The Katyń Massacre: Jane Rogoyska (1940)
Jane Rogoyska, author of Surviving Katyn.
In 1943 the discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk ignited one of the most explosive rows of the Second World War. The identity of the victims was clear enough. They were the Polish military elite and significant figures from wider Polish society. But who was responsible? In this episode the writer Jane Rogoyska takes us back to the scene of a sinister and bitterly contested crime: the Katyń Massacre.
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The Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 was a long-feared event. Something that was not anticipated, though, was the almost simultaneous attack of Stalin’s forces from the east. As their country was devoured, many of Poland’s leading military officers surrendered to the Red Army and were transported to prison camps at Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov inside the Soviet Union.
The map shows the assault on Poland at the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939. Source: Wiki Commons.
As today’s guest, Jane Rogoyska, explains, among these prisoners were more than simply military personnel. Many of them were reservists who belonged to the professional classes. There were journalists, writers, artists, academics, clergymen, politicians, engineers and industrialists as well as senior generals of the army and navy. Combined they represented a significant cross-section of the Polish intelligentsia.
Between September 1939 and the beginning of Operation Barbarossa – the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – in June 1941, little was known about the fate of these prisoners of war. While the Soviets were not signatories to the Geneva Convention, most believed that these 14,000 men would have been treated as prisoners of war. When plans went ahead in 1941, however, for the formation of a new Polish Army, the men had vanished.
The mystery of their whereabouts persisted until the spring of 1943 when the Nazi occupying forces excavated a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest, near Smolensk. From the uniforms of the victims and the objects that were recovered, it was instantly clear that these were the bodies of the captured Poles.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, reacted to the news with great glee. Here, he announced to the world, was clear evidence of Stalin’s brutality. With little known in the West about the Terror of the 1930s or the Holocaust, the murder of such a large number of prisoners was treated as an uniquely sickening event. In Goebbels’ mind, there was every chance that the massacre could be used to drive a wedge between Stalin and the Western Allies at a vital moment in the war.
Hearing the news, the Soviet’s retaliated that Goebbels’s words were nothing more than a ‘vile slander’, a lie that had been deployed to mask another act of Nazi brutality. And so began an argument that was to trouble figures from Churchill to Roosevelt, Khrushchev to Gorbachev, and which would not be reconciled until the fall of Communism in 1990. Just who was responsible?
This question lies at the heart of a new book by Jane Rogoyska. Surviving Katyń is simultaneously a reconstruction of what happened during the early months of the Second World War, and an analysis of the human behaviour – the lies, the mentality, the callousness – that led to such an act.
In this episode of Travels Through Time, Rogoyska takes the point of view of the survivors of the massacre. She shows us how events unfolded though their eyes.
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Click here to order Jane Rogoyska’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show notes
Scene One: March 1940, Starobelsk camp, Soviet Ukraine. Bronisław Młynarski and his friends find a mysterious message tied to the collar of a stray dog.
Scene Two: April 1940, Starobelsk camp. NKVD Commissar Kirshin stands on the steps of the ruined church watching the transports of men depart: ‘You are leaving,’ he says, ‘for a place where I would like to go myself.’
Scene Three: July 1940, Griazovets camp near Vologda in the far north of Russia. The artist Józef Czapski gives an informal lecture about Marcel Proust, delivered entirely from memory, to a group of friends lying on the grass in the sun.
Memento: One of the Christmas decorations created by graphic artist Edward Manteuffel while he was a prisoner in Starobelsk camp.
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Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Jane Rogoyska
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Colorgraph
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About Jane Rogoyska
Historian and biographer Jane Rogoyska is the acclaimed author of Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa. She has a particular interest in the turbulent period from the 1930s to the Cold War in Europe. Her research into the Katyn Massacre led to her first novel, Kozlowski (long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize) and Still Here: A Polish Odyssey which she wrote and presented for BBC Radio 4.
Map showing the location of the scenes in the Soviet Union, 1940
Map background credit: Library of Congress
Survivors of Katyń
Polish Information Centre, taken January 21, 1943. Józef Czapski sits in the centre of the second row in military uniform, Stanisław Swianiewicz is on the front row, second from the right. This photograph was most likely taken in Palestine, probably Jerusalem, when Polish II Corps was based in the Middle East (under British command) prior to their deployment in Italy. (Library of Congress)
Bronisław Młynarski (1899 - 1971)
Bronisław Młynarski was the deputy director of a shipping line but his true passion was music. He was related to the pianist Artur Rubinstein. Młynarski was a prisoner in Starobelsk Camp in the Soviet Ukraine and (as described in scene one) befriended the dog ‘Foch’.
Józef Czapski (1896 - 1993)
Józef Czapski (centre) was an artist and writer who was imprisoned at Starobelsk Camp in the Soviet Ukraine in 1940. After the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, he was briefly charged with locating the missing officers. He later wrote the book, Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942.
Stanisław Swianiewicz (1899 - 1997)
Stanisław Swianiewicz narrowly escaped the massacre in the spring of 1940. An economist, he was imprisoned at Kozelsk Camp with thousands of fellow officers. For reasons that are not fully understood, the papers ordering his release arrived while he was in transit towards his place of execution. He was one of the very few witnesses to the crime. He later narrowly escaped the USSR, in dramatic fashion.
General Jerzy Wołkowicki (1883 - 1983)
General Wołkowicki (centre) was already long-recongised as a military hero for his service in the Russian Imperial Navy by the time that war broke out in September 1939. His fame was such that he appeared as a hero in a novel. It was perhaps for reasons of his celebrity that he was spared execution by the Soviets in 1940.
(1) Joseph Goebbels, (2) Lavrenti Beria and Joseph Stalin and (3) the March 1940 execution order
(1) Joseph Goebbels
On learning of the discovery of mass graves at Katyń, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, attempted to make maximum propaganda use of the news. He recognised instantly that the issue could be used to drive a wedge between the USSR and the Western Allies. Over the weeks following the discovery, British and American prisoners of war and members of the Red Cross were invited to visit the graves to establish Soviet guilt. While many recognised the Soviet’s guilt, the Allies were unable to risk offending Stalin so preferred to let the matter rest. Image Source: Polish National Digital Archives
(2) Lavrentiy Beria and Joseph Stalin
The order to execute the Polish prisoners of war was drafted by Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD. Beria is shown in the foreground in this picture with Stalin, smoking a pipe, sat behind him. The note (No. 794/B) was marked TOP SECRET and was signed off by Stalin. Image Source: WikiCommons
(3) Note 974/B. In English translation it reads:
TOP SECRET
From the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to comrade STALIN
In the NKVD POW camps and in the prisons of the western oblasts of Ukraine and Belorussia there is currently a large number of former officers of the Polish army, former Polish police officers and employees of intelligence agencies, members of Polish nationalist c-r (counterrevolutionary) parties, participants in underground c-r rebel organizations, defectors and so on. All of them are implacable enemies of Soviet power and full of hatred for the Soviet system.
POW officers and policemen located in the camps are attempting to continue c-r work and are leading anti-Soviet agitation. Each of them is simply waiting to be freed so they can have the opportunity to actively join the fight against Soviet power.
NKVD agents in the western oblasts of Ukraine and Belorussia have uncovered a number of c-r rebel organizations. In each of these c-r organizations the former officers of the former Polish army and former Polish police officers played an active leadership role.
Among the detained defectors and violators of the state-
(Signatures: In favor - Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan)
(In margin: Comrade Kalinin- In favor. Comrade Kaganovich- In favor.)
Image Source: WikiCommons
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Click here to order Surviving Katyn by Jane Rogoyska from our friends at John Sandoe’s Books.
JR wrote a superb novel (‘Kozlowski’) about the Katyn massacre. This book uses the testimonies of survivors and investigators to understand how the effects of the massacre rippled on for decades among the Poles. (John Sandoe’s)
Featured image from Colorgraph
