About 350 military reenactors will today march silently through central Warsaw as Poles pause to honor the 22,000 that were killed during the 1940 Katyn Massacre, a horrific bloodletting that saw the cream of Poland’s officer class murdered by Stalin’s NKVD.
However, these were not just career soldiers that were executed by the Soviets, but also reservists who in their everyday occupations worked as doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, engineers and journalists. Together, they did not just represent the best of Poland, they represented its future.
This point was not lost on the Soviets. With Stalin already eyeing long-term hegemony over Poland, the chance to deprive the nation of the very people that stood to obstruct his tyrannical ambitions was too great to resist.
But to trace the origins of the Katyn Massacre, it is necessary to first dial back to 1939. Although it is often forgotten in the West, Poland was not invaded by Germany alone.
In August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression agreement that would become known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It included a secret annex that, in essence, agreed on the carve-up of Poland, dividing the German and Soviet spheres of interest loosely along the lines of the Narew, Vistula and San rivers.
But when Germany launched its Blitzkrieg on September 1, Stalin did not immediately follow suit. True to his Machiavellian nature, he instead bade his time to observe the reaction of Poland’s Western Allies.
Satisfied with what he saw, on September 17 he finally ordered Soviet forces to roll westwards under the pretext of bringing stability to the border areas following the “disintegration” of Poland’s leadership.
Fighting the Wehrmacht on one side, and the Red Army on the other, Poland was overwhelmed and the country surrendered on October 6.
Hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers were taken into Soviet captivity, and while many of these were later released, those in positions of rank were picked out and sent to camps inside the USSR, most notably in Kozelsk, Starobyelsk and Ostashkov, as well as prisons in what is now western Ukraine and Belarus.
These Polish POWs posed a problem for Stalin, who viewed them as a threat to his long-term plans to Sovietize Poland.
Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD—the feared secret police—agreed, and on March 5, 1940, he filed a report to Stalin branding the prisoners “sworn enemies” of the Soviet system.
He added: “The military and police officers in the camps are attempting to continue their counter-revolutionary activities and are carrying out anti-Soviet agitation. Each of them is waiting only for his release in order to start actively struggling against Soviet authority.”
Writing in cold, business-like language, Beria concluded that these Poles should face “the supreme penalty: shooting.”
The four-page document, which survives, was signed by Stalin in pencil and five of his henchmen. A month later, the killings began.
The most notorious of the murders took place in the forests of Katyn. It was here that about 5,000 inmates of the Kozelsk camp were loaded onto vans and trucks and taken to a remote location.
On arrival, they were led one-by-one into the forest’s bleary half-light by two Russian soldiers holding their arms. Some had their hands bound with wire, others sawdust stuffed into their mouths.
Those that tried to escape were bayonetted or beaten senseless with rifle butts. Those that did not, found themselves on the edge of a huge, excavated ditch whereupon they were clinically dispatched with a single shot to the back of the head.
Similar scenes played out elsewhere, both in Russia’s gloomy forests and inside NKVD facilities. The executions ran until May, after which the NKVD made sure to cover their tracks by smoothing the ground and then planting conifers over the mass graves.
In just the space of a couple of months, the Soviets had been able to eviscerate Poland’s middle class and officer elite.
This, though, was not the end of the Katyn story, rather the beginning—what followed was a cynical coverup that would take decades to fully expose.
When Hitler double-crossed Stalin in 1941 to invade the Soviet Union, the USSR became the West’s ally, and awkward questions about the missing officers were immediately raised on the prompting of Poland’s government-in-exile.
Stalin gave evasive answers to Polish and British authorities, saying that the officers had been transported east before escaping and disappearing in Manchuria.
Two years later, Stalin’s lies were exposed. By this time, the area of Katyn was occupied by the Germans, and it was soldiers of the Wehrmacht that discovered mass graves containing thousands of rotting corpses wearing Polish uniforms.
The Germans, sensing a propaganda coup, announced the news to the world on April 13, 1943, pinning the blame squarely on the Soviets. For Berlin, news of the grisly discovery was a godsend, and Nazi officials attempted to exploit it so as to drive a wedge between Stalin and the West.
The fallout was immense, and Poland’s government-in-exile demanded a full investigation.
Yet while Winston Churchill privately admitted that it was “perhaps true” that the Soviets were responsible for the atrocity, he also concluded that it was unwise to weaken the alliance with the Soviet Union.
These thoughts were echoed in the highest corridors of power—ultimately, the military value of the Soviet Union outweighed the search for the truth.
Others in the West, already too familiar with the outrageous claims of German propaganda, simply dismissed Katyn as another attempt by the Nazis to falsify the truth.
Stalin, for his part, flatly denied knowledge of the crime, and the Kremlin broke off diplomatic relations with Poland’s exiled government in a feigned fit of outrage.
A 1952 report by a US congressional committee announced that there was no doubt that the Soviets were guilty, describing the massacre as “one of the most barbarous international crimes in world history,” but these findings were suppressed by American officials keen not to escalate Cold War tensions any further.
It would not be until 1990 that the truth began to emerge when the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged that Beria’s NKVD was guilty.
In 1992, the newly-elected president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, went a step further, and revealed Stalin’s personal involvement when he handed Beria’s memorandum—signed by Stalin—over to Poland’s president of the time, Lech Wałęsa.
Since then, declassified documents have further indicated that the massacre was subject to an Allied cover-up, and in 2012 it was disclosed that two American POWs who had been taken to the mass graves by the Germans had sent coded messages to American intelligence affirming the Soviet Union’s guilt.
Katyn continues to cast a dark cloud over Polish-Russian relations, not just because of the scale and callous cruelty of the massacre, but also because of Russia’s continued attempts to twist the narrative.
Today, on the occasion of Katyn Memorial Day (set on the anniversary of the massacre being made public), it is not just the memory of those that died that will be remembered, but so too the painful search for truth.
