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PzLdr
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« Reply #440 on: April 13, 2018, 01:02:46 PM » |
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In 1939, when "Uncle Joe" was Adolf Hitler's ally [a fact conveniently overlooked by far too many people these days], the Soviet Union joined Nazi Germany in carving up Poland [you know, the country Britain and France went to war over], with soviet troops and secret police invading the eastern half of the benighted country. The U.S.S.R got over half the country [with a later reduction when the Germans 'gave' the Soviets the Baltic States], and began rounding up the intelligentsia, the government officials, the priests, and the Polish POWs that fell into their hands [With some 5 to 7 Einsatzgruppen, the Germans shot most of theirs].
The POWs were sent to camps in Ukraine, White Russia, and Russia itself, some 22,000 or more in toto. It appears some effort was made by the Soviets to sway the polish prisoners toward adapting a Marxist, pro Soviet attitude. It largely failed. So in Spring, 1941, Lavrenti Beria presented the Politburo a memorandum recommending that the Poles be liquidated as "enemies of the state" The memo was signed off on by Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and others.
As a result, trains began moving Polish prisoners from their camps to unknown locations [unknown to the prisoners, many of who believed they were being returned to Poland. They were not]. The locations the POWs were moved to included an NKVD complex in White Russia in the Katyn Forest. there the prisoners were, over a period of days, taken to the main building and shot in the back of the head, one at a time, or lined up at mass graves in the forest and shot there [at another location, the NKVD's chief executioner, Blodkin shot 250 Poles per night, one ata time, killing some 2,500 of them himself].
When the NKVD was done at Katyn, 4,400+ Polish military officers, officials and others had been murdered, buried, and covered up. and there they remained until April, 1943, when members of a German Signals unit stationed in the immediate vicinity saw a wolf, or a dog, with a human arm bone in its mouth. After questioning the locals, the Germans excavated the site, finding the over 4,000 corpses. Sensing a propaganda coup, the Germans invited in forensics experts and coroners from all over Europe, including Poland. The evidence clearly demonstrated that the poles had been killed in Spring, 1940. The benefit to the Germans exceeded all expectations.
For the Polish government in exile in london, now allied with Stalin, had been asking for months, including to Stalin's face, about over 20,000 missing prisoners of war, witrh Staqlin suggesting they may have walked to Manchuria after being released. when the Poles pressed the issue, the soviets broke relations with them, and the British, who went to war over Poland, but now needed the Red Army to defeat the Wehrmacht, sided with the Reds, even though they knew better [FDR, being the fatuous idiot he was, believed Stalin].
When the Soviets re-occupied the area of Katyn when they reconquered the area, they again disinterred the Poles, and held their own inquest. Not surprisingly, they determined the Poles had died in September, 1941, after the Germans had occupied the area [ Averell Harriman's daughter, when she visited the site wondered why the Poles had been wearing winter coats in the heat of September when they died].
The Soviets then attempted, at Nuremburg, to add Katyn as a charge against the defeated Germans. It went nowhere.
And so it rested until 1990. the Poles, restive, had never given up in their efforts to learn the truth about Katyn. And Gorbachev, with his policy of 'glastnost' was determined to open up [to a degree] Soviet Society. and so it was, on this date in 1990, Gorbachev produced the signed Beria memo, and admitted to the world that Stalin's NKVD, on the orders of the Soviet Politburo, had not only murdered the 4,400+ POWs found at Katyn, but a total of well over 20,000 at a total of four execution sites.
And there it rested again [Yeltsin later opened up the NKVD files on the case]. Not one participant in the Katyn Forest massacre, the other massacres, or the transportation operation supporting them was ever charged, let alone brought before an international, or even Russian tribunal for their crimes. And several were alive into the 1990s, drawing a pension for their work. Nor was there a public outcry, except for Poland, to bring these killers to justice.
Katyn is one more stain on a U.S.S.R drenched in blood. It is also a stain on the international community that first betrayed the Poles in the second world war, and then later failed to take up the case of mass murder perpetrated by the Soviets on the Poles at Katyn, and elsewhere.
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