The German War by Nicholas Stargardt

Author:Nicholas Stargardt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465073979
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2015-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

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At the end of February 1943, a unit of the Secret Military Police came across a mass grave in the woods of Katyn, a small town to the west of Smolensk. The ground was frozen solid and no further investigation could be done till it thawed. Army Group Centre immediately turned to its principal expert in forensic medicine, Professor Gerhard Buhtz of Breslau University. Buhtz, who had further developed his expertise by carrying out autopsies on concentration camp prisoners at Buchenwald, began to examine the exhumed remains on 29 March. The corpses were those of Polish officers, who had been deported and shot by the Soviets after their invasion of eastern Poland in 1939.

A few days later Goebbels learned of the find from a visiting propagandist from Army Group Centre and immediately phoned Hitler to obtain permission to exploit the news story to the maximum. Aiming to split the Allies, Goebbels immediately authorised a delegation of foreign correspondents from Berlin and a Polish delegation from Warsaw and Cracow to visit Katyn, so that they could see for themselves that this was not a German fabrication. Then, on 13 April, German radio made its announcement: the corpses of 10,000 Polish officers had been found in a mass grave measuring 28 metres by 16 metres. Still in their uniforms, they had been ‘murdered’ by the Soviet secret police, all of them ‘with wounds to the back of the head resulting from pistol shots. The identification of the corpses poses no difficulties because the soil conditions have mummified them and the Russians left their identification documents on them.’ Other Polish and international delegations would follow, most importantly an international medical commission which, under Buhtz’s guidance, produced a credible forensic report.38

Goebbels predicted that the material was sensational enough that ‘We shall be able to live on it for a couple of weeks’. There had been reports of this kind in 1941, such as those of the NVKD massacres in the three prisons in Lwów, which caught the imagination of Germans for a time. But they had been rapidly superseded by the news of the Wehrmacht’s victorious advance. In the spring of 1943 there was no such distraction, but there were other considerations. At first, Goebbels planned to downplay the story at home, lest it heighten anxiety amongst the families of German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. He changed his mind when he saw the photographs of the exhumed corpses, deciding that the German public had to be told – and shown the pictures. The story ran for seven weeks, into early June, culminating with an eight-minute film, The Katyn Forest. To a moving, funereal soundtrack, it showed the excavation of the trenches and the identification of the corpses. Forensic experts demonstrated the entry and exit holes of the NKVD’s trademark ‘shot in the back of the neck’. Most importantly, the human dignity of the victims was asserted. Photos were dug out of uniform pockets and held up to the camera to reveal the officers’ waving wives and smiling children.

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