One of the earliest and most infamous mass shootings of war prisoners amongst the events of World War II did not, in fact, occur in the midst of the heat of battle, but it was rather a ruthless act of political murder. In September 1939, Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians were captured by the Red Army and massacred, their bodies left in mass graves in the Katyn Forest.
This horrific event followed the newly allied USSR and Nazi Germany’s partitioning and subsequent dissolution of the Polish state. They then began to implement parallel policies of suppressing all resistance and destroying the Polish elite in their respective areas. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or the NKVD, and the Gestapo often coordinated their issues, including prisoner exchanges. In order to legitimize the invasion of eastern Poland, the Soviet Union claimed that it was liberating Ukrainian and Belarusian workers from their oppressive Polish rulers. Yet in the process of absorbing these regions into the Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet Republics, the “liberators” arrested tens of thousands of Polish landlords, officials, intellectuals, and officers and sent them to prison camps.
On April 13, 1943, German radio announced the discovery of a mass grave in Katyn forest near Smolensk, alleging that Soviet security forces had carried out executions of thousands of Polish officers. Stalin denounced the claim as a “monstrous invention by the German-fascist scoundrels” designed to sabotage the wartime alliances. The exiled Polish government, then in London, appealed to the International Red Cross to conduct an investigation, thus provoking the Soviet government to sever relations with the London Poles.
Until President Mikhail S.. Gorbachev’s leadership in 1990, the Soviet government continued to deny any responsibility. On April 14, Gorbachev admitted that the executions had been ordered by Stalin and carried out by the NKVD. Documents turned over to then Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski showed 4,443 Polish officers had been executed at Katyn and another 16,000 at other sites, resulting in the deaths of around 20,000 people. The official statement outlining the new Soviet position on Katyn expressed the Soviet Union’s “profound regret over the Katyn tragedy,” calling it “one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism.” Investigations done by the Soviet Union (1990-1991) and the Russian Federation (1994-2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the deaths but did not classify this action as a war crime or an act of genocide on the grounds that the perpetrators were already dead, and since the Russian government would not classify the dead as victims of the Great Purge, formal posthumous rehabilitation was deemed inapplicable.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art6.html
https://www.britannica.com/event/Katyn-Massacre
http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1943-2/katyn-forest-massacre/
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-03-09/local/me-1161_1_katyn-forest
Elise, cool article!
ReplyDeleteI really appreciated how you addressed the politics and ethical debates that occurred after Russia confessed to the Katyn Massacres. Personally, to a degree, I think that further measures should have been taken to reprimand Russia in some way for these crimes against humanity. But, it can be argued that the regime of fear under Joseph Stalin made it near to impossible to speak up and do anything about the mass killings. I read about the formal apologies given to address the Katyn forest massacres: "Vladimir Putin became the first Russian prime minister to pay tribute to the Polish dead"(2010). Furthermore, in an effort to better Polish-RUssian relations, Putin declared that "this crime can not be justified in any way", and that the "inhuman totalitarianism should be condemned". Although apologies and remembrance cannot bring back the dead, it does show how the Russian government is modernising as to address its past and create a more civil future.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/remembering-the-katyn-massacre-putin-gesture-heralds-new-era-in-russian-polish-relations-a-687819.html
This was a really well written article Elise! I found it really interesting that you mentioned that later on after Stalin denied all claims that he was in fact responsible for the Katyn Massacre, the Soviet government did in the end admit to it being their fault. I was still a little bit confused on why exactly the Soviets decided to kill all of these Polish people and found that really, there was no exact reason, which there shouldn't have been either. It was purely just that the NKVD felt they needed to kill the Polish officials. I was also curious exactly how other countries responded, or didn't respond, to the massacre and found that "both British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt were increasingly torn between their commitments to their Polish ally and the demands by Stalin and his diplomats." I hadn't really considered how at this point the U.S. was not really in position where they would be able to "side" with one country versus another. It was also investigated a bit later on during the Cold War time (1950-1951)
ReplyDeleteSource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre#Western_response
This was a very well blog with a lot of information! I enjoyed reading the parts not heard about in class including the consequences of the Katyn Massacre and the reparations made. It's also interesting to learn about how the well known Gorbachev dealt with the matter decades later. His actions(extremely democratic in comparison to other leaders), while here honorable, did lead to the dismantling of the USSR. This provokes an interesting thought on whether the admittance would have occurred without Gorbachev.
ReplyDeleteElise, I saw the topic of the Katyn Massacre on one of the readings we had for homework, and I was interested in what it was about. I'm glad I was able to read this on a blog post! I'm not sure if I understood the event completely, but it's interesting that the Soviet Union was blaming the Germans having caused this event. Upon further research, I found that during this massacre, nearly 111,000 people were executed during this horrible time. It's also interesting to see that investigations did not start until recently and a declaration that put Stalin and the Soviets to blame was not issued until 2010.
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