Theatres Of Violence by Philip Dwyer Lyndall Ryan

Author:Philip Dwyer, Lyndall Ryan [Philip Dwyer, Lyndall Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782389224
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2015-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

STALIN’S TRAP: THE KATYN FOREST MASSACRE BETWEEN PROPAGANDA AND TABOO

Claudia Weber

In March 1940, the Soviet NKVD killed about fifteen thousand Polish prisoners of war who had been captured by the Red Army in the wake of the invasion of Poland in September 1939. When German troops discovered the mass graves three years later, the so-called Katyn Forest massacres became the focus of war propaganda and politics. This chapter analyses the history of the Katyn massacres in the context of Allied policy on the treatment of war crimes during and immediately after the Second World War. In doing so, it concentrates on Soviet war crimes policy, often neglected by the academic literature due to difficulties in accessing archival sources. This chapter also considers the impact of Soviet war crimes policy on the Allies’ handling of the Katyn massacre after the war and, in particular, how Soviet policy shaped the beginnings of the Cold War. The failures and achievements of Allied policy on war crimes not only formed and influenced legal prosecution of war crimes but also shaped postwar narratives and myths on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Machine

In April 1943, the German Reichspropagandaministerium launched a propaganda campaign about the recently discovered mass graves at the Kosogory [Ziegenberg] area near the small village of Katyn. Joseph Goebbels had accidentally learned of the graves and the exhumations that had been initiated by the High Command of the Wehrmacht on 29 March 1943. The importance of the mass graves was first recognized by an editor from the German News Office [Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro], Hans Meyer, who was assigned to a propaganda unit in Smolensk. Sometime between late March and 1 April, Meyer informed Ministerialrat Werner Stephan in Berlin about the exhumations. Meyer told him about his concern that ‘the whole thing hadn’t been approached in the right way and the military hadn’t grasped the significance of the matter’.1 On Stephan’s recommendation, Goebbels met with Meyer on 1 or 2 April.2 The minister and his staff began to discuss the Katyn issue at their daily conferences at the ministry no earlier than 7 April. At that meeting, the decision was reached to use Katyn in propaganda disseminated outside of Germany, while avoiding public attention at home. Goebbels declared at the conference on 7 April that ‘he would defer using this material for domestic purposes, since the population might draw conclusions about the treatment of German prisoners of war by the Bolshevists. As far as [use] abroad was concerned, that was to be completely free of restriction.’3 On 11 April 1943, the first public mention of the Katyn graves was made by the German news agency Trans-Ocean, which reported on the discovery of the corpses of some three thousand Polish officers killed by the Soviet state security organization, the GPU, in the spring of 1940.4 During this early stage, German propaganda targeted the Polish population in the occupied territories, especially in the Generalgouvernement. In order to promote support for its own occupation regime

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