The discovery of the Katyn graves

In mid-March 1943, in the forest near the village of Katyn, a dozen or so kilometres west of Smolensk, the German Secret Field Police had for several weeks been questioning the local peasants and waiting for the ground to thaw. Under the sandy hillocks of the area known as Goat Hill (Kozie Góry) lay the bodies of Polish officers taken prisoner by the Red Army in September 1939 and murdered by the NKVD in the spring of 1940. The Germans had been talking to local witnesses since February; trial excavations had been halted by the frost, and the actual exhumation did not begin until 29 March. For a year and a half the Polish government in London had been asking Moscow about the fate of thousands of missing prisoners and had received no answer.

Some war chronologies record under 16 March 1943 that the first news of the Katyn massacre reached the West, that the NKVD had killed more than 22,000 prisoners and that it eventually blamed the Germans. That is not what happened. In March 1943 the matter was still a secret of the German army. No report of the graves appeared in the West at that time, and the Polish government had at most unconfirmed rumours from occupied Poland. The world learned of the discovery only on 13 April 1943, from a Berlin radio announcement. Nor does the figure of 22,000 refer to Katyn itself. It is the approximate number of all the victims of the decision of 5 March 1940, who were killed in several places. Some 4,400 of them lie in the Katyn Forest.

The search for the missing

The prisoners of the three NKVD special camps were the victims of the Katyn massacre. After the Soviet invasion of Poland, officers, police officers and members of other uniformed services were concentrated at Kozelsk (PL), Starobilsk and Ostashkov. In the spring of 1940 their letters to their families stopped arriving. Only 395 prisoners survived; they had been sent to the camp at Gryazovets.

The question resurfaced after Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The Sikorski–Maisky Agreement of 30 July 1941 provided for an “amnesty” for Polish citizens in the USSR and for the formation of a Polish army there. Its commander, General Władysław Anders, soon noticed that the officers from Kozelsk, Starobilsk and Ostashkov were not reporting for duty. Some 15,000 men were missing, including several thousand officers whom the army badly needed. Cavalry Captain Józef Czapski, one of the survivors of Starobilsk, was instructed by Anders to collect the names of the missing from their comrades and families; he went from one Soviet office to another and searched in vain for traces until April 1942. The ambassador in Kuibyshev, Stanisław Kot, handed Soviet officials one list and note after another.

The answers were evasive. On 3 December 1941, during a conversation in the Kremlin that preceded the Sikorski–Stalin declaration, Joseph Stalin told General Władysław Sikorski and Anders that all of them had been released, and that perhaps the prisoners had fled to Manchuria. He was similarly evasive on 18 March 1942 in a conversation with Anders and his chief of staff, Colonel Leopold Okulicki. Meanwhile reports from the NKVD’s directorate for prisoners of war were landing on Stalin’s desk which spoke plainly of the “transfer” of thousands of people to the NKVD regional directorates – that is, of their killing. According to Polish historians, the Polish government sent the Soviet authorities more than 200 notes and representations on the matter.

In the summer of 1942 Anders’s army was evacuated to Iran, and the Polish search inside the USSR practically ceased. Relations between London and Moscow were deteriorating. On 16 January 1943 the Soviet government declared all inhabitants of Poland’s eastern territories who had been there in the autumn of 1939 to be Soviet citizens. From 1 March 1943 Polish communists in Moscow, led by Wanda Wasilewska, were organising the Union of Polish Patriots, Stalin’s future instrument on the Polish question.

Polish workers in the Katyn Forest

The inhabitants of the villages around Goat Hill had known about the executions from the beginning. The forest was the site of a holiday centre of the Smolensk NKVD, and in the spring of 1940, for several weeks, lorries drove up to it from the railway station at Gnezdovo. The old peasant who lived nearest, Parfen Kiselev (PL), a watchman at the NKVD dacha, heard shots and screams. After the Wehrmacht occupied the Smolensk region in the summer of 1941, the locals began to talk about it to outsiders.

The first to listen were Poles. Polish forced labourers, mainly from Greater Poland, were working in the area; they had been drafted into the Organisation Todt and assigned to a construction train repairing the Vitebsk–Smolensk railway line. According to the account of one of them, Teofil Dolata, known after the war as Teofil Rubasiński (PL), at the turn of March and April 1942 several workers, shown the spot by Kiselev, dug into one of the hillocks and came upon bodies in Polish uniforms. They put up two birch crosses on the grave. Some accounts place this discovery in the summer of 1942, and some mention earlier rumours as far back as the autumn of 1941. Dolata later escaped from the train and made his way to Warsaw, and according to his biographers he informed the Home Army in December 1942, passing on sketches of the site. At the time, however, no one imagined that thousands of people lay in the forest, and the reports from occupied Poland never turned into any public information.

The German investigation in the winter of 1943

It is not known exactly when the German authorities learned of the graves. The sources and studies give dates ranging from the autumn of 1941 to the beginning of 1943. Rumours reached the headquarters of Army Group Centre, whose intelligence officer was Colonel Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff. The former NKVD dacha on the Dnieper housed the headquarters of Colonel Friedrich Ahrens’s 537th Signals Regiment. Ahrens later testified that he had discovered the graves by chance in February 1943, but some historians regard this version as a cover for earlier inquiries by the field police. The Germans put up notices in the area offering a reward for information about the shooting of Polish officers.

What is certain is that in February 1943 the matter was taken up by a Secret Field Police group attached to Army Group Centre. On 17 or 18 February Kiselev and another peasant from the neighbourhood, Ivan Krivozertsev (PL), showed the Germans the exact burial site. On 27 February Kiselev gave a statement about the transports of three years earlier. Further witnesses were questioned throughout March. Trial excavations in the frozen ground were broken off, and the police report went to Professor Gerhard Buhtz, a forensic doctor from Breslau, who headed a commission attached to Army Group Centre for investigating “Bolshevik crimes”. The Wehrmacht High Command agreed to an exhumation. On 29 March 1943 workers – Soviet civilians and prisoners of war – began to uncover the first pit under German supervision. By 11 April Buhtz’s team had identified 160 of the dead from documents, letters and badges found on the bodies.

All this took place without publicity. German documents show that news of the discovery reached the most senior officials in Berlin at the earliest at the beginning of March and at the latest at the beginning of April. The Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, learned of the graves only in the first days of April and at once saw a political opportunity in them. After the defeat at Stalingrad, during the “total war” campaign, the graves in the Katyn Forest could be used to frighten Europe with the spectre of Bolshevism and to split the Allied coalition.

Katyn and the other killing sites

The figure of “more than 22,000” is close to the truth, though slightly rounded up, but it refers to the whole crime, and its scale became known only after the war, not in 1943. Under the decision of the Politburo of 5 March 1940 the NKVD killed some 4,400 prisoners from Kozelsk, buried in the Katyn Forest; some 3,800 prisoners from Starobilsk, shot in Kharkiv and buried at Pyatykhatky (PL); and some 6,300 prisoners from Ostashkov, mostly police officers, killed in Kalinin (Tver) and buried at Mednoye. To these were added 7,305 prisoners from the western oblasts of Ukraine and Belarus: 3,435 people according to the Ukrainian Katyn list, some of whom lie at Bykivnia (PL) near Kiev, and 3,870 according to the Belarusian Katyn list, whose burial place is uncertain. The total of 21,857 victims was given in 1959 by the KGB chairman Alexander Shelepin in a secret note (PL) to Nikita Khrushchev.

In the winter of 1943 no one outside a narrow circle of Soviet officials knew this. The Germans had found only one of the sites. In the course of the spring and summer of 1943 they recovered 4,143 bodies from eight pits in the Katyn Forest, while their propaganda spoke of 10,000–12,000 dead, linking the graves at Goat Hill with all the missing. The families and the Polish government were to know nothing of the fate of the prisoners from Starobilsk and Ostashkov for another half-century.

Its place in the war

The preparations in the forest near Smolensk in March were the prelude to one of the greatest crises in the anti-Hitler coalition: after the German announcement of 13 April, the Soviet accusation against the Germans and the Polish request for an investigation by the International Red Cross, Stalin broke off relations with the Polish government in London during the night of 25–26 April 1943. Britain and the United States, dependent on their Soviet ally, did not want to raise the matter. In those same weeks Stalin was demanding a second front from them, and his position in the dispute over Poland’s future grew stronger with every victory of the Red Army.

The Katyn lie had a long life. In the autumn of 1943, after Smolensk had been retaken, the NKVD fabricated evidence, and in January 1944 a Soviet commission headed by Nikolai Burdenko attributed the crime to the Germans. The USSR even tried to charge them with it before the tribunal at Nuremberg, but the judges passed over the charge. The Soviet Union admitted the NKVD’s guilt only on 13 April 1990. The crime, hidden in the forest at Goat Hill, came to light at a moment when the Germans could exploit it and the Western Allies preferred to keep silent about it. For Poles it became one of the proofs that their allies’ ally was at the same time their enemy, and one of the most enduring testimonies that both occupiers had in 1939–1941 methodically destroyed Poland’s leadership class.