Death at Katyn

Death at Katyn Richard A. Widmann This April, a tragic plane crash took the lives of Poland’s president, Lech Kaczyński and 95 others. The plane was taking them to Katyn Forest where the dignitaries were planning to commemorate the 70th anniversary of a war-time atrocity in which approximately 22,000 Polish Prisoners of War were shot and buried in secret mass graves. The recent tragedy is an important reminder not only of the horrors of ‘total war’ but also of the falsifications and propaganda utilized during the Second World War. While World War Two holds a fascination for a significant portion of the population, with dozens of books and movies produced on the subject each year, the question of World War Two revisionism is still a touchy one. Why would anyone question what appears to be the clearest example of good and evil in modern history? How could the actions of the “greatest generation” be called into question? What ulterior motives must one have to dare to doubt the official history as pronounced by the victors? While the Katyn Forest Massacre was only one episode in a war which ultimately claimed tens of millions of lives, much can be learned by reconsidering it and the cover-up that followed. The Soviet invasion of Poland began on September 17, 1939 just 16 days after the German invasion from the West. The Red Army encountered minimal resistance as the Polish Army was already overwhelmed attempting to hold off the Nazi advance from the opposite direction. In fact, many Polish units surrendered to the Red Army with no resistance. The units that did resist were quickly overcome. With much of the Polish Army in flight from the West some 227,000 men ended up in Soviet captivity. On June 22, 1941 the Nazis invaded the USSR, including the Polish territory it took in 1939. The Soviets quickly released the Polish soldiers they held in captivity to form a new Polish army that would fight the Nazis under Soviet command. As the former POWs gathered, it quickly became apparent that their former officers were missing. Polish authorities began to officially inquire into the whereabouts of their missing officers. The Polish Ambassador was given assurances by Molotov and Stalin himself that a search was underway for the missing officers (estimated at 15,000 at the time). On December 1, 1941, Polish authorities sent General Sikorski to Moscow with a list of the names of many of the missing. Stalin, who met with Sikorski, suggested that the missing men may in fact have escaped to Manchuria. He further declared that a search for the missing thousands would be extended to the Arctic Circle. The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, a Nazi bureau which was established for the purpose of investigating War Crimes had begun to hear reports of a mass execution of Polish officers by the Soviets by the Summer of 1941. In February 1943 the German occupation authorities began to search the area around Katyn Forest. On April 12th, the Germans announced that a horrible atrocity had occurred. By June of 1943 the searchers had unearthed 4,143 bodies. Each body showed that they had been executed with a bullet in the neck at the base of the skull. Photo from 1943 exhumation of mass grave of Polish officers killed by NKVD in Katyń Forest in 1940. Photo is in the public domain. Source: Andrzej Leszek Szcześniak (1989). Katyń: Tło historyczne, fakty, dokumenty, s. 106, Warszawa: Wydawnictwa ALFA. ISBN 83-7001-295-5. The Germans organized a team of medical and legal experts from twelve neutral countries to visit Katyn and report on their findings. The evidence became clear that the Soviet NKVD had exterminated the missing Polish officers. But the story did not end here. The Soviets now announced that the prison camp in which they had held the officers (no need for an Arctic exploration!) had in fact been overrun by Nazi forces in July of 1941. The tale continued that it was in fact the Nazis who executed the officers with the purpose of falsely accusing the Soviets. The Soviets continued their cover-up by refusing to allow the International Red Cross to investigate the matter. With the war in progress, the story largely passed to the back pages with many believing the charge against our Allies, the Soviets, was simply a bit of the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels. The matter was not over however. At the conclusion of the war the victorious Allies put the Nazi Leadership on trial in Nuremberg. While ostensibly a trial by an “International Military Tribunal,” the victors did not have to answer for atrocities that would certainly have resulted in death sentences had they been committed by the vanquished Nazi leadership. After the initial indictment was signed by the Nuremberg prosecutors, including a charge that the Nazis murdered 945 Polish officers in Katyn, near Smolensk, the Soviets demanded that the indictment be rewritten. The passage should in fact charge the Nazis with the murder of 11,000 Polish officers at Katyn. The Soviets charged that the Nazis had perpetrated the crime and had increased the number originally suggested by 1000 per cent. The Nuremberg Tribunal assigned to the Soviets the task of introducing all the evidence of German atrocities in Eastern Europe. With regard to Katyn the Soviets introduced “testimony” which consisted of "written statements" said to have been signed by "eyewitnesses.” These testimonies were in fact only "quoted" in a "report" and read aloud by the Soviet prosecutor. The original documents were never attached to the report. A so-called "forensic report" was also introduced into evidence. It was the only forensic report introduced into evidence at Nuremberg. To the credit of the International Military Tribunal, the Katyn indictment did not appear in the final verdicts at Nuremberg. The United States Congress decided to investigate the matter in 1951 and 1952 and found that the Soviets were indeed the perpetrators. Still, the matter of the Katyn Massacre was unclear for many. Revisionist scholar F.J.P. Veale published his analysis of the crime in 1958. It was not until 1989 that Soviet scholars admitted that Stalin himself had ordered the massacre. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the execution had been carried out by the NKVD and confirmed the existence of two additional burial sites at Mednoye and Piatykhatky. Despite these high-level admissions it is not unusual to still see charges leveled against the Nazis for this atrocity. Several Russian politicians and commentators continue to support the Soviet tale that the Poles were executed by the Germans. Others even in the English-speaking world suggest that the Nazis somehow coordinated the effort with the Soviets or otherwise allowed the Soviets to carry out the murders. In 2007 and 2008 Russian newspapers published stories implicating the Nazis for the crime. By late April 2010 in the aftermath of the latest tragedy in Katyn, the Russians released for the first time documents which prove that the NKVD executed 22,000 Polish officers and other prominent citizens on Stalin’s orders. Moscow continues however to refuse to publish other important documents regarding this event. The Katyn Forest tragedy of 1940 reveals among other things that history is not black and white. An Allied power committed a thoroughly documented crime against unarmed POWs. They also produced falsified witness testimony and a phony “forensic report” to cover up their crime and utilized the power and authority of the tribunal at Nuremberg to hammer home their falsified version of the truth. One is forced to consider what else may have falsified by the Soviets at Nuremberg and elsewhere. There can be little doubt that revelations regarding such matters remain quite inconvenient to those in positions of power. Sources: Porter, Carlos, "Katyn: How the Soviets Manufactured War Crime Documents for the Nuremberg Court." On-line: http://www.codoh.com/trials/trikatyn.html [1] Smith, Bradley F., Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg: The Untold Story of How the Nazi War Criminals Were Judged, Basic Books, New York, 1977. Veale, F.J.P, War Crimes Discreetly Veiled, Devin-Adair, New York, 1959.

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Katyn: Unanswered Questions

Katyn: Unanswered Questions Joseph Bishop The air crash earlier this year in Russia in which the Polish premier and many senior members of his government perished, briefly brought Katyn back into public consciousness. They had been journeying there to commemorate the tragic events in 1940 in which 15,000 Polish officers were murdered by the Soviet NKVD. The events in the Katyn forest area in 1940 are today generally known by those amongst the reading public with an interest in history and/or World War Two. There is no longer much controversy over what occurred and thus there is no need to detail the events beyond a relatively brief summary as follows. Following the 1939 Russian invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union captured some 200,000 Polish prisoners of war. From that number, the Polish officers, numbering approximately 15,000, were separated from the enlisted men and moved to several separate camps in the Soviet Ukraine. In the spring of 1940 they were transported to the Katyn forest area of Russia where they were bound and executed by NKVD units. Surviving family members and Polish officials strongly suspected Soviet foul play and for several years attempted in vain to receive from the Soviet Union an official rendering of the fate of their officers. With the onset of the Russo-German war in 1941, the Polish government in exile became an ally of the USSR and the surviving Polish prisoners were released to form a Polish military under Soviet command. Polish attempts to locate the missing officers intensified but without result. In 1943 the German army announced to the world their discovery of mass graves in Katyn forest where many Polish officers were found. Representatives from the 'General Government' of Poland were allowed to visit the gravesites and to examine exhumed corpses, and subsequently requested the International Red Cross to undertake an investigation. However, without Russian permission the ICRC refused to do so. In consequence, Germany invited forensic medical specialists from twelve European countries - including neutral Switzerland - to form an International Medical Commission tasked to undertake exhumations and to study the date and manner of death. This medical commission concluded that the deaths were by execution and that they occurred in early 1940, i.e. while the officers were in Soviet hands. Many other international visitors were allowed to visit Katyn and were given a free hand in their own observations and investigations, including some American POWs. As with the commission members, all these visitors were allowed to move about freely and without hindrance or escort. Exhumation of mass grave of Polish officers killed by NKVD in Katyń Forest in 1940. Germans showing their findings to an international commission made up specialists from several European countries. Published 1943 as picture 23 (23. Einer Kommission kriegsgefangener britischer Offiziere werden die Ergebnisse der Obduktion zugänglich gemacht) on page 296 of: "Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von KATYN", Im Auftrage des Auswärtigen Amtes auf Grund urkundlichen Beweismaterials zusammengestellt, bearbeitet und herausgegeben von der Deutschen Informationsstelle, Zentralverlag der NSDAP. Franz Eher Nachf. GmbH., Berlin 1943. Source: Wikicommons. Photo is in the Public Domain. The Soviet Union responded to the news by blaming the Germans for the crime, and broke off relations with the Polish government in exile, accusing it of propaganda complicity with the Germans. The USSR steadfastly maintained this 'the Germans did it' line—also parroted by communists and others obedient to the Russian party line—for some fifty years until Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev confirmed in 1990 that the USSR had, indeed, committed the crime. Such is what is generally known of Katyn. However, other interesting aspects and details surrounding Katyn which are lesser known are useful to consider. Firstly, those today with little understanding of the nature of Marxism-Leninism remain puzzled as to the purpose of the executions. The communist belief is that the 'intelligentsia' of all nations represent a threat—real or theoretical, present or future—to the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', i.e. the nomenclature referencing the Soviet ruling elite, and must be 'liquidated' en masse. In other words, an entire class of people who represent the most intelligent, able, creative, and active members of society are to be physically exterminated. Such genocide has occurred everywhere the Soviets have taken over, and Poland was not to be an exception. One might think that times and mores have changed since 1940. A documentary film on Katyn was shown in Poland in the 1980s and some Poles had expressed anger over what had happened. Russian journalist Vladimir Abarinov did some groundbreaking research on Katyn in the 1980s and received a letter from an apologist of the NKVD who justified the massacres with: 'Is it really possible that our Polish friends cannot assess what happened from a clear-cut class standpoint? After all, these people were top echelons of the old Polish army that was in the service of the bourgeoisie. Why then, are the Polish comrades beginning to lose their class intuition and slip into nationalist arrogance?'1 [1]  In other words, it was ok, even necessary, to wipe out the cream of Poland's leadership; such was the communist view then, and such it remains today. Aside from the continued Soviet lies about Katyn, the convoluted politics of the western allies have involved a great deal of misinformation to their own peoples and to the world. These governments understood who the perpetrators were, but this was politically inconvenient to publicly acknowledge. During wartime, the USA and Britain wished to maintain Russian involvement in the war against Germany and were sensitive to the embarrassment and divisiveness which Katyn represented. They also hoped that by appeasing Stalin over Katyn—i.e. if they would continue to lie to the world—it might pre-empt his forming a Polish communist government on Soviet soil. So they maintained the fiction that Katyn was probably the act of the Germans or at the very least that they 'did not know' the real perpetrators. Poland was pressured by the western allies to go along, to exercise 'proper discipline', and a concerted voice casting suspicion on Germany was presented to the world. Thus the world's peoples were lied to and were led to believe that Katyn was probably a German crime or that we would never know the facts of it. As for a Polish communist satellite government, Stalin went ahead with that anyway. In point of fact, with the 1943 revelations, the only nation telling the truth about Katyn was Germany. For Germany it served the purpose of helping to reveal to the world the nature of Soviet communism, as well as—it was hoped—to drive a wedge between the USSR and Poland and the western allies. The location of the prisoners prior to their execution is also of interest. The three main camps housing the 15,000 Polish officers were former Christian church compounds. Kozielsk was a former Orthodox monastery, Starobielsk was also a former monastery and Orthodox church, and Ostashkov too was located on former Christian Orthodox monastery grounds. Perhaps the Soviet NKVD made such selections for the prisoners because of the allegedly high component of Jews serving in its uppermost ranks, venting a hatred towards Christianity and the former Tsarist system. Or perhaps it was all coincidental. According to Abarinov, the NKVD had a 'partiality' for using church buildings this way, in his view as a political act of desecration of Russia's sacred places2 [1]. However, there is no known information of the NKVD using former synagogues or mosques as places of imprisonment, torture, and execution. A 'large number of applications' by Jews3 [1] within the ranks of the Polish officers made formal request to the NKVD authorities for special treatment, praising the Soviet Union and asking to be separated from the Poles and admitted as citizens of the USSR. How many were thus saved and admitted is not known. This is noteworthy in view of the well-known solidarity of the officers whilst in captivity. In the early postwar period the International Military Tribunal was persuaded by the USSR to bring up Katyn as a war crime and it attempted to assign blame for it on the Germans. The Soviet perspective on trials was eminently political. In their view, defendants are already guilty because the police apparatus had decided it is so, therefore trials are mere formalities. Western jurists at Nuremberg were not much different in this respect of course, but still attempted from time to time to at least put on a show of objectivity and to listen to defendants' testimony and evidence. But in the case of Katyn the evidence was too flimsy and the defense testimony too telling. German defense counsels were allowed to mount a defense but were prohibited from themselves making accusations against the USSR; i.e. they could work to disprove the version of the prosecution but could not present their own version. They did manage to present sufficient evidence and testimony to clear their clients and the IMT dropped the matter. It was obvious to the tribunal that the Germans had not committed the deed, so who could the perpetrator have been? Rather than pursue that line, the charges were discreetly dropped. Really, that was quite an accomplishment for defense counsel, since Article 21 of the IMT charter read: 'The Tribunal shall not demand evidence about the commonly known facts and will consider them proved. The Tribunal shall likewise accept without evidence the official government documents and reports of the United Nations, including protocols and documents of the committees created in various allied countries for an investigation of the war crimes, proceedings and sentences of military or other tribunals of each of the United Nations.'  That is worth re-reading and pondering closely. It is how many innocent Germans were convicted and executed at Nuremberg. With the onset of the Cold War, the international political climate had radically changed and it was now in the interest of the western allies to resurrect Katyn and this time to point the finger of blame at the USSR. Angry Soviet denials continued, chimed in with by the new communist government of 'liberated' Poland, now a controlled satellite of the USSR. In 1952 a group of American Congressmen chaired by Ray Madden released a statement introducing House Resolutions 390 and 539 resolving Congress to form a committee to investigate Katyn and bring the perpetrators to justice. Resolution 390 was adopted, the committee was formed, and hearings were held.4 [1] Of course nothing came of it as it was a mere propaganda exercise. But such an exercise would have been politically impossible a decade earlier. High-profile speeches made by various American and British politicians during the early postwar period were similar exercises, intended to harden attitudes against the Soviet Union albeit without any practical effects. A 1950 statement5 [1] issued by Polish General Anders asked for enquiries and demanded that war criminals be brought to justice. It is noteworthy because of the moral stance taken by Anders in appealing for 'all war criminals of this past war' to meet with 'adequate punishment'. He also expressed his 'sincere thanks and appreciation to all those who preferred to put justice and truth before illusory political interests'. When reading something like this perhaps one could be forgiven for being appalled at the hypocrisy of someone like Anders. During the war he instilled in himself 'proper discipline' to not accuse the Soviets, expediently putting 'justice and truth' well behind the 'illusory political interests' of the time. General Anders was also surely aware of the massacres of ethnic Germans in Poland just prior to the 1939 war as well as the massacres of ethnic Germans there in the months and years after the war's close. It was illusory political interests that made Poles and the other allies say and do nothing about such crimes, putting justice and truth far behind those interests. In 1940 the German Library of Information in New York published a book6 [1]documenting the thousands of dead or missing ethnic Germans who perished in Poland at the hands of Poles in 1939. They estimated some 58,000 dead or missing while later researchers lowered the estimate to at least 5,000. If 5,000 Americans had been murdered anywhere in the world, it would certainly have resulted in a declaration of war. The world has paid very little attention to these crimes. They were not introduced at the Nuremberg IMT trials, no American congressional committee has called for justice, and no speech by Anders or any other prominent Pole has addressed this matter. Regardless of the number of fatalities, no attention at all has been focused here. This is not meant as a digression, but as a contextual issue related to Katyn. Massacres of ethnic Germans did in large measure did lead to the final breakdown of relations between Germany and Poland and to the German-Soviet invasions. This in turn led to the internment of hundreds of thousands of Polish troops by the Soviets and to the massacre of 15,000 of its leadership cadres, i.e. the 'intelligentsia' of Poland. It would have been tragically ironic if any of these officers had taken part in the pre-war massacres of ethnic Germans. If Germany and Poland had reasonably and peacefully addressed their mutual problems in 1939, the Katyn of 1940 would not have occurred. One must wonder how to look at all this. These numbers pale in comparison with victims of Allied bombing or with the millions who perished in postwar Europe's forced population movements or 'transfers'. And even those figures pale in comparison with the scores of millions of victims of Stalin's GULAG or with Mao's even greater crimes in China. But this is not really a numbers game. It is about the uniqueness of a crime in which the officer elite of an army is deliberately selected out and destroyed. However, even here one must reconsider. Stalin at Yalta had told his western counterparts that he would like to see, or intended that, '50,000 German officers' were to be shot at war's conclusion. His western allies thought or pretended to think that he was joking. In actuality a figure probably far higher of German officers were murdered by Stalin's henchmen, as literally millions of German POWs of all ranks in Soviet captivity were never seen again. So what is unique about Katyn? It was a disaster for Poland to be sure, but one receiving attention because the 15,000 served as a political football by all sides both during and after the war. A final issue is quite intriguing. To what extent did the Soviet secret police and their German counterparts cooperate between 1939 and 1941? Exchanging information, prisoners passed to and fro, etc., in accord with the secret protocols of the 1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact? Abarinov cites prisoner transfers and even relates an interesting high-profile case7 [1] in which a German prisoner deported to Germany from the USSR had a suitcase containing his underwear go missing whilst still in Russian hands. Enquiries about this went as high as the Soviet People's Commissar Merkulov—thus indicating a strong spirit of serious cooperation between the two nations. This in turn raises the possibility that information about the Katyn massacres may have been secretly passed to German security officials long before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. There is no evidence for this, it is a speculation only. But supposing it had, the question then raised is why did the Germans only reveal Katyn in the summer of 1943, rather than earlier? This and many other questions may never be answered about Katyn. The perpetrators themselves are mostly passed away, the documentary evidence is still only gradually surfacing from the former Soviet archives, and much of same has been destroyed and is thus lost forever. The world has mostly forgotten Katyn—although Poland remembers. But it too must remember other, related events from its own history, if justice is to ever prevail. Sources: The Murderers of Katyn: A Russian Journalist Investigates the 1940 Massacre of 15,000 Polish Officers in Soviet Captivity, by Vladimir Abarinov, Hippocrene Books Inc., New York, 1991 Katyn: A Crime without Parallel, by Louis Fitzgibbon, Tom Stacey Ltd., London, 1971 Polish Acts of Atrocity against the German Minority in Poland, German Library of Information, New York, 1940 Notes: Abarinov. The Murderers of Katyn. p.11 Ibid., p.107 Ibid., pp.114-116 Full text of Congressional statement in Fitzgibbon, Katyn. pp.197-201 Full text of Anders, ibid., pp.185-190 Polish Acts of Atrocity against the German Minority in Poland. German Library of Information, New York, 1940 Abarinov, ibid., p. 37 copyrighted 2010 by Joseph Bishop, all rights reserved contact:  Revisionist21@aol.com

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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/

French Wartime Film Report on the Katyn Massacre

French Wartime Film Report on the Katyn Massacre

Video

French wartime newsreel report on the Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviets. From a "France Actualités" newsreel of 1943, which made use of German-supplied film footage. Runtime: 2:17 mins. While people in Germany, France and other European countries were told the truth about the atrocity, US officials made sure that Americans were kept in ignorance. In keeping with Allied wartime policy and propaganda, US officials and the American mass media blamed Germans for the killings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTipYEWfdOc

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/most-damning-evidence-us-coverup-soviet-war-crimes/56693/

The Most Damning Evidence of a U.S. Coverup of Soviet War Crimes

JOHN HUDSON17,672 ViewsSEP 10, 2012

On Monday, the U.S. National Archives released 1,000 declassified documents pertaining to the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Poles by the Soviet Union. The Cliffs Notes version? America's coverup of the infamous Katyn Massacre was more extensive than previously thought.

For years, Poles and Polish-Americans have alleged that the U.S. government suppressed information about the Soviet Union's guilt in the World War II-era murders, which were aimed at killing off Poland's military and intellectual elite. As recently as 1992, the State Department said it "lacked irrefutable evidence" in the early 1950s to substantiate claims that the USSR, not Nazi Germany, carried out the crimes. But today's documents show the concrete proof U.S. officials had in their hands in the 1940s regarding the Soviet Union's guilt. 

You can see all of the newly-released documents and maps at the National Archives site here. The AP's Vanessa Gera and Randy Herschaft got an early peek at the documents and have zeroed in on the the most surprising revelation: Secret codes sent by two American POWs to the U.S. in 1943 acknowledging evidence of rotting corpses in a state of advanced decay. In essence, "proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area." The POWs were Capt. Donald Stewart and Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr, per the AP:

The newly declassified documents show that both sent secret encoded messages while still in captivity to army intelligence with their opinion of Soviet culpability. It's an important revelation because it shows the Roosevelt administration was getting information early on from credible U.S. sources of Soviet guilt — yet still ignored it for the sake of the alliance with Stalin ...

A statement from Stewart dated 1950 confirms he received and sent coded messages to Washington during the war, including one on Katyn: "Content of my report was aprx (approximately): German claims regarding Katyn substantially correct in opinion of Van Vliet and myself."

However displeasing, the decision to suppress the evidence during the war had its merits: the U.S. needed the Soviet Union's help in fending off Germany and Japan. However, why the secret codes were concealed until now is less defensible. Documents show that Stewart was ordered in 1950 " never to speak about a secret message on Katyn," a suppression tactic historians are now calling"potentially explosive."  

Elsewhere in the trove of declassified documents are maps of the mass graves. 

The above map shows the location of the Polish officers' graves, including a "detailed plan of the 8 mass grave locations." Below, is a map drawn by German Army reporter Gregor Slowenczik who documented the Katyn excavations for the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps in 1946. 

According to the National Archives, after Slowenczik's death, his wife "provided this map, along with photographs and other testimony remaining from her husband's visit to Katyn, to the United States Forces." You can see more of the declassified materials here. Below is a documentary about the Katyn Masscare held by the National Archives: