Remembering Katyn

Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe. This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn. Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.

The Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn and in other camps in 1940 was one of the most notorious incidents of the Second World War. The truth about the massacres was long suppressed, both by the Soviet Union, and also by the United States and Britain who wished to hold together their wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. This informative book examines the details of this often overlooked event, shedding light on what took place especially in relation to the massacres at locations other than Katyn itself. It discusses how the truth about the killings was hidden, how it gradually came to light and why the memory of the massacres has long affected Polish-Russian relations.

World War II was--and remains--one of the bloodiest wars in history. Not only did millions of soldiers die in combat but millions of civilians lost their lives--some for no greater crime than their religious heritage or their nationality. The Soviets, at first allied with the Germans, incarcerated thousands of Polish military officers and reservists in the pre-established Soviet camps of Ostashkov, Starobelsk and Kozelsk. On March 5, 1940, Joseph Stalin and his lieutenants signed an execution order for 25,700 Polish prisoners of war. After months of hardship and interrogation, 14,700 prisoners from these camps were taken to remote areas, murdered with a shot to the back of the head and buried in mass graves. Later, when Germany turned its sights on the Soviet Union, the USSR allied itself with the West. With the discovery of the first of the mass burials by the Germans in the Katyn Forest (the area from which the entire massacre gets its name), the Soviets attempted to place the blame for the atrocities on the Germans in spite of a plethora of evidence to the contrary. Only in 1990, with the fall of communism, did President Mikhail Gorbachev admit Soviet responsibility for the Katyn murders. Compiled from a series of interviews, this emotionally moving account records the stories and fates of 18 men and women, 16 of whom lost their fathers in the Katyn massacre. The author traveled to Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Canada and the United States to talk extensively with the 18, recording their thoughts, feelings, memories and experiences of the hardships during and after the war. Photographs and maps are included.

In the spring of 1940, Stalin‘s NKVD executed 22,000 Polish officers, ensigns and state officials near the Russian village of Katyn and other places. When Wehrmacht soldiers discovered some of the graves three years later, the Soviets succeeded in convincing US President Roosevelt of the German perpetration. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no clear picture of the crime, and therefore made no public comments. Using thousands of recently released US documents, this book refutes the popular thesis that the Western Allies deliberately lied about the Katyn case in order not to endanger the alliance with Stalin. As well as consulting Polish and Russian documentation on this war crime, for the first time, the diaries of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who wrote a great deal about Katyn, have been examined. Completely new for research is the role that Hitler's opponents in the Wehrmacht played in solving the crime: at the Nuremberg trial they convinced the US delegation that the executors were not from the SS, but from the NKVD. Nevertheless, it took until 1990 for Kremlin chief Gorbachev to admit Soviet responsibility. Today in Putin's Russia, however, there is a tendency once more to keep quiet about the crime or even to blame the Germans.