What happened to the other 10,000 Polish prisoners detained in the Ostashkovo and Starobelsk camps? All trace of those held at Ostashkovo disappear at the Bologoe and Vyazma train stations; the traces of those from Starobelsk are lost in the Kharkov region. Nothing more has been found about either group.
But 448 prisoners from the Kozelsk camp survived. They were considered possible collaborators of the Soviet government, a judgment made by the NKVD officials who operated in the camps under the command of a General Zarubin. They were transferred to the Pavelich Bor camp between the end of April and the end of May 1940. In early June 1941 they were moved to the Gratsovets camp.
The chairman of the Soviet commission of inquiry into the Katyn crime, which was set up immediately after the liberation of Smolensk, was Academician Nikolai Burdenko, a surgeon and a prominent figure in Soviet medicine. It was he who signed the official finding of the commission stating that the crime had been committed by the Germans in 1941. After the war, in 1946, when Burdenko was seriously ill and had retired, he confessed to a friend, Dr. Olshansky:
There is no question that these "Katyns" have happened and will happen. If you begin to dig around in the soil of our mother Russia, you will surely
come across a goodly number of similar archeological discoveries. We
were obliged to totally refute the widespread German accusations against us. Under Stalin's personal orders, I went to the place the bodies were discovered. An examination was made, and it was found that all the bodies had been there for four years. Death had occurred in 1940.... In fact, for me as a physician, that question is incontestable and there is no need for discussion on the topic. Our NKVD comrades committed a major mistake.74
Stalin knew the truth about Katyn; the extermination plan had been worked out by the NKVD and approved by Beria. Among others implicated in the affair, to various degrees, were Beria's assistant Merkulov (both he and Beria were shot in 1953) and NKVD Generals Zarubin and Reikhman.
The Katyn massacre was entirely in keeping with Stalin's political aims— to purge Poland of all patriotic elements, to wipe out the intelligentsia, and thus to clear the ground for a pro-Soviet regime. This was the policy he later pursued, at the time of the Warsaw uprising in 1944 and after that, when the Red Army was extending its control over all of Polish territory.
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH
The influence of the Russian Orthodox church and the number of its practicing members had been greatly reduced by the socioeconomic transformations in the Soviet Union and by government persecution. Of the 50,000 priests and 163 bishops before the revolution, only slightly more than 100 priests and 7 bishops remained at the outbreak of war. One thousand monasteries and sixty seminaries had been closed.75 In response to government persecution, all sorts of sects and communities, a kind of "church of the catacombs," came into being.
On the eve of World War II the religious policies of the party and the state began to change: the party understood the need to revive and exploit patriotic feelings. In the fall of 1939, after the annexation of the western Ukraine and Byelorussia, and again in the summer of 1940, after the occupation of the Baltic states, the patriarch of Moscow sent his bishops to these regions. The government was hoping in this way to win the complete submission of its new subjects. The Moscow Patriarchate willingly carried out this mission, since its own interests were being served as well.
The church was not left floundering by the German invasion. On June 22, 1941, the vicar general, Metropolitan Sergii, issued an appeal to the church and the people, calling on them to defend the country, and he condemned those priests who refused to heed his call. At the other extreme, in Berlin, Metropolitan Seraphim urged the Orthodox faithful to rise up against bolshevism under Hitler's leadership.76 During the first two years of the war, Sergii issued twenty-three epistles praying for victory. On his initiative, collections were taken up to finance the formation of the Dmitry Donskoi tank column.77 Stalin was generous enough to accept this gift from the church.
The German invasion awakened a tide of religious feelings among the population.78 In the occupied territories the Germans authorized the resumption of religious worship. For Hitler, the function of the church was to help the occupation authorities keep the population submissive. The religious aspect of the matter was of little interest; in Germany itself the Nazis did little more than tolerate the church. One of their objectives was to prevent any unification of the Russian Orthodox church and the anton- omous Ukrainian church. The law on religious tolerance published in Berlin on June 19, 1942, was in fact a measure designed to regulate religion. All religious organizations were ordered to register with the German district commissar. The commissar had the right to remove any priest suspected of political unreliability. Religious organizations, and their local and central officials, had to limit their activities to strictly religious matters or else face penalties ranging from fines up to the dissolution of the church community.79 Shortly before the promulgation of this law, Hitler told his inner circle: 'The formation of unitary churches for larger parts of the Russian territory is ... to be prevented. It can [only be] in our interest if each village has its own sect which develops its own image of God."80
The special units, Einsatzgruppen, which were in charge of exterminating Jews and other "undesirables," were also given the power to control the activities of the church, up to and including the arrest and execution of priests.
The main objective of Nazi policy vis-&-vis religion was to use the religious sentiments of the population to Germany's advantage. As one German document stated: "All the resources of the churches, mysticism, religion, and propaganda must be... employed to this end: 'Hitler against Stalin!'— or 'God against the Devil.'"81
Sometimes German commanders supported the resumption of religious activities on the territory under their control.82 Their aim was purely pragmatic: to ensure a secure rear area for the German army and safe communication lines by placating the local population. However, such commanders were severely reprimanded in Berlin. For example, following the celebration of a mass in the Smolensk Cathedral in August 1941, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht not to help the church in the occupied territories.83
The clergy's attitude toward the German occupation varied widely: from open support to the organization of resistance. In this respect, the story of Metropolitan Sergii Voskresensky is instructive. Sent to Riga as bishop in 1940, he refused to return to Moscow after the outbreak of the war. The Gestapo arrested and later released him, and he began preaching in favor of a German victory. At the same time he revived religious life in the Baltic region. By 1943 he had organized approximately 200 parishes, religious education was underway, and the church was publishing its own magazine. Such was Sergii's religious influence in the Pskov region that the Germans ordered his transfer to Vilnius. This was the beginning of a series of conflicts between Sergii and the Germans. He was assassinated on April 28, 1944, on the road from Vilnius to Riga, presumably by the Germans.84
Naturally, the mass of believers did not have the slightest idea of what the Germans were plotting behind the scenes in regard to the church. What mattered to them was the right to express their religious beliefs openly, without fear of persecution. They never suspected that the Germans not only reviewed sermons for proper subject matter but also censored the texts.