The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tzouliadis Tim

Author:Tzouliadis, Tim [Tzouliadis, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2008-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

IN JANUARY 1944, Kathleen Harriman was invited to visit a clearing in the Katyn Forest of Byelorussia, where the mass graves of several thousand Polish officers missing since 1940 had been discovered. At Katyn, half the Polish officer corps lay buried in pits alongside several hundred Polish doctors, university professors, and priests.27 The massacre had first been uncovered during the Nazi occupation, when Joseph Goebbels took full advantage of this propaganda coup to accuse Stalin of having ordered the killings. As World War II progressed, the Red Army had since recaptured the lost ground, and one year later, the Soviet propaganda machine now sought to convince the world that the Katyn massacre had, in fact, been a Nazi atrocity all along.

An international press corps was gathered to attend an official Soviet “Commission of Inquiry” at the site, and the ambassador’s daughter was selected as a prized witness, invited as a representative of the Office of War Information. Kathleen Harriman was driven into the Byelorussian forest in a Lend-Lease jeep. At the site of the murders, she gazed down into the pits and watched Red Army soldiers prising out the decomposing bodies, stacked in layers facedown and twelve deep. Standing next to the Associated Press journalist Homer Smith, Kathleen Harriman had “moaned and choked” at the stench of death.28

The Polish officers had all been shot in the back of the head. A few had broken jaws and bayonet wounds, evidence of a struggle at the end. At the forest site, the Soviet forensic scientists proceeded with their demonstration, whose purpose was to explain how all this was the work of the SS. Their lecture was a long and unconvincing affair, not least because the bodies had been removed from the graves dressed in heavy winter clothes. When a reporter asked why this was the case, given that they said the Germans had allegedly killed the Polish officers in August, there was a brief moment of confusion. After consultation, the Soviet investigators replied that the weather in Byelorussia was extremely variable in August: people often wore heavy winter clothing even at the height of summer.

However shallow, such explanations were enough to convince Kathleen Harriman. From Moscow, by confidential telegram, her father cabled President Roosevelt the news that his daughter could confirm that in “all probability the massacre was perpetrated by the Germans.” 29

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