Katyn -- 1952 US Congressional findings

[David Thompson]

Please try to keep arguments on Katyn on the main Katyn thread at:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=56940

Use these document threads for factual references in your main thread posts.

[Sven-Eric]

Does anyone know if the hearings itself of about 2300 pages are available online somewhere?

Regards,
Sven-Eric

[David Thompson]

Sven-Eric -- I have not seen the full report posted anywhere on the internet as yet, though "hard copies" are available at most major libraries in the US.

[michael mills]

From the conclusions of the report:

In the course of its investigation, this committee has observed a striking similarity between what happened to the Polish officers in Katyn and the events now taking place in Korea. We unanimously agree that this committee would be remiss in its duty to the American people and the free people of the world if it failed to point out that the identical evasions by the Soviets to the Polish Government while the Poles were searching for their 15,000 missing officers in 1941, appear again in the delaying tactics now being used by the Communists in Korea.

This committee feels that Katyn may well have been a blueprint for Korea. Just as the Soviets failed for almost 2 years to account for the missing Polish officers, so to this day the Communists in Korea have failed to account for many thousands of captured United Nations soldiers. Among these are 8,000 Americans whom General Ridgway described as atrocity victims in his report to the United Nations last July, and the estimated 60,000 South Koreans still unaccounted for.

The Communists' delaying tactics in the Korean peace talks today may be from the same cloth as the nebulous replies received from the Soviets by the Poles in 1941-42 while they searched for their missing officers.

The above seems to have been the contemporary "hidden agenda" of the Republican majority on the Select Congressional Committee. Elsewhere in the report, the Select Committee took the opportunity to make some trenchant criticisms of the Roosevelt Administration for its failure to press the Soviet Government for the truth about Katyn - another "hidden agenda" no doubt.

[David Thompson]

For interested readers and Sven-Eric:

The Katyn Forest Massacre : hearings before the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, Eighty-second Congress, first[-second] session, on investigation of the murder of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia .. (1952)
vol. 1
http://www.archive.org/details/katynforestmassa01unit
vol. 2 – not available
vol. 3
http://www.archive.org/details/katynforestmassa03unit
vol. 4
http://www.archive.org/details/katynforestmassa04unit
vol. 5
http://www.archive.org/details/katynforestmassa05unit
vol. 6
http://www.archive.org/details/katynforestmassa06unit
vol. 7
http://www.archive.org/details/katynforestmassa07unit

[henryk]

https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7989/Ar ... re-coverup

Polish state history institute slams Russia over Katyn Massacre 'cover-up'
Polskie Radio 08.05.2020 07:00

Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance has lambasted what it described as “a new wave of efforts to cover up the traces of the Katyn crime by the authorities of present-day Russia.”

Jarosław Szarek, head of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).Photo: PAP/Darek Delmanowicz
The Polish government-affiliated history institute was reacting after two plaques commemorating the victims of Katyn were reportedly removed from the building of the former regional headquarters of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, in the town of Tver, 180 km north-west of Moscow.

It was in Tver (known as Kalinin until 1990) that, in 1940, about 6,000 Polish POWs from the Ostashkov camp were executed, as part of what became known as the Katyn Massacre, the killing of some 22,000 Poles. The bilingual inscription, in Russian and Polish, on one of the plaques read: “In memory of the POWs from the Ostashkov camp killed by the NKVD in Kalinin. A warning to the world.”

At the end of 2019, the regional prosecutor’s office in Tver asked the town authorities to remove the plaques, claiming they had been mounted in violation of regulations. The office also asserted that the inscriptions were not based on documented facts. The head of the Institute of National Remembrance, Jarosław Szarek, has told public broadcaster Polish Radio that the removal of the plaques is part of “a new form of Russia’s historical policy,” adding that in presenting the history of World War II “the Russian authorities are returning to the communist, Soviet-era narrative.” Szarek said that the dismantling of the plaques in tribute to Poles murdered by the NKVD “will not efface the memory of the [Katyn] crime.”

The events in Tver were first reported by Radio Svoboda, which cited local activists who take care of the sites of remembrance of the victims of repression in the town. According to Tvernews.ru, among those who took part in the dismantling of the plaques was one Maxim Kormushkin, an activist of the National-Liberation Movement (NOD), a pro-government organisation that has been repeatedly accused by the independent media of attacks and provocations aimed at opposition leaders.

The Polish embassy in Moscow has been kept informed about the events in Tver.
(mk/gs)

[history1]

https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7989/Ar ... re-coverup

Polish state history institute slams Russia over Katyn Massacre 'cover-up'
Polskie Radio 08.05.2020 07:00
[...]
It was in Tver (known as Kalinin until 1990) that, in 1940, about 6,000 Polish POWs from the Ostashkov camp were executed, as part of what became known as the Katyn Massacre, the killing of some 22,000 Poles. [...]
The Polish embassy in Moscow has been kept informed about the events in Tver.
(mk/gs)

Szarek and the IPN should better care to tell about the Polish Jews murdered by fellow Poles and not hide this part of Polands history. They´re truly the last who need to complain about others making things up or hide something.
In fact the number of Polis victims in the Katyn massacre is about 4400. That overall ~22000 Poles were killed by the Soviets has nothing to do with Katyn.
And it´s a long road from Twer to Katyn. Most important is that the victims are remembered, a plaque on a NKVD building in a city is to negiogate.
https://goo.gl/maps/8XfWAvYsmq1QFvvA9
I didn´t hear that the IPN complains about that there is no plaque on this house for murdered Jewish victims from Germany, Austria or the Protectorat Bohemia and Morawa killed by the NKVD?

[wm]

The plague was removed because was "were not based on documented facts" following the well known, based on fake history Putin's attacks on Poland.

I don't quite understand why the IPN, i.e., [Polish] Institute of National Remembrance should concern itself with people murdered in Austria.

[history1]

[...]
I don't quite understand why the IPN, i.e., [Polish] Institute of National Remembrance should concern itself with people murdered in Austria.

It seems you don´t care for NKVD victims just as the IPN. They care only for ethnic Poles and even not for Polish Jews murdered by ethnic Poles.
I did NOT wrote "people murdered in Austria" but "people murdered by the NKVD from Austria". That´s a huge difference!

[henryk]

In fact the number of Polis victims in the Katyn massacre is about 4400. That overall ~22000 Poles were killed by the Soviets has nothing to do with Katyn.
And it´s a long road from Twer to Katyn. Most important is that the victims are remembered, a plaque on a NKVD building in a city is to negiogate.
https://goo.gl/maps/8XfWAvYsmq1QFvvA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

The Katyn massacre[a] was a series of mass executions of about 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedwabne_pogrom

The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust.[3]
At least 340 men, women and children were murdered, some 300 of whom were locked in a barn and set on fire. About 40 ethnic-Poles were implicated in the murders.[a] German military police were present in the town at the time.
............................................................
Knowledge of the massacre only became widespread in 1999-2003 due to the work of Polish filmmakers, journalists, and academics, in particular the 2001 English version of Jan T. Gross' book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Public interest in the incident prompted an official murder investigation in 2000-2003 by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, which confirmed that the main perpetrators were ethnic Poles. The country was shocked by the findings, which challenged common narratives regarding the Holocaust in Poland, wherein perpetrators were identified as Germans, not Poles. In a 2001 memorial ceremony at Jedwabne, Poland's President Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologized on behalf of the country. A decade later, the apology was repeated by President Bronisław Komorowski.

[history1]

Henryk, I really wonder. I bought a Polish book about the Katyn massacre and it is only about the victims murdered and burried in Katyn. And not a single sentence about the other Poles murdered by the Soviets. I don´t care what the Wiki page says as I know that scholars about the Holocaust are blocked there due to political/nationalists influence.

Regarding Jedwabne: Well it´s one thing to admid that bt another to publish exlsueively and permanent informations in social media about the good and heroic Poles. That´s what the PN does. They do not have only one publication in their shop about Polish crimes in WWII but dozens about the good Poles. Why?

[henryk]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/the-katyn ... t-1.944225

Jennifer Clibbon · CBC News · Posted: Apr 07, 2010 5:51 PM ET | Last Updated: April 8, 2010
Seventy years after the Katyn massacre, Russia and Poland have made a substantial effort to redress their enmity over a war crime committed during the opening stages of the Second World War. But there's still much left to discuss, historians say.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, met in Russia on Wednesday to jointly commemorate the more than 20,000 Polish officers, police and others who were murdered by the Soviet secret police and buried in mass graves in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in 1940.
...........................
What exactly was the Katyn massacre of 1940? It wasn't a single execution.
Katyn is the name of the forest where the Polish officers from Kozelsk Camp were executed.
When the execution sites of the POWs from Staroblesk and Ostashkov became known, and when it was known that 7,300 prisoners in NKVD [Stalin's security police] jails in west Belarus and western Ukraine were also shot, the Poles decided to give the name of Katyn to all the massacres.

[wm]

I did NOT wrote "people murdered in Austria" but "people murdered by the NKVD from Austria". That´s a huge difference!

Actually I don't care about those killed in Katyń, as they don't need my care for anything, and I don't care about people killed in Jedwabne - presumably for their collaboration with the murderous Soviets.

The question was why should a Polish institution, tasked with researching and preserving Polish history be interested in fate of some Austrians, in Austria or somewhere else.

The Poles were good and heroic. Poland was the only country that didn't collaborate with Nazi Germany. And that includes such fine collaborators like Russia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Belgium, France. No country, except Russia contributed and suffered so much.
Jedwabne was a who cares event, a footnote to a footnote. They were thousands of such Jedwabnes all over the territory of pre-war Poland.
My family miraculously avoided one of them but their neighbors didn't. And the only reason nobody remembers that today is the fact they were Poles. We aren't worth remembering, even the IPN can't change that.

[history1]

[...]
The Poles were good and heroic.

You personal opinion, not more not less. The Sviets saw this sure very different.

Poland was the only country that didn't collaborate with Nazi Germany. And that includes such fine collaborators like Russia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Belgium, France. No country, except Russia contributed and suffered so much.

No one is interested in your PiS-propaganda "the only country that didn´t collaborate with Nazi Germany".
You "forgot to mention "Poland, the only country in Europe which had years pre WWII anti-semitic laws like Nazi Germany. Poland the only country where Jews (which survived the Holocaust!) got murdered after WWII by their "good and heroic" Polish neighbours. And Poland, the country with countless Nazi aids: the Polish Blue Police, Poles in the Trawniki units, Polish partisans who murdered fellow Polish citizens because they were Jews (during WWII),Polish citizens which betrayed their neighbours for blood money, Polish citizens in the rows of the SS, Polish citizens - which again after WWII- did murder even their Soviet liberators, Polish Jews forced to leave the country in the 60ies because of the hostility of their good and heroic Polish neighbours,more than hundred Poles who in 2020 (!!!) call up in social media to burn Roma/Sinti in their house or to sent them in concentration/labor camps in Gdansk at the FB-page of the "Dziennik Balticky" (and no one from the newspaper did delete their rassistic comments !), etc..
Who cares if the Polish government did officially collaborate with Nazi Germany? What the citizens did, that is what is important.
And as this is a thread about Katyn I´ll not continue the discussion about your "good and heroic Poles" which got after WWII convicted to death and executed by Polish courts.

Jedwabne was a who cares event, a footnote to a footnote. They were thousands of such Jedwabnes all over the territory of pre-war Poland.

Ah, Jedwabne with Polish Jews as victims doesn´t deserve to be remembered. But "good and heroic ethnic Poles" which murdered even their liberators do deserve to be mentioned permanently by the PiS propaganda machine IPN.

[...] And the only reason nobody remembers that today is the fact they were Poles. We aren't worth remembering, even the IPN can't change that.

That´s nonsense. Every innocent victim deserves to be remembered and commemorated.

[Sergey Romanov]

https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7989/Ar ... re-coverup

Polish state history institute slams Russia over Katyn Massacre 'cover-up'
Polskie Radio 08.05.2020 07:00
[...]
It was in Tver (known as Kalinin until 1990) that, in 1940, about 6,000 Polish POWs from the Ostashkov camp were executed, as part of what became known as the Katyn Massacre, the killing of some 22,000 Poles. [...]
The Polish embassy in Moscow has been kept informed about the events in Tver.
(mk/gs)

Szarek and the IPN should better care to tell about the Polish Jews murdered by fellow Poles and not hide this part of Polands history. They´re truly the last who need to complain about others making things up or hide something.
In fact the number of Polis victims in the Katyn massacre is about 4400. That overall ~22000 Poles were killed by the Soviets has nothing to do with Katyn.
And it´s a long road from Twer to Katyn. Most important is that the victims are remembered, a plaque on a NKVD building in a city is to negiogate.
https://goo.gl/maps/8XfWAvYsmq1QFvvA9
I didn´t hear that the IPN complains about that there is no plaque on this house for murdered Jewish victims from Germany, Austria or the Protectorat Bohemia and Morawa killed by the NKVD?

Katyn has long ago become the collective term for the spring 1940 operation.