorial complexes at Katyn and Mednoye, the two NKVD
execution sites on Russian soil. However, in September of that year
the Russians also raised the issue of Soviet prisoner of war deaths
in the
camps
for Russian prisoners and internees in Poland . About 16,000 to
20,000 POWs died in those camps due to communicable diseases. Some
Russian officials argued that it was 'a genocide comparable to
Katyń'. A similar claim was raised in 1994; such attempts are seen
by some, particularly in Poland, as a highly provocative Russian
attempt to create an 'anti-Katyn' and 'balance the historical
equation'.
During Kwaśniewski's visit to Russia in September 2004, Russian
officials announced that they are willing to transfer all the
information on the Katyn Massacre to the Polish authorities as soon
as it is declassified.
In March 2005 the Prosecutor's General Office of the Russian
Federation concluded the decade-long investigation of the massacre.
Chief Military Prosecutor
Alexander
Savenkov announced that the investigation was able to confirm
the deaths of 1,803 out of 14,542 Polish citizens from three Soviet
camps who had been sentenced to death. He did not address the fate
of about 7,000 victims who had been not in POW camps, but in
prisons. Savenkov declared that the massacre was not a
genocide, that Soviet officials who had been found
guilty of the crime were dead and that, consequently,
there is
absolutely no basis to talk about this in judicial terms. 116
out of 183 volumes of files gathered during the Russian
investigation, were declared to contain state secrets and were
classified.
Despite earlier declarations, President
Vladimir Putin's government refused to allow
Polish investigators to travel to Moscow in late 2004.
In late 2007 and early 2008, several Russian newspapers, including
Rossiyskaya Gazeta,
Komsomolskaya Pravda
and
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
printed stories that implicated the Nazis for the crime, spurring
concern that this was done with the tacit approval of the Kremlin.
As a result, the Polish
Institute of National
Remembrance decided to open its own investigation. Prosecution
team head
Leon Kieres said they would
try to identify those involved in ordering and carrying out the
killings. In addition, on 22 March 2005 the Polish
Sejm unanimously passed an act, requesting the Russian
archives to be declassified. The Sejm also requested Russia to
classify the Katyn massacre as a crime of genocide.
The resolution
stressed that the authorities of Russia
"seek to
diminish the burden of this crime by refusing to acknowledge it was
genocide and refuse to give access to the records of the
investigation into the issue, making it difficult to determine the
whole truth about the murder and its perpetrators."
Russia and Poland remained divided on the legal description of the
Katyn crime, with the Poles considering it a case of genocide and
demanding further investigations, as well as complete disclosure of
Soviet documents. In 2008, Polish Foreign Ministry asked the
government of Russia about an alleged video footage of the massacre
filmed by NKVD during the killings. Polish officials believe that
this footage, as well as further documents showing cooperation of
Soviets with Gestapo during the operations, are the reason for
Russia's decision to classify most of documents about the
massacre.
In June 2008, Russian courts consented to hear a case about the
declassification of documents about Katyn and the judicial
rehabilitation of the victims. In an interview with a Polish
newspaper, Vladimir Putin called Katyn a "political crime."
The
European
Court of Human Rights
communicated the Katyn claims to the Russian
government on 10 October 2008 .
In art and literature
The Katyn massacre is a major plot element in many works of
culture, for example, in the
W.E.B.
Griffin novel
The
Lieutenants, which is part of the
Brotherhood of War
series, as well as in the novel and film
Enigma. Polish poet
Jacek Kaczmarski has dedicated one of his
sung poems to this event. In a bold
political statement for the height of the Cold War,
Dušan Makavejev used original Nazi
footage in his 1974 film
Sweet
Movie.
The
Honorary Academy Award
recipient Polish film director
Andrzej
Wajda , whose father, Captain Jakub Wajda, was murdered in the
NKVD prison of Kharkov, has made a film depicting the event, called
simply
Katyn. The film
recounts the fate of some of the women—mothers, wives and
daughters—of the Polish officers slaughtered by the Soviets. Some
Katyn Forest scenes are re-enacted. The screenplay is based on
Andrzej Mularczyk's book
Post mortem - the Katyn story.
The film was produced by Akson Studio, and released in Poland on 21
September 2007. In 2008 it was nominated for the Academy Award for
the Best Foreign Language Film.
In 2000, US filmmaker
Steven Fischer
produced a minute-long
public service
announcement titled
Silence of Falling Leaves honoring
the fallen soldiers, consisting of images of falling autumn leaves
with a sound track cutting to a narration in Polish by the
Warsaw-born artist Bozena Jedrzejczak. It was honored with an
Emmy nomination.
[384117]
Memorials
Several statues in memory of the massacre have been erected
worldwide. In the UK, plans to build a major Katyn monument were
objected to by the
British
government. When in 1976, a simple plaque with “KATYN 1940” was
put up in
Gunnersbury Cemetery,
west London, the first such Katyn memorial in the world, the local
council had it removed. It was formally unveiled in September 1976,
but the government was not represented at the ceremony as such a
memorial was firmly opposed by it and the local council.
In Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, UK, a memorial to the victims of
the Katyn Massacre was unveiled by Stefan Staniszewski, whose
father Hillary Zygmunt Staniszewski (a high court judge) died in
the massacre. Preserved below a small stone monument bearing a
plaque with the inscription "In memoriam to the 14,000 members of
the Polish Armed Forces and professional classes who were executed
in Katyn Forest (1940)" are phials of soil from both Warsaw and the
Katyn forest.
A golden
statue, known as the National Katyn Massacre
Memorial, is located in Baltimore
, Maryland
, on Alicianna Street at Inner Harbor East.
Polish-Americans in Detroit erected a small
white-stone memorial in the form of a cross with plaque at St. Albertus
Roman Catholic Church
. A statue commemorating the massacre is
erected at Exchange Place
on the Hudson River
in Jersey City,
New Jersey
.
A large
metal sculpture has been erected in the Polish community of
Roncesvalles
in Toronto
to commemorate the killings.
A simple
but beautiful memorial in Johannesburg
, commemorates the victims of Katyn as well as South
African and Polish airmen who flew missions to drop supplies for
the Warsaw
Uprising.
A
memorial complex was erected to the over 4300 officers of the Katyn
massacre murdered in Pyatykhatky, 14 kms north of
Kharkiv
in Ukraine. The memorial complex lies in a
corner of a former pansionate for NKVD officers. Children had
discovered hundreds of Polish officer buttons whilst playing on the
site. After escavation, the bodies were reburied with an alley of
plaques, one to each of the officers shot there, stating their
name, rank and town of origin. The monument is made of steel,
constantly red from the rusting signifying the blood of the
oficers. A bell sunk into the ground tolls on the hour.
Original documents
Authenticated copies of Soviet documents related to the Katyn
massacre (the second paper is an execution order signed by
Stalin,
Vyacheslav
Molotov,
Kliment Voroshilov,
Anastas Mikoyan).Image:1940-03-05
politbiuro.pngImage:1940-03-05 beria1.pngImage:1940-03-05
beria2.pngImage:1940-03-05 beria3.pngImage:1940-03-05
beria4.png
See also
References
- Fischer, Benjamin B., " The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field".
"Studies in Intelligence", Winter 1999–2000. Retrieved on 10
December 2005.
- Katyn documentary film
- Sanford, George. " Katyn And The Soviet Massacre Of 1940: Truth,
Justice And Memory". Routledge, 2005.
- Decision to commence investigation into Katyn Massacre,
Małgorzata Kużniar-Plota, Departamental Commission for the
Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, Warsaw 30 November
2004, (Internet Archive) (also see the press release online), last accessed on 19
December 2005, English translation of Polish document
- Data combined from Shelepin's letter to Khrushchev and Soviet
data from 03.12.1941 UPVI note in Katyn. 1940–2000,
Moscow, "Ves' mir", 2001, pp. 384, 385)
- Among them Maj. Gen. Alexandre Chkheidze, who was handed over
to the USSR by Nazi Germany per the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; cf.
- Sanford. p54
- Zawodny, Janusz K., Death in the
Forest: The Story of the Katyn Forest Massacre, University of
Notre Dame Press, 1962, ISBN 0-268-00849-3 partial html online
- Excerpt from the minutes No. 13 of the Politburo of the Central
Committee meeting, shooting order of 5 March 1940 online, last accessed on 19 December 2005,
original in Russian with English translation
- BBC News: "Russia to release massacre files", 16 December
2004
-
Text of the original TASS communique released on April 14,
1990
- Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars, p.171, Yale University
Press, 2006, ISBN 0300112041
- " Katyn Massacre Was Not Genocide — Russian Military
Prosecutor". Mosnews, 11 March 2005.
- Encyklopedia PWN 'KAMPANIA
WRZEŚNIOWA 1939'. Retrieved on 10 December 2005, Polish
language
- Молотов на V сессии Верховного Совета 31 октября цифра
«примерно 250 тыс.»
- Отчёт Украинского и Белорусского фронтов Красной Армии
Мельтюхов, с. 367.
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"Демократия": 1999, сс.20–21, 208–210.
- "The grave unknown elsewhere or any time before ...
Katyń – Kharkov – Mednoe". Retrieved on 10 December 2005.
Article includes a note that it is based on a special edition of a
"Historic Reference-Book for the Pilgrims to Katyń – Kharkow –
Mednoe" by Jędrzej Tucholski
- "The Katyn Diary of Leon Gladun", last accessed
on 19 December 2005, English translation of Polish document. See
the entries on 25 December, 1939 and 3 April, 1940.
- Gerhard Weinberg, A World At Arms, pg. 107.
Referenced by Weinberg to Akten zur deutschen
auswärtigen Politik D, 8, No. 657, n 2
- 03.12.1941 UPVI report in Katyn. A Crime Without
Punishment, A.M.Cienciala, N.S.Lebedeva, W.Materski (eds.),
Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 285, 286)
- Shelepin's memo to Khrushchev
- , , , , , ,
- , also in .
- The executioners used German weapons (7,65 mm Walther PPK) rather than the standard
Soviet 7.62x38R
Nagant M1895
revolver, as the latter was said to offer too much recoil, which
made shooting painful after the first dozens of executions. See for
instance:
- Beria's letter №4713/б of 2 November, 1940 published in Новая и
новейшая история, №2, 1993
- Lewandowska is also mentioned in numerous memoirs of the
officers killed in Katyn, whose diaries were found during the
German war-time exhumation, later published as:
- Various authors. Biuletyn „Kombatant” nr specjalny (148) czerwiec 2003
Special Edition of Kombatant Bulletin No.148 6/2003 on the occasion
of the Year of General Sikorski. Official publication of the Polish
government Agency of Combatants and Repressed
- Ромуальд Святек, "Катынский лес", Военно-исторический журнал,
1991, №9,
- Brackman, Roman. "The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden
Life]", 2001, ISBN 0-7146-5050-1.
- Assembly of Captive European Nations, First Session, September
20, 1954–February 11, 1955, Organization, Resolutions, Reports,
Debate; p118
- Engel,
David. "[1] Facing a Holocaust: The Polish
Government-In-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945]". 1993. ISBN
0-8078-2069-5.
- Bauer, Eddy. "The Marshall Cavendish Illustrated Encyclopedia
of World War II". Marshall Cavendish, 1985
- Goebbels, Joseph. The Goebbels Diaries
(1942–1943). Translated by Louis P. Lochner. Doubleday &
Company. 1948
- Davies, Norman. "Europe: A History". HarperCollins, 1998.
ISBN 0-06-097468-0.
- The Polish government official statement on 17 April 1943,
published in London on 18 April online, last accessed on 19 December, 2005,
English translation of Polish document
- Soviet Note of 25 April 1943, severing unilaterally
Soviet-Polish diplomatic relations online, last accessed on 19 December 2005,
English translation of Polish document
- Dean, Martin. "Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the
Local Police in Belarusia and Ukraine, 1941–44", Palgrave, 1999,
ISBN 0-312-22056-1 Google Book page view
- Paczkowski, Andrzej, The Spring Will
Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom,
2003, ISBN 0-271-02308-2. Google Books link to page
- Kubit, Jozef Kazimierz, Was General Sikorski a victim of the Katyn
massacre?, Polish News
- (Spetsial'naya Kommissiya po ustanovleniyu i rassledovaniyu
obstoyatel'stv rasstrela nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami v
Katynskom lesu voyennoplennyh polskih ofitserov)
- online "I saw it with my own eyes...", last accessed
on 19 December, 2005, English translation of a Polish document
- Full text of the original report as printed in
"Pravda" on
January 26, 1944 is available at the
Russian Wikisource.
- David
Carlton, "Churchill and the Soviet Union", Manchester
University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-7190-4107-4 Google Books page online
- Michael
Fowler. "Winston S. Churchill. Philosopher and statesman".
University Press of America. 1985. ISBN 0-8191-4416-9[2]
- Churchill, Winston, The Hinge of
Fate, 1986 (1950), ISBN 0-395-41058-4. Google Book Search page view
- National
Archives and Records Administration, documents related to
Committee to Investigate and Study the Facts, Evidence, and
Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre (1951–52) online, last accessed on 23 December 2005.
Also, Select Committee of the US Congress final report: "The Katyn
Forest Massacre," House Report No. 2505, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session
(22 December. 1952) online pdf, unofficial reproduction of the relevant parts.
- Van Vliet Report (reconstructed and discussion
of), last accessed on 19 December 2005
- Montréal Gazette, Canada, 5 November,
1990. " Germans Hanged for Katyn" and Letter published in Anzeiger der Notverwaltung des
Deutschen Ostens, No.5, Sept./Oct. 2005., Retrieved on 16
November, 2006.
- I.S.Yazhborovskaja, A.Yu.Yablokov, V.S.Parsadanova,
Katynskij sindrom v sovetsko-pol'skikh i rossijsko-pol'skikh
otnosheniyakh, Moscow, ROSSPEN, 2001, pp. 336, 337.
- S. S. Alderman, "Negotiating the Nuremberg Trial Agreements,
1945," in Raymond Dennett and Joseph E. Johnson, edd.,
Negotiating With the Russians (Boston, MA: World Peace
Foundation, [1951]), p. 96
- Excerpts of Nuremberg archives: Nizkor.org – Fifty-Ninth Day: Thursday, 14
February, 1946 (Part 7 of 15), last accessed on 2 January,
2006
- Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg, Carroll &
Graf Publishers, 1984, ISBN 0-88184-032-7 Google Print – p.454
- As precisely described by Iona Nikitchenko, one of the judges and a
military magistrate having been involved in Stalin's show trials,
"the fact that the Nazis chiefs are criminals was already
established [by the declarations and agreements of the Allies]. The
role of this court is thus limited to determine the precise
culpability of each one [charged]". in: Nuremberg Trials, Leo
Kahn, Bellantine, N.Y., 1972, p.26.
- Silitski, Vitali. " A Partisan Reality Show". Transitions
Online, 11 May 2005.
- .
- Yahoo News:
Russia says WW2 executions of Poles not genocide 11 March 2005
online
- United Press International:
Weeping Poles visit Katyn massacre site 30 October 1989
- BBC News:
Commemoration of Victims of Katyn Massacre, 1 November 1989
- Associated Press: Brzezinski: Soviets
Should Take Responsibility for Katyn Massacre 30 October 1989
- " Judgment On Katyn". Time, 13 November
1989. Retrieved on 04 August 2008.
- "CHRONOLOGY 1990; The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe."
Foreign
Affairs, 1990, pp. 212.
- Encyklopedia PWN, 'KATYŃ'. Retrieved on 10 December 2005.
- proposal online, last accessed on 19 December
2005
- Aleksandr Shelepin's 3 March 1959 note to Khrushchev, with
information about the execution of 21,857 Poles and with the
proposal to destroy their personal files. online, last
accessed on 31 January 2009, in Russian language;
- Вечер: "Катынь – боль не только Польши, но и
России" портал "Права человека в России"]
- Юрий Изюмов. "Катынь не по Геббельсу. Беседа с Виктором Илюхиным."
("Досье", №40, 2005 г.)]
- Юрий Мухин, "Антироссийская подлость"
- The
Economist: "In denial: Russia revives a vicious lie", Feb
7th 2008, last accessed on 31 January, 2009
- Nazi-Soviet Relations Page: Secret Supplementary Protocol
The Avalon Project at Yale Law School
- Dr. Jan Moor-Jankowski " Holocaust of Non-Jewish Poles During WWII," Courtesy
of Polish American Congress, Washington Metropolitan Area
Division.
- George Watson. "Rehearsal for the Holocaust?"
Commentary, 71 (June 1981), 60-61
- Mariusz Oleśkiewicz, The SAGA Foundation, 2 maja 2005.
- POLISH-RUSSIAN FINDINGS ON THE SITUATION OF RED ARMY
SOLDIERS IN POLISH CAPTIVITY (1919–1922). Official Polish
government note about 2004 Rezmar, Karpus and Matvejev book.
Accessed on 20 February, 2008.
- .Sanford, George. "Katyn And The Soviet Massacre Of 1940:
Truth, Justice And Memory". Routledge, 2005, ISBN 0-415-33873-5,
Google Print, p.8
- Radio Free Europe, ...DESPITE POLAND'S STATUS AS 'KEY ECONOMIC
PARTNER, Newsline Wednesday, 29 September 2004 Volume 8 Number
185, last accessed on 2 January 2006
- Ответ ГВП на письмо общества «Мемориал», 2005
- Guardian Unlimited, "Russian victory festivities open old wounds in
Europe", 29 April 2005, by Ian Traynor, last accessed on 31 January
2009
- STATEMENT: ON INVESTIGATION OF THE “KATYN CRIME” IN
RUSSIA, Memorial statement, last accessed on 31
January 2009
- Ecumenical News International,
"Polish priest deplores Russian blocking of massacre
enquiry", 8 April 2005, by Jonathan Luxmoore, last accessed on
31 January 2009
- Warsaw
Voice, "Katyn Resolution Adopted", 30 March 2005, last
accessed on 2 January 2006
- the resolution said: "On the 65th anniversary of the Katyn
murder the Senate pays tribute to the murdered, best sons of the
homeland and those who fought for the truth about the murder to
come to light, also the Russians who fought for the truth, despite
harassment and persecution"
- Polish government statement: Senate pays tribute to Katyn victims – 3/31/2005, last
accessed on 2 January 2006
- Polish government statement: IPN launches investigation into Katyn crime –
1/12/2004, last accessed on 2 January 2006
- wiadomosci.gazeta.pl: "NKWD filmowało rozstrzelania w Katyniu", 17
July 2008
- The
Economist: "Dead leaves in the wind: Poland, Russia and
history", Jun 19th 2008, last accessed on 31 January, 2009
- Ombudsman to Join Katyn Claims in Strasbourg
Court
- Kaczmarski, Jacek. " Katyń". kaczmarski.art.pl, 29 August 1985.
Retrieved on 05 August 2008.
- Andrzej Wajda. Official Website of Polish movie director -
Biography
- Katyń -
film Andrzeja Wajdy
- Katyn Monuments around the World by Alina Siomkajlo ISBN
83-7399-009-7 page 14-15
- "Wikipedia: Cannock Chase"
- " Picture and story of Monument, Cannock
Chase"
- " National Katyn Memorial Foundation". National
Katyn Memorial Foundation, 08 October 2005. Retrieved on 04 August
2008.
- " Photo of Detroit Memorial"
106."Katyn-Kolonko" (The Katyn Crime). Icore Ekdin,
Sunday Supplementary,Cover Story. 11.10.2009.
Written by Saubhik Ghosh.
Further reading
- Books about the Katyn Forest Massacre
- Anna M. Cienciala (Editor), Natalia S. Lebedeva (Editor),
Wojciech Materski (Editor),. Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment
(Annals of Communism Series). Yale University Press, January 28,
2008. ISBN 0300108516
- Adam Moszyński, Lista
katyńska. Jeńcy obozów Kozielsk–Ostaszków–Starobielsk
zaginieni w Rosji Sowieckiej (Katyń list: Prisoners of
Kozelsk–Ostaszków–Starobielsk camps who disappeared in Soviet
Russia), Londyn 1949;
- George Sanford,
"The Katyn Massacre and Polish-Soviet relations
1941–1943," Journal
of Contemporary History 41(1):95–111 online
- Stanisław
Swianiewicz, W cieniu Katynia (In the shadow of
Katyn), Paryż 1976. English edition by Borealis Pub, 2000, as
In the Shadow of Katyn: Stalin's Terror, ISBN
1-894255-16-X
- Jerzy Łojek (Leopold Jerzewski), Dzieje sprawy
Katynia (History of the Katyn affair), Warszawa 1980;
- Janusz K. Zawodny, Katyń, Lublin 1989;
- A. Basak, Historia pewnej mistyfikacji. Zbrodnia
katyńska przed Trybunałem Norymberskim (History of certain
mistification: Katyn crime before the Nuremberg Trials) ISSN
0137-1126 in Studia nad Faszyzmem i Zbrodniami Hitlerowskimi:
XXI, Wrocław 1993, ISBN 83-229-1816-X Table of contents online
- Komorowski, Eugenjusz Andrei, and Gilmore, Joseph L. (1974).
Night Never Ending. Avon Books. Largely discredited book
purporting to be the eyewitness story of the sole survivor of the
massacre.
- Victor Zaslavsky, Class Cleansing: The Katyn Massacre.
Trans. Kizer Walker. New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2008. ISBN
9780914386414
External links
- Official site of the Memorial of Katyn
- Original of Katyn order
- Katyn massacre victim list
- Polish
deaths at Soviet hands – website about Katyn forest
massacre
- Pictures taken during the 1943 exhumation
- British reactions to the Katyn Massacre,
1943–2003 by Minister for Europe, Denis MacShane
- The Katyn Massacre: A Special Operations Executive
perspective
- Katyn in Nuremberg
- Historians Have Yet to Face Up to the Implications of the
Katyn Massacre by Adam Scrupski, History News Network, 5-17-04
- 10Nov94 H-Diplo posting by Louis R. Coatney, "Argument for Katyn as start & end of
Cold War"
- Katyn Forest Massacre: Articles and links
- The Lies of Katyn by Jamie Glazov, FrontPage Magazine, August 8, 2000
- Stalin's Killing Field by Benjamin B.
Fischer
- The Katyn Massacre: An Assesment of its
Significance as a Public and Historical Issue in the USA and GB,
1940-1993
- Katyn Photo Galleries
- Stanisław Szukalski sculpture dedicated Katyń
memory
- Katyn executioners named Gazeta Wyborcza. December 15, 2008
- Ferdynand Goetel w Katyniu – story of one of the
Polish members of the 1943 International Commission
- A set of copies of Katyn-related documents which
were provided to Lech Walesa on 14 Oct. 1992
- Facsimile of the Soviet Izvestia newspaper with Burdenko
Commission's report
- Photos by Alexey Pamyatnykh from exhumations at Mednoe in
August 1991
- Two fragments from the videotaped interrogation of
P.K.Soprunenko (former chief of USSR NKVD Board for Prisoners of
War and Internees) about the Katyn massacre, 29.04.1991
- Burdenko Commission witness Mikhail Krivozertsev
interviewed in 1990, explains how testimonies were fabricated
(Russian with Polish subtitles)
- Katyn Victims Near Kharkov Covered with Lime,
Wacław Radziwinowicz, Gazeta
Wyborcza, August 10, 2009.
- Katyn massacre photographs at Wiki Commons