But three weeks later, the Nazis scored a major propaganda coup against the Allies that was to shake the alliance to its foundations and leave a lasting mark on the postwar politics of Europe. On April 13, the German press agency reported that German army reconnaissance units had discovered a mass grave of thousands of slain Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, near what had once been the Soviet-Polish border. The Germans charged that during the 1939 division of Poland between Germany and the USSR, the NKVD had arrested about 15,000 Polish officers, held them in POW camps for six months, then systematically murdered most of them in the spring of 1940. The German announcement said that 10,000 Poles were buried at Katyn, though later reports indicated the number of dead at Katyn was closer to 4,400, with about 10,000 more Polish prisoners still unaccounted for.29 Either way, it was a massacre.
The early Soviet replies to the story claimed that the Polish officers had never been in Soviet hands at all, that the graves discovered in the Katyn Forest were relics of a medieval monastery. When that story fell apart, the Soviets came up with a new explanation, which remained their official version for the next forty-seven years. The Soviets conceded that the Polish officers had been arrested by the NKVD in 1939 and that a number of them had been interned in a prison camp near Katyn. But they were not murdered by the NKVD, the Soviets insisted. Instead, the Nazis were said to have captured the Polish prisoners during the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, a year after the Germans said they had been killed. It was the Nazis who murdered the Polish officers, just as they murdered so many others. The Germans concocted the “Katyn hoax,” as the Soviets called it, as a means of splitting the Allies.*30
There were several problems with the Soviet claims. Some of them were apparent at the time, and others were discovered later. First, there were the documents found on the corpses. The Nazis displayed hundreds of personal letters, diaries, Soviet prison ID papers, newspapers, and other bits of material that they found on the bodies, all of which offered mute testimony to the fact that the prisoners had been murdered in the late spring or early summer of 1940, a year before the German invasion of the USSR. The method of execution also pointed to the NKVD: The prisoners’ hands had been tied behind their backs with cord manufactured in the USSR, then shot, usually with a single bullet in the back of the head. The significance of this modus operandi was brought home when the Germans discovered other corpses at the camp, these clearly dating from the mid-1930s when the camp was under NKVD control, where the identical method was employed. Other forensic techniques available at the time pointed to 1940 as the time of the murders, though that date could not be established with the degree of scientific certainty that would be possible today.31
The Nazis’ propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, knew that a psychological weapon of unprecedented power had fallen into his hands, and he was determined to exploit it to the fullest. The NKVD crime had the potential not only to split the Polish resistance movement beyond repair, but also to split the Western Allies away from the Soviets.
Goebbels knew that the Poles had been bitterly factionalized since the beginning of the war. The bulk of the Polish armed forces were loyal to right-wing General Wladyslaw Sikorski, who had established a British-funded Polish government-in-exile in London. But Sikorski’s government was divided over which country was the greater threat, Germany or the USSR. More than a few Polish military officers considered the Soviets to be the greater long-term danger to Poland, despite Germany’s ongoing occupation and near-obliteration of their country. This faction was rooted in the military juntas that had ruled Poland for most of the 1930s, when Poland had promoted itself in world politics as the linchpin of a cordon sanitaire of hostile states that could contain and someday destroy Bolshevism in the USSR. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, there was a smaller, well-organized group of Polish Communists and left-wing nationalists who had found refuge in Moscow. Despite nominal support for Sikorski’s London government, most of the Moscow-based Poles had little affection for the general and described his right-wing allies as fascists.32
The discovery of the Katyn atrocity proved to be the breaking point. The London Poles at first refrained from denouncing their nominal ally, the USSR, but pushed hard for a full-scale Red Cross investigation of the Nazis’ claims concerning Katyn. Then a previously unknown Moscow-based group, the Union of Polish Patriots, announced that Sikorski had been compromised by fascists and that his government no longer commanded the support of free Poles. On April 19, a front-page editorial in Pravda denounced the London Poles as “Hitler’s Polish collaborators.” Laying responsibility for the Katyn slaughter at the feet of the Nazis, the editorial asserted that the Polish exile government’s request for a Red Cross investigation was a “direct and obvious assistance to the Hitlerite provocateurs.” The Soviet news agency Tass went further: The fact that both the Germans and the London Poles had requested a Red Cross investigation was “grounds for surmise that the said anti-Soviet campaign is conducted upon a preliminary accord between the German occupationists and the pro-Hitler elements in Sikorski’s ministerial circles.” Two days later, the Soviets severed diplomatic relations with the Sikorski government.33
These events rapidly affected Allied war crimes policy. The Soviets now placed new conditions on their participation in the UNWCC. They wanted more seats on the commission’s governing committee to offset what they perceived as British (and Polish) domination of the organization, in part owing to fears that the UN commission could become a sounding board for anti-Soviet publicity—perhaps even investigations—focusing on NKVD massacres in Eastern Europe. The British had allocated seats on the commission to each of the British Commonwealth countries involved in fighting the Axis—Canada, Australia, India, and even South Africa—thus obtaining a clear majority of UNWCC seats and a virtual veto over the organization’s affairs. Meanwhile, the London-based (and British-backed) Sikorski government continued to represent Poland.
To offset this perceived imbalance, the Soviets now demanded that several of their constituent republics—the Ukrainian SSR, Byelorussian SSR, and the recently appointed Soviet governments in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—should each be accorded a voting seat on the Commission. As the Soviets saw things, this arrangement would guarantee them treatment no different from what the British had ensured for themselves.34
It was a sophisticated political manuever and a good example of how Allied response to Nazi war crimes was often held hostage to political concerns. In 1939–40, under a secret codicil to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Soviets had regained control of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which they had lost in the 1917 revolution. The U.S. and the United Kingdom had refused to recognize this new arrangement, however, holding that these small states remained independent countries. By insisting that representatives of these Soviet Baltic republics be seated at the UNWCC, the USSR hoped to take a long, quiet step toward international recognition of Soviet rule of these territories. What Stalin was now saying, in effect, was that the British would have to pay a diplomatic price for their war crimes commission.
Negotiations broke down after months of maneuvering on the representation issue. The British refused to accept the Soviet plan, and the Soviets refused to participate in the UNWCC. This split had symbolic and political consequences that extended well beyond the immediate question of who would sit on the UNWCC. It became one of the first major splits in East-West attitudes toward the treatment of Nazi criminals and, equally important, toward the Allied management of Germany after the war.
The USSR brought this tragedy upon itself. The NKVD’s mass murder of Polish officers had no doubt seemed necessary to some of the more bloodthirsty elements in Soviet security in 1940, when the Polish officer corps represented the most direct threat to continued Soviet control of eastern Poland. Like the Nazis, Stalin and his security forces may have also learned genocide by doing it, considering their record during the earlier purge trials and the famine in the Ukraine.35 But the N
KVD’s crime at Katyn, and Stalin’s refusal to take responsibility for it, seriously undermined Allied unity against Nazi Germany at a time when the survival of the USSR itself was at stake. The atrocity helped lay the groundwork for the cold war, and in time became an enduring symbol of Soviet-Polish enmity.
For his own reasons, Stalin had insisted that unity against Nazi atrocities be an important test of inter-Allied relations. Now that he had it, the most serious blow to his strategy had come, not from the Germans, but from his own security service.
In early March 1943, just as the British deal with the Soviets for participation in the UNWCC was about to unravel, the former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, Herbert C. Pell, shared an informal lunch with President Roosevelt at the White House. Pell had been without an assignment since the U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Hungary in late 1941, and he inquired of Roosevelt when he might be put back to work.
Herbert Pell was an anti-Nazi hard-liner who had been a valuable FDR ally in prewar struggles inside the U.S. government over what to do about Germany. He was also FDR’s personal friend and former Democratic party chairman in Roosevelt’s home state, New York. Shortly after the lunch, Roosevelt sent a note to the State Department: “Do you think there is some place where we could use Herbert Pell? As you know, he is a very devoted friend to the Administration.”36
Pell was not well liked at the State Department. He was an outspoken liberal, intolerant of State’s ponderous bureaucracy, and inclined to go outside of channels to make his diplomatic reports directly to the President. When the President had inquired the previous December whether there might be an opening for Herbert Pell, Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles curtly noted in an internal memo that as far as he was concerned there was “absolutely no place” for Herbert Pell in the department.37
When the President’s note arrived seeking a new appointment for Pell, the department’s political advisor, James Clement Dunn, first attempted to shuffle him off into negotiating relief for Jewish refugees. This was a dead-end position, in Dunn’s eyes, where administration loyalists could be safely dumped in order to leave the real business of international politics to the professionals in the department. But that failed to pan out.
Meanwhile, the legal advisor at State, Green Hackworth, had been seeking an American representative to the UNWCC. He wanted someone who could “weigh the political implications involved” in decisions concerning war crimes issues, but most of the reliable nominees were considered to be too old for a wartime assignment in London, and the younger men declined the appointment.38 Dunn thought he was solving two problems with one appointment when he settled on Pell for the UNWCC post, despite Hackworth’s objections.39 On June 14, the President formally offered Herbert Pell the office of U.S. representative to the United Nations War Crimes Commission. He quickly accepted.
* On April 12, 1990, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev told Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski during his state visit to Moscow that the NKVD had in fact murdered the Polish prisoners at Katyn, and had also killed all but a handful of the 10,000 missing officers. A radio broadcast by Tass, the official Soviet news agency, stated that “According to … recently discovered documents, those [15,000] prisoners were handed over to several commands of the NKVD, the then-security service, in April-May 1940, and were never mentioned anymore in area reports or [POW] statistical data. The sum of evidence points to the responsibility for the crime resting on the then-leadership of the NKVD department. The Soviet side expresses deep regret over the tragedy, and assesses it as one of the worst Stalinist outrages.” At last report, the USSR had located two other mass graves of the missing Poles, in addition to the one at Katyn, and had begun to exhume them.
9
Silk Stocking Rebel
Herbert Pell cut an impressive figure. At six feet five inches and 250 pounds, rich and handsome, he stood out in any crowd. The Pell family fortune can be traced back to the seventeenth-century land grants that gave his ancestor, Sir John Pell, much of what is today the Bronx and Westchester counties, New York. Pell’s mother, heiress to the Lorillard tobacco empire, was also a major investor in New York real estate and industry.1 For Herbert Pell, Rockefellers and Morgans were nouveaux riches.
Pell had what some called a “difficult” personality: obstinate, more than a little egocentric, convinced of both the rightness of his cause and of his tactics for achieving success. Put more charitably, he was a leader, determined to shape events in accord with his vision of right and wrong. And he was, as it turned out, one of the handful of men in the U.S. government who were brave and bullheaded enough to risk their careers to bring Nazi criminals to justice at a time when such actions were unpopular with most of the policy elite. In the end, Herbert Pell was to sacrifice his diplomatic career rather than abandon his commitment to justice.
He had from an early age shown a rebellious streak. He had dropped out of Harvard to pursue a life of travel and study of the arts. By the 1920s, Pell had lost whatever faith he may have once had in the American business community. “The destinies of the world,” he later wrote, “were handed them on a plate in 1920. Their piglike rush for immediate profits knocked over the whole feast in nine years. These are the people, with an ignorance equalled only by their impudence, who set themselves up as leaders of the country.” Pell thought both aristocrats and big businessmen to be “totally selfish,” as Arthur Schlesinger, jr., has put it, “but the aristocrat at least thought of his grandsons, while the bourgeois thought only of himself.”2
Pell’s family estate at Hopewell Junction, N.Y., was just down the Hudson River from the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park, and the two families had been friends and occasional business associates for generations. Franklin Roosevelt encountered “Bertie” Pell, as FDR called him, at Harvard, where Roosevelt had completed college in three years at about the time Pell dropped out. Later, Pell emerged as an important supporter of Roosevelt’s progressive faction of New York Democrats and served briefly as a congressman from Manhattan’s silk-stocking district. In 1936, Roosevelt named Pell vice chairman of the Democratic National Campaign Committee. After the victory, Roosevelt appointed Pell to sensitive ambassadorial posts in Portugal and later Hungary.3
FDR’s conflicts with the Foreign Service dated back to the first days of his administration. The disputes had often centered on what to do about Nazi Germany, and sometimes Pell had been involved. Roosevelt had come to distrust the European Division of the State Department, which disagreed with FDR’s politics and often pursued its own agenda regardless of directives from the White House. State’s Eastern European specialists, including William Bullitt, Loy Henderson, and George Kennan, leaned toward a strategy of rapprochement with Hitler and an anti-Bolshevik cordon sanitaire with Germany against the Soviets. Roosevelt favored normalized relations with the Soviets—in late 1933, he sent the first U.S. ambassador to Moscow since the 1917 revolution—and as the decade wore on, he increasingly viewed the German-Japanese Axis as the world’s most dangerous imperial force. Pell agreed, strongly backing the President in his controversies with the Foreign Service. FDR even went so far as to dissolve State’s Division of Eastern European Affairs, believing that the group was disloyal to the administration and was undermining efforts to strengthen international cooperation against the Axis.4
Pell had clashed with State’s bureaucracy during his ambassadorial appointments, and the conflict began anew following his selection for the UNWCC. Pell and Green Hackworth failed to get along almost immediately. The problem was partly one of style, partly one of jurisdiction. As Pell saw things, he was working directly for the President, regardless of the administrative technicalities of his appointment. As State’s legal advisor, Hackworth may have had some sort of bureaucratic oversight of Pell’s paperwork, but beyond that he was a hindrance to actually getting anything accomplished at the UNWCC. “Hackworth was well named,” Pell remembered from his first encounter with the man. “He was a little, legal hack of no particular attainments. H
e was manifestly not born a gentleman and had acquired very few of the ideas of a gentleman on his way up in the world. His manners were bad, his fingers were dirty [and] he was clearly unused to good society.”5
Hackworth saw things differently. It was he who was responsible for oversight of the U.S. government’s interpretations of international law, including war crimes policy. Pell may have been FDR’s friend, but he knew little about international law or U.S. foreign relations. For his part, Pell considered his lack of legal training to be a strength in the search for justice for the victims of the Nazis—a laughable proposition in Hackworth’s book. The legal advisor had seen political appointees like Pell before. He didn’t like them, and he had outlasted them all, at least so far.
Hackworth turned sixty the year that FDR appointed Pell. He was by then a puffy, fussy man, a confirmed bachelor with a monkish devotion to the law and, at least as far as the available record indicates, a complete absence of social life outside of his workplace.
By almost all accounts except Pell’s, Hackworth was a highly competent lawyer. He had been a legal specialist at State for more than twenty years by the time of his encounter with Pell, and chief legal advisor, reporting directly to the secretary of state, since 1931. During those years, he had emerged as the government’s preeminent specialist in international law, the drafter of numerous treaties and international agreements, and a frequent delegate to international legal conferences. From 1937 on, Hackworth had served simultaneously at his State Department post and as the U.S. judge at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague.6
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