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    Katyn: State-Sponsored Extermination: Collection of Essays
    Katyn: State-Sponsored Extermination: Collection of Essays
    Katyn: State-Sponsored Extermination: Collection of Essays
    Ebook163 pages4 hours

    Katyn: State-Sponsored Extermination: Collection of Essays

    By M.B. Szonert

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    KATYN: State-Sponsored Extermination is an insightful collection of essays and captivating historical photographs surrounding the mass murder of Polish officers and mass deportations of their families by the Soviet Union, a criminal act of historic proportions and enduring political implications. In March 1940 Joseph Stalin decided to exterminate 25,700 best sons of Poland based on the cold calculation that "death of one person amounts to a tragedy but death of millions amounts to mere statistics." We, the people, have the moral obligation to assure that the rational on which Joseph Stalin based his genocidal decision is wrong. This collection of essays is an attempt to draw public attention to the fact that the Katyn Crime has not been fully disclosed, adequately adjudicated, and properly condemned to this day. Accordingly, families of those who perished in the Katyn hecatomb are yet to find peace since the moral calculus that brings about closure has not been worked out with respect to the Katyn Crime.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris US
    Release dateAug 20, 2012
    ISBN9781477155806
    Katyn: State-Sponsored Extermination: Collection of Essays

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      Book preview

      Katyn - M.B. Szonert

      KATYN

      STATE-SPONSORED EXTERMINATION

      COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

      Edited by

      M. B. Szonert

      Libra Institute, Inc.

      Cleveland, Ohio 2012

      Copyright © 2012 by Libra Institute, Inc. 114566-SZON

      ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4771-5579-0

      Ebook 978-1-4771-5580-6

      All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

      To order additional copies of this book, contact:

      Xlibris Corporation

      1-888-795-4274

      www.xlibris.com

      Orders@Xlibris.com

      or

      Libra Institute, Inc.

      www.librainstitute.org

      librainstitute74@gmail.com

      Table of Contents

      Prologue

      Mark Kramer, What is Distinctive about Katyn; The Massacres in Context

      Tadeusz Jasudowicz, Radoslaw Fordonski, Moscow Secrecy in the Katyn Crime

      Karol Karski, The Katyn Crime under Nuremberg Principles

      Aurelia Pucinski, Wall of Secrecy; Investigation of Katyn

      Witold Wasilewski, Katyn Documents in the Russian Archives; 2012 State of Disclosure

      Maria Szonert Binienda, Katyn Families: Struggle for Justice

      List of Illustrations

      Image4596.tif

      Monument of Murdered and Fallen in the East

      Warsaw, Poland

      Image4602.tif

      Katyn Monument, Jersey City, New Jersey, USA

      Prologue

      The Katyn Forest massacre was a criminal act of historic proportions and enduring political implications.

      BENJAMIN B. FISCHER

      Center for the Study of Intelligence

      Central Intelligence Agency

      I came to fully realize, as a member of Congress, how incomplete our history is. What can I do as a citizen of this country to help to make the American history complete, the history of freedom and the fight for freedom complete? [ … ] I feel very deeply the incompleteness of history. The United States is the place that can help to push knowledge forward. That is our responsibility as a free people.

      HONORABLE MARCY KAPTUR

      Member, United States Congress

      February 2011¹

      The massacre at Katyn was aimed at trying to eliminate the very idea of Poland, and trying to knock out not only top officers but also intellectuals who carried with them the narrative of the Polish people; to exterminate the people and the memory of the people …

      We are not yet free from disgrace to humanity that the events [of Katyn] visited upon the world. It may be true that the bodies have been exhumed but the truth still lies buried. Katyn still presents to this day a moral crisis.² Wars can end but the moral calculus that really ends a war is worked out over generations of people. We are now into the fourth generation of people who look back to Katyn as a marker in human history that has not yet been fully inscribed …

      There is no possibility for the great souls who perished at Katyn to be able to truly rest in peace if not for our efforts to bring to the attention of the world the events that affected their lives …

      We are also mindful that Katyn in a sense is a template for the attempt to annihilate a historical truth and for the possibility of new massacres occurring. Yet, by forcing a recognition of truths that will be uncomfortable to some, we must work out these discomforts because we need to be made uncomfortable. We need to be shaken to our core about the events that resulted in the massacre …

      Katyn is a matter of importance to the world. We can come together to recognize historical truth, and in that, we can celebrate the potential of our own humanity to reconnect, heart to heart, to go beyond the tragedies that had visited us.

      HONORABLE DENNIS J. KUCINICH

      Member, United States Congress

      February 2011³

      Image4610.tifImage4616.tif

      1943 Exhumations of the Katyn Victims

      WHAT WAS DISTINCTIVE ABOUT KATYN?

      THE MASSACRES IN CONTEXT

      Mark Kramer, Ph.D.

      Harvard University

      T he Katyn massacres must be understood in their proper historical context — the context not only of Soviet domestic politics but also of Soviet occupation policy in the swaths of Eastern Europe that fell under Soviet military rule from September 1939 to June 1941. ⁴

      In the USSR in the 1930s, mass killing had become a way of life under Joseph Stalin. In the brutal de-kulakization and forced collectivization campaigns from 1929 to 1934, millions of peasants were killed, and millions more starved to death in famines that were the direct result of Stalin’s policies.

      During the mass terror in the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 1930s, the Soviet NKVD security apparatus became proficient in shooting vast numbers of people as rapidly as possible. In just sixteen months, from August 1937 through November 1938, the NKVD shot to death some 800,000 people in the USSR, most of whom were not Communists.⁵ This rate of mass killing in peacetime, with more than 50,000 people shot to death every month — 1,700 every day — is one of the most egregious cases of state-perpetrated murder in the long list of atrocities committed in the twentieth century. Among the 800,000 shot were nearly 250,000 (including more than 110,000 Poles) whose only crime was to belong to a particular ethnic group that had fallen into disfavor with Stalin. Mass deportations of ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, starting with some communities of ethnic Poles in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine in 1932-1936, and then more sweepingly with ethnic Koreans and Finns in 1937, also resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of people. Mass terror and mass killing became standard operating procedures for the Stalinist regime and the NKVD throughout the 1930s.

      Viewed in that context, the Katyn massacres, affecting roughly 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians, hardly seem especially significant. Millions of people in the USSR who died at Stalin’s hands, including millions of Russians, have never been memorialized.

      But in the context of Soviet occupation policy in 1939-1941, the Katyn massacres do stand out. When Soviet troops moved en masse into eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bessarabia after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the occupation regimes they established were brutal, killing many people and deporting huge numbers of others to desolate prison camps in Siberia and the Arctic region. But even though Soviet forces in the occupied regions committed atrocities on a regular basis, they generally did not carry out systematic executions of thousands of people at a time. Katyn in that sense was an anomaly in Soviet occupation policy and was soon perceived as such by some key Soviet officials and their Polish Communist counterparts.

      For example, the Polish Communist military officer Zygmunt Berling, who had fallen into Soviet captivity in 1939 and was imprisoned in Starobielsk and Moscow in 1939-1940 before moving on to become a key figure in Poland’s Communist-era army, recounts an episode in his memoirs that sheds interesting light on how at least a few Soviet leaders soon came to view Katyn. Berling, who avoided execution himself in 1940 by agreeing to cooperate with the Soviet NKVD, describes a meeting he and two other Polish Communist officers had in Moscow in January 1941.⁶ This meeting was first publicly disclosed in U.S. congressional hearings in the early 1950s in two different versions — one provided by Jozef Czapski, a Polish army captain who apparently heard about the meeting from the Polish army commander General Wladyslaw Anders, and the other by Henryk Szymanski, a U.S army colonel and military intelligence officer, who obtained a document about the meeting from General Anders.⁷ Of the two accounts, Czapski’s is more accurate, though the date that both he and Szymanski give for the meeting — the fall of 1940 — is earlier than the January 1941 date cited in the authoritative version in Berling’s posthumously published memoir.

      Berling in his memoir recounts that he and his two Polish colleagues were brought to speak with Lavrenty Beria, the head of the state security apparatus, and Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s deputy (who became head of the state security apparatus a few months later when it was separated from the NKVD). When Berling gave Beria and Merkulov a list of names of officers who had been imprisoned at Kozielsk and Starobielsk, hoping to find out whether any had been brought to Moscow, Beria told them We have no such people now in the Soviet Union. Merkulov added: We committed a big mistake with them. Berling, apparently deducing what this big mistake was, did not press the matter further.

      UNTANGLING THE COVER-UP

      For some 47 years after German forces discovered mass graves in Katyn Forest in 1943, the Soviet authorities stuck to the lie that German troops were responsible for the massacres. But we now know from declassified archival materials that Soviet Communist Party leaders from Nikita Khrushchev through Mikhail Gorbachev reviewed documents and, in some cases, considered whether the Soviet government should accept at least partial responsibility for the massacres. Not until April 1990, however, did Gorbachev (who had recently taken up the new post of Soviet president) finally acknowledge that Soviet NKVD forces had committed the murders. The official TASS statement, issued on 13 April 1990, stopped short of a fully candid disclosure insofar as it assigned blame for the massacres solely to Beria, Merkulov, and other senior NKVD officials, without any mention of Stalin and the Soviet Politburo.⁸ Not until October 1992, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, did the Russian government under Boris Yeltsin release documents from the Russian Presidential Archive showing that Stalin and other Politburo members had expressly authorized the massacres in 1940.⁹ Gorbachev and earlier Soviet leaders had seen these documents — and therefore were aware that Stalin and his Communist Party comrades ordered the massacres — but had declined to release them.

      Nonetheless, even though the April 1990 TASS statement equivocated, it was a key reversal of decades of Soviet falsification. The statement described the Katyn massacres as one of the most odious crimes of Stalinism — a characterization that, in light of the long list of mass atrocities perpetrated by Stalin’s regime, underscores Soviet leaders’ own recognition that Katyn, despite accounting for only a minuscule percentage of the total number of Stalin’s victims, was among the worst excesses, in part because it was kept shrouded in lies for so long.

      If Soviet leaders themselves recognized that Katyn was in some way special, we can easily understand why Poles — both inside and outside Poland —were so focused after 1940 on establishing the truth about Katyn. Long before any relevant Soviet archival materials became available, the basic truth about Katyn was known in the West, but starting in 1990 the release of key archival documents in Moscow confirmed what was known and added

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