World War II Behind Closed Doors (28 page)

In the light of the anti-Soviet publicity that was appearing in the Western press, much of it fuelled by the justifiable suspicion of the Poles, the Soviet authorities decided to fight back in the most cynical way imaginable – they attacked the Polish government in exile. In
Pravda
on 19 April 1943, under the headline ‘Hitler's Polish Collaborators!’ the Soviet case against the Poles was made explicit. Since both the German and Polish media had, not surprisingly, refused to accept the Soviet version of events, then this was, according to
Pravda
, clear evidence of collusion between them. The Polish Minister of Defence must have offered ‘direct and obvious help to Hitlerite provocateurs’. In addition, the suggestion that the Polish government in exile might in any way participate in the inquiry the Germans proposed to hold into the details of the mass murders was to strike ‘a treacherous blow at the Soviet Union’.

The Soviets thus sought to conceal their guilt by a straight forward lie, and in the process they deliberately misrepresented the position of the Polish government in exile in London. Whilst it was true that the Prime Minister, General Sikorski, had raised the possibility of an independent inquiry into the affair to be conducted by the Red Cross, he had never suggested colluding with the Germans; but
Pravda
elided this suggestion with a proposed German-run investigation – presumably to blacken the Poles still further. The line taken in
Pravda
, just six days after the Germans revealed the crime, would be stuck to by the Soviet authorities – in spite of all evidence to the contrary – for nearly fifty years until Mikhail Gorbachev authorized the truth to be told to the world.

The British government moved swiftly to try to stifle the protests of the Poles. Churchill wrote to Stalin on 24 April:
³⁹
‘I am examining the possibility of silencing those Polish papers in this country which attack the Soviet government and at the same time attack Sikorski for trying to work with the Soviet government’. He also did his best to explain away the coincidence of the Polish government in exile's call for an inquiry with the Germans' own moves to push forward with an investigation: ‘Sikorski stated [to Foreign Secretary Eden] that so far from synchronising his appeal to the Red Cross with that of the Germans, his government took the initiative without knowing what line the Germans would take. In fact, the Germans acted after hearing the Polish broadcast announcement’. Churchill's telegram to Stalin demonstrates how effective the immediate Soviet strategy of outright attack on the Poles had been. Much to the surprise of the Polish government in exile, its members were now the ones who were being berated for complaining about a crime that – at first sight – seemed might have been committed by one of their allies. Only one small reference in Churchill's telegram – to the fact that Sikorski had said he had ‘several times raised this question of the missing officers with the Soviet government, and once with you personally’ – gave any clue that Churchill was not siding wholly with the Soviet Union in this row.

The defensive nature of Churchill's telegram allowed Stalin to take the high ground in his reply the next day
⁴⁰
He coolly announced that he thanked the Prime Minister for his ‘interest in the matter’, then stated that ‘the interruption of relations with the Polish Government is already decided’ and that ‘I was obliged also to take into account the public opinion of the Soviet Union which is deeply indignant at the ingratitude and treachery of the Polish government’. It is worth noting the lengths to which Stalin now felt confident to take this device of protesting at being accused of a crime that he knew he had committed. For the idea that he was swayed in his decision-making by ‘public opinion’ was perhaps the most blatant lie of all.

Molotov's letter to the Polish ambassador in Moscow, dated 25 April,
⁴¹
which formally broke off diplomatic relations was just as
breathtaking in its audacity in the face of the facts he personally knew – since Molotov had been one of those who had signed the order that had led to the deaths of the Polish officers. He accused the Polish government of having ‘failed to offer a rebuff to the vile fascist calumny’ that the Soviets had murdered the Poles. Furthermore, Molotov ascribed to the Poles a wholly discreditable motive for their action – one that points strongly to the Soviet concern at the time: ‘The Soviet government are aware that this hostile campaign against the Soviet Union has been undertaken by the Polish government in order to exert pressure… for the purpose of wresting from them territorial concessions at the expense of the interests of the Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belorussia and Soviet Lithuania’. Thus Molotov claimed a linkage between issues that did not exist, and in the process used the Katyn controversy not just to sever relations with the Poles but to restate Soviet demands for Polish territory.

So, just twelve days after the Germans had announced the discovery of the bodies at Katyn, the Soviet leadership had managed to produce a position of strength from a potential position of great weakness. And in the process Stalin had clarified his own views about the ultimate usefulness of the Polish government in exile – something about which he had always had severe doubts. The previous year, Stalin's ambivalence about the Poles had been demonstrated by his treatment of the Polish army that had been formed in the Soviet Union after the German invasion. When it became clear that General Anders and his men were not malleable to Soviet will and were not prepared to fight as disparate units within the Red Army, they had been permitted to leave the Soviet Union and fight on the side of the Western Allies. However, a ‘free’ Polish army fighting in the West was always going to be an eventual problem for the Soviet Union, as would a ‘legitimate’ government of Poland based in London. Now, in one bound, Stalin had found the way to free himself of both these troublesome issues. The fissure that Stalin opened here, in the opportunistic moment of the German discovery of his war crime, would cause far-reaching problems for the Western Allies.

But in the crisis of the moment in April 1943 Churchill had no doubts about where his primary political interests lay. He referred disparagingly of the Poles to Stalin, remarking that ‘If he [General Sikorski, leader of the Polish government in exile] should go, we should only get somebody worse’. And his confidential government minutes in the aftermath of Katyn were even more brutally pragmatic. On 28 April 1943, for example, Churchill wrote to Eden: ‘There is no use prowling morbidly round the three-year-old graves at Smolensk’.
⁴²

Meantime, the Germans revelled in their propaganda coup and pushed forward swiftly with their own investigation into the crime. The International Commission they appointed consisted of a number of world-renowned forensic experts, but only Dr François Naville from Switzerland came from territory outside Nazi control. These twelve experts worked at Katyn from 28 to 30 April and were given access by the Germans to forensic evidence and to eye witnesses. No doubt the Germans, who knew for certain they had not committed the crime, were working on the basis that this was one of the rare cases of a war crime on the Eastern Front where they had nothing to hide.

The report,
⁴³
agreed unanimously by all the members of the Commission, pointed unequivocally to the fact that the Poles had been murdered three years before – which meant that it was the Soviets, without question, who had committed the crime. The experts pointed to a number of pieces of evidence that, cumulatively, had removed all doubt from their minds. First, the documents found on the bodies of the Poles – the letters, photographs, identity documents and so on – contained no date later than April 1940. Second, the spruce trees growing on top of the mass graves were considerably younger than the surrounding trees in the forest, and a forestry expert confirmed that these new trees must have been planted around spring 1940. Third, eye witnesses confirmed NKVD activity in the forest in April 1940, and stated that they had seen lorry-loads of Poles transported into the forest followed by the noise of gunfire.

On 24 May 1943 Sir Owen O'Malley,
⁴⁴
in his capacity as
British ambassador to the Polish government in exile in London, sent a long report to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, about the Katyn affair. This followed his despatch of 29 April, in which he had laid out much of the background to the disappearance of the Polish officers. His second report is one of the most remarkable documents in the wartime history of Anglo-Soviet relations.

O'Malley was a fifty-six-year-old British career diplomat of Irish descent when he wrote his report on Katyn. Although his education was conventional for his class at that time – Harrow and Oxford – he was of somewhat independent mind. He later wrote that he had been surprised when, at the end of his career, he had been appointed merely as ambassador to Portugal, since ‘Lisbon is a most enjoyable place but in the estimation of the Foreign Office only of third-class importance’. He asked a number of colleagues ‘what was the reason [for] my relative unsuccess in that Service bearing in mind that nothing I had done had ever met with explicit criticism or disapproval’. One of them told him that he ‘had been too often too right too soon’.
⁴⁵
That was certainly the case with O'Malley's judgement on Katyn.

In his report,
⁴⁶
O'Malley analysed the available evidence in an attempt to reach an – albeit preliminary – view as to who had committed the crime. And his conclusion was devastating: ‘But though of positive indications as to what subsequently happened to the 10,000 officers there was none until the grave at Katyn was opened, there is now available a good deal of negative evidence, the cumulative effect of which is to throw serious doubt on Russian disclaimers of responsibility for the massacre’. O'Malley clearly did not accept the Soviet claim that they had transported the Poles to the Katyn region in the spring of 1940 to work in labour camps, and that all these prisoners had then been killed by the Germans in the summer of 1941. This explanation lacked credibility – not least because the Soviets had failed to mention it when the Polish government in exile first enquired about the fate of the officers. If this was the reason for the disappearance of the Poles, why come up with the nonsense about ‘escaping to Manchuria’? Especially since, as O'Malley put it, ‘it is notorious
that the NKVD collect and record the movement of individuals with the most meticulous care’.

The cool analytical method by which O'Malley took apart the ludicrous Soviet claims about Katyn is in stark contrast to the tone of the last paragraphs of his report – words that are worth quoting at length. Having said that he was ‘inclined’ to believe that the Soviets committed the crime (obviously a deliberate diplomatic understatement, since the evidence he laid out in the preceding paragraphs was compelling), O'Malley wrote: ‘In handling the publicity side of the Katyn affair, we have been constrained by the urgent need for cordial relations with the Soviet government to appear to appraise the evidence with more hesitation and lenience than we should do in forming a common sense judgement on events occurring in normal times or in the ordinary course of our private lives; we have been obliged to appear to distort the normal and healthy operation of our intellectual and moral judgements; we have been obliged to give undue prominence to the tactlessness or impulsiveness of Poles, to restrain the Poles from putting their case clearly before the public, to discourage an attempt by the public and the press to probe the ugly story to the bottom. In general we have been obliged to deflect attention from possibilities which in the ordinary affairs of life would cry to high heaven for elucidation, and to withhold the full measure of solicitude which, in other circumstances, would be shown to acquaintances situated as Poles now are. We have in fact perforce used the good name of England like the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre; and in view of the immense importance of an appearance and of the heroic resistance of Russia to Germany, few will think that any other course would have been wise or right’.

Eloquent words, indeed; and they expertly outlined the dilemma the Western Allies faced in their relationship with the Soviet Union. For although Western leaders – and explicitly Churchill – knew about the brutal nature of Stalin and the Soviet regime before the war started, it was one thing to know that your ally is capable of evil acts, quite another to cover up those acts for him. This was a point that O'Malley made with pinpoint accuracy:
‘This dislocation between our public attitude and our private feelings we may know to be deliberate and inevitable; but at the same time we may perhaps wonder whether, by representing to others something less than the whole truth as far as we know it, and some thing less than the probabilities so far as they seem to us probable, we are not incurring a risk of what – not to put a fine point on it – might darken our vision and take the edge off our moral sensibility’.

After so clearly outlining the problem O'Malley was a good deal less successful in proposing any solution. He stated that, whilst he was a supporter of the dictum that ‘what in the international sphere is morally indefensible generally turns out in the long run to have been politically inept’, he nonetheless recognized that there was little alternative than to pursue the current course of dissembling, and not to tell the public the whole truth. But he did make a heartfelt plea in the final paragraph of his report that ‘since no early remedy can be found in an early alteration of our public attitude towards the Katyn affair, we ought, maybe, to ask ourselves how, consistently with the necessities of our relations with the Soviet government, the voice of our conscience is to be kept at concert pitch. It may be that the answer lies, for the moment, only in something to be done inside our own hearts and minds where we are masters. Here at any rate we can make a compensatory contribution – a reaffirmation of our allegiance to truth and justice and compassion. If we do this we shall at least be predisposing ourselves to the exercise of a right judgement on all those half political, half moral questions (such as the fate of Polish deportees now in Russia) which will confront us both elsewhere and more particularly in respect to Polish-Russian relations as the war pursues its course and draws to an end’.