The Number of Victims of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (1936-1945)

http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2012/volume_4/number_3/the_number_of_victims_of_sachsenhausen.php

The Number of Victims of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (1936-1945)

Klaus Schwensen

Every year on 22 April the liberation of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp is duly commemorated. On this occasion, the press sometimes still mentions the figure of 100,000 victims who allegedly perished or were murdered at this camp. Although Sachsenhausen does not belong to the six “classic” extermination camps (Chelmno, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka), the epithet of a “death camp” which was given to it by Soviet propaganda is sometimes still used. While the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site today contents itself with a death toll of “tens of thousands”, it has never publicly disavowed the propagandistic figure of 100,000 victims. One might speak of a “silent revision”: Certain Allied propaganda figures which arose during or shortly after the war are quietly jettisoned, but this fact is never publicly admitted, nor is there any discussion about the way these wildly exaggerated numbers arose.

So, how many people really perished at Sachsenhausen?

The conclusions of the Soviet Investigating Commission

As early as 1942 the Soviet authorities had founded an ”Extraordinary State Commission“ (ESC) aiming at ascertaining “crimes” committed by the ”German fascist occupiers” and the damage caused by them. The activities of the ESC naturally extended to the German concentration camps that had been liberated by the Red Army. Thus a Soviet commission carried out an investigation at Sachsenhausen in May/June 1945, one of its tasks being the ascertainment of the number of victims of the camp.

Members of the Soviet Investigating Commission at Sachsenhausen (May/June 1945). Source: GARF 7021-104-10

While the death books had been largely lost during the evacuation of the camp, the daily figures of prisoners present at roll call (Veränderungsmeldungen) has survived. With a few gaps, these documents covered the period from 1 January 1940 to 17 April 1945. Based on these figures, the Prisoner Records Office (Häftlingsschreibstube), which answered to the SS, had compiled monthly statistics of Prisoner Movement (Häftlingsbewegung). These documents, which were also captured by the Soviets, are now exhibited at the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site (Barracks 38), however they are falsely presented as statistics drawn up by former prisoners after the end of the war. As a matter of fact, the tables are contemporaneous with the camp’s operation and compiled at the Prisoner Records Office , which was subordinated to the Political Section (Politische Abteilung) of the SS.1


The authentic Häftlingsbewegung reports. Source: Sachsenhausen Memorial Site (permanent exhibition in Barracks 38)

The Soviet investigators ordered three former prisoners, the Communists Walter Engemann, Gustav Schöning and Hellmut Bock, to audit the statistics. This was undoubtedly done in order to prove that the SS had falsified the statistics to “cover up their crimes”. The group, headed by Engemann, performed its task conscientiously, paying special attention to “exits without information” (Abgänge ohne Angaben). Altogether 3,733 such unaccounted “exits” were found, 2,448 of them concerning Soviet POWs, who had disappeared from the statistics of the camp on 22 October 1941. Of course this does not prove in any way that these POWs were shot.

For the years 1940-1945, Engemann, Schöning and Bock, based on the Veränderungsmeld-ungen, ascertained a figure of 19,900 prisoners who had died in the camp. This result largely confirmed the death toll reported by the SS. In a report he produced for the ESC in Moscow, the head of the Sachsenhausen Commission, Lieutenant Colonel A. Sharitch, adopted this figure. In 2003, Carlo Mattogno arrived at a slightly higher number (20,173).2 This author (K.S.), who based his analysis on the Häftlingsbewegung data rather than the Veränderungsmeldungen and considered the whole period of existence of the camp (1936-1945), comes to the conclusion that Sachsenhausen claimed altogether 21,999 victims.

Which figures are these reports referring to?

In addition to the main camp, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp comprised about 15 satellite camps and dozens of small outstations. In the pre-war period, only male prisoners were interned here, but during the war, thousands of female prisoners were deported to Sachsenhausen as well. Another category of detainees was the Soviet POWs. Which categories of prisoners do the above-mentioned statistics refer to: All prisoners, or only the male ones? The entire Sachsenhausen complex including the satellite camps or only the main camp? And what about the Soviet POWs? Engemann and his comrades do not even broach these important questions, and historians hardly ever discuss them either. However, a comparison with contemporaneous SS statistics of allprisoners in all concentration camps (a document dating from January 1945) allows us to conclude that the Veränderungsmeldungen and the Häftlingsbewegung referred to the entire camp including the satellite camps, but only to the male inmates.3

How did the figure of 100,000 victims arise?

The man in the Kremlin, who was responsible for millions of deaths in the GULAG and who had his propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg claim 4 million victims of Auschwitz before the Red Army had even entered that camp, was apparently not sufficiently impressed by the Sachsenhausen death toll. For this reason, the figure of 19,900 (or slightly more) victims never appeared in Soviet propaganda. Instead the number of 100,000 first appeared in October 1945 in a letter Professor I. P. Traynin, a member of the ESC, wrote to Foreign Minister V. Molotov. The letter begins abruptly as follows4:

“At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, the German authorities have annihilated more than 100,000 citizens of the USSR, England, France, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Hungary and other states.”

No explanation whatsoever is given for this laconic assertion. It is highly improbable that Traynin would have undertaken to issue such a statement without a hint from the very top – in other words, from Stalin himself. The figure of 100,000 victims was immediately spread by Soviet propaganda.

In late 1946 and early 1947, a ”forensic commission“ headed by one of Russia’s most illustrious  pathologists, Professor V. I. Prosorovski, visited Sachsenhausen, but apparently did not carry out any further investigations. Prosorovski was no newcomer to this kind of activity: He had served as an expert for the ESC at the “war crimes trials” at Krasnodar5 and Kharkov6,7 (1943), co-authored the Soviet counter-expertise at Katyn8 (January 1944) and acted in the Katyn case as a witness for the prosecution at Nuremberg. It goes without saying that his forensic reports invariably confirmed the version of the ESC. As a citizen of the Stalinist Soviet Union, he had of course no other choice.

While the commission headed by Prosorovski adopted the figure of 21,700 victims which was based on the SS Häftlingsbewegung records and had been confirmed by Engemann and his team, they invented a plethora of additional groups of victims, making no attempt whatsoever to justify the figures adduced. The final death toll given by the commission was 100,000. This figure was adopted without any further ado by the Soviet military court that conducted the so-called “Berlin Trial”, where several members of the former SS garrison of Sachsenhausen were put on trial in Berlin-Pankow (October 1947). In 1961, when the “Sachsenhausen National Commemoration Site” was inaugurated by the East German authorities, a Book of Commemoration was published, where the 100,000 figure appeared three times: in the introduction, in a speech by Walter Ulbricht and in the “Cry of Sachsenhausen”. In the German Democratic Republic, this figure thus became a dogma nobody would dare to question.

The Soviet Prisoners of War at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

The number of Soviet POWs who perished at Sachsenhausen is still an unanswered question. Why were these POWs sent to a concentration camp in the first place and not to a “normal” POW camp - in their case, a “Russian camp”?

After their invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans took hundreds of thousands of prisoners within the first few months (the exact number is still disputed). Sheltering and feeding this huge mass of people confronted the Wehrmacht with enormous problems. Those Soviеt POWs who were sent to the territory of the Reich before the onset of winter were relatively lucky. Since the capacity of the existing POW camps was insufficient to lodge them all, a considerable number of Soviet prisoners were sent to farms to perform agricultural work or to German towns to perform communal work. Thousands more were interned in concentration camps – not for annihilation, but in order to work in industrial plants situated in the neighborhood of the camps. The “normal” camp inmates had to evacuate some of their barracks for the newcomers, which led to serious overcrowding.

Soviet POW´s arriving in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (Fall 1941)
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-K0901-014 / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Typhus

The six “Russian barracks“ designated for the Soviet POWs at Sachsenhausen were namedKriegsgefangenen-Arbeitslager and strictly separated from the rest of the camp (Russen-isolierung). From an administrative point of view this sector was not a part of the concentration camp but became part of Kriegsgefangenen-Stalag Oranienburg instead.9 Owing to the massive influx of POWs, the usual registration procedure which included delousing and 14 days of quarantine was apparently not observed, and within a short period of time typhus was rampant in the camp.

A separate register of deceased prisoners seems to have been maintained for the Stalag(Stammlager für Kriegsgefangene) since 22 October 1941. This document has not survived. The mortality among the Soviet POWs was staggeringly high. A surviving list10 about the (presumably) first two Russian transports reveals a horrific death toll: In the period from 18 October to 30 December 1941 altogether 2,508 Soviet POWs had been admitted to Sachsenhausen; however on 30 December 1941 only 1,360 of them were still alive. In other words: 1,148 prisoners (46% of the total) had died within these two and a half months, most of them undoubtedly from typhus.

The “Russenaktion“

Communist functionaries, especially Political Commissars (Politruks), of which at least one was attached to every unit of the Red Army, were meted out a far worse treatment than “normal” Russian prisoners (Arbeitsrussen) because from the National Socialist point of view, these functionaries were “carriers of the Soviet regime”. According to the Kommissarbefehl issued by theOberkommando der Wehrmacht on 6 June 1941 at Hitler’s instigation, commissars were not recognized as combatants and were denied the protection they would be entitled to as POWs in accordance with international law. They were ordered to be shot after capture. To its credit, the Wehrmacht disapproved of the Kommissarbefehl from the very beginning and largely failed to implement it so that only a minority of the captured commissars were actually shot. With Hitler’s agreement, this order was effectively revoked on 6 May 1942.11

While the Kommissarbefehl concerned primarily the combat units, two special orders (Einsatzbefehle) issued in July 1941 by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Sicherheitspolizei and the SD, provided for the screening of the inmates of POW camps. The Germans had become aware of the fact that many commissars had mingled with the great mass of prisoners, their uniforms being indistinguishable from the ones of military officers or common soldiers but for a red star on the sleeve (which could easily be removed). Therefore the POWs in the camps were subjected to systematic interrogation. Those identified as commissars were “singled out” and sent to the nearest concentration camp to be shot. Both the Kommissarbefehl and Heydrich’s Einsatzbefehlewere highly questionable measures and most likely illegal from the point of view of international law. As early as 15 November 1941, the two Einsatzbefehle were somewhat mitigated with Himmler’s approval: From now on, those singled out as commissars could be used for hard physical labor in the quarries instead of being shot.

It is not known when the shooting of Soviet POWs (Russenaktion) at Sachsenhausen began; the earliest date mentioned is late August 1941. Our knowledge is exclusively based on the statements of former prisoners (Büge, Sakowski etc.) which often contradict each other and were probably made under duress. In mid-November 1941 the Russenaktion was allegedly stopped, presumably for two reasons: The revocation of Heydrich’s Einsatzbefehle (15 November 1941) and the recent outbreak of typhus. Incidentally several German prisoners employed at the crematorium were among the first victims of the dread disease. During the Russenaktion they had sat on a heap of clothes belonging to shot Soviet soldiers and been infected by lice. Subsequently the camp was subject to a quarantine that lasted several weeks.

Soviet Propaganda

Efficiently exploiting the Russenaktion, the relatively bad living conditions in the camps and the frighteningly high mortality among “normal” Soviet POWs, Soviet propaganda insinuated that the NS regime deliberately exterminated its captured soldiers of the Red Army. Of course Moscow’s propagandists remained silent about the fact that the treatment of the Russian prisoners, who fared indeed much worse than Western POWs, was a direct consequence of Soviet policy. As early as 1919, the USSR had withdrawn from the 1907 Hague Convention, and the Soviet government never signed the 1929 Geneva Convention about the protection of prisoners of war. For this reason, the captured soldiers of the Red Army were not protected by these conventions, even if the universally recognized laws of humanity did apply to them.

After the liberation of the Sachsenhausen Camp Soviet operatives “fed” the former inmates with disinformation and atrocity propaganda about a huge slaughter of Soviet POWs. Rumors which had arisen during the war were now “confirmed” by “knowledgeable” former prisoners. German prisoners of war and prisoners of the NKVD were forced to make statements that they would never have made voluntarily. To what extent Soviet propaganda distorted the facts is demonstrated by the immensely exaggerated figures of victims bandied about by Moscow’s propagandists.

The number of allegedly shot Russian POWs according to the witnesses

The Russenaktion was carried out in the northern sector of the Industriehof (industrial court) which was situated outside the camp triangle. A special part of the Industriehof was the so-calledHolz- und Kohleplatz (wood and coal yard), which was protected from prying eyes by walls and buildings. According to the official history (which was later confirmed by former SS men before West-German Courts), the unsuspecting prisoners were marched into the barracks where they were placed in front of a supposed height-measuring device. Through an opening in the wall behind this device, the victim was killed with a shot in the back of his neck by a man standing in the adjacent room, various SS-Blockführer acting as executioners.

The bodies of the victims were incinerated in four field crematoria that had been installed in front of the barracks and were surrounded by a wooden fence. This grisly work was carried out by about eight German prisoners. The overwhelming majority of the inmates were not allowed to enter the northern sector of the Industriehof and had no possibility whatsoever to witness the killings: Whatever they knew was based upon rumors. As is to be expected under these circumstances, the “eyewitness reports” are literally teeming with improbabilities and contradictions. Nearly all “witnesses” claimed between 14,000 and 18,000 shooting victims, and some of them ventured even higher figures. In all likelihood, these “witnesses” had been instructed by Soviet operatives.

After the end of the war, at least two former prisoners seemed very well informed about theRussenaktion: Emil Büge, who had worked at the Prisoner Records Office where he had to register the admittees, and Paul Sakowski, who had been one of the crematorium workers. Both men left very detailed written reports about what had transpired at the camp, and Sakowski entered the witness stand at the Berlin Sachsenhausen trial. Both of them mentioned the usual figure of 14,000 or more shot Russian POWs. It stands to reason that they had no choice, each of them subject to the mercies of one of the victorious powers. According to his own statements, Büge had worked “for the Americans”, which most probably means the Augsburg-based U.S. War Crimes Commission. Lonely, impoverished and no longer needed by the Americans, Emil Büge committed suicide in 1950.

Paul Sakowski (born in 1920), whom East German propaganda christened “the hangman of Sachsenhausen”, was arrested by the NKVD shortly after his liberation from the camp. In October 1947, he was among the defendants at the Sachsenhausen trial at Berlin-Pankow. Sakowski was sentenced to 25 years, which he served until the very last day, first at Workuta and later in East Germany. As he had been previously interned at Sachsenhausen for six years, this man spent more than 31 years of his life behind prison bars.

The case of SS-Scharführer (Second Sergeant) Paul Waldmann starkly illustrates the means the Soviet agents resorted to in order to “prove” imaginary figures of victims. Waldmann, who had been a driver for the Oranienburg SS, was sent to the Eastern Front in December 1941 where he uninterruptedly served until the retreat of the German forces to Berlin. On 2 May 1945 he was taken prisoner by the Red Army near the “Zoo” Train Station12 and transferred to Posen, where he was subjected to routine questioning. The fact that he had served at Sachsenhausen obviously aroused the interest of his interrogators. On 10 June 1945, Waldmann signed a “confession”, stating that the Russenaktion, in which he had allegedly participated, had claimed the lives of no fewer than 840,000 (!) Soviet prisoners. Although this preposterous figure was never put about by Soviet propaganda, it has survived because owing to an obvious error of the clerks in Moscow, it was filed among the Auschwitz documents (IMT Doc USSR-52) where it was rediscovered by Carlo Mattogno in 2003. Paul Waldmann disappeared without leaving any trace; presumably he met his fate in the GULAG. In February 1946, the clerks in Moscow had apparently not yet become aware of their error, because excerpts from Waldmann’s “confession” were read by Soviet prosecutors Pokrovski and Smirnov at Nuremberg and thus became part of the protocols of the Nuremberg trial as well.13

The number of shooting victims – official statements

One of the earliest post-war documents about Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp is the so-called prisoners’ report (Häftlingsbericht) authored by Hellmut Bock. The report exists in seven or eight – more or less different – versions. The first version which was presumably completed on 7 May 1945 is now lost, but an English translation has remained.14 There we read:

September – December 1941. 16,000 Russian prisoners, driven together like cattle, were slaughtered. On the grounds of the industry-department four riding furnaces were standing so that the corpses could be cleared away uninterruptedly. Their ashes became the site for the new crematory. Before these people were murdered they were beastly ill-treated. Music out of big loudspeakers deafened the shrieking of the victims.

Although this earliest version of the report was modified several times, the number of 16,000 murdered Soviet POWs was still the same when Hellmut Bock submitted the final, seventh version of the report to the Soviet Investigation Commission.15

The head of the commission, Sharitch, slightly reduced this figure; on 30 June 1945 he wrote in his report16: “In September/October 1941, 13,000 to 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war were shot.”

In the various drafts of the ESC about Sachsenhausen the figure of 14,000 shot Soviet POWs regularly recurs.17 On the other hand, the commission headed by Professor Prosorovski18mentioned 20,000 shooting victims (January 1947), and in April 1961, when East Germany dedicated a National Memorial Site at Sachsenhausen, yet another figure (18,000) was claimed.

Since the collapse of East Germany, these figures have been somewhat reduced. On the occasion of the 56th anniversary of the camp’s liberation it was declared19 : 

"The so-called ´Station Z´, called so by the Nazis, was the annihilation site of the Concentration Camp with a neck-shot facility, gas chamber and crematorium. In Fall 1941 at least 12,000 Soviet POWs were shot here.”

Only four years later (2005) the Sachsenhausen Memorial Site wrote20:

“In the months from September to November 1941, the Wehrmacht transported at least thirteen thousand Soviet prisoners-of-war to Oranienburg, where the Concentration Camps´ Inspectorate organized the entire operation for the murder of Soviet prisoners-of-war. More than ten thousand of these were murdered within only ten weeks in an automated ´head shot´ facility.”

All these sources remained silent about the factual basis of their figures. Today, the official figures are obviously still based on the Soviet view of history as it was imposed after the War.

To the best of our knowledge, the only attempt to determine the number of Soviet POWs shot at Sachsenhausen with any degree of accuracy was made by the district court of Cologne (Köln) at the trial of Kaiser, et al. (1965).21 However, the verdict freely admitted: “It was not possible to ascertain the number of the shot Russians. There were no documents about this question.” All the same, the court quoted two sources it considered relatively trustworthy: A compilation by the former Arbeits- und Rapportführer Gustav Sorge and a statement made by the former camp elder (Lagerälteste) Harry Naujoks who had been assigned to collect the identification tags of the Russian soldiers. Despite its initial reluctance to name a concrete figure, the court finally concluded:

“Considering the possibility of further imprecisions, we can assume now as certain, that during the action from begin of September to mid of November 1941 at least 6,500 Russian POWs have been shot in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.”

The Russian сommemorative stone

In November 2000 a relatively modest monument consisting of two black granite blocks was dedicated on the grounds of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp by the foreign ministers of Russia and Germany, Igor Ivanov and Joschka Fischer. One of the stones bears a bronze plaque with the following inscription in Russian and German:

“1941-1945. Remember every single one of the thousands of sons and daughters of the fatherland who were tortured to death at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. The Government of Russia.”

Thus no explicit figure was mentioned, apparently because neither side desired to identify with the propagandistic figures still publicized by the media (10,000 to 18,000). Whether authentic German documents about the real number of victims of the Russenaktion still exist today (in Moscow or elsewhere) remains to be seen.

Summary

In the nine years of its existence, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (including all satellite camps and outstations) claimed the lives of about 22,000 male prisoners. In view of the fact that approximately 140,000 male deportees were sent (and registered) to this camp, this means that 15.7% of the prisoners perished. Compared to prison camps of other states, other wars and other times, such a percentage is unfortunately nothing extraordinary.

This number does not comprise the female detainees who died in the satellite camps and the Soviet POWs who perished from “natural causes” or were shot. The real number of these victims deserves further research. It bears mentioning that 533 prisoners were killed during Allied air raids in 1944/1945. After the Auer factories at Oranienburg had been bombed on 15 March 1945, the dead bodies of 282 female prisoners were retrieved.22 However, these tragic losses do not even remotely justify the propagandistic figure of 100,000 victims. As to the number of prisoners who perished during the evacuation of the camp (the inmates were marched away in various columns), the existing information is very incomplete. Obviously these deaths cannot be ascribed to the conditions in the camp. Just like the German refugees who died on their flight from the Eastern provinces to the West, these victims succumbed to the horrible conditions prevailing as a consequence of the invasion and conquest of Germany.

Abbreviations

AS                   Archive Sachsenhausen

BArch              Bundesarchiv Berlin (Federal Archive, Berlin-Lichterfelde)

FSB RF            Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation

GARF              Gosudarstvenniy Archiv Rossiskoy Federatsij (State Archive of the Russian Federation)

GULAG            Gosudarstvennaj Upravleniye Lagerej (State Administration of Camps)

IfZ                    Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich (Institute for Contemporary History, Munich)

NKGB              Narodniy Kommisariat Gosudarstvennoy Besopasnosti (People´s Commission for State Security)

Notes:

1 Klaus Schwensen, "Zur Opferzahl des KZ Sachsenhausen (1936-1945)," unpublished.

2 Carlo Mattogno, "KL Sachsenhausen – Stärkemeldungen und “Vernichtungsaktionen” 1940 bis 1945," in: Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (VffG), 7. Jahrg. Vol. 2 (2003), pp. 173-185.

3 Administration [Inspektion] of the Concentration Camps, List of Number of Prisoners in all the Camps (Bestandsliste der deutschen Konzentrationslager), Status 1. Jan. and 15. Jan. 1945; in: IfZ-Archiv, Sign. Fa 183; BArch NS3/439.

4 Letter from I.P. Traynin to Molotov, GARF 7021-116-177, p. 67. Handwritten date 8. X. 45, Reg.Nr. 189.

5 Forensic Expertise on German War Crimes in Krasnodar, dated 29 June 1943 (quoted in the Trial of  Kharkov).

6 Expertise of the Forensic Expert Commission, dated 15 September 1943; quoted in the Trial of Kharkov, see FN 7, pp. 12 and 77-81.

7 N.N., Deutsche Greuel in Rußland. Gerichtstag in Charkow (German Atrocities in Russia. The Trial of Kharkov) [Official Protocol of the Kharkov Trial], Stern-Verlag, Vienna undated [1945].

8 IMT-Document USSR-54, Report of a Special Commission for the examination and investigation of the circumstances of the shooting of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest by the German fascist invaders, Smolensk, 24 January 1944.

9 Mikas Šlaža, Bestien in Menschengestalt (Beasts in Human Shape), Vilnius (Wilna), Vaga Verlag 1995. The book contains Šlaža´s complete Sachsenhausen Report in German and Lithuanian with an afterword by Domas Kaunas.

10 German list (hectography) „Russische Kriegsgefangene“ (Russian POWs), dating from 18.10. - 30.12.1941; in: GARF 7021-104-4, p. 149-150.

11 Walter Post, "Erschiessung sowjetischer Kommissare," in: Franz W. Seidler und Alfred M. de Zayas (Ed.), Kriegsverbrechen in Europa und im Nahen Osten im 20. Jahrhundert, Verlag Mittler, Hamburg 2002, pp. 76-82.

12 There was a huge air raid shelter (Zoo-Bunker) in the area of the Berlin Zoo and close to the “Zoo” S-Bahn station. The bunker was equipped with anti-aircraft guns (Flak) and was one of the last strongholds of the defenders.

13 Soviet Prosecutor L.N. Smirnow on Tuesday, 19. Febr. 1946 (62nd day, forenoon), IMT Vol. VII, p. 635 ff.

14 N.N., REPORT ON CONCENTRATION CAMP SACHSENHAUSEN AT ORANIENBURG, [as Part 1 of a more extended report of Dutch ex-prisoners Frederik Willem Bischoff van Heemskerck and Johann Hers, translation into English by Bischoff]. Archives: Zentralnyj archive FSB RF or Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, Karton 27 Sachsenhausen, Nr. 59, Mappe 3 or AS Ordner 7 (Netherlands).

15 Hellmut Bock, Bericht Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen, presented to the Commission of the USSR to Investigate the Crimes of the German Fascists in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Oranienburg, 12 June 1945. Archives: GARF, 1525-1-340, T. 3, p. 31350 – 31382 (or sheet 351-383); Copy in AS 235 M. 173 Bd. 3, Bl. 148 -181.

16 A. Sharitch, Investigation Report [to the ESC in Moscow], Berlin, 29 June 1945; in GARF 7021-104-2, p. 29 (handwritten archive number).

17 Klaus Schwensen, "The Report of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp," Inconvenient History, Vol. 3 No. 4 (Winter 2011) orhttp://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2011/volume_3/number_4/
the_report_of_the_soviet_extraordinary_state_commission.php

18 Expertise of the Forensic Expert Commission, on behalf of the Investigation Group of the NKGB, [Jan. 1947]. German Translation: Staatsanwaltschaft Köln, 24 Ks 2/68 (Z), Sonderakten, Bd. 8, Bl. 1-28. Today in Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, Bestand Gerichte, Rep. 267 Nr. 1683.

19 International Sachsenhausen Committee, official Statement, 22 April 2001.

20 Günter Morsch (Ed.) [Director of Sachsenhausen Memorial Site], Mord und Massenmord im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen 1936–1945 [Murder and Mass Murder in Sachsenhausen CC], Metropol-Verlag, Berlin 2005, p. 166.

21 Irene Sagel-Grande, H. H. Fuchs und C. F. Rüter, Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, University Press Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1979, Urteil 591, p. 64 – 139 ff.

22 Wolff, Georg, Kalendarium der Geschichte des KZ Sachsenhausen, Herausgegeben von der Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg 1987.

Count Potocki de Montalk and the Katyn Manifesto

The governments of Britain and the United States proclaimed the German discovery of the Katyn Forest Massacre a monstrous lie. Time has exposed this Allied war crime.

French Ambassador Fernand de Brinon visits the place of the mass murder in the forest of Katyn accompanied by German officers. April 1943.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J15385 / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Count Potocki de Montalk and the Katyn Manifesto

http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2012/volume_4/number_3/count_potocki_and_the_katyn_manifesto.php

K.R. Bolton

At the time when the USSR was fighting alongside the Allied powers against the Axis, any mention of the atrocities and aggression of the Soviet Union was considered to be seditious and liable to place the exponent of such ideas on the black list of suspected ‘collaborators’ and ‘fifth columnists’. Hence, what eventually became the most infamous of the Soviet atrocities during World War II, the so-called ‘Katyn Massacre’ of 15,000 Polish Army officers at Katyn Forest by the Soviet invaders in 1940,1 was prohibited from discussion. Among the first in an Allied state to defy this censorship and risk the consequences was a highly eccentric New Zealand-born poet and claimant to the throne of Poland, Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, who was residing in England during the war.2

Potocki was, in contrast to most of the others of the New Zealand literati, decidedly of the ‘Right’, and in particular he was a Royalist.3 His opposition to Communism brought him closer to sympathy for Germany during World War II, and although his loyalty was to the Poland of his noble ancestors, from whence his claim to the Throne, he demanded a negotiated peace with Germany with the expectation that a result might be the return of Poland’s territorial integrity. Despite this pro-German orientation, Potocki enjoyed the confidence of Poles in exile in England during the war.

Allied Cover-Up

When on April 13, 1943 German radio announced the finding of mass graves of Polish officers in Katyn forest, near Smolensk, the Allies knew the Soviets were responsible. Prime Minister Churchill had believed from the start that the Russians had been guilty at Katyn, and wrote of his feelings long afterward.4 The British ambassador to Poland, Owen O’Malley, reported when the discovery was first made, his view of Soviet guilt, writing in a report that ‘we have, in fact, perforce used the good name of England to cover up the massacre’.5 ‘But such views could not be admitted to the people in wartime, and O’Malley’s messages were kept secret until the official records were opened thirty years later. The governments of Britain and the United States proclaimed at the time of the German discovery that it was all a monstrous lie’.6 The British ambassador in Moscow also considered Katyn to be Russia’s responsibility, and that the Soviet break with the Polish government-in-exile over the matter had been done to cover up their guilt.7 The only Allied newspaper to carry the story about Katyn from the start and to doubt the Soviet protests of German guilt was the Chicago Tribune. The other major press ignored the story as far as possible, before adopting the line that it was German propaganda.8 On April 20, 1943, the Allied press took up the Soviet line that the Polish Government-in-exile was in collusion with Germany in blaming the USSR for Katyn. Time claimed that the Poles had ‘promptly remembered’ that the Polish officers had been missing for three years, and that the Germans had ‘planted’ the story.9 The USSR made this a pretext for breaking off diplomatic relations with the Polish exile government based in England.10

French Ambassador Fernand de Brinon visits the place of the mass murder in the forest of Katyn accompanied by German officers. April 1943.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J15385 / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Potocki

Churchill had pressured General Wladislaw Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, to withdraw a request for a Red Cross inquiry into the massacre.11 However the Germans established their own commission of inquiry, which included representatives from the Polish underground, a Polish medical team, and scientists and medical men from twelve occupied and neutral countries, including Switzerland.12

Despite the high-level Allied pressure, the Polish government-in-exile charged that 15,000 Polish soldiers and civilians captured by the Russians were missing.13 The Washington Post even ridiculed the Polish government-in-exile as being composed of ‘reactionary and feudal’ individuals, although most, states Colby, had working class or peasant backgrounds.14

On Easter Day 1983, Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, writing from Switzerland, reissued his 1943 ‘Katyn Manifesto’, with a preface, and entitled these combined documents the ‘Second Katyn Manifesto’,15 in reaction to a letter that had been published in The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, stating that Katyn had been committed by the Germans.

The Polish government-in-exile in regard to Katyn was only permitted to publish the facts about Katyn in Polish, therefore leaving the English-speaking public unaware of the Soviet responsibility for the massacre. It fell to Potocki to correct this.

Writing his preface in 1983 to the ‘Katyn Manifesto’ that Potocki had distributed forty years earlier, he recounted that he was ‘the only person during the war to print and publish the facts in England in English, in Our Katyn Manifesto on 13th May 1943…’16 Potocki held the ‘English government of the time and their Polish lackeys, the so-called Polish government in exile’, to have been complicit in the Katyn cover-up. ‘The English authorities did everything in their power to prevent the Poles from hiring a hall to discuss the situation’, but the Roman Catholic Church ‘broke this boycott’ and permitted the use of Westminster Cathedral for a public meeting. The authorities were also unable to prevent the hire of Caxton Hall, where a meeting on Katyn was attended by Potocki in ‘velvet cap and silver white Eagle’, ‘scowling’ because of the failure of the meeting to have played the Polish anthem’.17 Potocki continues:

No one in the Kingdom except Ourself18 printed anything of the truth about Katyn in English: but the Poles were allowed to print all details in Polish (that is, after Dr Goebbels’s broadcast, 13 April, not before) because the English government, being as cunning as they are unwise, could realize that no one could read it except Poles (who knew the truth only too well) and a few spies: and it would and did give the numerous Poles in exile the totally false impression that their so-called government in exile was genuine from a Polish point of view, when in reality they were nothing but a group of highly paid lackeys of the English Secret Service.19

Potocki continued in his scathing attitude towards the compliance of the Polish government-in-exile, calling them ‘slaves’, ‘who had sold their souls for money and for prestige’, for not having printed a word in English about Katyn ‘to alert the more honest English’.20 He was contemptuous of their cowardice, asking ‘what of it’ if they might have been jailed for publishing an expose, as he – ‘the Claimant of the Polish Throne’ - and his ‘inoffensive French wife’ had been. As for the possibility of a Katyn expose prejudicing the war, ‘what of it?’ he asked again.

Potocki had a lifelong involvement with printing limited edition booklets of his poetry and manifestos on many issues, including a journal called Right Review, which he continued to print sporadically for decades after the war. Just as he had circumvented censorship on some of his more risqué poetry, he printed the ‘Katyn Manifesto’ on his own press, thereby, ‘not asking the permission of any English nobody to publish anything’.21

In May 1943 Potocki printed thousands of copies of the ‘Katyn Manifesto’, addressed as a ‘Proclamation to the English, the Poles, the Germans and the jews’ (sic).22

Potocki had shortly before sought out the opinion of the Duke of Bedford, a proponent of a negotiated peace with Germany, in regard to rumours circulating among Polish exiles about the execution of thousands of Poles by the Soviet invaders, which had allegedly taken place in 1940. Bedford replied:

Your Majesty

At the moment I am not quite sure where, by reason of my unpopularity, I should really be able to do much to help the Polish cause… What you say is confirmed by what more than one friend has told me of conversations with Poles in the Country. Very many seem to hate and fear Russia, even more than they hate and fear Germany, and consider that the Russian treatment of Polish prisoners has been more ruthless. Considerably more than a year ago a Polish officer told a friend of mine that the Russians had kept alive the private soldiers among the prisoners captured, but all the officers had disappeared and he believed that they had been murdered. The statement in the German propaganda seems now to confirm his supposition in a rather sinister fashion.

Yours very truly, Bedford.23

Stephanie de Montalk , writing the biography of her cousin sixty years later, recounts in a chapter entitled ‘Katyn’ that the Count had told her that, ‘On 4 May 1943, Poles in London had requested Potocki’s help in exposing the atrocity’.24 Stephanie de Montalk states that on May 13th thousands of copies were run off Potocki’s platen press and he went up to London and handed out the manifesto, with the help of Poles.25

Potocki was soon placed under surveillance, questions were asked in Parliament, and he was attacked by the press, including the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, which described the manifesto as ‘poisonous filth’,26 calling Potocki a ‘crazy Fascist Count’. It was at this time that Potocki was jailed for ‘insufficient black-out’,27 recalling that he arrived at the jail ‘dressed like Richard II’.28 After release he was ordered by the Ministry of Labour to serve six months in an agricultural camp in Northumberland, which he attended as a preference to conscription, adorned with his royal attire. After a month he told the camp manager he was leaving, and went.

Katyn Manifesto

Potocki’s ‘Katyn Manifesto’ shows the extent to which the facts were known by the Poles in exile. Potocki in printing the manifesto for wide distribution also took the opportunity to announce his plan for a post-war settlement. This served as a preamble to the Katyn material, beginning:

We have consulted a fair number of Poles in London including some of considerable importance and our finding is that they are unanimous in holding that the Bolsheviks29 and not the Germans, murdered the Polish officers at Katyn (and many other Poles as well). We have been asked by certain of the Poles we have talked with, to use our influence as a half English Pole to insist that the English look at the facts in the face and recognize that it was the Bolsheviks who committed this loathsome crime.30

Potocki was irritated by the insistence of Poles - presumably the government-in-exile – that he should not publish anything that would ‘annoy the soviets’, (surely an impossible task if one is exposing the Katyn Massacre) or to ‘harm the cause of Poland’, Potocki explaining: ‘by which they plainly mean (“the cause of Poles in England”) and in particular we have been begged 1. not to claim any soviet territory and 2. not to demand severance of diplomatic relations with the USSR’.31 To Potocki the requests were short-sighted and cowardly, and failed to take account of the ‘30,000,000 Poles in Poland, beside the generations of Poles yet unborn!’, stating:

We cannot see how the soviets can be regarded otherwise than as the worst possible, and most irreductible enemy of Poland; a soviet Poland would be the same as no Poland and a Poland with a powerful soviet neighbour would live in misery and fear and would be in perpetual risk of ultimate liquidations.

Not only the English, but the Poles in England, must look the facts in the face. We wish to know why the bolsheviks may claim Polish lands, while the Poles may not claim lands formerly stolen from Poland by Russians and why the bolsheviks may break off diplomatic relations with Polish officials and these Poles may not retaliate’.32

Potocki next listed his plan for the post-war reorganisation of Europe as it related mainly to Poland and the USSR, reflecting primarily his Royalist principles, beginning with the declaration that there is ‘no such thing as soviet land. Russian land belongs to the Tsar’. The lands that are claimed as ‘soviet’ are ‘fundamentally Polish’, including those further East, which are ‘fiefs of the Polish crown’. Potocki stated that diplomatic relations with the USSR are unacceptable for any ‘civilized government’ and doubted the ‘sanity’ of the Germans in regard to the former Russo-German Pact. His final point was that the defeat of England and Poland in the war would be better ‘from every point of view, whether spiritual or material’, than a victory over Germany won ‘in common with the USSR’. 33 After this four-point plan he listed the ‘facts about Katyn’, which follow verbatim:

1. Though the USSR occupied half Poland on the pretence of “saving” the Poles from the Germans, they took away vast quantities of the population, terrorised the remainder, and, according to the “Red Star” (17th Sept. 1940) treated 181,000 soldiers as prisoners of war, including about 10,000 officers.
2. According to proofs in the hands of the Polish administration in London, in November 1939 the great concentration camps were organised. At the beginning of 1940, the soviet authorities informed the prisoners that the camps were to be liquidated, so that they would be able to return home. For this purpose lists were made. At the time there were in the camps:-
   1. At Kozielsk 5000, of whom 4500 were officers.
   2. At Starobielsk 3920, all officers except about 100 civilians. Nearly 400 were doctors.
   3. At Otaszków 6570, of whom 380 were officers, the rest largely police.
3. On the 5th April 1940 the liquidation of the camps began, and every few days from 60 to 300 persons were taken away. From Kozielsk they were taken in the direction of Smolensk.
4. According to the Polish-soviet pacts of 30th July 1941 and 14th August 1941, a Polish army was to be formed and it was taken for granted that the above-mentioned officers would form the cadres. By the end of August no officers had turned up from Kozielsk, Starobielsk, or Otaszków, except 400 prisoners who had been removed to Griazowiec, and some who had been removed to common prisons. In all 8300 officers were missing, besides 7000 petty officers, soldiers, and civilians from these three camps.
5. On the 6th October 1941 the Polish Ambassador Kot and General Anders applied to the soviet authorities to know what had become of them, and were informed by Wyszinski, Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, that all prisoners of war had been liberated and therefore were free.
6. In October and November Ambassador Kot repeatedly took up with “Stalin”, Molotoff, and Wyszinski, the question of these prisoners and demanded copies of the lists, which had been carefully prepared by the soviets.
7. On the 3rd December General Sikorski took up the matter at Moscow in conversation with “Stalin”, and in view of the failure of the soviet officials to supply copies of their lists. Handed to “Stalin” a partial list of 3845 names put together by some of their fellow-prisoners. “Stalin” assured Sikorski that they had all been set free. An additional list of 800 names was handed to “Stalin” by General Anders on the 18th March 1942, but not a single one of these men reached the Polish Army.
8. Count Raczynski also took the matter up with “Ambassador” Bogomolow, who, in a note dated 13th March 1942, once more assured that all the prisoners, whether civil or military, had been freed.
9. Neither the Polish administration in London, nor the Polish ambassador in Russia, has ever received any answer as to the whereabouts of the officers and other prisoners removed from these three camps aforementioned.

These facts were mainly translated from the Dziennik Polski, and were confirmed to us personally by a high Polish official. In these circumstances how can any person in his right mind accept the Bolshevik version, to the effect that “the Germans did it”?

We are not aware that the Germans have ever, in their history, done such a thing, whereas the soviets have printed boasts of equally wicked crimes.

How is it the USSR have only now discovered, after the German announcement, that these prisoners were sent to work at Smolensk and were captured by the Germans?

Neither Poland, nor England, have any right to be allied to such a government.

It is high time for a negotiated Peace, in which we hope the Germans will be persuaded to display a proper regard for the rights of Poland. Poland and Hungary to be united according to our map34 (with possible concessions to the Germans); the jews to be helped if they will even at this late hour repent and behave themselves; the Tsar to be restored in Russia and the King in France.35

Inconvenient Poles

The betrayal of Poland by the USA and Britain to the USSR was a standing embarrassment and the public could not be permitted to compare this to the acclaimed war aims of the Allies, and specifically Britain’s ostensible reason for declaring war on Germany over the Polish issue. Katyn had to be put down the ‘Memory Hole’.

One of the most ignoble actions of Britain towards Poland came after the war when the official Victory Parade was held in London on June 8th 1946. Bernard Smith, (whose book carries a foreword by Irena R Anders, widow of Lieutenant General W Anders, commander of the free Polish Army) states that ‘the Polish forces, who had been the first in Europe to fight the Germans, were not asked to take part’ in the Victory Parade. Twenty-five airmen, representing the Polish crews who had played a significant part in the Battle of Britain, were invited to take part, but refused, because of the ban on the participation of the Polish Army.36 Even in 1976, the British Government would not send a representative to attend the unveiling of the Katyn Memorial in London and, moreover, members of the armed forces were forbidden to attend in uniform.37 Such an enduring attitude towards the Poles and Poland by Britain begs the question, which vested interests do not want asked: was the declaration of war on Germany in 1939, supposedly in defence of Poland, no more than a pretext for going to war, and was intended to hide wider issues?

The facts bought out by Potocki to the English-speaking public in 1943 were not conceded by the USSR until 1990. Stephanie de Montalk, in writing the biography of her cousin, states that when he told her about the Katyn Massacre in 1983, i.e., the year that he republished the ‘Katyn Manifesto’, she had ‘regarded his account with some scepticism’, stating that her own efforts at finding out about Katyn were ‘inconclusive’. 38 She writes, citing what Potocki told her in 1983:

It was not until June 1995 that I discovered from reports in the press the wartime intelligence reports, sealed for fifty years after the war, confirmed not only the full horror of the atrocity, but also Potocki’s belief at the time that the British Government had been aware of the massacre. The official line had been ‘to pretend that the whole affair had been a fake’ and that the Government had believed: ‘this is obviously the most convenient attitude to adopt, and, if adopted consistently enough, will doubtless receive universal acceptance’. The reason was that ‘any other view would have been most distasteful to the public since it could be inferred that we were allied to a power guilty of the same sort of atrocities as the Germans’. The Soviet Union had also emphatically denied Germany’s assertions that it was responsible for the massacre, and continued to do so until 1990, when KGB archives revealed irrefutable evidence that it had been carried out on the direct orders of Stalin.39

While British reluctance to disclose the facts seems to have been as persistent as that of the USSR, the US Congress initiated an enquiry in September 1951. The US authorities had known of the Katyn Massacre in 1943, as two American prisoners of war had been among the team taken by the Germans to inspect the execution site at Katyn Forest.  The senior officer, Colonel John H Van Vliet, handed a report on the matter to Major General Clayton Bissell, assistant chief of staff in charge of Army Intelligence, in May 1945. This was suppressed and Van Vliet was ordered to stay quiet. Van Vliet prepared a second report in 1950. The Congressional enquiry concluded that the report had been removed or destroyed. The Congressional investigation took two years, heard 81 witnesses, and unanimously found that the Poles had been murdered by the Soviets in the spring of 1940. The number of bodies found at Katyn Forest only amounted to 4,143, who had been prisoners at the Kozielsk camp, yet the committee concluded that the total number of Poles taken from the camps and executed amounted to approximately 15,400.40 Potocki’s publication in 1943 of the estimate of ‘8300 officers … besides 7000 petty officers, soldiers, and civilians from these three camps’,41 had been accurate.

Why had the USA reversed its position on the Katyn cover-up from 1950 while the British authorities remained mute? Firstly, the primary reason advanced for Britain’s having declared war on Germany was over the issue of Polish sovereignty, and the myth had to be maintained that the USSR had been invading ‘liberators’, otherwise British duplicity would become apparent. Secondly, the USA had entered the war for reasons other than Poland, and in the post-1945 world Stalin had become the ‘new Hitler’, much like today any number of US obstacles to global hegemony – such as Saddam Hussein or Milosevic – are transformed into ‘new Hitlers’. Rather than a ‘new world order’, as it is now called, emerging in the aftermath of World War II, in which the old empires would be eliminated in the spirit of ‘free trade’,42 and the USSR would serve as a junior partner in a US-dominated post-war world, Stalin rebuffed the USA’s overtures and he ceased being ‘Uncle Joe.’ Specifically, the USSR had rejected the two foundations for a US-dominated world order:

1. The USSR rejected the American plan for the United Nations General Assembly to serve as a world parliament, in which the USSR would be out-voted, and instead insisted that authority be vested with the UN Security Council, with member states having the right to veto any decision; thereby making the United Nations Organization null and void as a potential basis for a world government, and
2. The USSR rejected the ‘Baruch Plan’ for the ‘internationalisation’ of nuclear energy under UN auspices, which the USSR again regarded as giving de facto authority to the USA.43

As Benjamin Colby comments in relation to Katyn and the new post-war world situation: ‘It was not until the United States found itself fighting a war in Korea against an army trained, equipped and supplied by Russia, that an official effort was made to reveal the facts of Katyn. At long last the whitewash was to be stripped away’.44 Katyn could now be used as Cold War propaganda against the USA’s former wartime ally. As for the Soviet Union’s eventual admission of guilt in 1990, this was a time when the new rulers of Russia embarked on an altogether different path: that of de-sovietising the USSR,45 dismantling the Warsaw Bloc, and bringing Russia into the type of ‘brave new world’46 that Stalin had rejected in 1945. The release of the facts about Katyn was serving a new political agenda in Russia, just as their suppression had served an agenda of a different type during World War II. Katyn shows that, like the recent and present allegations of ‘war crimes’ in Kosovo and Syria respectively, such allegations are publicized or suppressed selectively, in the cynical pursuit of political agendas, and seldom have any regard for truth.

Notes:

1 Joseph Bishop, ‘Katyn: Unanswered Questions’, Inconvenient History, Vol. 3, No. 2,http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_3/
katyn_unanswered_questions.php

2 K R Bolton, ‘Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk: New Zealand Poet, Polish King and “Good European”’,Counter-Currents, August 2010, Three Parts, http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/count-potocki-de-montalk-part-i/

3 Ibid., Part II, http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/count-potocki-de-montalk-part-ii/

4 Benjamin Colby, ‘Twas a Famous Victory: Deception and Propaganda in the War with Germany(New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1974), p. 65.

5 Time, July 17, 1972, cited by Colby, ibid.

6 Colby, ibid.

7 Ibid., p. 68.

8 Ibid., pp. 70-74.

9 Time, April 26, 1943, cited by Colby, ibid., p. 71.

10 Colby, ibid.

11 Ibid., p, 68.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., p. 71.

14 Ibid., p. 72.

15 Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, ‘Second Katyn Manifesto’, Switzerland, 1983.

16 Ibid., p. 2.

17 Ibid.

18 Potocki capitalized references to himself as the claimant to the Polish throne and that of Hungary and Bohemia, and used the ‘Royal We’.

19 Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, ‘Second Katyn Manifesto’, op. cit., p. 2.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 ‘Jews’ lacked capitalization; an idiosyncrasy that Potocki also later adopted toward the ‘english’.

23 Bedford to Potocki, April 29, 1943; cited by Stephanie de Montalk, Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2001), p. 229.

24 Stephanie de Montalk, ibid., p. 232.

25 Stephanie de Montalk states that Potocki was helped by the Polish government-in-exile, although this seems unlikely, considering what Potocki wrote of the matter in 1983.

26 Stephanie de Montalk, op. cit., p. 232.

27 Ibid., p. 234.

28 Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, ‘Second Katyn Manifesto’, op. cit., p. 2.

29 Potocki always distinguished between ‘Bolsheviks’ and the Russian people.

30 Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, ‘Second Katyn Manifesto’, 1983, op. cit.; citing the first Katyn Manifesto, 1943.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Included in the original 1943 edition of the ‘Katyn Manifesto’, but not included in the 1983 reprint.

35 Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, ‘Second Katyn Manifesto’, 1983, op. cit.; citing the first Katyn Manifesto, 1943.

36 Bernard Smith, Poland: A Study in Treachery (West Sussex, 1984), p. 26.

37 Ibid., p. 18.

38 Stephanie de Montalk, op. cit., p. 231.

39 Ibid.

40 Benjamin Colby, op. cit., pp. 75-77.

41 Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, ‘Katyn Manifesto’, 1943, point 4.

42 Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill, ‘The Atlantic Charter’ (Point 4) August 14 1941,http://usinfo.org/docs/democracy/53.htm

43 K R Bolton, ‘Origins of the Cold War and how Stalin Foiled a New World Order’, Foreign Policy Journal, May 31, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/05/31/origins-of-the-cold-war-how-stalin-foild-a-new-world-order/all/1

44 Benjamin Colby, op. cit., p. 76.

45 Mikhail Gorbachev, as the architect of Russia’s subjugation to oligarchy, plutocracy and globalisation – albeit short-lived – handed the Soviet archives on Katyn over to Polish president Wojciech Jaruzelski in 1990, stating that the documents showed ‘indirectly but convincingly’ the Soviet responsibility. See: Esther B Fein, ‘Upheaval in the East; Gorbachev Hands Over Katyn Papers’, New York Times, April 14, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/14/world/upheaval-in-the-east-gorbachev-hands-over-katyn-papers.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

46 K R Bolton, ‘Mikhail Gorbachev: Globalist Superstar’, Foreign Policy Journal, April 3, 2011,http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/04/03/mikhail-gorbachev-globalist-super-star/