The other day, someone sent me a book and said, "I think you'll find this interesting."
I already knew about these events, but never in this much detail. Last night I started reading the book, and I realized I should write a Thing about the Katyn Massacre, because while it happened back during World War II, it is still very much felt to this day, and absolutely impacts relations between Russia and Poland, even now.
Here's a news story from last year, discussing a bit of the tensions between Poland and Russia due to this event.
So, what happened? This is, unfortunately, going to be a bit of a light overview, because this is a very, very complex topic and I just don't have the space to go into detail about it. However, here are the basic facts, and at the end, you'll have some further reading if you're interested.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
In 1939, Germany really wanted to invade Poland, but they were worried if they did, they'd agitate Russia. While Germany had a big, beefy army, Russia is huge, and they weren't too excited about invading Poland and then having to face Russia right away. So, they devised this plan. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany's foreign minister met with Vyachaslav Molotov to come to an agreement.
This agreement basically culminated in dividing Poland up between Germany and the Soviet Union. On August 23, 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (or the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact) was signed.
According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, "The German-Soviet Pact consisted of two parts, one public and one secret. The public part was a non-aggression pact in which each signatory promised not to attack the other. They further promised that, should one of the two signatories be attacked by a third country, the other signatory would not provide assistance of any kind to the third country. In addition, they each agreed to not participate in any arrangement with the powers that was directly or indirectly aimed at the other. The non-aggression agreement was to last for ten years and be automatically renewed for an additional five years if neither signatory moved to end it.
The secret part of the pact was a protocol that established Soviet and German spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. It recognized Estonia, Latvia, and Bessarabia as falling within the Soviet sphere. The signatories agreed to divide Poland along the line of Narev, Vistula, and San Rivers."
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| Image from the Holocaust Encyclopedia. |
To say the world was stunned about this agreement is an understatement. The wider world had long been aware of the fact that Hitler and Stalin were essentially mortal enemies. The two did not get along, and their political ideologies were at complete odds. Now, suddenly, they were coming to an accord. And not just any accord, but a nonaggression accord, which would allow them to dive up a territory that had been an issue since the Treaty of Versailles. What did it mean? What was going to happen? For allied forces in the West, this meant nothing good, and so they all prepared for... something... and watched as these two dictators carved up Eastern Europe between them.
So, with this treaty signed and the lines of demarcation settled, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, without fear of Soviet reprisals after an event I talk about here. Five months before this, however, France and the UK had promised to protect Poland's borders, and so once Germany invaded, France and the UK declared war on Germany. About two weeks later, the Soviet Union swarmed in from the East. Thus started World War II.
As Germany and the Soviet Union began asserting their control over their agreed upon spheres, the line began to move and wiggle a bit, until on September 29, 1939, a boundary was carved between the two nations through the heart of Europe.
According to the Warsaw Review, "On September 17, 1939, just about two weeks after the Third Reich attacked Poland, the Red Army attacked Poland from the east, implementing the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Meeting little resistance from the units of the Border Protection Corps and few military units, it occupied more and more towns at a fast pace. Because of the "stabbing in the back" with lacking support of allies, a decision was made to evacuate the highest authorities of the Republic of Poland abroad. At the same time, the Commander-in-Chief issued an unclear directive ordering the troops to get to Hungary or Romania and avoid fighting the Red Army. However, some Polish units and garrisons decided to take part in uneven battles against the aggressor -- but given the huge disproportion, the disaster was inevitable. The independent Polish state was eliminated, and its territory seized by the Third Reich and the Soviet Union."
Soviet Captivity
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| Polish officers captured by the USSR, from Wikipedia |
After the Soviet Union's invasion, about 250 thousand Poles were taken into captivity, including about ten thousand from the Polish army. Instead of treating them in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, they were handed over to the NKVD and dubbed "counterrevolutionary elements." The prisoners were divided between several camps (In the Warsaw Review, they list three camps but in this book, I believe there are more). By the end of 1939, around 14 thousand Poles were in custody in various camps in the western Soviet Union.
Conditions in the camps were abysmal. The camps themselves were overcrowded, and there was a distinct lack of resources and not enough food or water to go around. With the way the Soviet system was set up, each area in the USSR had certain food quotas, and food often went to the people in the area and then was sent to Moscow. The prisoners got whatever was left over. In Surviving Katyn (the book I'm currently reading) one soldier wrote this:
As to the matter of vegetables, the situation is bad indeed. We have enough potatoes for three or four days and now they are not bringing them to the camp, because the region did not complete a supply plan and all the local potatoes are being sent to Moscow. There is no cabbage at all and no hope of obtaining any.
Sleeping situations and accommodations weren't any better. Men were often sent to these camps by the thousands and just dumped there, with a "you figure it out" mentality. The NKVD officers who oversaw these camps spent months questioning the prisoners about basically anything and everything they could think of, from their political leanings, to associations with foreign governments, and even foreign language skills. The aim of this questioning was to learn about their connections in the wider world, and to break the prisoners down.
It should be noted, many of the officers involved in this action were specially trained questioners, meaning, many of them were specially trained in the art of torture and killing with one bullet. "Questioning", I think, often sounds a lot friendlier than it actually was.
Interrogations were often brutal and involved torture. Overcrowding brought on disease, and winters were harsh which made everything even worse. The situation for the men in these camps were subhuman. The Soviet Union, however, was under pressure, not only from within, but from the outside world as well. World War II was just kicking off, and nations were on the move. War was on the horizon, and all of this came to a head and determined what happened next.
The Death Sentence
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| Memo from Beria to Stalin, wikipedia |
According to the Warsaw Review, "Józef Stalin personally decided to murder Polish prisoners of war, at the request of the People's Commissioner of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, Lavrentiy Beria. In an extensive note of 5 March 1940, the head of the NKVD called for the case to be considered 'in a special procedure and giving them the maximum penalty -- execution.' He also requested that the 'cases should be handled without calling the arrested and without presenting charges, decision to end the investigation, and indictment.'"
The measure was signed off by highest members of the Politburo, and confirmed when Lazar Kaganovich and Mikhail Kalinin signed their names on the margins of the document. On that same day, the Politburo formally accepted Beria's proposal.
For a few days after that, meetings were held in Moscow regarding how to proceed. Eventually it was decided that, on March 14, 1939, the regional directors of Smolensk, Kalinin, and Kharkiv along with the NKVD commanders in those respective areas should deal with the situation. A week later, Beria sent out a missive about "unloading NKVD prisons". This sort of roundabout language is pretty common in missives like this. It's basically a way of ordering mass murder without having to say it. Basically, Beria was ordering the murder of Polish prisoners of war kept in these NKVD camps, with full government backing.
Why did this need to take place, however? What were the motivations behind such a vast and expansive slaughter? No one can really be sure, though there are a lot of theories out there. Some base the motivation back to the 1920s, fallout from World War I. My personal opinion (though I am no scholar, it should be noted) goes back to more of a current-to-the-day political issue. As the Warsaw Review succinctly says, "In the opinion of the Soviet authorities, Polish POWs, who were manifesting their patriotism, were "irredeemable enemies of the Soviet authorities and not likely to improve". For this reason, they were to be murdered. The Soviet authorities decided that this move would facilitate the future governance of the polish-Soviet Republic."
Planning
The Soviets were worried about a prisoners' rebellion if people found out what was going on, so the operation was carried out with brutal efficiency, and quietly. Lists of names were drawn up, and a troika approved who went on them. Men were rounded up and left their camps on packed prison carriages, sent to other places depending on which camp they were at. None of them knew where they were going or why. They were searched as they left camp, all sharp objects and anything that could be considered a weapon was taken away from them. Their identities were checked to make sure they were who they said they were.
On March 16, 1940, the operation really picked up momentum, and everything happened quickly after that. So quickly, in fact, most prisoners didn't realize what was happening until they were in NKVD prison cells or marched out to the Katyn Forest.
The confusion of this time can be evidenced in a survivor, Józef Czapski's statement (from The Warsaw Review):
"There was no way of figuring out what were the selection criteria for the groups of us sent away from the camp. Their age, years of birth, ranks, professions, social backgrounds, political beliefs were all mixed. Every subsequent batch was another contradiction to our guesses. We all matched only in one thing: each of us waited feverishly for that hour when they announced a new list of those leaving. Maybe this time it would finally be our turn to be on the list [...]. Standing on the great church stairs, the commandant bid farewell to the groups of those leaving with a smile full of promises. You're going out there, he told one of us, where I'd love to go myself."
The NKVD drew up death lists for the prisoners, which were then approved by a specially appointed NKVD troika (the three men on said troika were Vsevolod Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov, and Leonid Bashtakov), at which point prisoners would be moved from their camp/prison to the point of execution. Rather than one execution site, there were several arrayed throughout the western part of the Soviet Union. Each camp/prison had a different location used for execution. Executioners had been trained in the art of killing, usually shooting prisoners in the back of the head, and Moscow sent individuals to supervise the executions.
Massacre
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| Image of a mass grave in the Katyn Forest, from this website |
The first executions began in April. Executions were only carried out at night and in strict secrecy. Prisoners would be taken into one of the execution rooms, which were usually located in basements and cellars. If they fought, they were tied down. Prisoners would be shot in the back of the head, and the executions would end at dawn.
One book I read said prisoners would usually stand against a wall. There'd be a hole in the wall, just wide enough for a gun to shoot through, and that's where they'd put their head. The person standing on the other side of the wall would fire their gun, and that would be the end of that. So, one wall would separate the executioner and the executed. (I'm really trying to remember which book I read discussed this, but I've read so many I honestly can't remember, I'm sorry.)
The bodies of the slain would then be loaded on trucks and taken out into specially appointed areas, usually inaccessible. Pits would have already been dug, and the bodies would be dumped in them, and then covered up, the earth flattened afterward.
According to the Warsaw Review, "We know much less bout the executions in Katyn--in this case, our knowledge comes mainly from exhumations. The shells found above the death pits indicate that the executions took place directly there. However, before the victims were sent to the execution site, they were directed to a villa, which in the 1930s served as a resort for the most deserving NKVD officers. This building was where the searches were conducted. Perhaps it was also where some executions were carried out. Those who resisted had their hands bound. Some of them had coats put on their head tied with a rope, at the end of which was connected with a knot on their hands. The prisoners were then reloaded into prison cars without windows and transported to the execution site."
All told, almost 22,000 Poles were executed in this action (though some believe the number is actually higher), with only 395 escaping. According to historians, half of the officer corps of the Polish army were killed. "In the NKVD prisons of so-called Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, the Soviets detained officers who were not mobilized in September 1939, civil servants and local government officials. Many of the murdered were high-class specialists in various fields, among them university professors, engineers, priests, doctors, lawyers, officials, poets, writers--the intellectual elite of Poland." (Warsaw Review)
Beria had most of the documents related to this genocide destroyed, but in one surviving document, dated October 26, 1940, he rewarded 125 individuals connected to this massacre for "proper performance of special tasks."
The Blame Game
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| Mass grave at Katyn, 1943, Wikipedia |
In 1941, the Germans occupied the area around Smolensk and stumbled upon some mass graves in the Katyn Forest, though they didn't do anything about it. It wasn't until locals in the area found a corpse wearing a Polish army uniform that they started poking around. Eventually in 1943, with the help of the locals, the Germans found several mass graves.
The Germans revealed what they discovered after their defeat at Stalingrad, in an effort to use the news to divide the anti-Hitler coalition, and under Hitler's order, the case gained international publicity. Soon after, the Polish government began its own investigation. Pressure was heaped upon the Soviet government to explain what happened.
The Soviet government fired back. Stalin, adept at manipulating the historical record, accused the Polish government of helping the Germans cover up their own crimes (IE: We didn't do it, Germany did, and you're covering for them.). Under pressure from the Soviet Union (and really needing to keep them happy at this point in World War II), the British Foreign Minister, who had been on board with demanding information about what happened from the Soviet Union, retracted his demands, and added his voice to Stalin's, saying the massacre was a German "invention". The Polish government ended up retracting their investigation. The Allies, worried that Poland would impact their accord with the Soviet Union, censored Poland, including their radio transmissions and publications about the massacre.
Stalin broke off all diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile, and the narrative was successfully changed, from an event that the Soviet Government oversaw, to a German crime covered up by the Polish government. Soon, the area once occupied by Germans was once again occupied by the Soviet government. People were dispatched to falsify evidence of the crimes. In 1944, a special commission was dispatched to investigate, and found the Germans responsible for the crimes.
Summarized in this news article, the events are boiled down as follows, "In 1943, Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in Katyn Forest. The Soviets claimed that the killings had been carried out by the Nazis in 1941 and denied responsibility for the massacres. In 1990, Russia officially acknowledged and condemned the massacre by the NKVD."
After
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| From Wikipedia |
The USSR finally admitted to the massacre on April 13, 1990, an event made possible in part by Gorbachev's policy of openness. The Russian TASS agency announced that the NKVD, with Beria and Merkulov specifically, were responsible for the murder of the Poles, saying, "The Soviet side expresses deep regret over the tragedy, and assesses it as one of the worst Stalinist outrages." On October 14, 1992, Boris Yeltsin presented Polish President Lech Wałęsa with a copy of "Package No. 1" which included a letter from Beria to Stalin, as well as the minutes from the Politburo meeting where this action was decided.
Still, things are not at rest with this situation. Russia has refused to allow Poland to see the documents resulting from their investigation, citing secrecy. They have also not classified the crime yet. There are still unknown names victim lists, and graves that have not yet found and some still being uncovered. One, as late as 2011 was being exhumed, and people are still looking for more.
Poland considers the massacre a war crime and an act of genocide. They want to be able to prosecute any perpetrators of the crime still living, and properly memorialize those who died.
Currently, the narrative seems to be changing again. Local activists are requesting the removal of memorial plaques for the fallen Polish officers, and people are starting to question the true culpability of the Soviet Union. Critics are saying that Putin is aiding this flip in the narrative, which is "turning back the clock on reconciliation." All of this is driving a wedge in relations between Poland and Russia. (This news story.)
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