Tragedy Without Truth

On Aug. 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact that contained a secret agreement for the partition of Poland. On Sept. 1 Germany invaded Poland, and shortly after that the Soviet army moved in from the east to complete the conquest. More than 180,000 Polish soldiers were taken captive by the Russians. Among them were nearly 15,000 officers, many of them reservists, who were interned in western Russia. Two years later, with Germany and the Soviet Union now at war, the Russians released the captive Poles. Very few officers were among them.

On April 12, 1943, Germany announced that it had uncovered the bodies of 4,321 Polish officers in the Katyn forest near the Soviet city of Smolensk, an area that the Nazis had occupied nearly two years earlier. The Germans accused the Soviets of murdering the Poles in the spring of 1940. The Soviets claimed that the men had been killed by the Nazis in the winter of 1941, but quickly abandoned that story when it was pointed out that the dead were clothed in summer uniforms. From London the Polish government in exile asked for a neutral International Red Cross investigation. The Soviets promptly accused the exile government of colluding with the Nazis, and broke relations with it.

It was easy enough in 1943 and for some time after to accept that the Germans were responsible for the massacre. The atrocities committed by the Nazis in occupied territory, and indeed in Germany itself, powerfully supported such an assumption of guilt. But in time the weight of available evidence came to indicate otherwise. The officer-prisoners, for example, had on occasion been allowed to write home. All communication from them stopped suddenly in May, 1940, more than a year before the Germans occupied the area where they were held. The Soviets, after they recaptured Smolensk, conducted their own inquiry, which not surprisingly concluded that the Nazis had carried out the killings. No Poles and no impartial observers were allowed to participate in that investigation. And no credible accounting has ever been given about the fate of the more than 10,000 officers whose bodies were never found.

Independent historians, as well as most Poles, hold the Soviets responsible for the Katyn forest murders. In Poland the massacre remains a subject of great official sensitivity, though the now-banned Solidarity union and others have long sought to have a memorial raised to the murdered officers. Now, without public announcement, the Polish government has erected such a monument in a Warsaw cemetery. The inscription on the granite cross echoes the official Soviet version that the officers were murdered by “Hitlerite fascism.” It has taken 40 years, since the end of World War II, for Polish authorities to acknowledge the victims of Katyn. How long will it be before they are also free to acknowledge the truth?