THE KATYN MASSACRE: AN ASSESSMENT OF ITS SIGNIFICANCE AS A PUBLIC AND HISTORICAL ISSUE IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN, 1940-1993 A Thesis Presented to the Department of History Western Illinois University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by Louis Robert Coatney December 1993 Copyrighted, 1993, by Louis R. Coatney. All rights reserved. THE KATYN MASSACRE: AN ASSESSMENT OF ITS SIGNIFICANCE AS A PUBLIC AND HISTORICAL ISSUE IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN, 1940-1993 An Abstract of A Thesis Presented to the Department of History Western Illinois University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by Louis Robert Coatney December 1993 Copyrighted, 1993, by Louis R. Coatney. All rights reserved. Abstract The Katyn Massacre: A Assessment of Its Significance As A Public and Historical Issue in the United States and Great Britain, 1940-1993. The purpose of this research is to assess the public, political and historical, scholarly significance of the Katyn Massacre--the extermina- tion of 26,000 Polish officers, cadets, and other officials at Katyn and other killing sites in Russia in Spring 1940. Specifically, the study surveys the historical and contemporary treatment of the Katyn Massacre in the public press and scholarly literature of the United States and Great Britain, 1943-1993. The struggle to uncover and establish the truth about Katyn, in the face of denials, counteraccusations and/or equivocations by various Soviet governments and by some opinion leaders in Great Britain and the United States--including the leaders and bureaucracies of various Anglo- American governments--is, itself, significant. The Katyn Massacre and its coverup challenged the integrity of our political, academic, and media leaders and institutions. My thesis is that Katyn was obviously significant to those who knew the facts about it, and too many of those leaders and institutions remained indifferent to the issue and failed to grasp its importance. 1 2 Specifically, the Katyn Massacre's horrendous significance and the Soviet Union's responsibility for it was widely disbelieved or ignored, following the Second World War. Until Congressional hearings in 1952, a lack of public information about the massacre can be cited to explain and excuse the scanty coverage and widespread skepticism about Soviet guilt for the killings. After 1952--and certainly after the publication of Dr. Janusz K. Zawodny's book, Death in the Forest, in 1962--Katyn should not have been neglected as it was in many relevant studies: of of the politics and diplomacy of the Second World War; of the national diplomacies of Poland and the Soviet Union; or of the Cold War. Many journalists and scholars were unable or unwilling to report accurately on Katyn and its importance--even in the 1960s and 1970s--for reasons ranging from honest confusion or actual ignorance about the massacre and its implications to motivations that may have been rooted in ideological bias. I describe the implications of this oversight, in respect to the effectiveness and integrity--or lack thereof--of historians, journalists, and government officials in Great Britain and the United States. Chapter one describes the killings at Katyn. Chapter two deals with the discovery of the Katyn site as a Second World War war crimes issue. Chapter three analyzes its treatment as a postwar public and political issue in the United States and Great Britain. Chapter four considers Katyn's postwar historical and scholarly treatment in these countries. Chapter five summarizes the historical and political implications for the West of Katyn and similar episodes. A chrono- logical listing of Katyn-related books and articles is appended. APPROVAL PAGE This thesis, by Louis Robert Coatney, is accepted in its present form by the Department of History of Western Illinois University, as satisfying the thesis requirement for the degree Master of Arts. ________________________ Nicholas C. Pano Chair, Examining Committee ________________________ Sterling J. Kernek Member, Examining Committee ________________________ William L. Combs Member, Examining Committee ____________________ Date DEDICATION To Richard Wartman, my Russian professor at Augustana College (Rock Island, IL), 1971-72, who used wit and kindness to spark an appreciation for Russian language and history among his students, even though he had lost an uncle and cousin at Katyn ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my Western Illinois University thesis committee--committee chair Professor Nicholas Pano, a specialist in Eastern European and Albanian history and affairs; diplomatic history scholar Dr. Sterling Kernek; and German and Nazi history expert Dr. William Combs--for all of their time, criticism, and guidance. I also thank Polish-American leader Roman Pucinski, Soviet history authority Robert Conquest, U.S. State Department Soviet affairs strategic analyst Martha Mautner, Katyn scholars Dr. Janusz Zawodny and Robert Szymczak, and many others left unnamed for sharing their time, interest, and resources. Finally, I thank former Alaska Governor Steve Cowper for his unhesitating political courage on the issue of Katyn in Spring 1988. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii TABLE OF CONTENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii MAPS 1. KOZIELSK, OSTASHKOV, AND STAROBIELSK, WITH KILLING SITES . . . iv 2. KATYN AND GRAVES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v 3. THE "CURZON" LINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii CHAPTERS 1. INTRODUCTION: THE KATYN MASSACRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. KATYN AS A SECOND WORLD WAR ISSUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 3. KATYN AS A POSTWAR PUBLIC AND POLITICAL ISSUE IN THE WEST . . 40 4. KATYN AS AN HISTORICAL AND SCHOLARLY ISSUE IN THE WEST . . . . 81 5. THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF KATYN . . . . . .137 ENDNOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .147 SOURCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177 APPENDIX COVER PAGE OF L. BERIA'S 5 MARCH 1940 MEMORANDUM . . . . . . . . A-1 iii Map 1. Kozielsk, Ostashkov, Starobielsk and the killing sites iv Map 2. Katyn and graves* *U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, The Katyn Forest Massacre, Hearings before the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, Eighty-second Congress, Second Session, on Investigations of the Murder of Thousands of Polish Officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, Part 6, (Exhibits 32 and 33 Presented to the Committee in London by the Polish Government in Exile, (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 1742. v Map 3. The "Curzon" Line* *Edward J. Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), 347. vi PREFACE Fifty-three years ago, over 4,000 prisoners of war were taken out into a forest in small groups where they were methodically murdered. The victims, encumbered in greatcoats and with their hands tied behind their backs, were forced face down onto the fresh corpses of their comrades, to be likewise shot through the back of the head. A younger few who attempted to resist had self-strangulation knots tied from their hands to their necks. Sawdust was rammed down the gullets of those who screamed and struggled, or their overcoats were tied down around their heads. The small groups became vast, neat stacks of human refuse.1 At the time, these men and 11,000 others who suffered the same fate at similar killing sites were only known to be missing. The victims were Polish officers and cadets, about half of whom were reservists from key civilian professions: doctors, lawyers, teachers, clergymen, and the like.2 They represented the leading, educated elements--"the best and the brightest"--of Polish society. The place and time of their slaughter was the Russian forest village of Katyn near Smolensk in the Spring of 1940. At that time, their families' contact with them (by mail, to the Soviet internment camps where they were being detained) ceased with no explanation. They simply disappeared, until their mass graves were discovered and publicized by the Nazi government, whose troops occupied the area in April 1943. vii viii The intended purpose of this study is not to condemn the Russian people (or any other former Soviet peoples) for the Katyn killings, or to promote the punishment of any surviving executioners. It should be remembered that over 30,000 of the best and most forwardthinking Soviet officers of the Red Army were similary exterminated in the late 1930s-- greatly facilitating the Nazi German invasion in 1941.3 Before the Katyn Massacre, the Russian people themselves had suffered far worse holocausts from Stalinism, numerically.4 Forcing the now-aged NKVD executioners to remember and relive the details of their crimes and victims is far more vital and justice-serving, historically and morally, than punishing them in the conventional sense. Nor, in an age of a cheapening surplus of human life which is critically over-burdening an increasingly exhausted and fragile natural environment, is it the primary purpose of this paper to condemn mass killing as an unnecessary and immoral instrument of state policy.5 Rather, the purpose of this study is to assess the public and political and the historical and scholarly significance of the Katyn Massacre and its prolonged coverup. Specifically, the study will survey the contemporary and historical treatment of the Katyn Massacre episode and will assess its significance, both in the public press and the scholarly literature of the United States and Great Britain. "Significance" can be defined in two ways. One interpretation of the "significance" of an event can be the public recognition of its importance. Some may claim that something is not significant if its importance is not generally known. It is easy to believe this in our present age which has been dominated by news media which seem so all- ix pervasive and omnipotent. "Damage control" and "spin control" have become essential, recognized survival skills for a political leader or institution. Until the early 1950s, for reasons described later in this study, Katyn's power and danger were realized only by the Poles, the Soviet leadership, and a few political and intellectual leaders around the world. It is true that there are episodes in history that become known and significant because they are politically useful and used. Some- times, it is difficult to tell whether history begets political events or political events beget history. (Indeed, the two often cannot be separated.) However, an event (and the truth about it) is sometimes so historically and politically powerful and compelling--intrinsically significant--that it cannot be controlled, contained, or ignored. The Katyn Massacre has proven to be a sterling example of this. Its nature and implications exerted this kind of inexorable power and impact on the peoples and institutions of Poland, of the Soviet Union and other nations under its control, and of the West. The Katyn Massacre was a politically motivated, mass ethnic killing that has important political relevance and ramifications, for academic as well as civic spheres. The struggle to uncover and establish the truth about Katyn, in the face of denials and counteraccusations by various Soviet governments and by some opinion leaders in the West--including leaders and bureaucracies of various Western governments--is, itself, significant. The Katyn Mas- sacre and its coverup challenged the integrity of political, academic, and media leaders and institutions in the United States and Great x Britain. In retrospect, we see that too many failed the test of Katyn. The horrendous significance of the Katyn Massacre and of the Soviet Union's responsibility for it was widely disbelieved or ignored during the immediate postwar years. Until Congressional hearings in 1952, a lack of public information about the massacre can be cited to explain and excuse the scanty coverage and widespread skepticism. After 1952-- and certainly after the publication of Dr. Janusz K. Zawodny's book, Death in the Forest, in 1962--Katyn should not have been neglected as it was in many studies of Poland or the Soviet Union; of the politics and diplomacy of the Second World War; of the national diplomacies of Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, Great Britain, or the United States; or of the Cold War.6 I also intend to demonstrate that many reputable scholars were unable or unwilling to report accurately on Katyn and its importance-- even in the 1960s and 1970s--for reasons ranging from honest confusion or actual ignorance about the Katyn Massacre and its implications to motivations that may have been rooted in ideological bias. Finally, I shall describe the grave and enduring implications of this oversight, regarding the effectiveness and integrity--or lack thereof--of historians, journalists, and government officials in the West. CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: THE KATYN MASSACRE Documents found only recently, in 1992, have certified the identity of those who ordered the Katyn Massacre of April-May 1940. They point the finger of guilt to the collective membership of the Soviet Polit- buro, dominated by Communist dictator Iosif Vissarianovich Stalin. The killings resulted from the recommendation of Politburo member Lavrenti Beria, the dreaded chief of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.1 There were a number of motives for the killings. Foremost was the "liquidation"--the Communist euphemism for extermination--of the social and intellectual leadership elites of Poland, as the initial step to eliminating that independent, anti-Soviet (and, historically, frequently anti-Russian) nation, permanently. In 1939, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov had gloated, "One swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this bastard of the Versailles Treaty."2 Specifically, Beria suggested to the Soviet Politburo that the Polish officers be exterminated, since they were ". . . involved in anti-Soviet propaganda. Each of them is only waiting for his release from imprisonment in order to enter into a struggle against Soviet power."3 1 Indeed, the Poles were hardly model prisoners and imprudently ridiculed their Soviet guards and indoctrination cadre members to their faces.4 Their attitude now seems incredibly naive--even arrogantly stupid, considering that the Bolsheviks' record of atrocities was well known to them. Yet, the Poles apparently believed that the West-- specifically, the British and French--were actively concerned about them, being interested in their future usefulness, and would not abandon them. A "white paper" submitted to the 1952 U.S. Congressional hearings on Katyn by the Polish Government-in-Exile describes this misassumption: With a few exceptions, the morale of the prisoners at Kozielsk appeared to be good. Firmly believing in the ultimate victory of justice and trusting implicitly in Poland's Western Allies, the prisoners hoped for a quick release from Soviet captivity and the granting of facilities either to return to Poland or to make their way through a neutral state to join the forces fighting in the West.5 A rumour circulated in the camp that General Zarubin himself had said to one of the prisoners. "You have too many protectors, so you cannot go". The prisoners interpreted this remark as meaning that Britain and France did not want them to be returned to German-occupied Poland, as they were anxious to get them to the West. It was even said that Britain had asked the Soviets to send the Poles to the West and had offered to pay the expenses of their detention in Russia and that the Soviets were bargaining over the price. Rumours of this kind, which made the prisoners feel that they were an object of concern to the outside world helped considerably to keep up morale in the camp.6 Their faith in the West proved to be pathetically ill-advised. Although the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941-- "Operation Barbarossa"--forced Stalin to obtain material assistance from the West and concede the reestablishment of a postwar Poland independent in name (if not in fact), the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia facilitated another motive for the Soviet crime, the intended (and even- tual) Soviet subjugation of Poland. As former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1960, "The Nazi and Soviet extermination policies, which had decimated the Polish intelligentsia, the usual source of the political elite, had badly weakened the nation as a whole, decreasing its capacity for resistance."7 Stalin himself had a deep grudge against Poland and its intelli- gentsia. It stemmed in part from that nation's military victories over Bolshevik armies, to which Stalin was attached as a political commissar, in the Russo-Polish War of 1919-20.8 Another motive for the extermination of the Polish officers was Stalin's effort to appease his Nazi ally, Hitler. The second, secret protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact of 23 August 1939 had provided for the fourth partition of Poland, dividing it between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. While the Germans invaded Poland, in defiance of the British and French, and effectively began the Second World War on 1 September 1939, the Soviets did not attack the Poles until 6:00 AM, 17 September 1939.9 Although the Poles were by then already collapsing under the weight of the German onslaught, Polish Army units in the East fought, and in a few cases won, some pitched battles with the Red Army units advancing from the East. Against such over- whelming military odds, though, there obviously could be only one result, and Poland surrendered on 27 September 1939. While the British reaction to the German invasion of Poland had been to declare war, their reaction was noticeably more circumspect and indulgent toward the Soviet invasion. One example was this quote from The Times of London: Lloyd George, who had always been regarded by the Poles as hostile to their cause, justified his reputation with a suitable piece of invective in the Sunday Express. Under the heading "What is Stalin up to?" he criticized the "class-ridden Polish government" and praised the Soviet government for "liberating their kinsmen from the Polish yoke."10 At a somewhat later stage, on 11 November 1939, Picture Post captured the careful distinction fostered by many British officials, in referring to "The Nazi Army of invasion and the Russian Red Army of intervention . . . ."11 The Katyn Massacre occurred in the context of a Polish holocaust on a par with the Jewish Holocaust. It is estimated that 5,384,000 Poles, including Polish Jews, died during the German occupation through slave labor exhaustion, disease and starvation, repression of resistance, or outright extermination. The first victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were Polish. The first gassing at Auschwitz was performed upon 300 Polish and 700 Soviet prisoners of war.12 An estimated total of 6,028,000 Poles--22 percent of Poland's population--died in the Second World War. Half of the victims were Jewish.13 The Nazis launched a calculated campaign to exterminate the educated elite of Polish society and racially undesirable elements. The German Army perpetrated this massacre, as well as the more intently genocidal Nazi SS.14 There were plans to exterminate the Poles entire- ly, after they had outlived their usefulness and the Jews had already been annihilated. Polish children were not allowed to go to high school or college. The Catholic Church in Poland was suppressed.15 Ironi- cally, though, many of the Polish officers who were Jewish did avoid the Holocaust and survive the war, having been in the custody of the regular German Army Wehrmacht, rather than that of the Nazi SS.16 The method of capture, detention, and extermination of Poles by the Soviets is also important to consider. These victims were not just Polish officers and cadets who had surrendered to the Red Army in the field. They also included reservists and other officials who had been arrested in their homes in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland.17 As it was, many Polish officers had been murdered immediately upon their capture, in spite of Soviet assurances of good treatment, particularly when their units had successfully battled against the Soviet invasion. Polish civilians suffered many Red Army atrocities as well.18 Conditions in the Soviet-held territories were so ghastly that some resident Jews actually petitioned--a few successfully, tragically--to be transferred to the German-occupied zone.19 In the Ukraine during the confusion of the changeover, Ukrainian nationalists occasionally took revenge on the ethnic Poles in their region. In time, these killings were investigated and punished by the Soviets who had as little use for Ukrainian nationalists as for Poles.20 Later, during the German occupation, the Ukrainians and Poles fought pitched battles against each other.21 There were approximately 15,000 Polish officers and cadets captured by the Soviets in September-October 1939. Many of them were reservists who in civilian life were professionals such as doctors, lawyers, college professors, etc. They were incarcerated in three internment camps: Kozielsk (southwest of Moscow), Ostashkov (between Moscow and Leningrad), and Starobielsk (southeast of Kharkov). At the Kozielsk camp there were 262 Poles of Jewish descent.22 There was also one woman, Polish aviatrix Janina Lewandowski. Of the captive Poles, only 448 seemed to the Soviets to be receptive to political collaboration. Initially, and during the winter (of 1939/40), the NKVD appeared to be trying to convert the Poles to Stalinist Communism. However, the interrogation and indoctrination sessions were too crude, dogmatic, and alien for most of the loyal, sophisticated Poles to accept. Eventually, the NKVD separated the potential collaborators from the thousands of loyal Poles. Then, in April-May 1940, having been given food and assurances that they were to be repatriated home, the Poles were shipped out by train, in groups of a hundred or so at a time. The destinations of most of these prisoners were three separate killing sites. Katyn was the terminus for the Kozielsk inmates. The other points were similarly railheads, near Kalinin for the Ostashkov prisoners and near Kharkov for the Starobielsk captives. Only recently have the locations of these other mass graves been verified.23 The 448 potential collaborators were transported by train to Pawlishtchev Bor, located between Kozielsk and Smolensk. The NKVD executioners were brutally efficient, having refined their methods on many thousands of Russian social, political, and military purge victims in the previous decades. It was simply an occupational routine for the killers, and some wore special attire, similar to that of butchers.24 Apparently, there were also a few especially vicious or fanatical thugs who took delight in sadistically abusing these members of the Polish elite, as they murdered them.25 Until Spring 1940, some of these officers' families had been corresponding with them. Thereafter, the families' mail was returned as undeliverable. Inquiries about the missing officer prisoners from the Polish Government-in-Exile, in London, and from the British government went unanswered by the Soviet government. In December 1940 (after the German overrunning of France in the Summer of 1940) at a reception for the leaders of the pro-Soviet Polish officers, NKVD chief Beria and his deputy, Vsevolod N. Merkulov, both enigmatically admitted that a "great mistake" had been made in the case of the other Polish officers.26 There had been meetings in March 1940, during which the Soviet NKVD shared its well-practiced terror and extermination technology with the Nazi SS. (The only Nazi "improvement" over Soviet extermination methods was the use of poison gas.) Professor George Watson has concluded that the fate of the interned Polish officers may have been decided at this conference, which according to him was held in Cracow.27 In his 1991 book, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, historian Robert Conquest stated that the conference had taken place at Zakopane in the Winter of 1939/40.28 While it may seem to be grimly amusing and fair justice that the Nazis would ultimately turn these extermination techniques against the NKVD, political commissars, and other Stalinists that they caught, the terminal horror suffered by so many millions of innocent Jewish, Slavic, and other European peoples as a result of this meeting of evil minds is an indelible stain on the history and integrity of Western "civiliza- tion," with all of its humanitarian pretensions.29 According to Watson, the fate of the Polish officers in Soviet custody was probably discussed during the conference. This would have been a significant factor in Stalin's decision to exterminate them, considering how slavishly he adhered to his pact with Hitler. (In spite of warnings from the British and Americans of imminent Nazi attack, trainloads of Russian raw materials were being faithfully sent to the Germans, right until the very moment of Hitler's 22 June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.30 The NKVD even turned over, to the German Gestapo, German Communists who had been living in the Soviet Union.31) However, considering Stalin's predilection for mass murder as a political tool and his hatred of the Poles, he certainly would have had no hesitation about annihilating them, anyway. Even Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, noted his peculiar obsession with a much earlier forest death of Polish officers in the Russian folk opera, "Ivan Susanin."32 From Soviet-occupied Poland, Poles considered potentially subversive--including women and children--were shipped off in the 1940- 41 period to live in primitive camps in the Soviet Union. According to Polish sources, these captives numbered over a million. The categories of Poles considered potentially subversive even included stamp collec- tors and Esperantists.33 Two- or three-hundred-thousand Poles, an estimated quarter of the number exiled to the Soviet Union, perished in the Soviet Union.34 In contrast, in his recent, critical biography of Stalin, General Dmitri Volkogonov, quoted a 2 November 1945 NKVD memorandum to Stalin giving 494,310 as the figure of "former Polish citizens arrived in the Soviet Union." Later, the NKVD document mentioned 389,382 "men" being held in Soviet "prisons, camps and places of exile." Volkogonov added to this account that "None of the documents I have seen on Polish citizens, who were on Soviet territory at Stalin's will, contain accurate figures of those who were either killed or died."35 In any case, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov's remark about "wiping out all remains of this misshapen offspring of the Versailles treaty," during a session of the Supreme Soviet in October 1939, was indicative of the annihilatory nature of Soviet intentions toward the nation of Poland.36 Initiating the destruction of a nation by exterminating its leadership classes is consistent with the standard definition of "genocide."37 The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the resulting, initially desperate need for cooperation and assistance from Great Britain and the United States would later force Stalin to accept the continued existence of a Poland in some political form and in some westward, displaced location. However, the original, genocidal intent of the Katyn Massacre remains evident. The current Polish government apparently agrees, judging by the title, Katyn. Dokumenty Ludobojstwa (Katyn: Documents of Genocide), of its reprinting of the 1940 Soviet documents authorizing the massacre.38 CHAPTER 2. KATYN AS A SECOND WORLD WAR ISSUE Following the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941, the Polish Government-in-Exile in London pressed on its new Soviet ally its inquiries about the location of its missing officers and cadets. In the Soviet Union itself, a Polish general who had been in Soviet custody, General Wladyslaw Anders, raised the issue in his efforts to staff a Polish army being formed from survivors of the Soviet labor camps. (The studied, smiling ingenuousness on Stalin's face, photographed as he received a list of 15,000 missing Polish officers from Anders and Polish Government-in-Exile chief, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, during their meeting with him 3 December 1941, is macabre.1) He told the Poles that he did not know what had happened to their officers, but he thought that they were last known to be in Manchuria. Such evasive Soviet answers to their questions about the men led General Anders to conclude in 1942, after leading an exodus of 70,000 Polish soldiers and 44,000 Polish civilians out of the USSR, that tragedy had befallen the vast majority of Polish officers in Soviet custody.2 On 27 April 1942, the U. S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Admiral William H. Standley, also formally requested the Soviet government to clarify the fate of missing Polish pisoners of war. The request was 10 received and rebuffed by no less a personage than Andrei Vyshinsky, who had been the Soviet prosecutor of the victims of the Stalinist purge trials of the late 1930s. Inquiries were also made by the British at this time.3 All these questions remained unanswered for another year. At every diplomatic opportunity, Stalin had been pressuring the Western Allies to recognize his demands for the western Soviet border with Poland to be moved farther west, to the 1941 border--the "Curzon Line." (See Map 3.) Stalin brought the matter to a crisis in January 1943 by declaring that all Polish residents who lived east of that 1941 border were Soviet citizens. Naturally, the Polish Government-in-Exile protested.4 General Sikorski was under heavy pressure. He knew that he would lose his countrymen's support--particularly that of the Polish underground army, the "Home Army"--if he did not resist the Soviets' efforts to move the Russo-Polish border westward from the 1939 boundary.5 Then, on 13 April 1943, Radio Berlin announced the discovery of a mass grave (at the Russian forest village of Katyn) of thousands of Polish officers who had been murdered, it stated, by the Soviet NKVD. After a two-day delay, the Soviet government responded on 15 April 1943, suddenly remembering and declaring that the Polish officers had been captured by the Nazis in late Summer 1941 and countercharging that the Germans had killed the Poles.6 Finally, on 16 April 1943, both the New York Times and the Times of London dutifully reported the dispute.7 Twelve days later, the Times editorialized on the damage this episode posed to Allied cooperation in the war against Nazi Germany.8 Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels was gleeful about the divisive developments, noting in his diary, "One can speak of a complete triumph of German propaganda. Throughout this whole war we have seldom been able to register such a success."9 Indeed, Hitler was giving instructions that "the affair be given widest possible use."10 Under bitter pressure from its people within and outside of Poland, the Polish Government-in-Exile demanded an investigation and called on the International Red Cross to examine the site. The Red Cross agreed, but only on the condition that such an investigation would be acceptable to all governments. The Soviet government vetoed the proposal, of course, and broke off diplomatic relations with the London Poles on 25 April 1943, accusing them of "a hostile attitude towards the Soviet Union."11 However, it should be noted that the Poles had not specifically accused the Soviets of the murders. They had only asked for an impartial inquiry. The Soviet reaction was excessive and suggestive of a guilty party attempting to bully and bluff its way out of an indict- ment: in effect it seemed self-incriminating. This was noted at the time by the British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, who observed in official dispatches, "the anger and unconvincing terms of Russian denials suggests [sic] a sense of guilt."12 Moreover, Soviet credibility had already been undermined by revelations of the NKVD's acknowledged execution of two Poles who were leaders of the socialist Bund--the All Jewish Workers' Union--Henryk Ehrlich and Wiktor Alter. Because these men were Jewish, the Soviets would not recognize their Polish citizenship. Ehrlich and Alter had warned the Polish Embassy in Moscow of Soviet attempts to play off Polish Jews and Christians against each other. To justify killing Ehrlich and Alter, the Soviets accused them of being spies in the service of Polish and German(!) intelligence services.13 During 1943, a number of articles addressing Katyn and the border dispute appeared in American magazines. The 3 May article in Newsweek, "Row with the Reds," quoted the German propaganda accusation that the Katyn victims were executed by "Jewish OGPU Commissars."14 Newsweek's 10 May 1943 article, "Poles vs. Reds: Allied Unity Put to Test by Row over Officer Dead," described the effect of Katyn on the Allied war effort and was considerably more sympathetic toward the Russians than toward their Nazi-alleged victims, the Poles. For example, it offered the following speculation: The Poles' mistaken tactics may have been due to that curious trait of unrealism that led Polish lancers to charge German tanks and that still permeates Polish politics. The violence of the Russian reaction was probably due to the sensitivity of the Soviets in their dealings with foreigners.15 Time magazine's 10 May 1943 article was somewhat more considerate of the Poles. It described General Sikorski's moderate approach to the difficult task of attempting to reach a compromise between Poland's geo- political situation, on the Soviet Union's doorstep, and ultra-national- ist emigre elements. Time also understood Poles' anxiety about the possibility of a postwar political disappearance of Poland entirely.16 Ironically--considering it was a photograph magazine--Life's 10 May 1943 article was the most insightful, and it was startlingly candid. Life stated that the allegations needed to be investigated before any conclusions could be drawn, but pointedly observed that "Russians as well as Germans have shot plenty of Poles."17 Meanwhile, the London Poles were being accused by left-of-center commentators of using the Katyn atrocity to support their arguments with the Soviets over postwar Polish boundaries.18 In his 3 May 1943 "Back- stage of the War" column, Waverley Root--American journalist and international cookery expert--typically concentrated on the political implications of the Katyn-precipitated Soviet-Polish rift, maintaining that the Poles' principal motivation for demanding an investigation of Katyn was geopolitical, rather than moral or legal. He suggested: The Polish reason for agitating this issue was the desire dominant in the Polish government-in-exile to get an immediate pledge of the retention of Poland's eastern frontier. It saw in this incident a means of applying pressure to Russia. It neglected to consider the detail that one nation cannot apply pressure to another unless it possesses superior force--whether that force be military, moral, economic or psychological.19 "Progressive" Western intellectuals disputed the Nazi charges, and commentators in the West--such as Max Lerner, for example--agreed with the charge that the Polish Government-in-Exile had been duped into undermining the alliance with the Soviet Union by seconding the German call for an impartial investigation.20 Although British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not dispute the Nazi charges, he told General Sikorski, "If they are dead nothing you can do will bring them back."21 American President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unwilling to accept the validity of the Nazis' charges. When Captain George Earle, a personal friend of Roosevelt and a former naval attache to Bulgaria, later expressed to the president his desire to publish evidence implicating the Soviets (which he had received in Sofia), Roosevelt gave him a written order not to do so. After Earle indicated he might "go public" about Katyn anyway, he was soon there- after abruptly and otherwise inexplicably posted to the Samoan Islands for the remainder of the Second World War.22 The Western Allies at this time were primarily concerned with keeping the Soviet Union in the war against the Nazis. The Soviets were maintaining the biggest land front against the Germans, and the Russians (and other peoples of European Russia) had suffered terribly. As importantly, in August 1939 Stalin had demonstrated that he was capable of doing a complete about-face in international relations, if it suited his ruthless and seemingly inscrutable interests.23 In his book, Allen Paul recently referred to this bewilderment of the Western Allies about Eastern Europe and Stalin's intentions toward it: The crisis dramatized how little the world knew about the plight of the Poles. The war had begun as a fight to preserve their independence. But by 1943 it had become a war to defeat Germany and the initial objective was rapidly falling from view. Polish leaders were certainly powerless to prevent such a fundamental change and the Katyn crisis demonstrated how little political latitude they had in adapting to it.24 Churchill's complicity in the Katyn coverup went deeper. On 23 April 1943, he assured Soviet Ambassador Maisky in London, "We shall certainly oppose vigorously any `investigation' by the International Red Cross or any other body in any territory under German authority. Such investigation would be a fraud and its conclusions reached by terrorism."25 This proved to be a strategic diplomatic error. An emboldened Stalin not only broke with the London Polish Government diplomatically on 25 April 1943, but he also followed this by beginning to practice diplomatic relations with the embryo of his own Communist Polish government, the "Union of Polish Patriots." This committee of Polish Communists had been officially created only a few weeks before the Katyn discovery.26 This was an indication that, with the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in Winter 1942/43, Stalin was beginning to feel less dependent upon the Western democracies' and less solicitous of their political aspirations for Eastern Europe.27 One of the most morally significant and saddening episodes in the Katyn affair was a lengthy, secret memorandum authored by the British Ambassador to the Polish Government-in-Exile, Sir Owen O'Malley. It was circulated among senior members of the British Cabinet and Foreign Office who attached cover comments, such as "This is a brilliant, unorthodox and disquieting despatch . . . ."28 It confronted the British government with a basic question about the moral integrity of its declaration and conduct of the Second World War. As Paul observed, O'Malley's memorandum stirred the consciences of senior statesmen deeply for two reasons. First, his evidence against the Soviets was overwhelming. And second, he developed a persuasive argument that the crime could cause the British enduring "moral repercussions."29 The memorandum pointed out that collaborating with the Soviets in the coverup of their atrocity would destroy the Allies' claim to moral ascendancy in their crusade against Nazi Germany and could compromise the moral credibility and the legitimacy of the expected postwar war crimes trials. Also--as importantly for Goebbels in his propaganda exhortations--the refusal by supposedly democratic and humanitarian Western countries to consider the evidence and condemn such a massive and hideous Soviet atrocity could serve as further proof of a special, persecutory malevolence toward the German people in the Allied prosecution of the war. Not only was the O'Malley document circulated in Britain, it was also circulated within the upper echelons of the U.S. government. In early September 1943, the White House staff confirmed President Roosevelt had been given the document.30 Whether or not the President actually took the time to read it has not been established. What Winston Churchill failed to understand, though, was that by this time in the war Britain had lost much of its power and credibility in Stalin's eyes, anyway. In 1935, according to Churchill in his 1948 volume of his history of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm, Stalin had openly scoffed at French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, "Oho! The Pope! How many divisions has he got?"31 In terms of manpower, industry, and technology, the United States was far outpacing Britain and, in the latter two categories, even the Soviet Union. Indeed, the most powerful weapon Britain had in the Second World War was its moral ascendancy. Along with France, it had met its moral and treaty obligations to Poland and had declared war on Nazi Germany's crusade of racist aggression. Britain had stood alone and battered, but unbending, in the darkest hours of the war, when the Soviet Union was Nazi Germany's ally. Britain had been a goading example and inspiration to Americans and to the rest of the world of a democracy which was prepared to fight and endure for its--for our--survival and moral principles. Stalin knew well the power of ideas and speech. In a 19 April 1923 speech, he declared, "Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party."32 If Churchill and Britain had roared outrage about Katyn, instead of mewing caution and restraint, the American public would have had to take notice and, after bitter debate, could have pressured Congress and Roosevelt to face the truth about Katyn and to get firm with the Soviets about Allied war aims at a critical juncture in the war, when the Soviet Union was still heavily dependent on any equipment and other help the Western Allies could provide. By this time in the war, also, not even Stalin could have made a separate peace with the Germans. The Soviet peoples were too consumed with rage and vengeance over German atrocities. With his capitulation on the truth about Katyn, Churchill and his government unnecessarily forfeited much of Britain's real power--its moral greatness. In fairness to Churchill (and Roosevelt), though, it should also be pointed out that at this time reports of the Nazi extermination of Jews and other Eastern Europeans, in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere, were coming out of Occupied Europe. Any disruption in Allied effort--and a major row could have profoundly disrupted supply shipments, as well as military cooperation among the multi-tiered ethnic and political strata of Allied forces--would have given the Nazis additional time to extermi- nate these enslaved peoples and to rebound militarily and industrially. The Nazis exterminated half the Jews of Europe, as it was. As to the Poles' justification for demanding an investigation into the murder of 15,000 of their finest people, George Kennan (the famous diplomat and policy planner) offered an objective judgement in 1961: The German government, in announcing the discovery, asked for an investigation by the International Red Cross. The Polish government-in-exile, after some anguish, associated itself with this request. The Allies were furious at them for doing this, correctly fearing that it would anger the Russians. It is hard, in retrospect, to see how the Poles could have done less.33 The Germans saw their opportunity to disrupt Allied relations further and pressed on with an independent investigation conducted by leading forensics experts, principally from occupied Europe. These men were leaders in their field and were not coerced in their research. The Swiss representative, Professor Francis Naville, was a proven anti- Nazi.34 Following its inquiry, the Commission presented its findings. The men had been killed in their winter coats, indicating a cool season. Their uniforms were in relatively good condition at the time of their execution, indicating a period of captivity of months rather than years. Their hands had been tied behind their backs using rope of Russian manufacture. The mail and diaries left in their clothing indicated that their deaths had occurred during Spring 1940, when they were in Soviet custody. Several of the diaries even described the Poles' detraining at the railway station near Katyn and their growing concern about their impending fate.35 Local inhabitants testified that Katyn had been used by the NKVD as a killing site for years.36 The Poles executed at Katyn were all from the internment camp at Kozielsk. However, not all of Kozielsk's internees had been murdered, and those Polish officers who survived to join Anders' army had compiled sequential lists of the Spring 1940 departures of their campmates. The corpses identified at Katyn were buried in groups in the order of their departures from Kozielsk.37 Other evidence uncovered included tree saplings planted over the graves. Although they were five years old, biological analysis indicated they had been planted three years before the Spring 1943 German-sponsored investigation.38 The only evidence contrary to a conclusion of Soviet guilt was the ammunition used. It was 7.65 mm caliber and of German manufacture. One of the provisions of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was a trade agreement whereby Soviet raw materials--especially oil--would be exchanged for finished German goods. Among the types of finished products the Germans traded to the Soviets were pistols and ammunition. German pistols and ammunition were preferred by the NKVD for their superior efficiency.39 While the Katyn controversy was in the news, the Nazis were exter- minating Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto. To prevent Katyn from be- ing used as a distraction from that atrocity, on 30 April 1943 a Polish Government-in-Exile delegate in London spoke out in support of the beleaguered Jews. On 5 May 1943, General Sikorski himself went on radio urging Poles "to give [Jews] all possible aid and to resist this terrifying barbarity." Indeed, some Polish Home Army guerrillas were meanwhile fighting pitched battles with the Nazis in Warsaw, attempting to break through the Ghetto's walls to the Jews.40 Meanwhile, in the United States, the large Polish-American community was slowly becoming agitated over Katyn. Polish-Americans distrusted Russians categorically. An article in reference to Katyn appeared in the 28 April 1943 Chicago Tribune, entitled "American and Polish Leaders Brand Russia a Nation of Liars and Old Conspirators."41 In Congress, members sympathetic to Poland entered items mentioning Katyn in the appendices of the Congressional Record. In the Record, itself, there is no direct mention of Katyn. There is, however, intri- guing mention of the Office of War Information (OWI) on 19-20 April 1943. On 19 April, Senator Robert Taft (R--Ohio) submitted a bill regulating the OWI's activities.42 On 20 April, Congressman Roy O. Woodruff (R--Michigan) asked for the floor for one minute. In his brief diatribe, he demanded an investigation into Communist infiltration of the OWI, concluding "the man in charge of the Polish Overseas Unit of O.W.I. has not lived in Poland for 15 years and has been active in French Communist circles, coming recently to America." More interesting were some of his earlier remarks: For 3 years the Polish Government in exile has been working to keep morale within Poland alive against the time of liberation. But now reports are constantly reaching me and other Members of Congress that the propaganda activities of the Polish Unit of O.W.I.'s Overseas Division are destroying rather than building the morale of the helpless Polish people. These reports tell us that much of this propaganda follows the American Communist Party line and is designed to prepare the minds of the Polish people to accept partition, obliteration, or suppression of their nation when the fighting ends. The same is true of Yugoslavia, where, I am told, the name of the great Mihailovitch is blocked out by O.W.I. radicals. If it is true that Communists have infiltrated into the O.W.I.'s Overseas Division and are following the party line in their propaganda to Poland, as well as other countries, then it is an outrageous violation of the faith that is reposed in Elmer Davis and Robert Sherwood.43 It is a significant coincidence that Woodruff would have made such animated accusations at the time when the U.S. Government was trying to control coverage of Katyn. It reflected the volatility of the atrocity as a political issue. It also demonstrated that at least one member of Congress concerned enough to speak openly about the implications and consequences of the OWI's ability to censor valid public issues during the war. The appendices of the Congressional Digest included copies of inserted newspaper articles, some of which mentioned Katyn. Congressman John Lesinski (D--Michigan) submitted articles from the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald on 16 April 1943. The first accused the Soviet Union of holding hundreds of thousands of Poles in the USSR hostage to its territorial demands. The second attacked a suspected attempt by British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden to get President Roosevelt's agreement to the postwar concession of Eastern Poland to Stalin.44 On 19 April, Lesinski confronted Congress with the 18 April 1943 Washington Times-Herald account of the Nazi charges and demands by the Polish Government-in-Exile that its prisoners in Soviet captivity be protected.45 On 29 April, Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D--Montana) submitted the Washington Times-Herald article of the same day, "Again the Polish Question." The article pointed out the logic of Soviet guilt for killing the Polish officers, considering past Communist use of "liquidation"--mass murder--in class warfare.46 There were indications at the time that some American politicians were willing to overlook a Soviet mass murder for the sake of wartime expediency. On 7 May, Congressman B.J. Monkiewicz (R-Connecticut) inserted the article "We'd Better Watch Him," which had been published in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. The paper quoted Wendell Wilkie's statement, "Russia is our ally, and . . . even if the Polish officers were murdered by Russia, we must have her help to win against Germany." The author of the article then went on to wonder when the Poles had become enemies of the Western Allies.47 Congressman Lesinski inserted another article into the Congressional Record. It was entitled "Stalin's Sweet Note," and it concluded with the following three significant and prescient points: 8. A tacit admission that we must flatter Russia out of fear that she may yet make peace with Hitler or Hirohito equals the whipping of public opinion, of American dignity and realism, into a Munich fever which undermines the morale and consciousness of Americans. 9. The propagated fear to criticise [sic] anything that Stalin does has created a temperature of hypocrisy and submission which may prove to be more harmful than it is apparent. 10. Russia should be helped--but should be informed now that she is only one of many elements of an allied commonwealth, equal and not ruling, interdependent and not isolated, responsible to the democratic world and not irresponsible.48 The Roosevelt Administration did whatever necessary to suppress the outcries. When a Polish-American radio announcer in Detroit quoted London Polish sources' evidence of Soviet guilt, he was silenced by the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information.49 Specifically, in a May 1943 meeting in New York, division chief Allen Cranston (lately a U.S. Senator from California), with the presence of FCC representative Hilda Shea, expressed concern about the anti-Soviet broadcasts to the station owner who then removed the commentator.50 The reaction in the Macomb, Illinois, daily newspaper was typical of a small town. There were many brief reports on local servicemen, and the news reflected a completely American perspective. Only on 27 April 1943, soon after the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations with the London Poles, did syndicated war news columnist Donald MacKenzie mention (in that context) the "10,000" murdered Polish officers at Katyn.51 On the front page of the 29 April 1943 edition of the Macomb Daily Journal, an Associated Press article discussed British attempts to restore those relations and the implications of the breakoff.52 Facts on File, the annual news summary which had begun publication in 1941, included a number of items about Katyn in 1943. For 16 April 1943, it had the German report of the discovery of the mass grave of 10,000 officers "near Smolensk."53 Subsequent entries described the Soviet counteraccusations and the Soviet severance of diplomatic relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. This was followed, on 2 May, with a plaintively titled article, "Churchill Predicts Free Poland."54 Former Berlin correspondent and world affairs authority William L. Shirer wrote the introduction to Facts on File for that year. In Great Britain, Keesing's Contemporary Archives, Vol. 4, 1940- 1943, contained a detailed rendering of the official statements made by the various governments at the time of the Katyn controversy and the rupture in Russo-Polish diplomatic relations. The documents republished in Keesing's, which included Polish Government-in-Exile releases, did not exonerate the Soviets, suggestively leaving the question of guilt to its readers to judge for themselves.55 After the Soviet retraction of recognition of their government, Free Poles were dealt another blow when General Sikorski died in a mysterious crash of his personal aircraft, on 4 July 1943, upon his departure from Gibraltar. To this day, many Poles and Polish-Americans are convinced Sikorski was assassinated by sabotage.56 On 12 November 1952, former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles stated, in regard to Sikorski's death, "I have always believed that there was sabotage."57 The questionable circumstances of Sikorski's death were even the subject of a book written by the iconoclastic British historian David Irving, Accident: The Death of General Sikorski.58 In seeking to account for Sikorski's untimely death, Katyn historian Allen Paul has also noted the coincidence of Kim Philby's responsibility for the British intelligence operations in North Africa at the time: A more likely explanation was that Stalin himself had issued Sikorski's death warrant. At the time of the crash, Soviet superspy Kim Philby was in charge of British security for North Africa. Philby's knowledge of Sikorski's route and schedule, as well as his contacts along the way, could have greatly aided any Soviet plot to engineer the crash. No evidence has ever been found to link Philby to Sikorski's death. . . . Coming when it did, only weeks after the discoveries at Katyn, Sikorski's death seemed too convenient. Evidence of sabotage was not found, but conclusive proof of an accident was not found either.59 Although there were many politicians and journalists in the West willing to defend the Soviets from incrimination, the Soviets felt compelled to hold their own investigation of Katyn in 1944, once the site had been retaken from the Germans. There was even a tour of Katyn conducted for interested Western journalists, including Kathleen Harriman--American envoy Averell Harriman's daughter.60 The Soviet investigating commission had only Russians as members.61 Predictably, it produced evidence--such as the testimony of local residents--to convince Miss Harriman and her friends at the time that August 1941 was when the Poles had been killed and that the Nazis had actually done the killing.62 Despite Soviet efforts to deny responsibility for Katyn, by Spring 1944 concern in the United States over Stalin's overall intentions toward Poland had become serious, as evidenced by Time magazine's republication of an appeal of some prominent Americans made to "Soviet Russia." Growing doubt about the fate of Poland was evident.63 Nevertheless, the Polish plight became the butt of humor for some editors. For example, such titles as "Poles Apart" and "Poles in a Hole" were given to 1944 Newsweek articles.64 In retrospect, the tone of these titles seems cruel and mocking. Just as Katyn would later become the emotional fuse to rally anti- Soviet sentiment in Poland and, in 1980, the political movement known as "Solidarity," it triggered the political mobilization of Polish-Ameri- cans in May 1944 in Buffalo, New York, when some 2000 delegates from twenty-two states met to plan efforts on behalf of Polish-Americans and Poles. The conference was highlighted by a parade of 25,000 Polish- Americans through the center of the city. Coincidentally, 1944 was an election year, and the Roosevelt Administration's OSS (Office of Strategic Services) intelligence service warned that the Polish American Congress (PAC) might be a serious political factor in the upcoming election.65 Nevertheless, President Roosevelt would not meet with Polish- American leaders until there occurred another tragedy as rending as the Katyn Massacre. This was the Warsaw Uprising, 1 August-2 October 1944. On 29 July 1944, the Soviet-backed Union of Polish Patriots, attached to Red Army units advancing on the city, broadcast to the people of Warsaw the exhortation that they rise up and throw out the Nazis before the latter could fortify the city.66 The Polish Underground and Home Army, under the command of General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski did just that, expecting the Red Army to lift the Nazi siege of the city within a few days--much as Paris would be liberated by the Free French and American armies on 25 August 1944. However, despite the intense pleas of the Americans and British, the Red Army did not advance and the Nazis were allowed to shatter the Free Polish military and political groups that were attempting to defend the Polish capital and to establish a credible, independent government. Stalin claimed that the Vistula River was a tremendous obstacle, defying fording by tanks. It is true that the western banks of the rivers of Eastern Europe and European Russia are much higher than the east banks, and the Germans were defending the western banks. However, by this time the Red Army's "artcorps"---mobile, corps-sized massings of rocket and gun artillery-- could obliterate any German defensive strongpoint or concentration. Also, considering how bitterly Stalin had criticized his Anglo-American allies for waiting so long to launch the invasion across the English Channel, his protestations about crossing a river verge on mockery.67 More significantly, the Soviets would not cooperate in the Western Allies' efforts to supply the defenders of Warsaw by air. Crushed by its Nazi SS besiegers, the Home Army surrendered on October 5th.68 When the Red Army finally rolled into Warsaw, the NKVD rounded up and deported to slave labor camps or exterminated outright as many surviving members of the Polish Home Army as it could find.69 These events were duly noted in the American press. Newsweek publicized the Poles' accusation of duplicitous Soviet inaction in a 16 October 1944 article. Subtitled "Soviet Failure to Aid Bor[-Komorowski] Is Barrier to Rapprochement with Mikolajczyk Government," the article described the London Poles' accusations that the Red Army had called upon the Home Army to act, and the Soviets' accusations that the Home Army had acted without consulting the Red Army.70 Polish-Americans traditionally supported the Democratic Party-- being, for the most part, working class--and loyal to President Roosevelt, but they were now outraged. Nevertheless, during his visits with PAC leaders in October 1944, Roosevelt quickly and easily averted their new, naive political activism with a few of the vague, expansive presidential blandishments for which he was famous.71 The issue of Katyn faded with the progress of the war. The London Poles had lost political influence with the Western Allies, in spite of the valor displayed by their troops in Italy and Northwest Europe, and in spite of the large emigre communities long in the U.S. and growing in Great Britain. However, all this abuse of the Poles by the Soviets did not go as unnoticed by the American people as it was by their government. Before and during the war, there had been a number of attempts to gauge American public opinion about European affairs and Stalin's Russia. In January 1939, a poll was taken to ascertain whether Americans would prefer Germany or Russia to win a war between those two nations. Eighty-three percent of the respondents indicated that they wanted Russia to win.72 On the other hand, in a poll taken in March 1940, after Stalin's collusion with Hitler and the Soviet invasion and defeat of Finland and the Baltic republics, fully 34.2 percent of Americans considered Russia the "worst influence in Europe," second only to Germany which was censured by 55.3 percent.73 Nor did Americans have any charitable feelings toward Communists. In May, 1941, two-thirds of those surveyed wanted the U.S. Communist Party suppressed.74 In July 1941, soon after "Operation Barbarossa" had begun, another poll was taken of Americans' preference for a victor in that already- bloody war. This time, only 72 percent wanted Russia to win--11 percent fewer than in the January 1939 poll--while 24 percent were indifferent or undecided.75 More revealing about the U.S. popular attitude toward the nature of Stalinist Russia was the October 1941 poll wherein 32 percent considered the "Russian" government only slightly better than the "German" government, 35.1 percent thought the Soviet and Nazi governments equally bad, and 4.6 percent thought the Soviet government worse than the Nazi version--for a total of 71.7 percent considering the Soviet government to be only slightly better or worse than the Nazi government. Even in October 1941, with the Russians maintaining the biggest front against the Nazis, fully 19.8 percent of Americans were undecided which government was better or worse.76 However, polls taken in March 1942 and February 1943, and on 29 April 1943, showed the effect of Katyn on American public opinion about whether the USSR could be trusted to cooperate after the war was over. In March 1942, 39 percent trusted Russia, while 39 percent did not. In February 1943, at the time of Soviet victory at Stalingrad and general inter-Allied goodwill, 46 percent of Americans expected Russia's postwar cooperation, while only 29 percent did not. However, on 29 April 1943, after the controversy about Katyn and the Soviet breakoff of diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile in London, the number of doubters rose back to 34 percent (although the number of optimists remained at 44 percent). The inference that may be drawn is that the Katyn epidsode and the ensuing diplomatic controversy had catalyzed some previously undecided Americans into distrusting the Soviets.77 Katyn's significance as a public issue was cited in an article by Warren B. Walsh, "What the American People Think of Russia," in the Winter 1944-45 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly magazine.78 After describing the increase in trust of the Soviet Union, thanks to the Stalingrad victory, Walsh wrote: There was a minor increase in trust, soon reversed, and a greater increase in distrust with the curve of the latter rising ever more steeply as new shocks disturbed American-Soviet relations. Ambassador Standley accused the Soviet Government of concealing from its people the facts about American aid and supplies. On top of that, the Russians broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile over the masterly Nazi propaganda charges of mass murders in the Katyn forest. The dissolution of the Comintern in May, 1943, momentarily reversed the trust and distrust curves, but caused a sharp rise in the "no opinion" group. Many people did not know whether to take that dissolution at its face value or whether it was merely "another clever Communist trick."79 Walsh then went on to chart the ups and downs of Americans' trust of Stalin's Russia and concluded: Opinion has remained relatively stable in recent months. At the present writing (November, 1944), 47% believe that Russia can be trusted; 35% feel that she cannot; and 18% don't know. Neither the continuing Russo-Polish quarrel and the Papal condemnation of Communism on the one hand, nor the Red Army advances and Stalin's praise of the second front on the other hand, seem to have affected the American attitude materially.80 Among Walsh's closing analyses was the following point: There is a hard core of distrust about Russia. Roughly one out of three does not trust Russia, and this group clings stubbornly to its opinion. There is a smaller number--roughly one out of five-- which is more pliable and whose opinion can be changed.81 Apparently, Katyn and similar Soviet transgressions--such as the NKVD's executions of Henryk Ehrlich and Wiktor Alter, in March 1943--had helped solidify the anti-Soviet feeling of roughly one-third of Americans.82 The Facts on File volume for 1945 did not reflect this distrust of the Soviets and contributed another misleading entry on the Katyn mystery. A 27 June 1945 entry, titled "Massacre Fraud Disclosed," said "Stockholm reports that a close collaborator of Heinrich Himmler told Allied authorities in Germany two days ago . . ." that Katyn was actually a Nazi massacre contrived to appear as a Soviet killing for propaganda purposes.83 Neither the reporter nor the source was named. Journalist William L. Shirer was now officially responsible for world affairs entries. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 (and later at the Potsdam Conference of July 1945), the future of Poland was a major point of discussion. At Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt conceded that the Soviets had a right to ensure the safety of their western border with the Poles. Roosevelt agreed to the westward shift of Poland's borders, with the Curzon Line as the basis for the Polish Soviet border.84 Everyone agreed that postwar Poland should be "free and independent." Stalin, adeptly reversing his 1939 plans, even stated: That is why Russia today is against the Tsarist policy of abolition of Poland. We have completely changed this inhuman policy and started a policy of friendship and independence for Poland.85 Churchill and Roosevelt accepted Stalin's vague assurances of respect for an independent Poland. However, in April 1945, sixteen leaders of the Polish underground who had accepted Soviet invitations to conferences and cooperation were arrested, tortured, and (with one exception) forced to sign confessions of anti-Soviet subversion.86 Poland had become a political embarrassment to Western politicians, throwing into doubt the genuineness of the Allied victory for world peace and freedom--evidencing a half-finished crusade to rid the world of exterminatory totalitarianism. Uneasiness about Katyn bubbled to the surface of the American public's consciousness again, early in 1945. The American journalist, William L. White raised uncomfortable questions about Katyn in his travelogue, Report on the Russians.87 White pointed out the obvious inconsistency of the victims being found in winter clothing--even during the Soviet reinvestigation--according to the Soviet version that had set the time of their deaths as Summer 1941. He also wondered why the Soviets could not locate the Polish officers prior to the German invasion, when requested to do this.88 The reaction to White's book in the leftwing--"progressive"--press in the West was savage and shrill. Pro-Soviet Westerners signed a statement attacking White's book and accusing him of "warmongering"--a serious charge at a time when the issue uppermost in the mind of the American public was "bringing the boys home" as soon as possible. Also, as was recently observed by Roman Pucinski of Chicago, Chief Investiga- tor of the Congressional Katyn hearings in the early 1950s, the United States and its people were utterly exhausted by the Second World War by mid-1945 and did not want any confrontation with the Soviet Union.89 Most reviews of White's book--which was remarkably prescient concerning the impending, souring fate of Soviet-American relations--were hostile.90 Three reviews specifically mentioned White's coverage of Katyn in his book. In his Saturday Review of Literature review, author John Hersey castigated White for comparing the wartime plight of the Russians to an American standard of living. He then went on to say, "His account of the Katyn Forest massacres is obviously from sources sympathetic to the London Poles, and makes no pretense at being impartial; it sounds very much like the Berlin radio."91 (Note that Hersey did not attempt to defend the Soviets from the Nazis' charge about Katyn: he only faulted White for repeating it.) Interestingly, in his own, lead review in the Saturday Review of Literature coverage of White's book, renowned- -and recently returned--Moscow correspondent Louis Fischer omitted any reference to White's treatment of Katyn in his generally favorable analysis of the book. In its otherwise critical review of the book, The Christian Science Monitor stated, "Sometimes the author is evidently trying to be fair- minded--even in the chapter on the disturbing affair of the Katyn atrocities, which is surely an inflammable topic to broach on such a mission as this."92 The description of Katyn as a "disturbing affair" epitomized its place in Western consciousness at this point in time. The hideousness of the charges against the Soviets and the confidence with which the Nazis obviously levelled them had profound and ominous implications about the true nature of the Soviet regime and the postwar world. In the New Republic, journalist Bruce Bliven's coverage of White's treatment of Katyn was similarly ambivalent. In regard to the famous case of the 10,000 Polish officers who were murdered in the Katyn Forest, either by the Germans or the Russians, White gives at great length all the arguments in favor of the theory that they were killed by the Russians, and no evidence whatever on the other side. Then, with a poker face, he announces that the evidence is overwhelming that the Germans did it. Anyone who has no other information on the subject than this book is bound to believe that White in his final verdict was under some sort of pressure--or had suddenly gone off his head.93 This is not an accurate description of White's treatment of Katyn. White did outline the Soviets' arguments in their defense. He did not "announce that the evidence is overwhelming that the Germans did it." What White did say was: The evidence of German guilt gathered by the Soviet Commission is detailed, complete, damning, and it answers all questions but this one: if the Polish officers were still alive in the summer of 1941 and could be captured by the Germans, why were the Poles not told this at once? A few lines later, White stated that the evidence of German guilt, as presented by the Soviet commission, was overwhelming, not that the objective evidence was. He pointed out that spring being the time of execution was more consistent with the victims' heavy clothing than late summer would have been, and he wondered why the Soviets had said nothing about a German execution of the Poles until the discovery of the victims in 1943. Otherwise, White left his readers to draw their own conclusions.94 White's credentials were too sound for him to be accused of being pro-Nazi or fascist. His father, William A. White, was one of the most influential journalists of the 1930s. The elder White was also the director of the CDA, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. On behalf of the Roosevelt Administration, this organization had taken the offensive in the public forum against the America First Committee, which had sought to discourage the United States from aiding the Allies and from getting involved in another world war in any way.95 The elder White died in 1945.96 Perhaps in reaction to White's book, which had been pre-released in condensed, two-part article form in the Reader's Digest--omitting his coverage of Katyn, incidentally--a flurry of books were soon published defending the Soviet Union and, in a few cases, directly criticizing White's book.97 One outstanding example is Edmund Stevens' 1945 account, Russia Is No Riddle. Stevens and his books are worth examining in detail, because of the complete about-face which he, as a journalist, took--or, because of increasingly anti-Soviet public opinion, he had to take--between his 1945 and 1950 books. At the beginning of the 1945 book, Stevens mentioned his Russian wife's adjustment to America. Later, he described his January 1944 trip with Kathleen Harriman to Katyn and presents the Soviet version of Katyn, even mentioning the "537th Construction Battalion" as being the duplicitous designation of the Nazi extermination unit. His description of his acknowledged Soviet friends--"the distinguished looking chairman, Alexander Potyomkin, scion of a famous Russian family" and "Chief of the Commission . . . Nikolai Burdenko, Surgeon General of the Red Army and one of the world's most distinguished brain surgeons"--reeked of cronyism. (Nonetheless, in 1946 Burdenko confided to a close friend that the Polish officers had obviously been murdered in 1940--i.e., by the NKVD.)98 At the end of Stevens' book, in a chapter entitled "Friendship or Else," he condemned White's account of the Soviet Union by concluding that the "abuse of Soviet hospitality is the shabbiest aspect of the White episode."99 He did not, however, mention White's own treatment of Katyn, specifically. A startling contrast, then, was Stevens' 1950 book, This Is Russia: Uncensored. In his preface to the book, retired U. S. Army general Walter Bedell Smith stated, "Years have passed since the first book on the Soviet Union by the young correspondent, Edmund Stevens, appeared in print. These have been years of disillusionment.100" In his 1950 book, Stevens was even more critical of the Soviet Union than White had been in 1945. Although Katyn went unmentioned this time, Stevens' description of an NKVD arrest in his Moscow apartment house which he witnessed during the purges of the late 1930s is searing: My most vivid recollection is that of a young mother. Across the years, I still can hear her screams as they took her two-month-old baby away from her and she and her husband were led off to the "Black Crow"--Russian equivalent of the "Black Maria," or police wagon. Only three weeks previously her husband had returned from an assignment to Japan with all sorts of lovely presents for his wife and child.101 Stevens then concluded the purges had "undermined public morale and impaired the country's economic and military strength."102 Later, in the chapter "Will the Slaves Revolt?," Stevens opined, with character- istic sympathy and optimism, It is essential that the West learn to distinguish between the police state and the Soviet people, for if the former are implacable foes, the latter, unless stupidly antagonized, are potential friends and allies. And it is they who eventually will decide their country's destiny.103 While these words were all very impressively prescient (in light of the political developments of the late 1980s and early 1990s), Stevens himself certainly hadn't helped Westerners to make that vital distinc- tion between terror state and Russian people when it counted, in 1943- 45. Indeed, in his 1945 book he had written: Even people in America who are strongly opposed to the Soviet system, if not blinded by prejudice, must admit that in its preparation for the Nazi attack and in its conduct of the war, the Soviet Government has shown considerable foresight and a capacity for leadership. It is impossible, as some writers attempt, to distinguish in this respect between the Government and the people. Without this preparation and leadership, not all the heroism of the Russian people would have availed against the Nazis.104 That he could write this while at the time he personally knew what the purges were like--and must have known how they had decimated the Red Army officer corps (and decapitated the Red Army) immediately prior to the Nazi invasion--was reflective of the sympathetic predisposition many Western commentators had toward the Soviet Union in 1945. However, by 1950 (Stevens') anticommunism was fashionable, unlike in 1945 when William L. White's measured questions about our Soviet allies unleashed such a torrent of abuse from his pro-Soviet colleagues. Indeed, White's treatment by his fellow journalists provoked The Saturday Evening Post to print an article in May 1945 examining the significance of the episode. The following excerpt addresses this anti- White crusade by some journalists: This almost unanimous chorus of denunciation alarmed us a little, for two reasons. The first is that there seems to be a disposition to put Russia in a special category as the nondiscussible Ally. . . . The other reason why the anti-White "line" taken by critics and intellectuals worries us is that it suggests that too many of the people who tell the public what kind of books it ought to read are a little touchy about having the nature of the Communist setup understood by the rank and file of Americans.105 In the following year, 1946, the Soviets attempted to raise Katyn as a Nazi war crimes issue at Nuremberg. The Soviets formally charged the Nazis with the Katyn Massacre and put it on the agenda for prosecution. They may have assumed, after the apparent acquiescence of the West on the matter of Katyn during the war, that the court would be inclined to support the Soviet position regarding this episode. In any case, a Nuremberg finding of German guilt for Katyn would thereby make the Western powers officially subscribe to the lie. As Sir Owen O'Malley had foreseen, the Katyn episode at Nuremberg did indeed become a particular embarrassment, especially for the Western Allies who were actually claiming to believe in the humanitarian ideals for which violation the Nazi war criminals were being prosecuted. The Nuremberg war crimes trials, with their condemnation of mass murder and other totalitarian and/or criminal misdeeds had been intended to be a moral cornerstone of the postwar world. However, Katyn would reemphasize the trials' one-sided nature and leave an inescapable impression of hypocrisy. The handling of Katyn made evident the fact that the trials certainly did not uphold the ideal of "justice for all." Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess removed their headphones in disgust and many of the other Nazi war criminals laughed in derision as the judicial triumvirate (which included a Soviet prosecutor, General Rudenko) solemnly intoned against the German defendants for planning military aggression against Poland in 1939--which they had indeed done, with the active collaboration of their Soviet cosignators to the 1939 Stalin- Hitler Pact.106 A leading witness for the Soviet case was Dr. (M.D.) Markov from Bulgaria, who had served on the German-sponsored "International Commis- sion" which had investigated Katyn.107 Since the Soviet takeover of Bulgaria, Dr. Markov had recanted his previous opinion that the Soviets were guilty of Katyn. Coincidentally, the death sentence which had been decreed for Dr. Markov by the Soviet-backed Bulgarian government was suspended. At Nuremberg, Dr. Markov claimed his earlier statements indicating Soviet responsibility for the crime had been made under Nazi coercion.108 The German defense attorney produced testimony from other members of the German commission that their findings had not been made under German intimidation. Even more embarrassing for the Allies, there voluntarily appeared at Nuremberg Colonel Ahrens, the former commander of the German communications unit--the 537th Signal Regiment--accused of performing the Katyn Massacre by the Soviets. He quickly and convinc- ingly denied the Soviet charges of his guilt, proving that he was not commanding the unit or even in the area at the time of the killings alleged by the Soviets. When the Soviets then tried to accuse his predecessor, Colonel Bedenk, that gentleman also promptly appeared to deny and refute his guilt with equal alacrity. The only alternative to the Germans being guilty for Katyn was embarrassingly obvious, and, significantly, Katyn was omitted from the list of Nazi war crimes in the final Nuremberg judgement.109 Nonetheless, the 1946 Facts on File coverage of the issue of Katyn at Nuremberg only described the Bulgarian Dr. Markov's pro-Soviet testimony.110 CHAPTER 3. KATYN AS A POSTWAR PUBLIC AND POLITICAL ISSUE IN THE WEST With the conclusion of the Second World War in Europe, Soviet behavior toward Eastern European peoples and German civilians raised concerns about the actual intent of our Soviet ally in these areas. The 17 June 1946 issue of Time magazine included an article entitled "`You Cannot Shoot Us All.'" Time documented the Communist-dominated Polish government's intensifying campaign of terror against the Polish Peasant Party led by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, who had taken over the Polish Government-in-Exile after General Sikorski's death in July 1943. According to Time, Mikolajczyk had sent the following message to his wife and son in Britain, "You may let them know that I do not know what can happen to me. I may be killed. I may be deported."1 Mikolajczyk was actually quoted telling Communist Vice Premier Wladislaw Gomulka, "You cannot shoot us all." This was rather rash, considering that he must have been aware that Stalin's exterminatory methods had already obliterated millions of Russians, as well as hundreds of thousands of his fellow Poles. However, like Katyn, such massive murders had been disputed in the Western press by its Moscow correspondents.2 Also appearing in 1946 was the third volume of Waverley Root's The 40 Secret History of the War, entitled Casablanca to Katyn. Root devoted forty-six pages to defending the Soviet version of Katyn.3 Gamely, Root even included Merkulov's admission that a "great blunder" had been made concerning the Poles, rationalizing that Merkulov was referring to the Poles being left behind to the advancing Germans.4 However, Root had already betrayed his naivete about the Soviets when he stated: According to the German report, bodies of Russian civilians were found beneath those of the Poles. Was it the German contention that the Russians had murdered their own nationals as well? Russians might be expected to murder Poles, perhaps, but not Russians. Germans had systematically murdered both.5 During the war, in his 3 May 1943 "Backstage of the War" column, Root had been only slightly more responsible when he concentrated on the political implications of the Katyn-precipitated Soviet-Polish rift--as noted on page 14 of this study. Whatever the opinion of Western journalists and the confusion among their publics back home on the issue, the staff at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after the war well knew that the Soviets had killed the Poles at Katyn, according to Martha Mautner, a new foreign service officer assigned to the Moscow post at the time.6 In 1947, the book The Dark Side of the Moon, authored by General Sikorski's widow, Helena Sikorska, was published. It was her account of the suffering of Polish people in Soviet custody and exile, written and completed in manuscript form during the war. Although the mystery of the missing Polish officers was mentioned, Sikorska did not accuse the Soviets of the crime.7 Only in the "Epilogue," authored by "an Englishman," was Katyn mentioned--and then only to defend General Sikorski's request for the Red Cross investigation.8 Nonetheless, the victimization of Polish captives by the Soviet regime was compellingly portrayed. Then, in 1948, I Saw Poland Betrayed, a book by former U.S. Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane, was published. In his initial coverage of Katyn, Lane did not directly accuse the Soviets of the Katyn Massacre. The identity of the perpetrators of the outrageous massacre of Katyn, contrary to all laws of war and of humanity, has never been definitely established. Perhaps it never will be. But I was to obtain evidence in Poland from Poles whose veracity I had no reason to distrust, which leads me to question seriously the sincerity of the outburst of Soviet indignation over the Polish Government's approach to the International Red Cross.9 Later in the book, Lane finally and directly challenged the Soviet denials of guilt, stating: Even though the Soviet Government has tried to avoid responsi- bility for the Katyn incident, with violent protestations of innocence, the accusing finger of public opinion in Poland is still pointed at the Kremlin; for that liquidation of ten thousand Polish officers would be consistent with the Soviet policy of systematically destroying all elements representative of Polish nationalism. Not only were the Nazis and Soviets in agreement on the annihilation of the Polish state, but they employed similar police-state measures to snuff out the spirit of Polish independence.10 There were also postwar accounts by Polish survivors of Soviet captivity, such as Lieutenant General Wladyslaw Anders and Josef Czapski, who directly challenged Soviet denials of guilt for Katyn.11 The Nazis and the Soviets had not succeeded in eliminating all the Polish intelligentsia, and the survivors fought back with the one, very potent weapon they had: the pen. Also in 1948, the wartime memoirs of Polish Peasant Party leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk were published. He had escaped Poland and death at the hands of the NKVD, after all. In The Rape of Poland: Pattern of Soviet Aggression, Mikolajczyk devoted an entire chapter to Katyn, leaving no doubt that he was convinced that Stalin was guilty of the executions, saying, "But the order--`Liquidate'--was signed by Stalin himself." He based this contention on remarks made by a Red Army military attache in London.12 In his 1949 book, An Army in Exile: The Story of the Second Polish Corps, General Anders recounted his reconstruction of the Polish Army from the labor camps of the Soviet Union and its subsequent political betrayal by the Allies. Time magazine titled its review of Anders' book, "Polish Tragedy." Without mentioning Katyn, the review described Stalin's "feigned innocence" as he accepted from Anders and General Sikorski the list of "4,000" missing Polish officers, many of whom were later disinterred at Katyn.13 This was not necessarily in reference to the Katyn Massacre itself, but to the aforementioned list of missing officers.14 Later in the book, Anders had mentioned the total number of 15,000 missing Polish officers in detail, and described his growing anxiety about them as he left the Soviet Union.15 In Anders' book, the chapter titled "The Katyn Murders" clearly indicated his certainty that the Soviet Union was guilty of Katyn: On April 13, 1943, the Germans broadcast a report that the corpses of thousands of Polish officers had been found buried at Katyn. The German radio was naturally suspect, but nevertheless we were already well aware that something dreadful had happened to the missing officers; our efforts to trace them in Russia had been unavailing, and the Russians had been suspiciously silent about their fate. There was therefore unfortunately only too much reason to believe the German report, for we well knew the Russians were quite capable of committing a crime of such magnitude.16 Anders later cited Stalin's anti-Semitism and a Soviet attempt to smear Poles with the taint of anti-Semitism (during the evacuation of Polish refugees from the Soviet Union in 1942).17 Nonetheless-- remarkably, considering the fact that that his son was missing somewhere in Eastern Europe--Anders was trying to accept the situation as positively as possible: I and other Polish soldiers had, in spite of our personal experiences, entertained some hopes at first that after the defeat of Germany, Russia, free from any menace from the West, would not only change her attitude towards her neighbours but transform her internal regime into a more liberal and democratic one. We were influenced by the pledges given by the heads of the N.K.V.D., though we received these with natural caution. We wanted to forget the past. But our confidence resulted not only from a kind of wishful thinking, but also from our insufficient knowledge of Russia and our tendency to judge things in Russia by European standards.18 Also in 1949, the book The Katyn Wood Murders, by Joseph Mackiewicz, was published in London. Mackiewicz, a Polish journalist, was brought by the Germans (with the approval of the Polish underground) to Katyn in 1943, to record the disinterment. Among other items, Mackiewicz described the eighth, and last, mass grave which contained the final one hundred officers murdered in May 1940. These victims were distinguished by their lighter, warm-weather clothing. German propagandists, unaware of the other two killing sites, had claimed there were ten to twelve thousand Polish officers buried at Katyn, and the total figure of 4,243 was an embarrassment to their case.19 Mackiewicz's book is interesting in that it detailed the murders of Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian civilians by the NKVD at the time of the Soviet withdrawal from the German invasion in Summer 1941. The NKVD was even executing Soviet airmen, presumably in retaliation for the successful German knock-out attacks on the Red Air Force early in the invasion.20 (Like the execution of commanders of the Western Special Military District, this may have been to eliminate embarrassing wit- nesses, since the NKVD had been responsible for airfield construction and preparedness on the USSR's western frontier.) This was further, important evidence that the NKVD's extermination of the Polish officers and cadets was consistent with Soviet policy toward captured territories and populations. At the end of the book, Mackiewicz theorized that if the Germans had murdered the Poles at Katyn in August 1941, they would have attempted to accuse the Soviets of the crime immediately, to confuse their own crime with the Soviet atrocities they were discovering. Furthermore, he went on--bravely, in a book published during Stalin's lifetime--to observe: But for once, with the Katyn crime, the Germans did not need to conceal any clues. They were not guilty and they were only too anxious that the world should know the truth. It is a strange paradox and a very sad conclusion that this truth is still unbelieved or wholly unknown. Furthermore such ignorance contains a danger for the future. Because if the culprit of such a crime [Stalin] is not brought to the dock--what will his next crime be? Or should we not rather ask--who will be his next victim?21 Also in 1949, journalist Julius Epstein assembled a private committee--with former Ambassador Lane as president--to conduct public hearings on Katyn, collecting any evidence and testimony possible about Katyn.22 In addition to Epstein and Lane, the committee included such notables as former OSS chief William Donovan, former foreign intelli- gence operative Allen Dulles, Polish American Congress president Charles Rozmarek, and journalists Max Eastman and Clare Booth Luce, among others.23 Although the committee gathered much testimony and evidence, its credibility suffered from a lack of legal procedure. In 1950, the fourth volume of Winston Churchill's wartime memoirs and history of the Second World War, The Hinge of Fate, was published. Churchill, presumably mindful of British national secrecy and Foreign Office credibility, did not directly declare the Soviets guilty of the Katyn Massacre. He instead candidly stated that General Sikorski had a "wealth of evidence" to support the German accusation against the Soviets and that, in reply, he told Sikorski, "If they are dead nothing you can do will bring them back."24 Discussing the credibility of the 1944 Soviet re-investigation of Katyn and counter-charge that the Nazis killed the Poles, Churchill ruefully commented: This version, to be believed, involves acceptance of the fact that nearly 15,000 Polish officers and men, of whom there was no record since the spring of 1940, passed into German hands in July, 1941, and were later destroyed by the Germans without one single person escaping and reporting, either to the Russian authorities or to a Polish Consul in Russia or to the Underground Movement in Poland. When we remember the confusion caused by the German advance, that the guards of the camps must have fled as the invaders came nearer, and all the contacts afterwards during the period of Russo-Polish co-operation, belief seems an act of faith.25 Even after the war, in the late 1940s, the U.S. State Department (as well as the British Foreign Office) continued to suppress official mention of the Katyn Massacre.26 Nonetheless, interest in Katyn and its significance began grew in the West during the early 1950s. On 18 September 1951 the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously adopted House Resolution 390, which created the "Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre." There were three apparent motives for the resurrected Congressional interest in Katyn. First, Communist atrocities against U.S. prisoners of war in Korea had enraged the American people and were similar in method to the Katyn killings.27 Second, the Epstein-Lane committee's investigation of Katyn had raised national concern and a sense of guilt about America's postwar betrayal of East Europeans. Finally, Democrat Congressmen needed a 1952 election year issue to prove their opposition to Leninist-Stalinist Communism to American voters who had seen the loss of Eastern Europe and China to Communism under Democrat administrations.28 It also gave supportive Republicans a chance to court American voters of East European descent.29 The Katyn hearings began, unexpectedly, on 11 October 1951.30 John J. Mitchell--no relation to Attorney General John Mitchell of the Nixon Administration--was chief counsel. Young lawyer Roman C. Pucinski of Chicago, Illinois, was the committee's chief investigator. Congress-man Ray J. Madden (D--Indiana) was the chairman. Hearings were to be held in Washington DC, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Naples. The London hearings were held, despite resistance and difficulties presented by the British Foreign Office.31 Scores of witnesses were interviewed, exhibits studied, and depositions taken. Additional revelations had occurred during the hearings. During their investigation, the Germans had brought in captured American and British officers to verify the forensic conclusions. U.S. Army Lieu- tenant Colonel John H. Van Vliet, Jr.--a fourth-generation West Point graduate, Class of 1937--was the senior American prisoner-of-war taken to Katyn by the Germans to witness their investigation. Immediately upon his arrival in Washington, D.C., on 22 May 1945, after his release from German captivity, Van Vliet had filed a personal report with Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall's Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Major General Clayton Bissell. Bissell immediately classified the report "Top Secret" and, at Van Vliet's own request, issued him an order not to discuss the report with anyone. Sometime after that, the report vanished--inexplicably.32 The input of the American Army officers was termed "the most significant testimony of the independent witnesses."33 Van Vliet stated that although he hated the Germans, he was convinced of the 1940 killing date by the excellent condition of the victims' boots at the time of their original burial. Personal experience had convinced these American prisoners of war that boots could not survive more than a few months of prison camp life in such fine condition.34 The suppression of Van Vliet's judgement was given larger, strategic implications in the second conclusion of the Committee's Final Report: "In justifying his actions for designating the Van Vliet report "Top Secret," General Bissell said he was merely carrying out the spirit of the Yalta agree-ment.35" and, later, ". . . this committee believes that had the Van Vliet report been made immediately available to the Department of State and to the American public, the course of our governmental policy toward Soviet Russia might have been more realistic with more fortunate postwar results."36 Despite the Committee's efforts, no link could be established between General Marshall and the disappearance of the Van Vliet report. General Bissell's responses to intensive questioning do raise doubts about this, though. After having acknowledged that he classified the report "Top Secret," because it was a potential political bombshell which might wreck U.S.-Soviet relations and disrupt Soviet cooperation in the final military defeat of Japan, General Bissell stated, concerning the report: There is a possibility that I may have mentioned it to General Marshall or to the Secretary [of War]. I have no distinct recollection of having done so, and I don't see much reason why I should have.37 Such studied credulity from a career intelligence officer sorely tested the good faith and patience of his Congressional listeners, and his questioning was the bitterest of the hearings.38 Van Vliet has always supported General Bissell's decision to suppress the report, in consideration of the Soviets' contribution to victory over the Nazis and the overriding need for their pinning of the powerful Japanese forces in Manchuria in 1945.39 However, it is well beyond credence that General Bissell would permanently suppress such a strategically political report on the basis of his own judgement and authority alone, without consulting the political judgement of General Marshall or someone else. In its final report published on 22 December 1952, the Committee concluded, on the basis of all the evidence amassed and "beyond any question of reasonable doubt," that the Soviet NKVD "committed the mass murders of the Polish officers and intellectual leaders in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia." The Committee was "equally certain" that the 11,000 other Polish officers had been similarly murdered by the NKVD elsewhere.40 The relevance to the Korean War was emphasized in the sixth, and final, conclusion of the Committee: 6. This committee began its investigation last year, and as the committee's work progressed, information, documents, and evidence was submitted from all parts of the world. It was at this same time that reports reached the committee of similar atrocities and violations of international law being perpetrated in Korea. This committee noted the striking similarity between crimes committed against the Poles at Katyn and those being inflicted on American and other United Nation troops in Korea. Communist tactics being used in Korea are identical to those followed at Katyn. Thus this committee believes that Congress should undertake an immediate investigation of the Korean war atrocities in order that the evidence can be collected and the truth revealed to the American people and the free peoples of the world.41 American news magazines recorded the progress of the hearings. A photograph used by the magazines was of a hooded witness holding a pistol to the back of the neck of a man whose hands were held behind his back, to describe how the prisoners had been "bound and shot." In an article which pointed out that 6,000 American soldiers were missing in Korea, a Special Committee member was quoted as saying that "Katyn may well have been a blueprint for Korea."42 One typical article, titled "Who Is Guilty of the Katyn Massacre?," appeared in the July 1952 issue of The Readers Digest In this piece, Oxford history professor G.F. Hudson, whose April 1950 scholarly article on Katyn is described in the following chapter, assessed the evidence and pronounced the Soviets guilty of the crime. As to the significance of Katyn, he concluded: No one knows better than the Communist leaders how deeply the truth about this bestial crime can hurt their cause. But the more the Soviet Union obstructs the uncovering of the truth, the more certain it becomes that the men who lie dead in Katyn Forest lie also on the conscience of the Soviet Union.43 Coverage of the Katyn hearings, even the one held in London, was much more circumscribed in Britain. No journal article on this matter was listed at all in the (British) Library Association's Subject Index to Periodicals annual volumes for 1951, 1952, and 1953. The Times of London did publish several small articles, particularly in 1952. One was on 21 April 1952, a week after the London hearing, and was titled, "Katyn Forest Massacre: Alleged Statement by Mr. Stalin's Son." It referred to a Polish emigre's claim that Yakov Stalin had told him that the Polish officers had been "liquidated" and that doing so "was necessary, but that the Russians would do it in a humane way."44 Facts on File covered the development of the Katyn case in the early 1950s. In the 1950 volume, the 18 September 1950 publication of Lieutenant Colonel Van Vliet's report by the Department of the Army was recorded.45 The 1951 volume recorded the unanimous 18 September 1951 U.S. House of Representatives vote authorizing the hearings.46 The 1952 volume covered the Committee's visit to Europe, the Soviet counter-charges of U.S. germ warfare in Korea, and the acknowledgement (to some Allied officers) of Stalin's responsibility for Katyn by Stalin's own son (Yakov) in a German prisoners-of-war camp. More sensational was Congressman Thaddeus H. Machrowicz's charge that Anglo- American commander (and 1952 Republican Presidential candidate) Dwight D. Eisenhower had ignored reports of Katyn. (Eisenhower was recorded as promptly replying on 29 April 1952 that he had been "fairly busy" with other matters at the time of the political, diplomatic controversy wrought by Katyn.)47 What would be the last coverage of Katyn in Facts on File until 1988 was the report of the Committee's unequivocal findings that the Soviets were responsible for the Katyn Massacre.48 Also interestingly, even though Committee hearings were held in London and throughout Western Europe, the British-published Keesing's Contemporary Archives would continue to omit any mention of Katyn until 1988. After the Congressional hearings and final report, little transpired in the Katyn case. The Soviets and the pro-Soviet Polish government continued to attempt to blame the Germans for the massacre. Under Soviet occupation, the Polish people seethed with hatred and frustration about Katyn and other Soviet atrocities and injustices. In 1956, the Polish people's uprising against a hardline Communist regime was motivated in part by continuing anger about Katyn. In a chapter entitled "Legacy of Hate," Anglo-Polish author Konrad Syrop described in his 1957 book, Spring in October: The Story of the Polish Revolution, 1956, the significance of Katyn for Poles enduring Soviet Cold War domination: The horrible crime at Katyn became a symbol of Polish-Soviet relations. In vain the Russians tried to shift the blame for it on the Germans; they failed to produce any convincing evidence to support this charge and the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg made no reference to Katyn in its findings. . . . In any case the responsibility lay in the cruel and ruthless Soviet system, and the mass graves at Katyn containing the bodies of more than four thousand Polish officers strengthened the already existing wall of hatred between Poles and Russians.49 At the moment of the Poles' victory--evidenced by a Soviet agreement to a more moderate Polish leadership--the "insistent" chant, "Katyn! Katyn!" was heard in the streets.50 Also in 1956, the popular, influential book, Deliver Us from Evil, by U.S. Navy doctor Tom Dooley, was published. Dooley chronicled the atrocities inflicted on Vietnamese by Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh Communists during the Communist takeover of North Vietnam in the early 1950s. Dooley described such Viet Minh barbarities as the ripping off of left ears of children of a Catholic province who were caught listening to the "evil words" of the Lord's Prayer.51 Dooley's description of the bungling attempts by an International Control Commission (CIC) to enable refugees to escape safely from the Communist North contained an echo of Katyn. He wrote: Within the CIC committees there arose the same problems that arise in all conference bodies containing representatives of Communism. The Poles seemed determined to be stumbling-blocks and I personally witnessed their obstructive tactics many times. I would take a refugee to the CIC, a refugee who had been horribly beaten up by the Viet Minh. There would be a council meeting. The refugee would tell his story. After hours of wrangling, he would be sent back to the camp. It seemed that the Polish representatives always wanted proof that obviously was unobtainable. Certainly this poor peasant had been beaten--that could not be denied--but what hard-and-fast proof did he have that the bullets which had torn into his arm were Communist bullets? The peasant would have to present something substan-tial in the way of proof, which of course he couldn't do, and not just his maimed body and feeble voice.52 Perhaps a proven ability to rationalize away Communist atrocities against fellow Poles--as in the case of Katyn--uniquely qualified these Polish Communists for their membership in the CIC, to represent Communist interests. In 1960, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities produced for the public record the illustrated booklet, Lest We Forget! A Pictorial Summary of Communism in Action, to remind Americans of the methods of terror practiced by the Soviets. In addition to commentary and photographs of the Ukrainian Famine of the early 1930s, of the starved condition of Polish survivors of Soviet Siberia, and of the political exterminations hastily executed by the NKVD during the 1941 Soviet withdrawal from the Baltic states, Katyn was included with the following comments by the principal author and researcher, Klaus Samuli Gunnar Romppanen: May I call your attention to exhibit No. 49, which is a view of an incident, if we can call it an incident, that the free world has long known but appears to have quickly forgotten. (P. 35.) It is the view of the mass graves in the Katyn Forest, where 4,242 Polish Army officers were murdered, not in armed conflict on the field of battle, but murdered in cold blood because they were not regarded as trustworthy by the Communists.53 In the West, Polish emigre communities observed the anniversary of Katyn. In journal articles and books, a few writers pieced together more testimony and evidence as it became available. The carefully researched book about Katyn which is usually cited as the most credible, scholarly source is Janusz Zawodny's Death in the Forest, published in 1962. In popular reviews, it was well-received. For example, in Saturday Review of Literature reviewer H.C. Wolfe opined: An objective, painstakingly documented report that, unless additional information is revealed some day from Moscow's secret files, will remain the definitive work on the subject. . . . Scrupulously sifting every shred of available evidence from far- flung sources, interviewing numerous survivors of Polish prison camps in Russia, and weaving a tortuous way through tangled wartime politics and propaganda, Dr. Zawodny pieced together a mosaic of facts that shaped themselves into a finger of accusation. . . . The murder victims were . . . the very men who would have provided leadership for postwar Poland. Their loss was tragic both for their families and the new Poland. Dr. Zawodny's findings indict the Kremlin.54 Further discussion of Zawodny's book appears in the following chapter of this study which deals with academic coverage of the issue in the West. In 1962, New York Herald Tribune journalist Seymour Freidin mentioned Katyn in his book, The Forgotten People. Freidin's description of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe included this introductory passage about Poland: The man, now in Britain, was not a Jew. On the cinders of the old Ghetto, however, it was hard to reconcile anti-Semitic feelings with the Polish plight. Under the Germans, they had both suffered as inferior peoples. There also was the concentration camp, Auschwitz, in Poland, which will live forever infamous in man's memories. At the same time, Poles, even the younger ones, never forget that their officer corps was liquidated in the Katyn Forest during the war. "The Russians did it, of course," Polish students have told me repeatedly. "It was the Nazis, but they left a suspicion of doubt," was the way a Polish [Communist] central committee member described the episode to me.55 More significant to the public record was the U.S. Government's 1963 publication of Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943, Vol. III, Diplomatic Papers. These documents revealed that even before the Katyn controversy, U.S. State Department officials had been aware of anti-Polish Soviet activities. Concern about the Soviets breaking off diplomatic relations with the London Polish government had been expressed by General Sikorski, and President Roosevelt had felt moved to send him, on 12 April 1943, a letter reassuring him of American support.56 The Katyn affair, itself, consumed many pages. Its diplomatic repercussions were felt through the summer of 1943. Significant was President Roosevelt's 26 April 1943 telegram to Stalin, wherein he stated, "In my opinion Sikorski has in no way acted with the Hitler gang but instead he has made a mistake in taking up this particular matter with the International Red Cross."57 Russia at War: 1941-1945, by wartime Moscow correspondent Alexan- der Werth, was published in 1964. Werth clearly indicated his opinion that it was "more than probable, if not absolutely certain" that the Soviets had been responsible for Katyn. Werth was strongly sympathetic to the wartime suffering of the peoples of the Soviet Union, and his verdict about Katyn carried considerable weight.58 In 1965, an English translation of the 1948 book, The Crime of Katyn: Facts and Documents, was published in London by the Polish Cultural Foundation. The 1948 preface and 1965 foreword were both written by General Anders. In careful detail, the book reviewed the sequence of events and evaluates the evidence of the German and Russian investigative commissions. It contained first-person testimonies, including that of one Ivan Krivozertzev, a local Katyn resident who had worked as a laborer for the occupying Germans. Krivozertzev first drew the Germans' attention to the Polish graves, in 1943. He later fled the returning Soviets and in Autumn 1946 finally arrived in Ancona, Italy, at Polish 2nd Army Corps headquarters, where he reported his experience. (In 1947, he was found hanged in a barn outside a "displaced persons"-- refugee--camp in Britain.)59 The 1965 edition of The Crime of Katyn includes material not in the 1948 version. For example, the testimony from U. S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Van Vliet during the Congressional committee hearings is mentioned. In 1971 there appeared Khrushchev Remembers, the first volume of the memoirs of post-Stalin Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. Although Khrushchev refrained from any mention of Katyn, a prefatory note by Sovietologist Edward Crankshaw to the "Advance into Poland" subchapter mentioned the NKVD's killing of the Poles at Katyn and the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Polish people to Siberia.60 A veritable crusader on the issue of Katyn was Louis Fitzgibbon, who had a number of books published in the 1970s bringing forth the contemporary evidence accumulated. In 1971, his book Katyn presented some of the most graphic and compelling evidence of Soviet guilt. While he acknowledged the Western Allies' reluctance to embarrass their Soviet ally with an inquest about Katyn during the war, Fitzgibbon's comment on the postwar silence in the West reflected the Soviets' continuing, extreme sensitivity to the issue: After the war Russia greatly increased its strength, its territorial possessions and its potential danger to the other powers in Europe. It would have seemed, and still does appear, imprudent to irritate or provoke so powerful a country, and further mention of Katyn would have done just that. So a conspiracy of silence descended on the matter, and various efforts, presented as appendices to this book, have failed to produce a clear and positive international proclamation of the truth.61 In 1972, British Foreign Office records declassified (after the standard thirty-year waiting period) included wartime British Ambassador to Poland Owen O'Malley's secret report on Katyn. This resulted in a Time magazine article titled, "Poland: Death in Katyn Forest," describing the moral significance of the Western Allies' wartime coverup of the Soviets' killings.62 Also in 1972, journalist Louis Fischer's new book, The Road to Yalta, devoted an entire chapter to Katyn, "Murder in the Forest."63 Fischer left no doubt about his conviction that Stalin was guilty of the crime. This is especially significant, since Fischer was a respected Sovietologist who had been sympathetic to Stalinism in his reporting as a correspondent in Moscow during the 1930s and the early part of the war. Along with New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, Fischer was later accused of having had omitted reports of the Ukrainian Famine in the early 1930s, to maintain his favored status with the Soviet regime.64 Two books by Soviet emigres appeared in 1972, as well. Watchdogs of Terror: Russian Bodyguards from the Tsars to the Commissars was written by Peter Deriabin, a former NKVD counterintelligence officer. Deriabin mentioned Katyn, in the context of the wholesale deportations and exterminations of Poles in 1940-41. However, he used the inaccurate Nazi figure of 10,000 as the toll of victims at Katyn.65 Boris Levytsky, who dedicated his book--The Uses of Terror: The Soviet Secret Police, 1917-1970--to his liquidated parents and brothers, murdered by the Soviets, did not mention Katyn, even though he did describe the incarceration, suffering, and eventual release (of some) of the Polish deportees. One interesting postwar development--viewed by some commentators as an example of how far the Soviets would go in their attempts to blot out the memory of Katyn--was the erection of the Soviet war memorial at "Khatyn," to 149 Russian villagers massacred by Nazi German troops in Spring 1943--the same time of the announcement of Katyn by the Germans.66 This was chronicled in (the 1983 English translation of) the 1978 edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The "Khatyn" article gave the opening date of the "complex" as 5 July 1969. Its centerpiece statue, "The Defiant Man," won a Lenin Prize in 1970.67 There was, of course, no mention of Katyn--as a geographical place or even as the site of a "fascist atrocity"--in the Encyclopedia. In 1974, U. S. President Richard M. Nixon--attempting to salvage his tottering presidency with a collegial visit to Soviet leader Brezhnev at Minsk--visited the Soviet Khatyn memorial and obligingly refrained from any mention of Katyn, on up the road to Moscow, which could have embarrassed his hosts and hampered continued progress toward detente. Nonetheless, and to its credit, the New York Times felt constrained to point out the difference in a separate article.68 Of the hundreds of villages massacred by the Nazis, it was suspicious that the Soviets chose one having a name so similar to Katyn for their memorial. In 1987, the accusation was made that "Khatyn" was, in part, "an Orwellian memory hole" intended to disinform the Western tourists and peace activists taken to it by their Soviet guides.69 In September 1976, the erection of a Katyn memorial in London was boycotted by the British government, because it had the inscription, "Katyn, 1940," indicating Soviet guilt. The British weekly, The Economist, acidly observed, "Last week the British foreign office made a diplomatic but ill-judged and unsuccessful attempt to protect the reputation of Joseph Stalin."70 An accompanying article indicated The Economist's own opinion with the title, "Almost Certainly by Russia."71 Even the Royal British Legion, a veterans' organization, was refused permission to send a bugler, until protests by a "Mr. Winston Churchill MP"--the former Prime Minister's grandson--proved compelling.72 Katyn became an issue of controversy again during 1980. In the Gdansk shipyards, according to British journalist Timothy Garton Ash, its mention epitomized and steeled the uncompromising anger which produced Polish Solidarity.73 A Solidarity monument to Katyn, speci- fying the date of the killings as 1940--and, therefore, the guilt for it being the Soviets'--was raised in Warsaw and then torn down by the Polish Communist government.74 Indeed, the Soviet massacre of the Polish leadership in 1940--of which Katyn was only one instance, albeit the best known--was the crime which underlay and made illegitimate Poland's Soviet-installed Communist government. Katyn's memory (or, worse yet, any Soviet admission of it) was a direct threat to that government's continued existence. Realizing this, an earlier Polish leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, had once even declined Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's offer to admit Soviet responsibility for Katyn.75 Katyn was the "Achilles Heel" of Soviet domination of Poland, and control of Poland was the keystone of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.76 The 1982 book, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, by former Polish Army counterintelligence officer Michael Checinski, described the postwar persecution of Jews by the Polish Communist regime and by anti-Communist rebels who held Jews responsible for the Communist takeover. Checinski estimated that the takeover cost as many as 100,000 lives, and that 8,000 pro-Communists--about 20 per cent of whom were innocent Jews--were killed in return or revenge.77 As to the reset- tlement of some of the lands Poland lost to the Soviet Union, Checinski wrote: True to the Stalinist doctrine of collective guilt and organized genocide, over 150,000 civilian Ukrainians were forcibly deported from their land and "resettled" in the Recovered Territories in western and northern Poland. During this "resettlement action," known as "Operation Wisla," thousands of children, women, and old people were killed, sometimes being burned alive in their villages.78 In his only reference to Katyn, Checinski wrote that the Polish Army officer corps had been so decimated by Katyn and postwar Stalinist purges, that "some 15,000 Soviet officers, including at least 40 generals, served in the Polish armed forces."79 The coincidence of that number with the military toll of Stalin's Spring 1940 massacres of Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere is noteworthy. Nonetheless, the Polish people nurtured the memory of Katyn. On pages 166-67 of the 1982 picture book, Portrait of Poland, there was a photograph with the caption, `Poland is not yet lost . . .'--the first line of the national anthem stands over the patch of grass in the Warsaw municipal (and formerly military) cemetery which in 1981 was spontaneously made into an unofficial memorial to the victims of the Katyn massacre. A cross that was set up here was removed overnight by the secret police, and the Mayor of Warsaw thereupon issued a public appeal for donations to institute an official memorial. The bodies of more than 4000 Polish officers were found in 1943 in a mass forest grave at Katyn (now in Soviet territory). [Actually, Katyn has always been in Russian-Soviet territory.] The officers had been captured by Soviet forces when they occupied Eastern Poland in October 1939, and the Russians stand accused of the massacre; but they have never, even in periods of de-Stalinization, acknowledged responsibility. The Poles have not forgotten.80 In August 1982 some Scandinavian peace marchers, who were sympathe- tic to the Polish Solidarity movement, had the moral courage to boycott the Soviet "Khatyn" memorial, citing "unanswered questions" regarding Katyn. This enraged their Soviet hosts, including propagandist Yuri Zhukov, who accused the Scandinavian peace group of containing "Nazi sympathizers" who had instigated the boycott.81 Typically, though, American visitors were more naive and pliant. An example of this was a 1984 account of a visit to the Soviet memorial at Khatyn, by Reverend James O. Watkins Jr. of the Presbyterian Peace- making Program.82 Subsequently informed about Katyn and requested to distinguish between the two placenames in his "Peace Notes" column, he only did so under considerable political pressure. In the 1984 book Fearful Warriors, author Ralph K. White bewailed the probability of thermonuclear war and had challenged the motives and mindsets of the opposing Western and Eastern blocs, much as English author A.A. Milne had done in his book Peace with Honour, in the 1930s. After beginning the book with a chapter entitled "Empathizing with the Soviet Government," White rendered his version of a comparative history of the East-West conflict. Although he mentioned the border dispute between the London Polish government and the Soviets, he omitted any mention of Soviet guilt for the Katyn Massacre or of Soviet inaction during the Warsaw Uprising being two of the early causes of anti-Soviet feeling in the West.83 However, the Poles were carefully escalating their opposition to the Soviets, and in 1985 Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev agreed to respond to some Polish concerns, in an attempt to defuse the anti-Soviet rancor. During a meeting with Polish First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski, Gorbachev agreed to set up a joint Russo-Polish historical commission to examine what Solidarity leaders had called the "blank spots" of their two nations' mutual histories. Items to be studied included Stalin's 1938 extermination of the Polish Communist Party leaders, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact which eliminated Poland, mass deportations of Poles to Siberia and other regions of the Soviet Union in 1939-40, and the Red Army's failure to relieve the siege of Warsaw in August 1944. The blank spot initially considered too sensitive to examine was Katyn.84 This ill-advised omission only infuriated the Poles. Finally, in March 1988, one member of the Polish national political assembly, the Seym, even had the audacity to break the taboo against the use of the word "Katyn." Even more explosively, Ryszard Bender raised the Katyn issue as a test of "Glasnost"--Soviet leader Gorbachev's new policy of openness--demanding to know, in regard to the unknown fate of the other Polish officers, "Where are their graves? Do we have `glasnost' or not?"85 Bender specifically stated that the truth about the Katyn Massacre had to be divulged before Poland and the Soviet Union could have genuinely friendly relations.86 Meanwhile, in February 1988, fifty-nine prominent Polish dissidents had submitted a letter to the principal Soviet press agencies, demanding an open Russo-Polish investigation of Katyn and the truth.87 At the same time, Soviet members of the historical commission became noticeably more intractable on the issue of Katyn. Responding to its people, and to the heat of their outrage, the Polish government stopped blaming the Germans for Katyn in March 1988.88 At the Poles' instigation, Katyn became a formal agenda item for the "blank spots" commission. Polish commission members simply demanded more documents from the Soviets about the Polish officers and cadets who had been in their care. The Katyn issue had now become the "blank spots" commission's most important issue.89 On his June 1988 visit to the Soviet Union, Polish Cardinal Glemp emphasized the importance of the truth about Katyn to Russo-Polish relations. As RAND/UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior analyst, Thomas S. Szayna, commented: In doing so, he cut to the very heart of the matter: as horrible as the massacre was, it was not so much the event as the deceit, the lies, and the official falsification of history surrounding it that caused Polish bitterness toward the Russians.90 The book Katyn Killings: In the Record, by U.S. Marine officer John H. Lauck, appeared in 1988. This was largely a compilation of facts and documents which had been previously published, particularly pertinent excerpts from the Congressional hearings.91 The issue of Katyn was so powerful and compelling that it could be utilized as a potent political weapon even by an individual citizen. This was demonstrated when I used it to temper the anti-military, pro- Soviet fervor in Alaska in 1988. On 21 April 1988, the very day before the arrival in Juneau of longtime Gorbachev friend and "glasnost" spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, the Juneau Empire published my article, "Sunday, April 24th: A Day to Remember Katyn." Basically, I asked my fellow Alask