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A Sample Research Paper. A Roadmap To Education: A Quiet Vendetta New Edition. A People, A Place: A Primer Of Playwriting. A Way To The Way. A Philosophy Of Religion. A Palette Of Particles. Militarily, the war was over by late February, though a peace agreement was not signed until March. NKVD interrogations were completed about the same time. The Poles were encouraged to believe they would be released, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to determine who would live and who would die.
On 5 March , Stalin signed their death warrant--an NKVD order condemning 21, prisoners to "the supreme penalty: During April-May , the Polish prisoners were moved from their internment camps and taken to three execution sites. The place most identified with the Soviet atrocity is Katyn Forest, located 12 miles west of Smolensk, Russia.
For years historians assumed that the grounds of an NKVD rest and recreation facility were both an execution and burial site for nearly a fifth of the unfortunate Poles who found themselves in Soviet captivity. Post-Cold War revelations, however, suggest that the victims were shot in the basement of the NKVD headquarters in Smolensk and at an abattoir in the same city, although some may have been executed at a site in the forest itself.
In any event, the Katyn Forest is--and will probably long remain--the main symbol of the atrocity, even if it was not the actual killing field. Beria to "Comrade Stalin" proposing to execute captured Polish officers, soldiers, and other prisoners by shooting. Stalin's handwritten signature appears on top, followed by signatures of Politburo members K. Signatures in left margin are M.
Kaganovich, both favoring execution. The Katyn Forest massacre was a criminal act of historic proportions and enduring political implications.
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When Nazi occupation forces in April announced the discovery of several mass graves, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels hoped that international revulsion over the Soviet atrocity would drive a wedge into the Big Three coalition and buy Germany a breathing space, if not a victory, in its war against Russia.
Despite overwhelming evidence of Soviet responsibility, Moscow blamed the Germans, and for the rest of the war Washington and London officially accepted the Soviet countercharge. When the Polish government-in-exile in London demanded an international inquiry, Stalin used this as a pretext to break relations. The Western allies objected but eventually acquiesced. Soon thereafter, the Soviet dictator assembled a group of Polish Communists that returned to Poland with the Red Army in and formed the nucleus of the postwar government.
Stalin's experience with the Katyn affair may have convinced him that the West, grateful for the Red Army's contribution to the Allied military effort, would find it hard to confront him over Poland after the war. Professor Stanislaw Swianiewicz was the sole survivor of Katyn. He was waiting to board a bus to the forest area when an NKVD colonel arrived and pulled him out of line. Swianiewicz was an internationally recognized expert on forced labor in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, who had been born in Poland when it was still part of the Russian empire, and had studied in Moscow. He ended up in Siberia, and after the war emigrated to the United States, where he taught economics at the University of Notre Dame.
Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, majors, captains, 17 naval captains, 3, NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors; physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than writers and journalists as well as about pilots. Most of the victims were reservists who had been mobilized when Germany invaded.
In all, the NKVD eliminated almost half the Polish officer corps--part of Stalin's long-range effort to prevent the resurgence of an independent Poland. Recent historical research shows that of the victims were Polish Jews. Katyn created a big echo in the United States. Dozens of books have been written on the subject--the Library of Congress has catalogued 19 new ones since and several Web sites on the Internet are devoted to it.
There is a Katyn memorial in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and one Web site belongs to a Baltimore group trying to raise funds to erect a monument there. Several states and many cities have issued commemorative proclamations. Two US servicemen, brought from a POW camp in Germany, were at Katyn in , when Berlin held an international news conference there to publicize the atrocity. The ranking officer was Col. Van Vliet, a fourth-generation West Pointer. After returning to Washington in , he wrote a report concluding that the Soviets, not the Germans, were responsible.
He gave the report to Maj. George Marshall's assistant chief of staff for intelligence, who deep-sixed it. Years later, Bissell defended his action before Congress, contending that it was not in the US interest to embarrass an ally whose forces were still needed to defeat Japan. In , President Roosevelt assigned Capt. George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyn. Earle did so, using contacts in Bulgaria and Romania. He too concluded that the Soviet Union was guilty. The report was suppressed.
When Earle requested permission to publish his findings, the President gave him a written order to desist. Earle--who had been a Roosevelt family friend--spent the rest of the war in American Samoa. It was chaired by Rep. Madden and was popularly known as the Madden Committee. Although not without political or propaganda overtones, the hearings were the most comprehensive effort to date to gather facts and establish responsibility. The hearings gave Democrats a chance to deflect charges of having "betrayed" Poland and "lost" China at Yalta and offered Republicans an opportunity to court voters of Polish and other East European ancestry who traditionally favored Democrats.
Before disbanding the select committee, Madden tried to get the UN to bring the Katyn massacre before the International Court of Justice and sought Congressional support for a joint Senate-House inquiry. Stalin's death, the rise of a new leadership, and the end of the Korean war seemed to auger a thaw in US-Soviet relations. Meanwhile, the Soviets obliterated references to Katyn on maps and in official reference works. Then, in , Moscow did something strange that many believe was further calculated to confuse the issue further: There was no apparent reason for the selection.
Khatyn was one of 9, Belorussian villages the Germans had destroyed and one of more than a hundred where they had killed civilians in retaliation for partisan attacks. In Latin transliteration, however, Katyn and Khatyn look and sound alike, though they are spelled and pronounced quite differently in Russian and Belorussian. The standard scholarly work was written by Dr. Zawodny, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Later, the Reagan and Bush administrations both released previously classified records bearing on Katyn.
These were the first official US efforts since the House hearings aimed at documenting Soviet responsibility. Old habits die hard. Incredibly, in a souvenir program sold at the exhibit, the Russian exhibitors repeated the Soviet lie that the Nazis, not the NKVD, had murdered Polish prisoners at Katyn. For 50 years, the Soviet Union concealed the truth. The coverup began in April , almost immediately after the Red Army had recaptured Smolensk. In January , Moscow appointed its own investigative body, known as the Burdenko Commission after the prominent surgeon who chaired it.
Predictably, it concluded that the Polish prisoners had been murdered in , during the German occupation, not in To bolster its claim, the commission hosted an international press conference at Katyn on 22 January. After viewing exhibits of planted evidence, they endorsed the Burdenko Commission's findings. Harriman later repudiated her statement before the House select committee. Eight days later, the Soviets held a religious and military ceremony attended by a color guard from the Polish division of the Red Army to honor the victims of "German-fascist invaders.
Katyn was a forbidden topic in postwar Poland. Censors suppressed all references to it. Even mentioning the atrocity meant risking reprisal. While Katyn was erased from Poland's official history, it could not be erased from historical memory. In , Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription "Katyn, The police confiscated it. Later, the Polish Government, on cue from Moscow, created another memorial. In , the Soviet president signed an agreement with the head of Poland's military government, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, for a joint historical commission to investigate "blank spots," that is, censored subjects, in the two countries' troubled history.
Polish historians tried unsuccessfully to include Katyn on the agenda. The commission did provide a forum, however, for Polish historians to press their Soviet counterparts for access to official records, even if to confirm the Burdenko Commission's conclusions. There were, after all, "court historians" on both sides. Gorbachev had a chance to address Katyn during a July state visit to Warsaw, but dodged the issue. Pressure was building on the Soviets, however. Prominent Polish intellectuals signed an open letter asking for access to official records and sent it to Soviet colleagues.
A month after Gorbachev's visit, demonstrators paraded in the streets of Warsaw demanding an official inquiry. The Kremlin had to do something; it chose to deceive. In November, the Soviet Government announced plans for a new memorial at Katyn commemorating Polish officers "[who] together with Soviet prisoners.
Russia and Poland were both victims of German aggression, something neither country should forget. In early , three top Soviet officials sent Gorbachev a memorandum warning him that the issue was becoming "more acute" and that "time is not our ally. At a Kremlin ceremony on 13 October , Gorbachev handed Jaruzelski a folder of documents that left no doubt about Soviet guilt. He did not, however, make a full and complete disclosure.
Gorbachev laid all blame on Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, and his deputy. This was a safe move, because Beria and his deputy had been branded criminals and summarily shot by Stalin's successors. Gorbachev also failed to mention that the actual number of victims was 21,more than the usually cited figure of 15, By shaving the truth, Gorbachev had shielded the Soviet Government and the Communist Party, making Katyn look like a rogue secret police action rather than an official act of mass murder. The next major discovery turned up in an unexpected place--the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.
While conducting research on Katyn at the Archives in spring , a Polish-American art and antiques expert named Waclaw Godziemba-Maliszewski was given a copy of an article entitled "The Katyn Enigma: Poirier, who used imagery from Luftwaffe aerial photoreconnaissance during World War II to uncover evidence of the original crime and a Soviet coverup during Among other things, it showed that the area where the mass graves were located had not been altered during the German occupation and that the same area displayed physical changes that predated the Germans' arrival.
Poirier speculated that the corpses had been removed and reburied at another site. Largest of seven mass graves. Five layers of murdered Polish officers buried here by the Soviets. He also found additional shots of Katyn and the other two execution sites at Mednoye and near Kharkov. He discovered much additional imagery, new collateral evidence, and eyewitness testimony, resulting in important new conclusions about what actually happened at Katyn. After completing further research, in January Godziemba-Maliszewski turned over copies of the imagery and Poirier's article to scientists at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
They in turn passed the information to the Polish Ministry of Justice. The Ministry had to be convinced that the article and photographic evidence were bona fide and that Godziemba-Maliszewski was not, as some suspected, a CIA agent!
This was the first public disclosure of the Luftwaffe imagery and its utility for identifying burial sites in the USSR. The disclosure had an immediate impact in Germany, where media interest in Katyn had been running high since the s, and in the USSR as well. Armed with this "smoking gun," a Polish prosecutor assigned to investigate Soviet crimes flew to Kharkov now Kharkiv , where the Ukrainian KGB, under watchful Russian eyes, assisted in identifying a series of sites, including Piatikhatki, where prisoners from the Starobelsk camp had been executed.
Ironically, for a second time the German military had provided evidence, albeit unwittingly, of Soviet complicity in the massacre. The new evidence put additional pressure on the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation to reveal the full truth. In , Moscow suddenly "discovered" the original execution ordered signed by Stalin and five other Politburo members-- in Gorbachev's private archive. In doing so, he made a point of chiding his arch enemy Gorbachev, with whom he was locked in a bitter domestic political battle.
During a visit to Warsaw's military cemetery, Yeltsin knelt before a Polish priest and kissed the ribbon of a wreath he had placed at the foot of the Katyn cross. Meanwhile, Soviet and Polish teams were permitted to excavate at Katyn and the other two sites, on a selective basis, where Polish prisoners had been executed. In , a Soviet historian published a book that for the first time called Katyn a "crime against humanity. Katyn is a wound that refuses to heal.
In May , officials from Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus announced their intention to end an official probe into "NKVD crimes" committed there and at other sites. Stalin's secret police had committed crimes against some 11, Poles living in western Ukraine and western Belorussia after the USSR had incororated those regions, and murdered more than 3, Polish prisoners in panic killings when Germany attacked in June With the official investigation complete, Yeltsin appeared a few days later at a ceremony to lay the cornerstone for a Polish cemetery at Katyn.
Those expecting an expression of contrition were disappointed. Yeltsin told his audience that "totalitarian terror affected not only Polish citizens but, in the first place, the citizens of the former Soviet Union. The NKVD had used the forest as a killing ground in the s. Yeltsin's plea that the tragedy "not be allowed to divide our nations and be the subject of political games" fell on deaf ears. Less than two weeks later, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman warned Poles still insisting on an apology not to exploit the memorial service to sow "distrust between Russia and Poland.
Some Poles undoubtedly took offense at Yeltsin's effort to commemorate Katyn as a common Russian and Polish tragedy and blame it on "totalitarianism. Meantime, resentment by extreme nationalists and Communists in the Duma was increasing. It repudiated Gorbachev's admission without mentioning Yeltsin's elaboration two years later and repeated the old Stalinist charge of German guilt.
The book came at a bad time for Godziemba-Maliszewski, who was completing a study based on new information, some of it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and the good offices of former national security adviser Dr. His manuscript included declassified satellite imagery and maps as well as eyewitness statements, personal photographs, stills from a documentary film, and other items. It also contained a detailed study and reinterpretation of Luftwaffe imagery. The manuscript was entitled "Katyn: Before the manuscript went to press, the Polish editor, with an eye toward Moscow's retrenchment on the Katyn question, insisted on deleting 20 pages of text and notes and other material.
The editor also dropped a tribute to analyst Poirier, presumably on the grounds that it would give the manuscript an unacceptable CIA imprimatur. And so the story stood until fall , when Moscow made a bizarre move. In September, Procurator General Yuri Chayka sent a letter to Poland's minister of justice demanding an official inquiry into the deaths of Russian soldiers captured during the Polish-Soviet war of The letter asserted that 83, internees had died "in Polish concentration camps as a result of cruel and inhuman conditions.
The offer was not accepted. This was the first time Moscow had raised such an allegation at an official level, but such charges had been circulating in Russian circles for some time. A rumor heard in Warsaw in the early s claimed that Gorbachev had ordered his staff to find a "counterbalance" to Katyn. The rumor has not been confirmed, but after the first Katyn disclosure in the Soviet and later Russian press occasionally cited alleged abuses in Polish POW camps.
This article formed the basis of Chayka's demarche. It would be good if Poland followed in Russia's footsteps and pleaded guilty to the savagery [against Red Army soldiers]. No one knows for certain what prompted the new charge, but it may have been a preemptive reaction to more revelations about Katyn and new evidence of Soviet crimes in Poland.
Prisoners of an Undeclared War. The reports detailed a second wave of terror unleashed during the postwar occupation, showing that the crimes committed during were not an aberration but part of a single imperial design. Soon thereafter, a group of Polish members of parliament spent 10 days in Russia, trying unsuccessfully to obtain an official acknowledgment that the Soviet Government had engaged in genocide.
In the meantime, more graves filled with Polish corpses were found near Tavda and Tomsk, east of the Urals. Russians cannot look at Katyn without seeing themselves in the mirror of their own history. Thus official Moscow resists using the "g" word genocide to describe the atrocity. When Gorbachev's advisers warned him in that Poland's demand for the truth contained a "subtext. Reports of vandalized war memorials and looted battlefield cemeteries underscored growing popular disillusionment with the cult of triumphalism built around Stalin and the USSR's victory over Nazi Germany.
But that is not likely to end the controversy. Two days earlier, speaking at a ceremony in the Ukrainian village of Piatikhatki, the site of the third killing field, Kwasniewski declared that Poland has a duty to continue speaking the truth about Katyn. Until Russians and Poles reach some mutual understanding about their past, Katyn will continue to cast a shadow over their futures. German-Russian Military Relations, ] Berlin: Vision Verlag , pp. These photographs were intended for official use only, since German policy was still officially anti-Communist.
Relations between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht were genuinely friendly, based on mutual hostility toward Poland and years of secret collaboration after World War I. In addition to Groehler's book, see Aleksandr M. The parade was organized by Col. Semyon Krivoschein and Gen. Heinz Guderian, both outstanding tank commanders who would go on to distinguish themselves in the Soviet-German war. Guderian's panzer group was the first German force to reach the outskirts of Moscow in Krivoschein's tank corps was the first to reach Berlin in and capture Hitler's headquarters.
His encounter with Guderian almost cost Krivoschein his life in April , when a SMERSH military counterintelligence detachment searching Nazi archives discovered a photograph of Krivoschein and Guderian shaking hands. The Soviet general was questioned and released, probably because he was Jewish and therefore an unlikely Nazi spy. Arms and Armour, , p. The same order identified an additional 18, prisoners, including 10, Poles, being held in NKVD jails in western Ukraine and Belorussia formerly eastern Poland for possible execution. The Free Press, , p.
Catégorie : Divers
The killings probably continued after May , and the total number of victims may have exceeded 27, Ongoing excavations in Ukraine and Russia are turning up more Polish corpses, so this number may increase. There were many more Polish victims of Stalin's crimes. During , the NKVD unleashed a reign of terror, arresting, torturing, and killing thousands of Poles and inciting national and ethnic violence among Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Belorussians in the former eastern Poland. Princeton University Press, The social and professional profile of the other two groups was similar.
During the Korean war, the Soviets gave North Korea a copy of the film for instructional purposes. The Katyn Forest Massacre: US Government Printing Office, The hearings began in a campaign year. Stein, "Can We Talk? A relative of his, an uncle of his father's, was among the victims. In March , the head of the KGB recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that all records of the execution of Polish soldiers and civilians be destroyed, arguing that they had no operational or historical value and could come back to haunt the Soviet Government.
For reasons that remain unclear, Khrushchev refused. A rumor that has never been confirmed claims that Khrushchev wanted to reveal the truth about Katyn, but Polish leader Wladislaw Gomulka rejected the idea because it would discredit the Polish Communist Party, which had fabricated evidence to implicate the Germans and exculpate the Soviets. The rumor is probably not true, however; even while acknowledging some of Stalin's crimes, Khrushchev was always careful not to implicate the Communist Party.
A press photo of the event became one of the most poignant images of the Cold War. A Crime Against Humanity ] Moscow: Godziemba-Maliszewski kindly sent me a copy of his study after reading a monograph I had written for the Center for the Study of Intelligence. Pikoia and Aleksander Gieysztor, eds. Mezhdunarodnyi Fond "Demokratiia," Basic Books, , p. The graverobbers were looking for artifacts to sell to military collectors. The author's answer is yes. In an intrductory note, the US editors expressed their disagreement with this view.
Ce qui les rendrait imprescriptibles. La recherche sur Katyn et la fin du ressentiment polono-russe. Le communisme est un totalitarisme: Les faits et les chiffres. Les deux chapitres suivants pp. La France comptait 2,75 millions d'hommes; le Royaume-Uni 1,4. La Table ronde, Paris, L'adresse url de cette page est: Ce nouveau livre, "Staline assassine la Pologne.
Ils sont beaucoup moins connus mais lourds de sens. En voici un exemple. Katyn et la bataille de Varsovie. Ce livre en apporte de nombreuses fois la preuve: Moscou rompt les relations diplomatiques avec le gouvernement polonais en exil. La figure de Lech Kaczynski. Bref, ils affrontent le pouvoir communiste et sont donc anticommunistes. Regardons autour de nous: Pour sa part, la Pologne devrait accueillir dans un premier temps des missiles Patriot. Il y a 65 ans, le massacre de Katyn. Section de Toulon de la LDH, http: Plus de 81' sont donc toujours manquants For Poles, Katyn is a symbol of the criminal policy of the Soviet system against the Polish nation.
In the Polish-Soviet relations in the years —, Katyn is the culminating moment. The Katyn Massacre was the secret execution by the Soviets of almost 22, citizens of the Polish state who — after the Red Army entered Poland on 17 September — were taken prisoner or arrested. The victims were mainly important citizens of the Polish state: They were buried anonymously in mass graves, in at least five places within the territory of the Soviet Union.
Those killed in Kalinin currently Tver were buried in Mednoye. Others, held in prisons and murdered there, were buried in previously undetermined places; two are known: The Soviet Union broke the alliance in April , when the German Army stationed in the Smolensk region discovered a burial ground in the Katyn Forest and attacked the Soviet Union for propaganda purposes. Soviet authorities responded with the tactic of pinning the blame on the Germans who had allegedly murdered Poles after entering those territories in The Katyn Massacre was not an isolated event.
It was the consequence of system differences, the Soviet attempt at creating a state of the world proletariat, and the growing hostility between the Soviet Russia and the pre-war Poland. When, after the end of the Polish-Bolshevik war in , which was victorious for Poland, the Soviets had to give up the export of the revolution to the West for many years, and Stalin himself was criticised for his significant mistakes on the Polish front — the Soviet authorities accepted their Western neighbour to be their main enemy.
During the Great Terror in the USSR in the years —, which was aimed at pacifying the anti-Bolshevik mutiny brewing in the whole of Russia, the Soviets fought Polish groups in their territories with extreme fierceness. Over 70, Poles Soviet citizens were killed with a shot to the back of the head at that time. One in every ten victims of the Great Terror was related to Poland. The mechanism of mass exterminations was fine-tuned in the USSR then. When in September Stalin, after entering into an alliance with Hitler, attacked Poland defending itself against the Germans, one of his aims was to permanently destroy the Polish statehood.
From the very first moments of that aggression, the Soviets consistently isolated or killed on the spot those people whom they regarded to be representatives of the group of leaders of the state that was being destroyed, and particularly the officers. With regard to those prisoners the Soviet did not apply the rules of international law, that is why they held on to the lie they devised with such consistency. Many Russians helped in discovering the truth about that crime. In August , a group of Russian historians developed an exhaustive expert appraisal in Moscow, presenting honestly the process of the crime and the subsequent lies.
Those guilty of this crime have never been judged. However, the investigation on the Russian side was discontinued, and the Russian authorities refuse to make any comments on this subject. No one has been and no one will be punished for the crime. There is a material trace of the crime. Three cemeteries built by the Poles — in Katyn, Mednoye and Kharkiv — where each and every one from among almost 15, Polish POWs is commemorated by name.
This is an exception among the graveyards remaining after the crimes of the Soviet power. Facts, Documents and Witnesses. Prestuplenie protiv chelovechstva Katyn. Crime Against Humanity , Moskva, Kultura Wojciech Materski, Anna M. Lebedeva, Aleksander Gieysztor, Wojciech Materski et al. Plenniki nieob'iavlennoi voiny Katyn. The Captives of an Undeclared War. During the war he served in Military Government in France and Germany. He has edited and translated from Polish a wartime memoir, Am la Murderer?
In he was invited to lecture at the National Museum in Warsaw on the occasion marking the 30th anniversary of the Polish Poster Museum. Resident in New York since his arrival from Poland in , he has been the recipient of over a hundred awards. His work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Deutsche Bank, Carnegie Foundation and in many private and corporate collections. The following year his poster was chosen to represent the City of New York and in , he received an award from the Society of Illustrators for the Best Poster.
He has had numerous one-man shows in America and abroad and his opera posters have been commissioned by the New York, San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia opera companies. Copies of this work may be obtained from W. I owe more than words can express to two friends whose knowledge of the subject and commitment to historical truth spurred me on to complete this work. I would also like to pay personal tribute to Professor Janusz K. I am grateful for the support given me by Bill Anderson of West Chester University publications and his staff. To Professor Walther Kirchner who read an earlier version of the manuscript and who in his long and distinguished career as a teacher never ceased to await results of his patient tutelage, I offer this study as a recompense, albeit a partial one.
To my daughter Nina, who has always asked me to find subjects other than massacres to write about, I can only say that historians describe such events so that there may be a future without them. To my son Julian, whose computer skills and helpful criticisms have been invaluable in all my writing efforts, I offer grateful thanks. To my patient wife Anne, a fellow writer, my personal reward was the smile on her face when I told her that I had found a publisher. Peter Obst, a writer and friend, provided invaluable assistance in preparing the book for printing.
Diana Burgwyn read the manuscript and helped improve it. Finally, I dedicate this work to the many who died a cruel and lonely death in that "inhuman land. The horrors of that war had been foreshadowed by the earlier conflict in Bosnia—and both were photographed from the skies. On August 9, , Madeline K. Albright, the chief American delegate to the United Nations, presented to the Security Council a pair of photographs taken by a U-2 "spy" plane. The first showed Muslim "safe areas" of Srebrenica before July 11, the day when this enclave fell to Serb forces.
The photograph included an empty field. The second image taken after the town was captured highlighted the same field with the telltale signs of freshly dug and hastily covered surfaces. As for Kossovo, NATO officials released in April a surveillance photograph that showed Serb forces in the act of "ethnic cleansing"—homes destroyed and villages cleared of inhabitants with what was described as "grim efficiency. On June 7, the Associated Press reported that stalling on pullback was "to eliminate evidence of war crimes.
The International Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia is ready to do its grim investigative work. Aerial photographs will be an essential tool. Fifty-five years ago aerial photography provided a record of history's worst crime. But the complex of concentration camps located along the Sola River in south central Poland was not the target of this photo reconnaissance mission. Several miles from Auschwitz were the Buna works built by I. Farben for the manufacture of fuel, rubber and other synthetics. Sweeping the countryside and using large-lens split verticals to include as much of the area as possible, the cameras automatically photographed the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps.
It was, as Roy M.
Poirier, with the assistance of Gino Brugioni who discovered the sites of Russian missiles sites in Cuba , decided to look again at the I. They knew that the death camps were in direct alignment with that plant, and since the plane's cameras were turned on before the target was reached, they were confident that the concentration camps would be on those photographs. They found a treasure trove of horror.
There were twenty cans of films with about exposures in each can , clearly showing evidence of gassing and cremation, undeniable proof of the "conveyer-belt" murderous enterprise that was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Fifty-five years has dimmed world's memories but the photographs were still clear.
They showed lines of people lined up at crematoria, the nicely landscaped quarters for those administering the killing process, the roofs empty of snow on the barracks of those still alive and the snow-covered roofs of the medical bloc whose inmates had been put to death. An analysis of some of the key photographs makes one an impotent witness to horror. A photo taken on August 25, , shows a transport has just arrived. Groups of people are moving from the rail cars to the men's and women's camps.
In consecutive pictures the lines of these condemned people end where there is no gate. The only exit leads to the gas chambers and crematoria. The photographs of Birkenau displayed the effects of a revolt the preceding year—one of the gas chambers had been destroyed and two were being dismantled. The condemned did fight back. Unlike the images from Auschwitz, the photographs from Bosnia and Kossovo were not hidden from the public, but while they provide us with a historical record they are still in the service of leaders and states whose interests may not be to find and punish the perpetrators.
The fact is that while the technology available to surveillance today—U-2 planes, spy satellites, video recorders in Predator drones and RC River Joint that can monitor communications on the battlefield—their usefulness in preventing mass murder or at the very least punishing those responsible, is limited.
Governmental secrecy about intelligence gathering sometimes serves interests of bureaucracy more than those of justice. The twentieth century has recorded millions of brutal deaths as well as unprecedented attempts to eradicate or hide traces of mass murder.
In recent times, Cambodia, Srebrenica in Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, the killing grounds in Africa and the province of Kossovo are proof that the end of Nazi and Soviet dictatorships did not put a stop to massacres and efforts to conceal them.
But if perpetrators cannot always be punished it is imperative to find proof of their crimes and at the very least to search and identify victims' remains so that the dead may be honored. Not until the fall of the Soviet Union did the new leaders of Russia acknowledge that their government ordered the murder of 27, Polish soldiers and civilians. The painstaking and unheralded work of a young Polish-American photo-interpreter has been crucial in this investigation.
For the past ten years he has been supplying the Polish government with information that has enabled it, in spite of opposition and interference from the Russian side, to locate many of the remains.
This book is not only about lives cruelly extinguished, but also about the few who have struggled to honor the dead with truth. He told me recently of his trip to Spain to find burial places of Polish lancers who sacrificed themselves at the Somosierra pass during the Napoleonic Wars, thereby opening the road to Madrid. He has been an inspiration to others, and particularly to Maliszewski.
This work should serve as an antidote to those who see contemporary history as a record of failure for individuals who fight against a faceless bureaucracy. The achievements of Maliszewski show us how in a struggle between the expediency of state power and moral principles, the dedication of one person can make a difference. The medical examinations proved conclusively that these murders were committed in while the area was under Russian control.
While German propaganda used the discovery for its own purposes, the Russians blamed Germans for the mass murder and saw an opportunity to break off relations with the Polish government-in-exile that vainly sought an International Red Cross investigation of this atrocity. Prime Minister Winston Churchill for whom the wartime alliance was paramount was unwilling to say that the Russians were responsible. Roosevelt took Stalin at his word. As World War II was coming to an end, a cache of millions of German war photographs was found in Bad Reichenhall and promptly sent to America to be analyzed by the intelligence services.
These films were part of a Anglo-American project whimsically code-named Dick Tracy. The captured materials, images gathered over the British Isles, Central and Eastern Europe, Balkans and the Middle East, were assembled in Medmenham, England, the very efficient wartime center of photographic intelligence. Within that index there were individual photographs with geographical coordinates. Still in their original boxes with the mylar overlays kept separately, they framed a flight plan of a particular area and gave the time of day, and other technical data. Known as the GX series, these photographs were eventually deposited at the National Archives.
It was within the GX file that Robert G. Poirier, one of CIA's most-experienced photo interpreters made a startling discovery. Smolensk was an important rail center for the German forces, and Poirier foresaw correctly that the Luftwaffe would photograph it at various times: He discovered in the GX films that Germans flew as many as seventeen sorties over the site between July 9, and June 10, The majority of prints were made after the region was recaptured by the Russians in late September According to Poirier, there were no differences in the films taken between July 9, two weeks after German the invasion of Russia, and September 2, In February , the same month that Germans suffered the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, their Signal Corps Regiment billeted at.
The bodies of the Polish officers were then reinterred in four large graves and a monument was placed there. The Germans took no aerial photographs over the site until after the Russians recaptured the territory in September , but images taken by the Germans in October show that the area of the mass graves had again undergone considerable alteration. The German memorial to the Polish dead officers could still be seen, but a comparison of aerial photographs with those taken on the ground showed that the Russians had begun to dismantle the crosses placed there the preceding April, and that they were ready to dismantle the monument and level the burial mounds.
Successive German photographs showed that by January 30, the area of the existing mass graves had been cleared and a new monument erected in time for the joint ceremony involving Polish forces led by General Zygmunt Berling, a lieutenant-colonel in Poland before the war who accepted wartime service under Russian command.
Poirier's analysis of the Luftwaffe photographs was not only proof that a crime had been committed, but that the Russians had made extraordinary efforts to conceal the evidence—the bodies of the Polish officers. A Luftwaffe image of April 28, , revealed the presence of a new Russian monument and showed that a major excavation had taken place near it. A bulldozer and striation marks made by the blade could be seen within a dugout pit. It was clear that the existing grave had been excavated and the bodies of the Polish officers removed.
As Poirier noted in his startling analysis, this photograph was never made public, even though it had been in the possession of our government since The photograph of April 28 also showed many new open trenches at the old grave site and shovel marks indicating a considerable effort to locate more bodies. Photographs taken on the May 12 and 28 confirmed a sizable enlargement of the previously cleared area and the filling in of the pit seen excavated in the April 28 image.
The change in the depth of that pit could be ascertained by the angle of shadows as well as loss in stereo depth. The story of the Russian bulldozer explains a great deal about the Russian way of life and death. There had been a shortage of bulldozers in Russia as a result of Stalin's efforts to collectivize farms. American industrialists, particularly the Caterpillar Corporation of Peoria anxious to do business with Stalin sent him a sample of their wide-track bulldozer.
Stalin thanked them, kept the sample, and had copies of the machinery made in the Urals and at Kharkov. These were faithful reproductions of the original, except that in place of the word Caterpillar embossed on front of the machine the Russians affixed the sign Stalinets. When the Germans retreated many pieces of machinery were destroyed or rendered useless, but enough were left so that the Russians could use them in ways never imagined in Peoria. The images of June 2 provided the last glimpses of the forest before the advancing Russian troops drove deep into German-held territories.
There were objects in the area of the gravesites that appeared to be lampposts. A truck was parked near the site. The pit photographed on April 28 was now filled. Poirier concluded that prior to April 28, , the Russians conducted large-scale excavations, but removed or destroyed not only bodies but also the monument they had placed there. He wrote that the numerous holes and trenches dug in the area suggested the use of lime pits as the Russians discovered additional graves.
The erection of a building, lighting system and fences, clearly involved considerable personnel and machinery. Poirier summarized that the "search for new graves In the spring of , a year before President Gorbachev lifted the curtain partially, to be sure admitting that it was the Soviet secret services that committed the crime. Not surprisingly the telephone line went dead.
Maliszewski read Zawodny's book when he was still in his teens. His work in aerial photography was to be the fruit of that inspiration. It was Poirier's classified report that Maliszewski, was allowed to see during one of his visits to the National Archives. It was Maliszewski who eventually determined that the bulldozer that Poirier discussed in his report was the D.
K, model because of its characteristic vertical profile recognition features. In a private letter to Maliszewski, Poirier noted that he was the first person outside the government to view his work. Though intended for public release, it was abruptly withdrawn and classified. It was written, after all, on the eve of martial law declared by President Wojciech Jaruzelski in December The majority of bodies at Auschwitz had been reduced to ashes. The Russians more than matched the murderous record of the Germans, but their disposal of victims in the vast spaces of their empire always left open the possibility that victims' remains might one day be discovered.
A crucial question had been left unanswered. Since there were more than 27, victims, where were the hiding places for the remains of so many? Richard Breit-man, Official Secrets: For more recent advances in aerial photography, see: Day et al, Eye in the Sky: For a discussion of bombing of Auschwitz, see: Levy, "The Bombing of Auschwitz Revisited: And how to this day, not even the collapse of the Soviet Empire has solved the mystery of thousands of missing bodies. There are forests in Russia where unusual mushrooms grow in abundance.
Glabrous, shiny-red, with crisp white gills and white spots, they rise on thin legs amidst decaying twigs and needles. This is the genus Marasmius Scorodonius, a fleshy, edible mushroom with a distinct garlic odor. During Stalin's rule, villagers familiar with mist-shrouded woods realized that these mushrooms were found in profusion on freshly excavated soil. The appearance of Marasmius Scorodonius was to become the telltale sign for thousands of Polish corpses, officers who were shot and thrown into pits by their Soviet executioners.
The dense forest area was surrounded by a tall fence, topped with barbed wire. There were guards with dogs. From to , day and night, often three times daily, those to be executed were brought there by cars. Villagers could not recall if the killings went on Sundays as well.
Muffled moans were heard as the shootings began. A woman who lived nearby heard the cries. It was reported that the victims were killed quickly and thrown into prepared pits.
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Some were still alive. Another woman remembered that as a seven-year-old she thought she saw the earth move. Each layer of the dead was covered with sandy soil and small spruces were planted afterwards. A gravel road leading to that place was called "the road of death. The villagers talked about large red mushrooms with white spots that looked as if they had fed on blood.
In Brzezin-ski's language, these were the "red spots" in Russia's history, not the innocuous-sounding "blank spots," or "white spots" that the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, referred to in his speeches on Glasnost and Perestroika. The paths which led the condemned Poles to forests and killing cellars of the Soviet Union had their origin in the secret German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship of August 23,, which stipulated that the Soviet Union was to invade and annex Polish territory following the German invasion on September l.
Many atrocities were committed against the Polish forces, such as the slaughter of young students and cadets in Grodno. Soviet attitude towards the Polish officer class may have been gauged by the orders of General Semen Timoshenko who called upon the Polish soldiers to "strike" at their officers. He urged them to join their "brethren," the Red Army. German-Russian cooperation, symbolized by a joint victory parade at Brest-Litovsk before the German forces withdrew to their new boundary lines, was soon in full bloom.
Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov announced that Nazism was a "matter of taste," and though enemies yesterday, "today we are friends. The Russian and German secret services worked closely together. They exchanged preferred lists of human cargo destined for imprisonment, torture and death. The Gestapo particularly wanted German communists, some of them Jews, who had been active anti-Nazis. They reciprocated by sending Ukrainian and communist opponents of Stalin's across the border. Russian lists were very specific. They included Polish Red Cross workers, those who had traveled abroad, hotel and restaurant proprietors, philatelists and even Esperantists!
Of the approximately one and a half million Poles who were transported in cattlecars to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union, at least one half were dead within a year. In addition to the civilian deportees, close to , Polish prisoners of war were confined under most primitive conditions and mistreated. Only about 28, of these survived the war. One group of military prisoners was singled out for special attention by the Russians. They were placed in three camps: In addition to thousands of high-ranking officers, twelve of whom were generals one was a rear-admiral , these prisoners included over doctors, lawyers, judges, engineers, university professors and members of professions holding reserve status in the armed forces.
Among these were clergy of various faiths, including Major Baruch Steinberg, the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army and spiritual leader for hundreds of deported Jewish officers. Also included were frontier guards, journalists, social workers, elementary and secondary school teachers, landowners, and industrialists. Some were officers disabled since World War I, and of the women officers one was a flier shot down in combat.
If there was to be a free Poland after the war, these individuals, who represented almost one-half of Poland's commissioned officers, would have been entrusted with the task of national reconstruction. Families of the captives received mail intermittently until the spring of Then all contacts ceased. Inexplicably, at first, although as events were to prove the Soviet hoped to "convert" some of them, officers had been separated from the others and were sent first to Camp Pavelishchev Bor and then to Camp Grazovec, near Vologda.
These men now began to give accounts of life in the Ostashkov, Kozielsk and Starobielsk camps whose inhabitants had in the meantime vanished into thin air. These officers considered more malleable than the others, testified to the mistreatment, the inadequate facilities, the unvarying diet of bread and herring, and the frequent searches. But they were unable to provide any information as to the whereabouts of their fellow officers. Still, there was nothing to indicate that the Soviet authorities had planned anything worse than a temporary confinement.
In a country where millions disappeared from view in the s through man-made famine and murder without the world taking much notice, few were expected to pay attention to the fate of thousands during a war that was causing enormous military and civilian casualties. The accounts of the survivors tended to allay the worst fears. Apparently the officers who remained in the camps were interrogated repeatedly, personal data was carefully recorded, and each one was photographed, some several times. While crude attempts were made to indoctrinate them through posters, pamphlets, films and ceaseless exhortations via loudspeakers, the officers, almost to a man, resisted these efforts.
Strictly forbidden to have religious services, they agreed to a three-minute silence every evening at nine, a custom that was observed by believers and non-believers alike, by Catholics and Jews. The officers tried to maintain a military bearing. Periodically, lists of names were transmitted to the camps from Moscow, followed by departure of transports. The Russians did everything possible to convince the Poles that they were being repatriated.
There were moments of misgiving but how could dark suspicions be voiced when an orchestra played to amuse the inmates, and the NKVD officer said to those leaving: Even the rarest of Russian treats appeared—clean paper with which to wrap food for the journey. The high-ranking Polish officers were treated to farewell dinners of caviar and wine and cheered by the NKVD when they were driven away. Perhaps they should have had a foreboding when the NKVD officer said to those who wanted to leave with friends rather than the group they were assigned to: The 27, Polish officers and civilians disappeared without a trace.
Catégories
Those who fault millions of panic-stricken Jewish civilians for failing to heed what we now see as obvious signs of danger might consider the hopeful attitudes of seasoned, battle-tested Polish officers. It is worth noting that there were similarities in the deceptions practiced by both Nazis and Communists in lulling their victims with a false sense of security.
According to Professor Natalia Liebiedieva, whose research into the use of railways in the extermination process has been of considerable importance, the officers were told to give as a return address a resort named Gorky. This tactic was designed to deceive both the officers and their families. And just as the Nazis used the term "special treatment" or "resettlement" as code names for extermination, the Communists referred to "Unloading," when decreeing the transporting of Polish officers to their deaths. The victims felt comforted by this evidence of a bureaucratic "order," while those involved in extermination saw in it an imprimatur of a "higher authority" or at least of historical necessity.
But even if the documents were a ritualistic sham, they at least afforded some relief to those who felt distaste for such "work" And surely the perpetrators did not expect failure and eventual judgment in a world obviously blind and deaf to such acts. On June 22,, in another masterful deception, the Germans attacked their erstwhile Russian ally. The fate of the thousands of the missing Polish officers was overlooked in the aftermath of the ferocious attack as German forces reached the outskirts of Moscow by October.
Stalin, desperate and fearful of a total collapse, decided to enlist the aid of the exiled London Polish government and the many thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians who were scattered in the vastness of Asiatic and Siberian Russia. Nothing was said by the Russians about the 27, Poles still assumed to be alive.
Both Churchill and Roosevelt, anxious not to do anything that might harm their recent alliance with Stalin, cautioned the Polish government in London not to raise embarrassing questions about the missing officers. On July 30,, the Soviets signed a treaty with the London Poles and proclaimed an amnesty for the Polish citizens it had deported, none of whom had been convicted of any crime. By this time, almost half of these exiled and mistreated innocents had died. In April , robbed of their possessions and evicted from their homes in Eastern Poland, Maliszewska and her family were sent in unheated cattlecars on a two-month journey to Siberia.