The Katyn Massacre

<a
The Katyn Massacre
by Bruce KennedyCNN Interactive Writer
In 1943, German soldiers discovered a mass grave in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia. The grave held the bodies of between 4,000 and 5,000 Polish army officers. Hoping to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its Western allies, Nazi officials publicized the grave and accused the Soviets of the massacre. Moscow denied the charge and claimed the Germans were attempting to cover up their own atrocity.
Despite evidence that the Kremlin was indeed behind the massacre, Britain and the United States chose to look the other way. London’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, opposed a call by the Polish government-in-exile for an investigation by the International Red Cross into the incident.
Following the war, at the Nuremberg war crime tribunals, the issue of Katyn was originally included on the list of crimes attributed to the Nazis. But it was later dropped, apparently out of concern that any revelations about the massacre would embarrass the Soviets.
It wasn’t until 1990 that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev admitted Soviet involvement in the Katyn forest massacre. Two years later, the Russian government handed over to Polish President Lech Walesa previously secret documents showing that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had directly ordered the killing of the Polish army officers.
Most of the victims in Katyn forest were Polish army reservists — lawyers, doctors, scientists and businessmen — who were called up to active service following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. But instead of fighting the Germans, about 15,000 Polish officers found themselves prisoners of the Red Army, which had occupied eastern Poland under the terms of a secret Moscow-Berlin treaty.
In the spring of 1940, about 4,500 of these officers were taken by their Soviet captors to the Katyn forest. Most were then gagged, bound, shot once in the head and buried on the spot. The other Polish POWs were taken to other locations, where many of them were also executed. The mass liquidation killed off much of Poland’s intelligentsia and facilitated the Soviet takeover of the nation.
The memory of the massacre was an open wound in Soviet-Polish relations throughout the Cold War, and it continues to strain ties between Warsaw and Moscow.
In 1995, Walesa and relatives of the Katyn forest victims attended a memorial service at the site of the massacre. Boris Yeltsin was invited to take part in the ceremonies but declined. The Polish media denounced the Russian president’s decision.
“Boris Yeltsin’s absence leaves a deeply unsettling message,” said the Zycie Warszawy newspaper. “There has been no apology of the kind that Germany has long since made. This day could have been a symbol of reconciliation between two nations tragically marked by communism. Instead it is a bitter shame, and Katyn forest continues to cast its dark shadow.”