Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  German Army near Kalinin, but had joined a Russian partisan unit and had finally got across the German lines.

  As regards the trained soldiers, the impression one had was that although they were a very mixed lot, the patriotic propaganda was having the desired effect. They were well-disciplined, well-fed, well-clothed and the idea of being "the first Poles to enter Poland"

  had its attractions. There was a strong element of flattery in the propaganda and many of these people who had been at a loose end were made to feel important now. Many of

  them were, in fact, Poles whom Anders would have mobilised (and taken away to Iran), if he had been given time to do so.

  A press conference was given by Berling and Wassilewska. Berling said he was born

  near Cracow in 1896 and had served in Pilsudski's Polish Legion in the last war. (Nobody was tactless enough to ask against whom they had fought then.) He was on the general staff of the Anders Army but disagreed with Anders's political line. He said that the principal criterion in selecting and mobilising people into the Kosciuszko Division was the man's own conscience; if he considered himself a Pole, he was accepted. Other points he made were:

  It is not certain whether we shall accept Poles who served in the German Army. We may take those who deliberately came over to the Red Army; but shall be much

  more careful with those simply taken prisoner.

  We have 600 women doing mostly auxiliary work in our division, also nurses...

  No political work is done in the division. But care is taken of cultural activities and a big effort is being made to stamp out illiteracy.

  Most of the people have been in the Soviet Union since 1941, or earlier (sic); many left their homes as civilian refugees (sic). Some have their families in the Soviet Union, and the Union of Polish Patriots is taking care of them.

  Father Kupsz has been here only a short time, but judging from the number who

  attended mass this morning, a high proportion of our soldiers feel the need for

  religious services.

  Wanda Wassilewska, in a somewhat pugnacious mood said that the division clearly

  showed that all foreign suggestions that it would be merely a token force were utter nonsense. She said she was born in Cracow in 1905, had graduated at the University of Cracow, was a member of the National Committee of the Polish Socialist Party until the collapse of Poland. She had been a journalist, and, since 1934, an author. She came to the Soviet Union in September, 1939. (She did not mention the fact that she was a member of the Supreme Soviet.)

  The Union of Polish Patriots (she said) was established in April, 1943. The Union had directly appealed to Marshal Stalin for assistance; and had offered to provide the people who would do the Union's work. The Union of Polish Patriots had three

  objects: (1) stimulate the formation of Polish armed forces in the Soviet Union; (2) satisfy the cultural needs of the Poles in the Soviet Union; and (3) build a network of Polish schools and take care of the children.

  There was no full record of all the Poles in the Soviet Union. The areas over which they were scattered were so enormous that it had not been possible to get in touch with everybody.

  The Polish organisations—schools, hospitals, et cetera, run by the Polish Embassy at Kuibyshev were quite unsatisfactory; the Union of Polish Patriots had taken the

  whole thing over. By September 1, there would be enough schools for all Polish

  children in the Soviet Union.

  It was difficult to say whether any rapprochement with the Polish Government in London was possible.

  The Union of Polish Patriots merely dealt with Poles in the USSR; it had no

  pretension of being an ersatz Polish Government.

  But it strongly felt that the future Government of Poland must come from the

  people, not from the émigrés. Poland must be democratic, not feudal.

  Sikorski [who shortly before had been killed in a plane crash] was a good, honest man, but he was too weak, and he was unable to resist the pressure of the

  reactionaries.

  The Union of Polish Patriots was not conducting any propaganda inside Poland,

  but, the very existence of a Kosciuszko Division here would certainly make the

  strongest impression on the Polish people— especially once it started, together with the Red Army, driving the Germans out of Poland.

  Clearly, the whole thing was of far-reaching political importance, and this is not altered by the fact that both Wassilewska and Berling were—for different reasons—to disappear as leaders of the movement before very long. Other, and stronger, people were to take their places.

  Katyn

  In September, 1943, the Russian Army recaptured Smolensk from the Germans, and soon

  people in Moscow were asking when light would at last begin to be thrown on the Katyn murders. But for a long time nothing happened, and it was not till January, 1944, that the Russians published their findings, and also invited the Western press in Moscow to visit the mass graves.

  On January 15 a large group of Western correspondents, accompanied by Kathie

  Harriman, the daughter of Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador, went on

  their gruesome journey to look at the hundreds of bodies in Polish uniforms which had been dug up at Katyn Forest by the Russian authorities. It was said that some 10,000 had been buried there, but actually only a few hundred "samples" had been unearthed and were filling even the cold winter air with an unforgettable stench.

  [The London Poles alleged that only 4,000 were buried at Katyn and that there were two other "Katyns" inside Russia which had not been discovered.]

  The Russian Committee of Inquiry, which had been set up, and was presiding over the

  proceedings, consisted of forensic medicine men, such as Academician Burdenko, and a number of "personalities" whose very presence was to give the whole inquiry an air of great respectability and authority; among them were the Metropolitan Nicholas of

  Moscow, the famous writer Alexei Tolstoy, Mr Potemkin, the Minister of Education, and others. What qualifications these "personalities" had for judging the "freshness" or

  "antiquity" of unearthed corpses was not quite clear. Yet the whole argument turned precisely on this very point: had the Poles been buried by the Russians in the spring of 1940, or by the Germans in the late summer or autumn of 1941? Professor Burdenko,

  wearing a green frontier guard cap, was busy dissecting corpses, and, waving a bit of greenish stinking liver at the tip of his scalpel would say "Look how lovely and fresh it looks."

  Hundreds of pages have been written about the findings of the Committee of Inquiry set up in April, 1943, by the Germans and of the Russian Committee of Inquiry of January, 1944. Both cases have been very fully summarised in a number of books, particularly in General Anders's Katyn. Anders's conclusion, of course, is that, however many millions of people the Germans had murdered elsewhere, there was not the slightest doubt that in this case the Russians were guilty.

  While this is more than probable, if not absolutely certain, it must be said that the Russians conducted their publicity round the case (including the visit of the Western press to Katyn) with the utmost clumsiness and crudeness. The press was allowed to

  attend only one of the meetings of the Russian Committee of Inquiry, which questioned several witnesses. Among them were a Professor Bazilevsky, an astronomer, a doddery

  little man whom the Germans were said to have persuaded or compelled to become the

  assistant burgomaster of Smolensk; he declared that his chief, a quisling who had since fled with the Germans, had told him that the Polish officers were to be liquidated; a notebook said to belong to this ex-burgomaster was produced with this significant, if somewhat cryptic, entry: "Are people in Smolensk talking about the shooting of the Poles? "

  Among other witnesses was a girl who had been a servant at the former NKVD villa

  taken over by the Gestapo, whe
re the German killers lived.

  [Why was there such a villa near Katyn Forest? One might well have wondered.]

  She related how lorries used to drive into the forest and how, soon afterwards, with her employers absent from the villa, she could hear shots being fired some distance away.

  There was also a railwayman who explained how it was impossible to evacuate the Poles from the camps near Smolensk in July 1941 during the German advance. The railways

  were in a state of grave disorganisation, with the Red Army in full retreat.

  Another witness declared that on the roads leading to Katyn Forest he had met large

  lorries covered with tarpaulins from which came a terrible stench of corpses—the

  inference being that not all the killing had been done at Katyn, and that many bodies had been brought by the Germans from elsewhere—indeed old, 1940 corpses, which would

  help to confirm their story about these Poles having been killed in 1940. One very scared peasant admitted that he had been bullied by the Germans into testifying as they wanted him to, during their inquiry into the Katyn murders. All this was very thin.

  One strange peculiarity of the one and only session of the Committee of Inquiry which the foreign press was allowed to attend was that it was not permitted to put any questions to the witnesses. The whole precedure had a distinctly prefabricated appearance.

  Altogether, the Russian starting-point in this whole inquiry was that the very suggestion that the Russians might have murdered the Poles had to be ruled out right away; the

  whole idea was insulting and outrageous, and there was, therefore, no need to dwell on any facts which might have led to the Russians' "acquittal". It was essential to accuse the Germans; to acquit the Russians was wholly irrelevant.

  The circumstances of the captivity and the exact number and whereabouts of the Polish officers and N.C.O.'s, in fact, continued to be treated as a "State secret" which concerned the Russian authorities only. No outsider was ever shown the three camps "near

  Smolensk" at which the Poles were supposed to have been trapped by the Germans.

  It must be said that the Russians did not do much to destroy the "London-Polish"

  arguments for disbelieving the Russian version. For one thing, they did not even trouble to deal with the circumstantial evidence which, on the face of it, was favourable to them.

  First, whatever the Germans said to the contrary, the technique of these mass murders was German, rather than Russian; in countless other places exactly the same technique had been used by the Gestapo in their mass murders. The record of the NKVD, on the

  other hand, rather suggested that people in their care did frequently die in large numbers

  —but through neglect, overwork, bad food and exposure to cold, rather than in any kind of mass murders. Secondly, why kill them in 1940 when Russia was at peace, and there could be no urgency for exterminating even these "class enemies"?

  Then there was the question of the bullets; the Poles had been murdered with German bullets, a fact which—judging from his Diary—had greatly perturbed Goebbels. Anders quotes a witness as suggesting that these "Geco" bullets had been sold in large numbers by Germany to the Baltic States, and that the Russians had helped themselves to them there. But this argument is not perfect: the Russians were supposed to have murdered the Poles in March, 1940, and they did not fully occupy the Baltic States until three months later.

  We now know the London-Polish story about the proposed Russo-German exchange of

  these officers for 30,000 Ukrainians held by the Germans, the subsequent refusal of the Germans to "accept" them, and the "mistake" made by the NKVD in misinterpreting Stalin's alleged order to "liquidate" the camps. But this story still needs a lot of clarification.

  A not wholly convincing pro-Russian argument was that Katyn Forest used to be the

  favourite excursion place for the people of Smolensk, which had not been surrounded by barbed wire until after the Germans had come in July 1941. It was very hard to say

  whether this was true or not. The Russian argument was that there had been no barbed wire round Katyn Forest before the German invasion, and that, in the circumstances, it was ridiculous to suggest that people would have been allowed to picnic on fresh mass-graves!

  Finally, the Germans had been in Smolensk since July 1941; was it conceivable that they would not have heard about the shooting of the Poles until two years later? But all this, too, was very thin.

  On the other hand, was it not possible that the Germans had murdered the Poles in 1941

  —with a view to "planting" them on the Russians two years later? Since there might well have been serious doubts about the exact "age" of the corpses, this was just conceivable, except for the extreme obscurity surrounding the three camps "near Smolensk" at which the Poles were supposed to have been kept after being transferred there from the three original camps.

  Then, there was another version which was put forward by some members of the British Embassy in Moscow at the time—and that is that the Russians did not murder the Poles in 1940, "which made no sense", but in 1941, during their stampede, when they lost their heads and decided that it was impossible to evacuate the Poles, but also most undesirable to leave this "bunch of Fascists" in German hands.

  - If this had happened, that would explain why the Russians were so infernally cagey whenever Sikorski or Anders kept asking about the missing officers. But it would still not explain why not a single message had been received in Poland from any of them—except the lucky 400 near Vologda—after the three original camps had been disbanded.

  The material evidence produced by the Russians that the Poles had been murdered in 1941 and not in 1940 was very slender, one must say. Correspondents who looked at it were not impressed: newspapers and letters dated both 1940 and 1941 (all of them in very small numbers) were, together with other undated objects, such as tobacco pouches,

  medals and a fifty-dollar bill, displayed in show cases.

  Sceptics inevitably wondered whether those few 1941 newspapers or one or two

  unmailed postcards could not have been slipped into the dead men's pockets at some time between September 1943 and January 1944. In 1943 the Germans had certainly put on

  show many thousands of " 1940" objects supposedly found on dead Poles.

  The Russians, in presenting their case to the outside world, had certainly taken no notice at all of what would, in Western terms, be regarded as evidence. The idea that foreign experts should have been invited to take part in the inquiry was dismissed by the

  Russians as "insulting". The answer to such a suggestion would have been: "Are you suggesting that Professor Burdenko or Alexei Tolstoy, or the Metropolitan Nicholas

  could tell a lie?" True, even a benevolent foreigner might say: "Well, if he thinks it in the interests of his country that he should tell a lie, wouldn't Tolstoy or the Metropolitan do it?" But then such an argument would also have been dismissed by the Russians as

  "hostile". Also, there was the perennial element of distrust: even if the Russians were one hundred per cent sure of their case, what certainty was there that a foreign expert might not prove either ignorant or malevolent, in expressing the view that the corpses, for all their "freshness" were three-and-a-half and not two-and-a-half years old.

  [The "freshness" of the corpses is attributed by Anders to the fact that the Russians made a bad mistake in burying them in sandy soil, in which they tended to become

  "mummified". In damp soil nothing but unidentifiable skeletons would have been found by the Germans.]

  There was always a risk of "Western bad faith".

  The Western correspondents who had been allowed to visit Katyn in such peculiar

  circumstances were put in an extremely difficult— indeed impossible—position; they

  could do little more than say what they had been shown; and even any implied criticism of the Russian handling of the whole case, however mild, was deleted by
the Soviet

  censorship. Also, to suggest that the Russian case was as bad as Goebbels's case, or even worse, was something one couldn't do in wartime; it was imperative not to play into the German's hands. Might it not also have been this consideration which prompted Miss Harriman to state in January 1944 that she was "satisfied" that the Russian version was correct?

  Looking back on it now, with all the evidence accumulated by the "London Poles", which broadly tallies with the German version, one can only wish the Russians would open up their secret archives on the whole Katyn case. They must know far more than could be revealed in the days when Beria was head of the NKVD. It was surely also Beria who

  was Culprit No. 1 in either case—whether the Poles were murdered in 1940 or whether

  they were left behind in 1941, for the Germans to murder. But it would, even now, no doubt be too much to expect Moscow to make a clean breast of it merely for the sake of historical truth. Katyn, to the Russians, as well as to the Poles, is still so explosive a word that there is a kind of tacit agreement to say nothing about it. To the Russians it has, one feels, remained an embarrassing subject, whatever their true beliefs as to what really happened.

  All the same, the Russians might help to clear up the mystery in their own favour if only they would produce documentary evidence to show that the murdered Poles had really

  been in "Camps No. 1 ON, No. 2 ON, and No. 3 ON, 25 to 45 km. west of Smolensk" in the summer of 1941. There must be something about it in the archives of the NKVD—if the Poles really were in these camps at that time. But were they? In Poland, to this day, very, very few—if any—believe in the NKVD's innocence.

  And it is, of course, well known that at the Nuremberg Trial, where the same old

  Bazilevsky repeated the same old story, the Tribunal found the evidence on Katyn much too thin to take account of it in the final indictment of the Germans.

  [TMGWC, vol. 17, pp. 355-62.]

  For years Katyn Forest was going to cast a shadow on Russo-Polish relations. It almost seemed as if there was a kind of curse on the relations between the two Slav peoples. For even if, despite Katyn, the Red Army, entering Poland, together with the Moscow-made Polish Army, was at first welcomed by the Polish population, more bitter feeling was, before long, to be created by what came to be known in London as "the monstrous crime against Warsaw". But in reality, as we shall see, the two cases are not identical, or even comparable.