An exhibit about the 1940 Katyn massacre is on display in the Russell Senate Office Building rotunda.
WASHINGTON – Documents published for the first time on a Soviet government website last week confirmed what the West has known for decades: The 1940 massacre of nearly 22,000 Polish prisoners of war in Russia’s Katyn forest was approved by top Soviet leadership and carried out by the Soviet security police, not the Nazis who had long been accused of the atrocity.
But experts say there’s much more in the Russian archives on Katyn that has yet to be revealed, including key pieces of information that would offer further insight into one of the largest wartime massacres of the 20th century.
“There is a sign that this is the tip of the iceberg,” said Slavic studies scholar and expert Ewa M. Thompson.
Part of that iceberg, according to Thompson and other experts, are the details of U.S. complicity in the crime’s initial cover-up and past efforts on the part of the U.S. government to suppress what it knew about Katyn.
The massacre, its Soviet cover-up – and U.S. knowledge of both – will be discussed at an international conference at the Library of Congress on Wednesday.
When German soldiers announced in 1943 they’d found a mass grave containing thousands of bodies in a Russian forest, the Soviet government blamed them for the crime, and continued to do so until Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted Soviet guilt in 1990 and disclosed the location of two more mass graves in the Katyn forest. The three graves contained the remains of almost 22,000 Polish officers, prisoners-of-war, each with a bullet hole in the base of his skull.
A 1951-1952 U.S. congressional commission concluded an extensive investigation by unanimously finding the Soviets guilty of the crime. It also revealed that various individuals in the State Department, Army Intelligence, Office of War Information, Federal Communications Commission and other government agencies “failed to properly evaluate the material being received from our sources overseas,” and that information about Katyn was “deliberately withheld from public attention and knowledge.”
While U.S. archives on Katyn, which include the congressional report, are extensive, they are also incomplete; some information is missing, possibly illegally destroyed, according to Kyle Parker, Russian expert and policy adviser to the U.S. Helsinki Commission.
“There are certainly good reasons one could argue for keeping a certain prudential silence on Katyn at the time,” Parker said, adding there’s a big difference between a cover-up and silence.
The Kosciuszko Foundation, which has organized the conference in cooperation with the U.S. Helsinki Commission and the Polish embassy, Tuesday called for the release of U.S. documents about Katyn, including a 1945 report by Army Col. John Van Vliet, who as a German prisoner of war had been taken to the Katyn gravesite in May 1943.
Upon his return to the U.S., Van Vliet described his observations, concluding “emphatically and unequivocably (sic), that he was convinced the Polish officers were murdered by the Soviets,” according to the congressional report. By the time the congressional report was published in 1952, Van Vliet’s report had disappeared. According to the congressional committee, “the Van Vliet report was either removed or purposely destroyed in Army Intelligence.”
The Soviet documents released last week provide technical details: Joseph Stalin’s signature on the execution order and Soviet security police head Lavrenty Beria’s letter to Stalin suggesting the execution.
But according to Thompson, those documents are, in a sense, irrelevant.
No decision of the magnitude of the Katyn massacre is made without discussion, she said, and nothing with regard to meeting minutes or discussions has ever been released.
“Where is the process?” she asked. “I want to know the person or persons who came up with the idea. We won’t really understand Katyn until we understand the process. We don’t know how it came to be.”
Russian archives hold not just documents from the time of the crime, but from the 1990s, when Russia opened an investigation into the crime after Gorbachev’s admission. Those documents have since been reclassified, according to Parker.
“We can imagine one of the reasons is that Russian prosecutors spoke to a number of people who under some certain circumstances should be indicted and face charges,” he said. Additional questions remain that the opening of Russian archives could reveal, Parker said.
The executed prisoners were taken from three camps: Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov. Some 400 Poles were spared from a combination of the three camps, but it has never been determined why and what sort of criteria were used to spare them, according to Parker.
He also said there’s a question of the strange explanations offered by Soviet leadership during the war when various inquiries were made as to the location of the missing prisoners. The U.S. congressional investigation details some of the explanations heard firsthand by witnesses: One Polish officer was told by a Soviet government official in 1940, “We have committed an error. These men are not available.”
As a symbol, Katyn is interesting in a broader perspective, Parker said, in terms of where Russia is and where it needs to go.
“One of the big things that’s still an issue in Russia is the issue of repatriations, trials, compensation, genocide,” Parker said. “There never really was a national repentance, an honest look and evaluation of Soviet history.”
Part of the difficulty, said Soviet Union expert and analyst Paul A. Goble, is the Soviet defeat of Hitler. Because of the Soviet victory, Soviet crimes like Katyn, Goble said, are a “cultivated blind spot.”
The fact that Hitler and Stalin were originally allies has been dropped from the Russian narrative, Goble said.
He believes Russia won’t admit its guilt about Katyn to the extent desired by most Poles.
“No matter what [Poles] are given,” he said. “It won’t be enough. This was a horrific crime. None of the people were ever punished.”
Parker said the fact that Katyn is receding into history doesn’t change the need for that repentance. “The reality is that crimes of the past continue to have to be dealt with by the generations of the future,” he said.
Katyn’s newest chapter is also a tragic one: A plane carrying the Polish president and key government officials and prominent Poles crashed April 10 near Smolensk, Russia on its way to a Katyn memorial ceremony.
All 97 passengers were killed. They included family members of Katyn victims.