The Katyn lie, inextricably linked with the Katyn massacre, is the result of Soviet propaganda. For decades it was also perpetuated and reinforced by Polish communists. Meanwhile, people who fought for the truth of this crime were prosecuted by the communist security and even murdered.
In early April 1940, the NKVD (Soviet political police) began murdering Polish prisoners of war captured after the aggression on September 17, 1939, by the Soviet Union against Poland. It happened as a result of the decision taken on 5 March 1940 by the highest Soviet authorities, headed by Joseph Stalin, at the request of Lavrentiy Beria – the head of the NKVD. In total, nearly 22,000 Polish citizens were murdered in Katyn, Kharkiv, Tver, Kyiv, Minsk and in Kherson. The victims included professional military personnel, reserve officers, policemen, soldiers of the Border Protection Corps and prison officers. Among them, there were military chaplains of various confessions, Catholic priests, the chief rabbi of the Polish Army (WP) – Baruch Steinberg, the chief Greek Catholic chaplain of the Polish Army – Mikołaj Ilków, and the chief Orthodox chaplain of the Polish Army Szymon Fedorońko.
After murdering their victims, the Soviets tried to cover up traces of the crimes they had committed. After the German aggression of June 22, 1941, against the Soviet Union, the Sikorski-Majski pact of July 30, 1941, was signed in London restoring diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union that had been previously severed as a result of the attack on the Polish state on September 17. This treaty, signed by the Polish prime minister and commander-in-chief, General Władysław Sikorski, and the ambassador of the Soviet Union to Great Britain, Ivan Majski, assumed the establishment of a Polish army in the Soviet Union under Polish command. The consequence was the announcement of an amnesty by the Soviet authorities on August 12, 1941, for “all Polish citizens who are currently deprived of their liberty in Soviet territory as prisoners of war or on other sufficient grounds”.
General Władysław Anders, who was released from the prison in Lubianka, became the commander of the new army. Thousands of Poles freed from camps and places of exile joined its ranks. Among them, there were relatively few officers who were taken prisoner by the Soviet Union in 1939. The Polish authorities intervened many times in Moscow on this matter, mainly through the Polish ambassador Stanisław Kot. Queries regarding the officers’ fates were sent with attached personal lists of the wanted persons. Unfortunately, the responces were extremely confusing. It was explained that all Poles were released and that with time they should reach the places where the army was being formed. As General Anders recalled, the most bizarre answer was given by the Soviet dictator Józef Stalin at the meeting with Sikorski, Kot and Anders on December 3, 1941. He replied that Polish officers probably ” fled to … Manchuria “.
Regardless of diplomatic efforts, Gen. Anders commissioned Captain Józef Czapski, a prisoner of one of the camps in Starobelsk, to find the missing soldiers. For obvious reasons, the search turned out to be unsuccessful.
On April 11-13, 1943, the Germans announced the discovery of mass graves with the bodies of Polish soldiers in Katyn near Smolensk. In response to the disclosure of the crime, the Soviets on April 15, 1943, announced in an official announcement that Polish prisoners of war were carrying out construction works near Smolensk and “fell into the hands of German fascist executioners in the summer of 1941, after the retreat of the Soviet troops, and then they were murdered by the Germans”.
Information about the Katyn massacre also turned out to be a problem for the authorities of Great Britain and the United States. Despite having very reliable information about the real perpetrators of this crime, both countries decided to completely ignore it, and even keep it secret. After the Germans announced the crimes against Poles in Katyn, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill advised the Polish to be cautious and … silent, saying “There are things that, although true, cannot be proclaimed in public, without considering the situation. *–Harsh statements on them would be a grave mistake”.
In the fall of 1943, the vicinity of Smolensk was occupied by the Soviets, and the authorities in Moscow appointed a special commission to investigate the Katyn case under the lead of Prof. Nikolai Burdenko. At the end of January 1944, the commission announced that the Polish officers were murdered by the Germans between September and December 1941. The Soviet authorities tried to use the above “findings” in 1945, at the trial of German criminals in Nuremberg. They introduced German responsibility for the Katyn massacre into the indictment. In its judgments on September 30 and October 1, 1946, the Court completely disregarded this allegation for lack of evidence.
Following the Soviet pattern, throughout the period of communist rule in Poland, official propaganda proclaimed that the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre were the Germans. For many years, functioning censorship tried to delete the word Katyn from all publications. The Katyn lie was also common in judicial issues. Many people were convicted for providing information or distributing studies that conveyed the truth about the actual perpetrators and the circumstances of this crime. One of them was Józef Bałka, a student from Chełm, sentenced in 1949 to three years in prison. He would have been commemorated by the late Lech Kaczyński in his speech at the ceremony on the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. As we know, this did not happen due to the president’s death in the Smolensk plane crash on April 10, 2010.
It was only on April 13, 1990, that the Soviet Union officially admitted to committing the Katyn massacre. This information was provided by the government agency TASS, issuing an article on this matter. It admitted that Polish prisoners of war were shot in the spring of 1940 by the NKVD. Unfortunately, in recent years Russia has made attempts to deny the responsibility of the Soviet Union for the Katyn massacre. An example of this was a conference organized in November 2020 by the Russian Military and Historical Society, an organization established personally by the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Another action was the dismantling of two plaques dedicated to the victims of the Katyn massacre from the building of the Medical University in Tver, the former headquarters of the NKVD where Polish prisoners of war from the Ostaszków camp were murdered and then buried in Miednoje.