Katyn Forest Massacre - Soviet Denial and Western Complicity

Polish Prisoners of War in the fall of 1939

Soviets denied responsibility and blamed Nazi Germany until 1990

European Red Cross committee and Wehrmacht officers in Katyn 1943

The fate of the 22,000 Poles killed in the Katyn massacre went undiscovered until April 1943 when the government of the German Reich announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest, located 19 kilometers west of Smolensk in Russia. The Germans brought in a European Red Cross committee called the Katyn Commission, comprising 12 forensic experts and their staff, from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, and Slovakia. In 1941, the Polish government-in-exile had agreed to join up with the Soviets to fight together against Germany. The Germans hoped that the discovery would turn Polish opinion against Communist Soviet. The Soviets now claimed that German SS troops had murdered the victims in 1941. The Katyn massacre was a criminal act of historic proportions and enduring political implications. Representatives from the Polish government went to the site of the massacre and determined that the Soviets were indeed responsible, but U.S. and British officials did not want to risk losing the Soviets as an ally against Germany. Poland thus agreed to blame Germany for the Katyn massacre. Both British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt were increasingly torn between their commitments to their Polish ally and the demands by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. On April 24 1943, Churchill assured the Soviets: We shall certainly oppose vigorously any 'investigation' by the International Red Cross in any territory under German authority. In the United States a similar line was taken. The number of victims in the Katyn massacre is estimated at about 22,000 Polish servicemen, politicians and landowners, as well as intellectuals and professionals captured by the Red Army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. The massacre was prompted by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps, dated March 5 1940, approved by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, including its leader. The Allied powers would accept the Russian version of events at the Katyn massacre up until the fall of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. It was not until a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 2012 that Katyn was officially recognized as a Soviet war crime. Credit: Andrew Milne and FMR Chief Historian of the CIA Benjamin B. Fischer. Top image: as a result of the Soviet invasion of Poland, approximately 250,000 Polish soldiers became POWs in the Soviet Union. Soviet had not signed international conventions on rules of war and the Polish prisoners were denied legal status. The Soviets murdered almost all captured officers, and sent numerous ordinary soldiers to the Gulag camps. Photo by Hugo Jäger. LIFE photo archive. FU. Middle image: medical examinations of the corpses exhumed in Katyn proved that these victims were murdered no later than the spring of 1940. Bottom image: European Red Cross committee and German officers at the edge of a partly-emptied mass grave in Katyn Forest in April 1943. Credit: J.B.J. PD.