Burdenko Commission

On 24 January 1944 in Smolensk the members of the Soviet special commission chaired by Academician Nikolai Burdenko (PL) signed a communiqué on the results of their work in the Katyn forest. It stated that the Polish prisoners of war, officers from the Kozelsk camp, had been shot by the Germans in the autumn of 1941, and that in the spring of 1943 the same Germans, covering their tracks, had staged a provocation to shift the blame onto the Soviet Union. Two days later, on 26 January, the text filled more than two and a half pages in “Pravda” and “Izvestia”. The communiqué was a forgery. The Polish officers had been killed in the spring of 1940 by the NKVD on the basis of the decision of 5 March 1940, and the commission announced conclusions prepared beforehand by the same NKVD. For almost half a century its communiqué was the foundation of what is called the Katyn lie.

The date of the document is given variously. The communiqué itself is dated 24 January, the IPN portal devoted to Katyn writes that the commission issued it on 25 January, and that it reached the public on 26 January, the day of publication in the Soviet press.

Three months of preparation

The Red Army recaptured Smolensk on 25 September 1943 and in the last days of the month occupied the forest at the Kozy Gory site, where in the spring the Germans had revealed the mass graves of Polish officers. The area was at once sealed off by NKVD units. Even the Soviet doctors and scientists who came at the end of September to investigate German crimes against the inhabitants of the Smolensk region were not admitted to the graves. From October to January a group of NKVD officers and Smersh counter-intelligence worked on the spot, headed by the People’s Commissar for State Security, Vsevolod Merkulov, in 1940 one of the three members of the troika that decided on the shooting of the prisoners, and by Deputy People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Sergei Kruglov.

According to Polish and Russian findings from the 1990s, the officers opened the graves, ripped open the pockets and linings of the victims’ uniforms and put in documents bearing dates from 1941. According to photographs taken at the time by the Americans, two new graves were also dug. The inhabitants of the surrounding villages and the staff of Gnezdovo station were interrogated, especially those who had given testimony to the Germans in the spring and summer of 1943. Some of them had fled before the arrival of the Red Army, others under pressure retracted their earlier testimony and claimed that the Germans had intimidated them. From October 1943 to January 1944, 95 people were interrogated. The results were collected in a document, “Information on the results of the preliminary investigation in the so-called Katyn case”, dated 10-11 January 1944 and signed by Merkulov and Kruglov. The communiqué of the Burdenko Commission repeated it almost word for word, including the errors in the spelling of the witnesses’ names.

The special commission

The commission was appointed on 13 January 1944, according to Polish studies by decision of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Formally it operated under the Extraordinary State Commission investigating the crimes of the occupier on the territory of the USSR. Its full name was: Special Commission for Establishing and Investigating the Circumstances of the Shooting by the German-Fascist Invaders of Polish Officer Prisoners of War in the Katyn Forest. The result was thus already written into the name.

The chairman, Nikolai Burdenko, was chief surgeon of the Red Army, a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and one of the founders of Soviet neurosurgery. In the summer of 1943 he had examined the graves of Soviet soldiers and civilians killed by the Germans in recaptured Oryol, and had then written to Vyacheslav Molotov that the manner of killing resembled the Katyn murder and was a typical “German system”. The commission also included the writer Aleksey Tolstoy (PL), Metropolitan of Kyiv and Galicia Nikolay (PL), the commandant of the Military Engineering Academy Gen. Aleksandr Gundorov, the chairman of the Soviet Red Cross and Red Crescent Sergei Kolesnikov, the People’s Commissar for Education of the Russian SFSR Vladimir Potemkin, the head of the Red Army’s Main Military Sanitary Directorate Gen. Yefim Smirnov (PL) and the chairman of the Smolensk regional executive committee Rodion Melnikov. The draft membership of 12 January still included Polish communists from the leadership of the Union of Polish Patriots, Wanda Wasilewska and Bolesław Drobner, but according to the IPN Joseph Stalin struck out their names. There was nobody on the commission from outside the USSR, neither representatives of neutral states nor of the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose participation the Polish government had requested in April 1943.

According to the communiqué, the exhumations conducted under the commission’s supervision lasted from 16 to 23 January 1944. In all 925 bodies were exhumed and examined, which was a small portion of the victims. At the first session, before the members of the commission had seen the graves, Burdenko referred to his research in Oryol, and Kruglov presented to them the NKVD’s preliminary findings. The commission questioned only witnesses from among those whom the NKVD had spoken to earlier, and the communiqué cited the testimony of a hundred people.

What the communiqué claimed

According to the communiqué, until the summer of 1941 the Polish prisoners were employed building roads in three labour camps, called 1-ON, 2-ON and 3-ON, west of Smolensk. When the Germans approached in July 1941, it had not been possible to evacuate them for lack of railway wagons and because of bombing. In the autumn of 1941, between September and December, they were said to have been shot by soldiers of a German unit disguised under the name “Staff of the 537th Construction Battalion”, quartered in a former NKVD dacha at Kozy Gory, under Lieutenant Colonel Arnes and his officers Rekst and Hott. In the spring of 1943 the Germans were said to have forced about 500 Soviet prisoners of war to dig up the graves, remove from the pockets of the dead documents bearing dates later than the spring of 1940 and bring in bodies from other places, and then to have killed those prisoners. There were said to be about 11,000 victims at Katyn.

In support of this version the commission presented four kinds of evidence. The first was nine documents and objects found on the bodies with dates from 1940-1941, among them an unsent postcard of 20 June 1941 signed by Stanisław Kuczyński. The second was a notebook said to have been kept by the mayor of Smolensk under the German occupation, Boris Menshagin (PL), with entries from August to November 1941, including a mention of rumours about the shooting of Poles. The handwriting was confirmed by his former deputy, Professor Boris Bazilevsky. The third was the ON camps themselves, and the fourth the testimony of witnesses: the watchman of the NKVD dacha Parfion Kiselyov, the head of Gnezdovo station, a professor of the Smolensk medical institute and others. The communiqué ended with the statement that the method of killing, a shot to the back of the head, was the same as the Germans had used against Soviet citizens in other cities, and that the German provocation was meant to set the Poles against the Russians. The leading articles on the front pages of “Pravda” and “Izvestia” on 26 January struck directly at the Polish government in London, which according to “Izvestia” was helping “the executioners of the Polish people”.

A show for the correspondents

The commission needed witnesses from the West. On 22 January a dozen or so American, British and Canadian correspondents accredited in Moscow were brought to the Katyn forest. They were accompanied by Kathleen Harriman, daughter of the new US ambassador William Averell Harriman, and John Melby of the American embassy. They were shown the graves and the bodies being exhumed, three autopsies were carried out in their presence, and then a press conference was held. The journalists did not know that for three months the area had been in the exclusive possession of the NKVD.

At the conference Potemkin said that the Germans had shot the prisoners in August and September 1941. The correspondent of “Time” asked why the dead were wearing greatcoats and warm underclothes if they had died in summer. Potemkin replied that September nights are cold, and Tolstoy that the prisoners had no other clothes. In the communiqué issued two days later the period was already given as September to December. The British correspondent Alexander Werth had the impression that the conclusions had been ready before the show began. Melby noted in his report that the witnesses’ testimony sounded learnt by heart and that the whole show had been arranged for the correspondents, but in the end, like Kathleen Harriman, he judged the Soviet version convincing. The journalists, according to historians, were less convinced than the diplomats.

How Burdenko’s version collapsed

The communiqué had weak points from the start, which the Polish authorities in exile noticed at once. During the exhumation in 1943 the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross had worked there, the graves had been examined by the International Medical Commission, and the forest had been visited by journalists and prisoners from German officers’ camps, while the documents found on the bodies then ended in the spring of 1940. The Polish government in London pointed out the contradictions in the communiqué in a report of 1946, and in 1948 a volume entitled “Zbrodnia katyńska w świetle dokumentów” (“The Katyn Crime in the Light of Documents”) appeared in London, which refuted, among other things, the figure of 11,000. About 4,400 people lay in the Katyn forest.

The USSR introduced Burdenko’s version into the indictment before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (PL). The indictment of October 1945 stated that in September 1941 11,000 Polish officers had been killed in the Katyn forest, and the commission’s communiqué was submitted as evidence USSR-54. At the beginning of July 1946 the tribunal heard three defence witnesses and three for the prosecution. Colonel Friedrich Ahrens testified that he had commanded not a construction battalion but the 537th Signals Regiment, and denied that his men had shot anyone there. Lieutenant Reinhard von Eichborn, who served in that regiment, added that there had been no construction battalion numbered 537 in the area at all. For the prosecution Bazilevsky testified, together with the forensic doctor Viktor Prozorovsky of the Burdenko Commission and the Bulgarian pathologist Marko Markov (PL), in 1943 a member of the International Medical Commission, who now retracted his signature on its protocol. In its judgment in the autumn of 1946 the tribunal did not mention Katyn at all.

The other elements of the communiqué fell one after another. Menshagin, who had fallen into Soviet hands in 1945 and spent a quarter of a century in prison, refused to confirm Bazilevsky’s testimony, and in memoirs recorded near the end of his life denied that he had ever kept the notes attributed to him by the commission. The US Congressional committee headed by Ray Madden, after hearings in 1951-1952, concluded in its final report of 22 December 1952 that the crime had been committed by the NKVD. In the Polish People’s Republic “Trybuna Ludu” was still reprinting the communiqué on 4 March 1952, and the censors ordered it to be cited until the 1970s. In 1989 the Polish members of the joint commission of Polish and Soviet historians published an expert opinion according to which the conclusions of the Burdenko Commission had no foundation.

On 13 April 1990 the USSR admitted that the prisoners had been murdered by the NKVD, and in 1992 Russia handed Poland the documents of the decision of 5 March 1940. The Russian investigation conducted since 1990 by the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office showed that the nine documents presented by the commission had been fabricated. Stanisław Kuczyński, the supposed author of the postcard of June 1941, had not died at Katyn: in February 1940 he had been taken from Starobelsk to Moscow. Other “found” documents belonged to policemen from Ostashkov, shot in May 1940 in Kalinin and buried at Mednoye, of which in 1944 nobody apart from the NKVD knew. On 2 August 1993 experts appointed by the prosecutor’s office found that the commission’s conclusions met neither the requirements of science nor the truth. Burdenko died in November 1946. An émigré journal in Paris published in 1950 an account by an acquaintance of his, according to which before his death he admitted that the NKVD had been to blame, but historians consider it probably invented, and it is not known to what extent the commission’s chairman was himself deceived.

Its place in the war

The communiqué of the Burdenko Commission appeared when the Red Army had already crossed Poland’s pre-war border in Volhynia, and at Tehran Stalin had persuaded Churchill and Roosevelt to base the future Polish-Soviet frontier on the Curzon Line. The government in London, with which Moscow had broken relations in April 1943 under the pretext of the Katyn affair, was now in the eyes of Soviet propaganda a government that repeated “Hitlerite slanders”. The British and American governments did not challenge the communiqué publicly, because they did not want a quarrel with Stalin.

For the families of the murdered and for Poles in the country the communiqué closed, for half a century, the possibility of telling the truth in official circulation. Its version became the binding interpretation in the Polish People’s Republic: the censors ordered it to be cited, and the publishers of encyclopaedias were instructed to omit the entry “Katyń”. What the Burdenko Commission presented as proof of a German crime turned out, years later, to be one of the best-documented examples of the falsification of evidence by a state.