A Death in the Forest by Daniel Ford

Author:Daniel Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Warbird Books
Published: 2014-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Some Victims Buried Alive

Zbigniew Rowinski, who testified in London, said he had been taken to Katyn by the Germans in April of 1943. Rowinski at the time was a German prisoner of war interned at Woldenberg. He said not all the victims were shot in the head:

“I suppose only those people who tried to defend themselves were bound, because I saw some bodies with the sawdust in their mouth and some of them had even their heads covered with their overcoats, then a string round the neck connected with string at the hands. So when they started to struggle to free the hands, they must have choked themselves.”

[While possible, no other account bears out this version of the executions.]

In London the committee heard the testimony of Ferdinand Goetel, an official of the Polish Red Cross who visited the graves at Katyn. The following is an exact quotation of the conversation the Polish Red Cross group had with Lieutenant Slovencik who was in charge of receiving of members of all delegations of all nationalities who went to Katyn at the time of the exhumations:

“Another even more interesting detail of our conversation with Slovencik was that although he was inclined to describe the whole case as a most dramatic incident from the Polish point of view, he had no idea where could have come from all these bodies of Polish officers. All he knew was what the local inhabitants had told him that they had been brought in transports arriving from the direction of Smolensk. As he already had in hand photographs and, I think, even originals of some of the letters and postcards found on the bodies, he asked us whether we could explain why the address of Kozielsk repeated itself so often on many of the cards. I told him in short what I knew about the camps of Kozielsk, Ostashkov, and Starobielsk and I closely watched his reaction to this piece of news. It was most lively and convinced me beyond all doubt that Slovencik had learned about Kozielsk only from us.

“It was the only detail of our conversation of which he made a note. A moment later, after we had finished our talk, I heard him repeating the news about Kozielsk to Olenbusch and to the other Germans.”

Thus, from the above-quoted testimony, it is evident that the Germans were unaware of the camp in Russia where these Polish officers had been imprisoned during the period, September 1939 through May 1940.

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