When Polish General Wladyslaw Anders, formerly a prisoner of war of the Soviets, was allowed to start organizing Polish troops in the USSR, it was discovered that many men on the Polish army's officer lists had disappeared. Of the 14 generals taken prisoner by the Red Army, only 2 could be found, and only 6 out of 300 higher-ranking officers. The Polish command began an investigation, questioning Poles who had been prisoners of the Soviets. It was established that the 15,000 missing officers had been held in three camps, Kozelsk, Ostashkovo, and Starobelsk, and that they were known to have been there up until the spring of 1940. After that all trace of them was lost. The Soviet authorities claimed total ignorance on the matter. The Polish command set up a special commission to investigate the disappearance of the 15,000. It was discovered that the camps had been evacuated in April 1940 and that the Polish prisoners had been taken to nearby train stations and shipped to a place west of Smolensk.
Anders and the diplomatic representatives of the Polish government in Moscow tried to obtain an answer from official Soviet sources as to the fate of the missing officers. At a meeting with Stalin on December 3, 1941, General Sikorski, head of the Polish government in exile, asked about them again. The answer was unexpected: 'They fled." Stalin was then asked where 15,000 men could have fled to. His answer was plainly absurd: 'To Manchuria."65 The Polish government in exile continued to search through official Soviet channels for the missing men, with the help of Britain and the United States, but to no avail.
In February 1943 the Germans announced they had discovered in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk, the buried corpses of thousands of Polish officers. Each one of them had been shot in the back of the neck with a German bullet.
On April 16, 1943, the Sovinformburo announced that the crime of the Katyn forest had been the work of the Nazis.66 The Germans responded with the creation of an international commission under their leadership. It said that the Polish prisoners had been executed by the NKVD in April 1940, that is, one and a half years before the Germans took Smolensk. The Germans authorized Polish physicians living in occupied Poland to hold an independent investigation. The doctors concluded that the Katyn murders had taken place in 1940. Nevertheless, the Germans failed in their attempt to obtain an anti-Soviet statement from them. The Poles did not want the NKVD crimes exploited by their sworn enemies, the Nazis.
The Polish government in London asked the Red Cross to investigate the matter. The Soviet Union categorically refused to cooperate with the Red Cross in such an investigation.
The discovery of the Katyn massacre and the furor raised over it led Stalin to break relations with the Sikorski government on April 25, 1943.67 Churchill had urged Sikorski to keep the matter quiet, to preserve the anti- German coalition.68 The Soviet government took advantage of the situation to organize a Union of Polish Patriots, which Stalin hoped would become the future Polish government.69 At the same time, a Polish division was organized on Soviet territory. It was thus that the Katyn controversy unexpectedly came to serve the long-term political objectives of the Soviet government.
Immediately after the liberation of Smolensk by Soviet troops, a Soviet commission investigated the massacre and, of course, found it had been the work of the Germans in the fall of 1941, not of the NKVD in April 1940.70 Its findings did not even mention such important details as the material of the ropes used to tie the victims' hands, the origins of the square wounds produced by bayonet stabbings, and the character of the vegetation on the graves. The commission also named the guilty, among them a certain Colonel Arens. He, to the surprise of all parties, turned himself in at the Nuremberg trial. At Soviet request, the Katyn affair was included in the indictment. But when it was established that Arens had been away from Smolensk in the fall of 1941 and that the Soviet testimony was very cloudy, a decision was made not to include Katyn in the final judgment of the Nuremberg tribunal. Later, Churchill was to write in his memoirs: "It was decided by the victorious Governments concerned that the issue should be avoided, and the crime of Katyn was never probed in detail."71
For years a number of organizations and individuals laboriously gathered facts and testimony to establish what happened to the 15,570 Polish prisoners who had been in the Soviet camps of Ostashkovo, Kozelsk, and Starobelsk between September 1939 and April 1940. In 1952 the U.S. Congress set up a special commission of inquiry. All the facts and testimony were summarized, leaving no doubt about who committed the crime and when.
Among the prisoners were a large number of reservists, including 1,000 lawyers, hundreds of schoolteachers, university professors, journalists, artists, over 300 medical doctors, and a number of priests. Here was the cream of the Polish intelligentsia, equally hated by the Nazis and the Soviet Communists. Officers on active duty numbered between 8,300 and 8,400.
The corpses of 4,443 Polish prisoners of war were found in the Katyn forest.72 They were identified as those who had been held in the Kozelsk camp. Some of the younger ones had offered resistance and had been beaten; some showed wounds from bayonets of the type used in the Red Army. The bullets were made in Germany prior to 1939. Bullets of this type had been sold before the war in Poland, the Soviet Union, and the Baltic countries.
The last letters received by the families of the prisoners were dated April 1940. In the personal diaries which by some miracle survived, the last date written was April 9. It was also discovered that the prisoners had written on the walls of the railroad cars in which they were shipped. All the inscriptions said the same thing: the trains were heading northwest and being unloaded at Gnezdovo. People were treated with utter brutality. At
Gnezdovo the road from the railroad station to the forest was lined with NKVD men. Prisoners were unloaded and forced to board buses, which disappeared into the forest and returned empty for the next load.
Those who remained in the camp at Kozelsk kept a count of those who were taken. The lists of victims were given to the Polish resistance and thus survived. A total of twelve shipments from Kozelsk, 50—300 each, was thus recorded. The following are excerpts from one diary, whose author left the Kozelsk camp on April 8, 1940, with a group of 277.
April 8,
We were loaded at the station into a prison-train under heavy guard.
We are moving in the direction of Smolensk....
April 9,
Tuesday—Today weather like that during the winter. ... Snow on the fields. ... It is impossible to deduce the direction of our motion.... Treatment is rough.... Nothing is allowed.... 2:30 PM we are arriving at Smolensk. ... Evening, we arrived at the station Gniazdowo [Polish spelling]. It
appears that we shall get off a lot of military men around. Since yesterday
we have had only a piece of bread and a sip of water.73
Finally, living witnesses of the massacre were found. They said that the crime had been carried out by personnel from the Smolensk and Minsk divisions of the NKVD.
The Katyn massacre took place in April 1940, over a year before the German occupation of the Smolensk region. As was shown by an independent commission of inquiry, three-year-old vegetation was found on the graves discovered in 1943: in other words, the crime was committed in 1940 and not in 1941.