The Katyn Massacre 1940 by Thomas Urban;

Author:Thomas Urban;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / Military / World War II
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2020-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Berling’s appeal and descent

Only a few days before the reception in the Kremlin, Berling had been at the head of a delegation of 600 of his soldiers in Katyn Forest. In his speech he said about the murdered officers: ‘The Germans shot them like wild animals, shot them with their hands tied together. … We now have a weapon in our hands which our friendly ally, the Soviet Union, has given us, on which the Germans wanted to shift their own guilt.’ Berling announced that a tank unit of Polish units under Soviet supreme command would be named ‘Katyn’s avengers’.75

A former press officer of the Berling Army who fled to the West reported in 1948 to the American military intelligence service CIC that anyone who doubted the version by the German perpetrators had been transferred to a punishment company. This company had been almost completely destroyed in battles at the front. He saw a report by a Polish politruk that several drunken soldiers accused the Soviets. This ‘enemy propaganda’ must be counteracted and all debates about Katyn must be stopped, said the report.76

The day after Berling’s speeches, a Catholic requiem took place in the cemetery, and in the sermon the Polish chaplain also accused the Germans of mass murder.77 After the mass, some of the Berling Army officers wanted to talk to villagers, but NKVD soldiers had blocked off the way. After all, they learned that none of Katyn’s former inhabitants could still be found there, the population of the village had been completely exchanged.78

As only became known decades later, the witnesses presented by the Burdenko Commission also had to leave their home village. Some of them were imprisoned for collaborating with the Germans; it was only in 1956, during the first wave of amnesties three years after Stalin’s death, that they were released. The traces of the farmer Parfen Kiselev and some others were completely lost.79 In the early 1990s, former police General Dmitry Tokarev, who was involved in the mass execution of Poles in Kalinin, reported that Moscow had given the order ‘not to let any of the witnesses alive’.80

The Burdenko Commission also attracted a lot of attention in London. The British Embassy in Moscow reported that the correspondents were not very impressed with the presentation in Katyn. However, the diplomats warned against criticism, as this could lead to ‘explosions’ by the Soviets.81 The British ambassador to the Polish government in exile, Owen O’Malley, referred to numerous inconsistencies in the report. He saw it as an indirect admission of guilt that the Soviets had not invited American or British specialists to Katyn.82

Some experts in the Foreign Office, on the other hand, considered the Soviet report more plausible than the Official Material of the Germans, for the very reason that the latter had been commissioned by Goebbels.83 The experts also pointed out that the speaker of the International Medical Commission in Katyn, the Hungarian Ferenc Orsós, could not be considered objective because he was known as an anti-Semitic sympathiser of the Nazi regime.

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