10. In the third place there is evidence of those who have visited the grave: first, a Polish commission including among others, doctors, journalists and members of the Polish Assistance Committee, a former president of the Polish Academy of Literature and a representative of the Mayor of Warsaw; secondly, another Polish commission which included priests, doctors and representatives of the Polish Red Cross Society; thirdly, an international commission of criminologists and pathologists of which the personnel is given in Annex II. The Report of this Commission forms Annex III to this despatch, and the reports of the two Polish commissions add little to it. Several hundred identifications have been established. All this evidence would normally be highly suspect since inspections took place under German auspices and the results reached us through German broadcasts. (For reasons reported separately in my secret despatch 52 of today’s date) There are fair grounds for presuming that the German broadcasts accurately represented the findings of the Commissions, that the Commissions’ findings were at any rate in some respects well founded, and that the grounds were sound on which at any rate some of the identifications were made.
11. In the fourth place there is the fact that a mass execution of officer prisoners would be inconsistent with what we know of the German army. The German army has committed innumerable brutalities, but the murder by them of prisoners of war, even of Poles, is rare. Had the German authorities ever had these 10,000 Polish officers in their hands we can be sure that they would have placed some or all of them in the camps in Germany already allotted to Polish prisoners, while the 6,000 other ranks, policemen and civil officials would have been put to forced labour. In such a case the Polish authorities would in the course of two years certainly have got in touch with some of the prisoners; but in fact none of the men from Kozelsk, Starobelsk or Ostashkov have ever been heard of from Germany.
12. Finally there is the evidence to be derived from the confusion, which characterises explanations elicited from or volunteered by the Soviet Government. Between August 1941 and April 12th, 1943, when the Germans announced the discovery of the grave at Katyn the Russian Government had, among other excuses, maintained that all Polish officers taken prisoner in 1939 had been released. On the other hand, in conversation with the Polish Ambassador, a Russian official who had drunk more than was good for him, once referred to the disposal of these officers as ‘a tragic error’. On April 16th, immediately after the German announcement, the Soviet Information Bureau in Moscow suggested that the Germans were misrepresenting as victims of Russian barbarity skeletons dug up by archaeologists at Gniezdowo [Gnezdovo], which lies next door to Katyn. On April 26th, M. Molotov in a note to the Polish Ambassador in Moscow said that the bodies at Katyn were those of Poles who had at one time been prisoners of the Russians but had subsequently been captured by the Germans in their advance at Smolensk in July 1941 and had been murdered then by them. On a later occasion, and when the German broadcasts gave reason to think that some bodies were sufficiently well preserved to be identifiable, the Russian Government put forward a statement that the Polish officers had been captured by the Germans in July 1941, had been employed upon construction work, and had only been murdered shortly before the German ‘discovery’ was announced. This confusion cannot easily be understood except on the assumption that the Russian Government had something to hide.
13. The cumulative effect of this evidence is, as I said earlier, to throw serious doubt on Russian disclaimers of responsibility for a massacre. Such doubts are not diminished by rumours which have been current during the last two and a half years that some of the inmates of Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov had been transported towards Kolyma, Franz Joseph Land or Novaya Zemlya, some or all of these being killed en route. It may be that this was so, and it may be that some less number than ten thousand odd were destroyed and buried at Katyn; but whether the massacre occurred (if it did occur) in one place or two places or three places, naturally makes no difference to Polish sentiments. These will accordingly be described without reference to the uncertainty, which exists as to the exact number of victims buried near Smolensk.
14. With all that precedes in mind it is comprehensible that the relatives and fellow-officers of the men who disappeared should have concluded that these had in fact been murdered by their Russian captors and should picture their last hours – somewhat as follows – with bitter distress. The picture is a composite one to which knowledge of the district, the German broadcasts, experience of Russian methods and the reports of the visitors to the grave have all contributed, but it is not so much an evidentially established description of events as a reconstruction in the light of the evidence – sometimes partial and obviously defective – of what may have happened. But it – or something like it – is what most Poles believe to have happened, and what I myself, in the light of all the evidence such as it is, incline to think happened. Many months or years may elapse before the truth is known, but because in the meantime curiosity is unsatisfied and judgement in suspense, we cannot even if we would – and much less can Poles – make our thoughts and feelings unresponsive to the dreadful probabilities of the case.
15. Smolensk lies some 20 kilometres from the spot where the common graves were discovered. It has two stations and in or near the town the main lines from Moscow to Warsaw and Riga to Orel cross and re-cross each other. Some fifteen kilometres to the west of Smolensk stands the unimportant station of Gnezdovo, and it is but a short mile from Gnezdovo to a place known locally as Kozlinaya Gora or ‘the Hill of Goats’. The district of Katyn, in which this little hill stands, is covered with primeval forest, which has been allowed to go to rack and ruin. The forest is mostly coniferous, but the pine trees are interspersed here and there with hardwoods and scrub. The month of April normally brings spring to this part of the country, and by early May the trees are green; but the winter of 1939–40 had been the hardest on record, and when the first parties from Kozelsk arrived on April 8th, there would still have been occasional patches of snow in deep shade, and of course, much mud on the rough road from the station to the Hill of Goats. At Gnezdovo the prison vans from Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov discharged their passengers into a barbed wire cage surrounded by a strong force of Russian soldiers, and the preparations made here for their reception must have filled most of the Polish officers with disquiet, and some indeed with dismay who remembered that the forest of Katyn had been used by the Bolsheviks in 1919 as a convenient place for killing of many Tzarist officers. For such was the case, and a Pole now in London, Janusz Laskowski[12] tells me that when he was eleven years old he had to listen every evening to an account of his day’s work from one of the executioners, Afanaziev, who was billeted in his mother’s house. From the cage, the prisoners were taken in lorries along a country road to the Hill of Goats, and it must have been when they were unloaded from the lorries, that their hands were bound and that dismay gave way to despair. If a man struggled, it seems that the executioner threw his coat over his head, tying it round his neck and leading him hooded to the pit’s edge, for in many cases a body was found to be thus hooded and the coat to have been pierced by a bullet where it covered the base of the skull. But those who went quietly to their death must have seen a monstrous sight. In the broad deep pit, their comrades lay, packed closely round the edge, head to feet, like sardines in a tin, but in the middle of the grave disposed less orderly. Up and down on the bodies the executioners tramped, hauling the dead bodies about and treading in the blood like butchers in a stockyard. When it was all over and the last shot had been fired and the last Polish head been punctured, the butchers – perhaps trained in youth to husbandry – seem to have turned their hands to one of the most innocent of occupations: smoothing the clods and planting little conifers all over what had been a shambles. It was of course, rather late in the year for transplanting young trees, but not too late; for the sap was beginning to run in the young Scots pines when, three years later, the Polish representatives visited the site.
12
Janusz Laskowski, born in 1908 near Smolensk, knew Katyn woods well, where he often cycled as a boy. A journalist of Socialist convictions, editor of pre-war