The Great Terror

Apart from the approximately 440,000 Polish civilians sent to camp, in September 1939 the Russians took about 200,000 Polish prisoners of war. Most of the officers and several thousand soldiers were sent to camps at Starobelsk, Kozielsk, and Ostachkov. In April 1940, there were about 15,000 of them there, including 8,700 officers. Only 48 were ever seen again; they had been removed from the camps and sent to Soviet prisons. The missing group included 800 doctors and a dozen university professors.

When, under the agreement between the Poles and the Russians following the Soviet entry into the war, the former Polish prisoners were allowed to leave Russia and form their own army in the Middle East, the Polish representatives gave the Russians lists of names of soldiers who were known to have fallen into Russian hands and had not been released.

The Polish Ambassador, Professor Kot, raised the subject ten times with Molotov and Vyshinsky between October 1941 and July 1942, and always received the reply that all the prisoners had been released. When Kot met Stalin in November 1941, Stalin made a call to the NKVD on the subject. Whatever the answer was, Stalin then went on to the next point and would not discuss the matter further.

When General Sikorski saw Stalin on 3 December 1941, he was told that perhaps the missing men had got over the border into Manchuria. But Stalin promised to look into the question, saying that if any Poles had not been released, through local obstruction by NKVD officers, the latter would be disciplined.

In April 1943, the Germans announced the discovery of mass graves containing executed Poles in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. Within two days, the Russians produced a clear-cut official story of Polish officers in camps in the Smolensk area who had been left behind and had fallen into German hands—a totally different account from those which had previously been given by Stalin and his subordinates.

Allied leaders, while not all actively accepting the Russian story, took the line that no trouble should now be caused in view of the overriding importance of unity against Hitler. The Western press, however, accepted the Russian version almost unanimously. The American military paper Stars and Stripes even published a caricature of a Polish officer, represented as pretending to have been killed by the Russians.¹⁰

The Germans allowed access to the Katyn Forest to a large number of expert or interested parties—a European medical commission, containing experts from universities all over Europe, including neutrals such as Dr. Naville, Professor of Forensic Medicine at Geneva;fn2 representatives of the Polish underground; senior Allied prisoners of war, who correctly refused to pronounce any opinion, but who reported confidentially to their Governments that the German story was quite clearly true.

Basically, the proof consisted of digging up previously untouched mass graves; examining the corpses, compacted under earth; finding on them Soviet newspapers and similar material going up to April 1940, and nothing later; and noting that they were mostly in thick clothing, as against the Russian story that the executions had taken place in the warmth of September 1941.

The bodies found at Katyn, 4,143 in number, represented only those who had been in the Kozielsk camp; 2,914 were identified, and 80 percent of them were among the lists of missing the Polish authorities had assembled.

What happened to the Poles from the other two camps, numbering about 10,400 men, remains unknown. There are stories that a number of Polish prisoners were packed into old barges and scuttled in the White Sea. And there are also tales of a mass execution and burial resembling Katyn in the neighborhood of Kharkov.¹¹

The Nuremberg judges examined the Katyn Affair from 1 to 3 July 1946 in a derisory fashion, and did not mention Nazi responsibility for it in their verdict. No evidence of any sort has ever been forthcoming from German prisoners or captured material of Nazi responsibility for this particular crime.

But it is now hardly necessary here to say more. It is nowhere believed any longer that the Germans were responsible.

The significance, from the point of view of our theme, the Purges, is that we have here a clear-cut example of a mass execution carried out, without trial and in complete secrecy, as a routine administrative measure—and in peacetime.