Katyn Massacre - Discovery

Discovery

The fate of the Polish prisoners was raised soon after the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Polish government-in-exile and the Soviet government signed the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement which announced the willingness of both to fight together against Nazi Germany and for a Polish army to be formed on Soviet territory. The Polish general Władysław Anders began organizing this army, and soon he requested information about the Polish officers who were missing. During a personal meeting, Stalin assured him and Władysław Sikorski, the Polish Prime Minister, that all the Poles were freed, and that not all could be accounted because the Soviets "lost track" of them in Manchuria.

In 1942 Polish railroad workers heard from the locals about a mass grave of Polish soldiers at Kozelsk near Katyn, found one of the graves and reported it to the Polish Secret State. The discovery was not seen as important, as nobody thought that the discovered grave could contain so many victims. In early 1943, Rudolf von Gersdorff, a German officer serving as the intelligence liaison between Wehrmacht's Army Group Center and Abwehr, received reports about mass graves of Polish military officers. These reports stated the graves were in the forest on Goat Hill near Katyn. He passed the reports up to his superiors (sources vary on when exactly the Germans became aware of the graves — from "late 1942" to January/February 1943, and when the German top decision makers in Berlin received those reports (as early as 1 March or as late as 4 April). Joseph Goebbels saw this discovery as an excellent tool to drive a wedge between Poland, Western Allies, and the Soviet Union, and reinforce the Nazi propaganda line about the horrors of Bolshevism and American and British subservience to it. After extensive preparation, on 13 April, Berlin Radio broadcast to the world that German military forces in the Katyn forest near Smolensk had uncovered "a ditch ... 28 metres long and 16 metres wide, in which the bodies of 3,000 Polish officers were piled up in 12 layers." The broadcast went on to charge the Soviets with carrying out the massacre in 1940.

The Germans brought in a European commission consisting of twelve forensic experts and their staffs from Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, and Hungary. They were so intent on proving that the Soviets were behind the massacre that they even included some Allied prisoners of war, not to mention writer Ferdynand Goetel, the Polish AK prisoner from Pawiak. After the war, Goetel escaped with a fake passport due to arrest warrant issued against him; two of the twelve, the Bulgarian, Marko Markov and the Czech, Frantisek Hajek, with their countries occupied by the Soviet Union, were forced to recant their evidence, defending the Soviets and blaming the Germans. The Katyn massacre was beneficial to Nazi Germany, which used it to discredit the Soviet Union. Goebbels wrote in his diary on 14 April 1943: "We are now using the discovery of 12,000 Polish officers, murdered by the GPU, for anti-Bolshevik propaganda on a grand style. We sent neutral journalists and Polish intellectuals to the spot where they were found. Their reports now reaching us from ahead are gruesome. The Führer has also given permission for us to hand out a drastic news item to the German press. I gave instructions to make the widest possible use of the propaganda material. We shall be able to live on it for a couple weeks." The Germans won a major propaganda victory, portraying communism as a danger to Western civilization.

The Soviet government immediately denied the German charges and claimed that the Polish prisoners of war had been engaged in construction work west of Smolensk and consequently were captured and executed by invading German units in August 1941. The Soviet response on 15 April to the initial German broadcast of 13 April, prepared by the Soviet Information Bureau, stated that "Polish prisoners-of-war who in 1941 were engaged in construction work west of Smolensk and who fell into the hands of the German-Fascist hangmen ."

In April 1943 the Polish government-in-exile insisted on bringing the matter to the negotiation table with the Soviets and on opening an investigation by the International Red Cross. Stalin, in response, accused the Polish government of collaborating with Nazi Germany, broke off diplomatic relations with it, and started a campaign to get the Western Allies to recognize the alternative Polish pro-Soviet government in Moscow led by Wanda Wasilewska. Sikorski died in an air crash in July—an event that was convenient for the Allied leaders.