Polish Paper Links Soviets to Wartime Massacre

Poland broke a longstanding taboo Thursday by allowing a newspaper here to publish evidence that points to Soviet responsibility for a massacre of Polish army officers in World War II.

The article, in the weekly Odrodzienie (Rebirth), did not state outright that the Soviet secret police of that time (NKVD) murdered the officers, believed to number in the thousands, but it pinpointed the time of the killings in the Katyn forest in the Soviet Union as 1940, a time when the Soviets had control of the area.

The Soviets have always contended that the Polish officers, often lamented here as representing the cream of the nation’s military, were murdered by Nazi forces who had captured them after the German invasion of 1941. The Soviets had invaded Poland in 1939, in alliance with Nazi Germany. When Adolf Hitler broke the alliance, German troops invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941.

The issue has long been a sore point between Poles and Soviets, and the long official silence on the question is referred to here as one of the “blank spots” in Polish history.

A joint commission of Polish and Soviet historians has been appointed to investigate the matter, but the Poles have been growing impatient with an apparent Soviet reluctance to issue a final report. The Polish government spokesman commented Tuesday that “Polish society shares (the) opinion that work on the matter is proceeding at an unnecessarily majestic pace.”

Historian Jarema Maciszewski, in an introduction to the weekly’s publication of a Polish Red Cross report suppressed since 1943, said that when the Germans did take over the Katyn region, they allowed a Polish team to inspect the site of the massacre for propaganda reasons.

The Red Cross report, one copy of which was delivered to the British in 1943, was kept secret until Polish researchers found it in war archives in London.

The officers, the report says, were shot in the back of the head with pistols. Kazimierz Skarzynski, head of the Polish Red Cross during the war, said identification of the bodies was impossible, but that uniforms and insignia of rank were clearly determined.

Skarzynski said Polish workers in the area told in 1943 of Polish officers being brought to the area earlier in truckloads, and described hearing gunshots in the forest. Some of the Polish workers unearthed a few of the mass grave sites in 1942, Skarzynski’s report said.

Skarzynski said a note was found in the pocket of one of the victims, apparently written by a Major Solski. The major indicated that he was in a group of Polish officers who were brought to Smolensk at 3:30 a.m. The Red Cross report concluded that he and the others, their valuables stolen, were probably killed at dawn.