Katyn: State-Sponsored Extermination: Collection of Essays
By M.B. Szonert
()
About this ebook
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.
M.B. Szonert
M . B . S Z O N E R T
Related to Katyn
Related ebooks
Katyn: Stalin’s Massacre and the Triumph of Truth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Red Star at War: Victory at All Costs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOne Day We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives Under the Soviet Police State Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hitler, Stalin and the Destruction of Poland Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPolitics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Stalin's Genocides Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Surviving Katyn: Stalin's Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Soviet Soft Power in Poland: Culture and the Making of Stalin's New Empire, 1943-1957 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One Soldier's War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leon Trotsky Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoland's Struggle: Before, During and After the Second World War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Crimes of Stalin: The Murderous Career of the Red Tsar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Rape of Poland: Pattern of Soviet Aggression Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Destination Gulag Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStalin: an Appraisal of the Man and His Influence Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ten Days that Shook the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hitler’s War on Russia Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Last Snowsuit of Eva Braun Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDarkness Falling: The Strange Death of the Weimar Republic, 1930-33 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRussian Combat Methods in World War II Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Soviet Union at War, 1941–1945 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Price of Victory: The Red Army's Casualties in the Great Patriotic War Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Katyn 1940: The Documentary Evidence of the West's Betrayal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gestapo: A History of Hitler's Secret Police 1933-45 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Barbarossa Through Soviet Eyes: The First Twenty-Four Hours Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
European History For You
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dry: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mein Kampf: English Translation of Mein Kamphf - Mein Kampt - Mein Kamphf Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book: The Script Book Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jane Austen: The Complete Novels Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400 – 1066 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Celtic Mythology: A Concise Guide to the Gods, Sagas and Beliefs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of English Magic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Law Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Violent Abuse of Women: In 17th and 18th Century Britain Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Celtic Charted Designs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Negro Rulers of Scotland and the British Isles Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Katyn
0 ratings0 reviews
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.tifMonument of Murdered and Fallen in the East
Warsaw, Poland
Image4602.tifKatyn 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.tif1943 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