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Auschwitz Museum Director Attends Ceremonies Marking the 70th Anniversary of the Katyn Massacre
A ceremony commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn Massacre by the NKVD of more than 21,000 Poles, mostly army officers, was held at the cemetery in the Katyn Forest in Russia on April 7. Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland attended at the invitation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia. The Polish delegation also included numerous relatives of the victims, Minister of Culture and National Heritage Bogdan Zdrojewski, clergy of many denominations, and, as guests of Prime Minister Tusk, Lech Wałęsa, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Andrzej Wajda, Norman Davies, Paweł Machcewicz, and Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
During the main ceremony at the Katyn Memorial, the prime ministers of Poland and Russia paid tribute to the Polish officers murdered by the KGB and to the Russian victims of Stalinist crimes in the Katyn Forest. A Memorial Roll Call was held, ecumenical prayers were said, and wreaths laid and candles lighted.
"We are under an obligation to preserve the memory of the past, and we will do so, no matter how bitter the truth. There can be no justification for these misdeeds. The crimes of totalitarianism have been condemned in no uncertain terms in our country. This condemnation is irrevocable. We cannot change what happened in the past, but it is within our power to preserve or reconstruct the truth, as a sign of historical justice,” said Putin, who also characterized the decades of cynical denial about Katyn as an affront to the tragic history of the Soviet people. Referring to the Poles and the Russians, he said that "our shared experiences and history should bring us closer together. We have no right to pass a heritage of mistrust and hostility on to future generations.”
Prime Minister Tusk cited Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who said that "one word of truth will draw the whole world along with it." He went on to say: "Today, I want to believe that one word of truth will draw two great nations along with it. Mr. Prime Minister, they are here. They lie in this earth. The eye sockets in their bullet-riddled heads look, and wait, to see whether we are capable of changing violence and falsehood into reconciliation. We must believe that we have found the right direction. We have placed two road signs along the way to reconciliation: memory and the truth. If we go on this way, I believe, soldiers of Katyn, that this will be your greatest victory yet," said the Polish prime minister in concluding his remarks.
In the opinion of Auschwitz Museum Director Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, it is especially important that the memory of Katyn be constructed on the truth. "At Katyn," he said, "the NKVD murdered Polish officers, but also Russians regarded as enemies of the communist system. Memory can thus unite, rather than divide. However, this requires a desire to discover the truth and show empathy."
"The history of Katyn and of Auschwitz are inseparably connected not only by the fact that they are the most important Polish cemeteries. According to some sources, it was the exposure by Nazi German propaganda of the crime at Katyn that prompted Himmler to decide on the mass cremation of the corpses of the victims of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other extermination centers," added Cywiński.
From the memoirs of Pery Broad (an official of the Politische Abteilung in Auschwitz)
"Thousands of p.o.w.'s were shot in a wood near Birkenau and were buried in large collective graves, one layer of corpses lying on another. The graves were some 50 to 60 metres long, 4 metres deep and their width was probably 4 metres too. The camp authorities had thus solved the Russian problem to their utmost satisfaction.
But then came the time when Katyń hit the headlines in all German news-papers. The authorities were unpleasantly reminded of the mass graves in their own camp. At the same time there were complaints from the fisheries that fish had perished in the large lakes around Birkenau, e.g. near Harmense. Experts maintained that this was due to cadaveric poison in the ground waters. That was not all. The sun was very hot that summer in Birkenau, so the bodies, which had only partially decomposed, began to tester and dark red matter seeped out from gaps in the ground. The resulting stench was indescribable.
Something had to be done about it and quickly. In view of Katyń the presence of mass graves was most compromising, particularly mass graves in which corpses evidently could not decompose properly, but came into sight. SS-Hauptscharfuhrer (later Obersturmfuhrer) Franz Hössler, who was arrested in Belsen in 1945, was ordered to open the graves and burn the corpses,maintaining the utmost secrecy about his job. He found 20 to 30 particularly reliable SS-men for the job and madę them sign a pledge, that in the event of their betraying the trust put in them, or mentioning in any way the naturę of their task, they would be put to death. These SS-men were, of course, not expected to put their hands to the shovels and themselves remove the traces of the atrocities. There were plenty of prisoners to do this. Hössler's speciai squad consisted of several hundred Jews from ali the countries occupied by the Germans. They worked in two shifts. Many prisoners refused to do the work and were liquidated with pistol shots. The SS-men, who supervised the opening of the mass graves and the cremation of the decomposing but still quite well preserved corpses, got speciai food rations from the SS mess. Every evening they received 1 litre of milk, sausage, cigarettes and, of course, vodka."
(KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS,Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau 2009, pages 125-126)
The Katyn Massacre
After the their aggression against Poland on September 17, 1939, the Soviets took 250 thousand Polish soldiers, including over ten thousand officers, prisoner. In early October, the Soviet authorities decided to release the rank-and-file POWs, while creating two "officers' camps" in Starobilsk and Kozelsk, as well as a camp in Ostashkov to hold police, Border Protection Corps, and prison service personnel.
At the end of February 1940, these camps held 6,192 police, Border Protection Corps, and prison service personnel, and 8,376 army officers, including a large cohort of reserve officers called up at the start of the war. Most of them belonged to the white-collar, professional, and intellectual strata—doctors, lawyers, teachers, university faculty, engineers, writers, journalists, politicians, and national and local government officials, as well as landowners. There were also Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, protestant, and Jewish army chaplains in the camps.
The decision to slaughter the Polish POWs in the Kozelsk, Starobilsk, and Ostashkov camps, and in NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) prisons in occupied eastern Poland, was taken at the highest levels of Soviet power on March 5, 1940 by the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party, on the basis of a note from the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrenty Beria, to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
First came a month of preparations. Then, on April 3, 1940, the liquidation of the Kozelsk camp began, followed two days later by the liquidation of the Starobilsk and Ostashkov camps. Over the next six weeks, Poles were transported in groups from the camps to the killing sites.
From Kozelsk, 4,404 persons were transported to Katyn and murdered by being shot in the back of the head. At NKVD headquarters in Kharkiv, 3,896 POWs from Starobilsk were killed; their corpses were buried at Piatykhatky outside the city. 6,287 victims from Ostashkov were shot at NKVD headquarters in Kalinin (now Tver), and buried in Mednoye. In total, 14,587 people were murdered.
On the basis of the March 5, 1940 decision, 7,305 other Poles were murdered at prisons where they were being held in formerly Polish territory annexed to the USSR. 3,435 Poles were shot in the Ukraine, and are probably buried in Bykivnia near Kiev; about 3,800 Poles were shot in prisons in what is now Belarus, and probably buried at Kurapaty outside Minsk.
On the night of April 12/13, 1940, while Polish POWs and prisoners were being murdered by the NKVD, the Soviet authorities carried out a mass deportation of their relatives into the depths of the USSR. NKVD data indicate that 61,000 people were sent eastward at this time, mostly to Kazakhstan.
The Germans revealed this crime after they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and used it as propaganda to incite anti-Soviet sentiment in Poland and Western Europe. For many decades, despite all the evidence in the archives and obtained from exhumation at the site, the Soviets attempted to blame Nazi Germany for the massacre. In communist Poland, the subject was politically taboo until the 1980s. Only during the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev did the Soviets admit that the NKVD was responsible.
