0750958502 (N) by Douglas Boyd

Author:Douglas Boyd [Boyd, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General, Modern, 20th Century, Political Science, Intelligence & Espionage
ISBN: 9780750963541
Google: luJ2BgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00R0IOUYW
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

BETRAYAL, BEATINGS, ELECTIONS AND EXECUTIONS

The inhabitants of the Kakolewnica Forest near Radzyn Podlaski call their woodland maly Katyn – meaning ‘little Katyn’ – for good reason. After the departure of Rokossovsky’s troops, the area was occupied by 2nd Polish People’s Army, commanded by General Karol Swierczewski, a hard-line Stalinist alumnus of the Frunze military academy in Moscow, who had commanded an International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War using the nom de guerre ‘General Walter’. Under him, detachments of Informacja Wojskowa – Polish Military Intelligence – worked in collaboration with NKVD teams. The forest was turned into an unobserved execution ground by the forcible evacuation of many local residents, who were not allowed to take their belongings with them. People living nearby, however, heard much shooting in the forest at night, and the comings and goings of military trucks at all hours.

Under a PKWN decree in October 1944, whose effect was back-dated to August of that year, membership of all non-Communist Polish anti-German forces was made punishable by death. As one example of many, 18-year-old Czesław Pekala had been a courier taking messages between different AK bands. Arrested by the NKVD and thrown into Radzyn Podlaski jail, his jaw was broken, he suffered head injuries from severe kicking and splinters were driven under his finger nails. At one point he spent four days lying unconscious in several centimetres of water in a cellar. Released after two months, he had lost half his body weight of 68kg, and was too terrified of re-arrest to say what had happened until 1998, long after the collapse of the USSR.

In one dossier alone, courts martial of 2nd People’s Army sentenced sixty-one people to death; forty-three of these were executed. But no one knows how many were killed and thrown into unmarked forest graves, with or without trial, after these areas were cordoned off by security troops and civilians forbidden to enter. When the 2nd Army moved out in early 1945 the area had been levelled and saplings planted. After a few years, heavy rainfall began washing to the surface bones and other human remains. A memorial was erected in 1980. In March of that year the Radzyn Podlaski district prosecutor ordered an investigation of several identified execution pits. The forensic report concluded:

The executed men had their hands and legs tied with wire. Some of the victims had sustained injuries in the form of broken and fractured ribs, arms, legs, etc. Some of the skulls showed signs of severe trauma caused by a blunt, heavy object [like a rifle butt]. The examiners confirmed injuries sustained by a single shot [to the head] with the entry wounds located either in the rear, or on the side of the skull.1

Given the forensic resources of the time, the exhumation failed to identify any individual victim, but established that they had all been wearing winter clothing. Many Soviet-manufactured bullets and cartridge cases were found in the graves. When trees in the area were later being machined in the sawmills,

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