other hand, rather suggested that people in their care did frequently die in large numbers
—but through neglect, overwork, bad food and exposure to cold, rather than in any kind of mass murders. Secondly, why kill them in 1940 when Russia was at peace, and there could be no urgency for exterminating even these "class enemies"?
Then there was the question of the bullets; the Poles had been murdered with German bullets, a fact which—judging from his Diary—had greatly perturbed Goebbels. Anders quotes a witness as suggesting that these "Geco" bullets had been sold in large numbers by Germany to the Baltic States, and that the Russians had helped themselves to them there. But this argument is not perfect: the Russians were supposed to have murdered the Poles in March, 1940, and they did not fully occupy the Baltic States until three months later.
We now know the London-Polish story about the proposed Russo-German exchange of
these officers for 30,000 Ukrainians held by the Germans, the subsequent refusal of the Germans to "accept" them, and the "mistake" made by the NKVD in misinterpreting Stalin's alleged order to "liquidate" the camps. But this story still needs a lot of clarification.
A not wholly convincing pro-Russian argument was that Katyn Forest used to be the
favourite excursion place for the people of Smolensk, which had not been surrounded by barbed wire until after the Germans had come in July 1941. It was very hard to say
whether this was true or not. The Russian argument was that there had been no barbed wire round Katyn Forest before the German invasion, and that, in the circumstances, it was ridiculous to suggest that people would have been allowed to picnic on fresh mass-graves!
Finally, the Germans had been in Smolensk since July 1941; was it conceivable that they would not have heard about the shooting of the Poles until two years later? But all this, too, was very thin.
On the other hand, was it not possible that the Germans had murdered the Poles in 1941
—with a view to "planting" them on the Russians two years later? Since there might well have been serious doubts about the exact "age" of the corpses, this was just conceivable, except for the extreme obscurity surrounding the three camps "near Smolensk" at which the Poles were supposed to have been kept after being transferred there from the three original camps.
Then, there was another version which was put forward by some members of the British Embassy in Moscow at the time—and that is that the Russians did not murder the Poles in 1940, "which made no sense", but in 1941, during their stampede, when they lost their heads and decided that it was impossible to evacuate the Poles, but also most undesirable to leave this "bunch of Fascists" in German hands.
- If this had happened, that would explain why the Russians were so infernally cagey whenever Sikorski or Anders kept asking about the missing officers. But it would still not explain why not a single message had been received in Poland from any of them—except the lucky 400 near Vologda—after the three original camps had been disbanded.
The material evidence produced by the Russians that the Poles had been murdered in 1941 and not in 1940 was very slender, one must say. Correspondents who looked at it were not impressed: newspapers and letters dated both 1940 and 1941 (all of them in very small numbers) were, together with other undated objects, such as tobacco pouches,
medals and a fifty-dollar bill, displayed in show cases.
Sceptics inevitably wondered whether those few 1941 newspapers or one or two
unmailed postcards could not have been slipped into the dead men's pockets at some time between September 1943 and January 1944. In 1943 the Germans had certainly put on
show many thousands of " 1940" objects supposedly found on dead Poles.
The Russians, in presenting their case to the outside world, had certainly taken no notice at all of what would, in Western terms, be regarded as evidence. The idea that foreign experts should have been invited to take part in the inquiry was dismissed by the
Russians as "insulting". The answer to such a suggestion would have been: "Are you suggesting that Professor Burdenko or Alexei Tolstoy, or the Metropolitan Nicholas
could tell a lie?" True, even a benevolent foreigner might say: "Well, if he thinks it in the interests of his country that he should tell a lie, wouldn't Tolstoy or the Metropolitan do it?" But then such an argument would also have been dismissed by the Russians as
"hostile". Also, there was the perennial element of distrust: even if the Russians were one hundred per cent sure of their case, what certainty was there that a foreign expert might not prove either ignorant or malevolent, in expressing the view that the corpses, for all their "freshness" were three-and-a-half and not two-and-a-half years old.
[The "freshness" of the corpses is attributed by Anders to the fact that the Russians made a bad mistake in burying them in sandy soil, in which they tended to become
"mummified". In damp soil nothing but unidentifiable skeletons would have been found by the Germans.]
There was always a risk of "Western bad faith".
The Western correspondents who had been allowed to visit Katyn in such peculiar
circumstances were put in an extremely difficult— indeed impossible—position; they
could do little more than say what they had been shown; and even any implied criticism of the Russian handling of the whole case, however mild, was deleted by the Soviet
censorship. Also, to suggest that the Russian case was as bad as Goebbels's case, or even worse, was something one couldn't do in wartime; it was imperative not to play into the German's hands. Might it not also have been this consideration which prompted Miss Harriman to state in January 1944 that she was "satisfied" that the Russian version was correct?
Looking back on it now, with all the evidence accumulated by the "London Poles", which broadly tallies with the German version, one can only wish the Russians would open up their secret archives on the whole Katyn case. They must know far more than could be revealed in the days when Beria was head of the NKVD. It was surely also Beria who
was Culprit No. 1 in either case—whether the Poles were murdered in 1940 or whether
they were left behind in 1941, for the Germans to murder. But it would, even now, no doubt be too much to expect Moscow to make a clean breast of it merely for the sake of historical truth. Katyn, to the Russians, as well as to the Poles, is still so explosive a word that there is a kind of tacit agreement to say nothing about it. To the Russians it has, one feels, remained an embarrassing subject, whatever their true beliefs as to what really happened.
All the same, the Russians might help to clear up the mystery in their own favour if only they would produce documentary evidence to show that the murdered Poles had really
been in "Camps No. 1 ON, No. 2 ON, and No. 3 ON, 25 to 45 km. west of Smolensk" in the summer of 1941. There must be something about it in the archives of the NKVD—if the Poles really were in these camps at that time. But were they? In Poland, to this day, very, very few—if any—believe in the NKVD's innocence.
And it is, of course, well known that at the Nuremberg Trial, where the same old
Bazilevsky repeated the same old story, the Tribunal found the evidence on Katyn much too thin to take account of it in the final indictment of the Germans.
[TMGWC, vol. 17, pp. 355-62.]
For years Katyn Forest was going to cast a shadow on Russo-Polish relations. It almost seemed as if there was a kind of curse on the relations between the two Slav peoples. For even if, despite Katyn, the Red Army, entering Poland, together with the Moscow-made Polish Army, was at first welcomed by the Polish population, more bitter feeling was, before long, to be created by what came to be known in London as "the monstrous crime against Warsaw". But in reality, as we shall see, the two cases are not identical, or even comparable.