Katyn Massacre - Background

Background

On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Meanwhile, Britain and France, obligated by the Polish-British Common Defence Pact and Franco-Polish Military Alliance to attack Germany in the case of such an invasion, demanded that Germany withdraw. On 3 September 1939, after it failed to do so, France, Britain, and most countries of the British Commonwealth declared war on Germany but provided little military support to Poland. They took little other significant military action during what became known as the Phoney War.

The Soviet Union began its own invasion on 17 September, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army advanced quickly and met little resistance, as Polish forces facing them were under orders not to engage the Soviets. About 250,000-454,700 Polish soldiers and policemen had become prisoners and were interned by the Soviet authorities. Some were freed or escaped quickly, while 125,000 were imprisoned in camps run by the NKVD. Out of those, 42,400 soldiers, mostly of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity serving in the Polish army who lived in the former Polish territories now annexed by the Soviet Union, were released in October. The 43,000 soldiers born in West Poland, then under German control, were transferred to the Germans; in turn the Soviets received 13,575 Polish prisoners from the Germans.

In addition to military and government personnel, other Polish citizens suffered from repressions. Thousands of members of the Polish intelligentsia were also arrested and imprisoned for allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests." Since Poland's conscription system required every nonexempt university graduate to become a military reserve officer, the NKVD was able to round up a significant portion of the Polish educated class. According to estimates by Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), roughly 320,000 Polish citizens were deported to the Soviet Union (this figure is questioned by some other historians, who stand by the older estimate of about 700,000-1,000,000). IPN estimates the number of Polish citizens that died under Soviet rule during World War II at 150,000 (a correction of the older estimates of up to 500,000). Of the one group of 12,000 Poles sent to Dalstroy camp (near Kolyma) in 1940-1941, most POWs, only 583 men survived, released in 1942 to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East. According to Tadeusz Piotrowski, "...during the war and after 1944, 570,387 Polish citizens had been subjected to some form of Soviet political repression."

As early as 19 September, Lavrentiy Beria ordered the NKVD to create the Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees to manage Polish prisoners. The NKVD took custody of Polish prisoners from the Red Army, and proceeded to organise a network of reception centers and transit camps and arrange rail transport to prisoner-of-war camps in the western USSR. The largest camps were located at Kozelsk (Optina Monastery), Ostashkov (Stolbnyi Island on Seliger Lake near Ostashkov) and Starobelsk. Other camps were at Jukhnovo (rail station "Babynino"), Yuzhe (Talitsy), rail station "Tyotkino" 90 kilometres/56 miles from Putyvl), Kozelshchyna, Oranki, Vologda (rail station "Zaonikeevo") and Gryazovets.

Kozelsk and Starobelsk were used mainly for military officers, while Ostashkov was used mainly for Polish boy scouts, gendarmes, police and prison officers. Some prisoners were members of other groups of Polish intelligentsia, such as priests, landowners and law personnel. The approximate distribution of men throughout the camps was as follows: Kozelsk, 5,000; Ostashkov, 6,570; and Starobelsk, 4,000. They totaled 15,570 men.

According to a report from 19 November 1939, the NKVD had about 40,000 Polish POWs: about 8,000-8,500 officers and warrant officers, 6,000-6,500 police officers and 25,000 soldiers and NCOs who were still being held as POWs. In December, a wave of arrests took into custody some Polish officers who were not yet imprisoned, Ivan Serov reported to Lavrentiy Beria on 3 December that "in all, 1,057 former officers of the Polish Army had been arrested." The 25,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers were assigned to forced labors (road construction, heavy metallurgy).

Once at the camps, from October 1939 to February 1940, the Poles were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political agitation by NKVD officers such as Vasily Zarubin. The prisoners assumed that they would be released soon, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to determine who would live and who would die. According to NKVD reports, if the prisoners could not be induced to adopt a pro-Soviet attitude, they were declared "hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority."

On 5 March 1940, pursuant to a note to Joseph Stalin from Beria, four members of the Soviet Politburo - Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, and Anastas Mikoyan - signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. The reason for the massacre, according to historian Gerhard Weinberg, was that Stalin wanted to deprive a potential future Polish military of a large portion of its talent:

"It has been suggested that the motive for this terrible step was to reassure the Germans as to the reality of Soviet anti-Polish policy. This explanation is completely unconvincing in view of the care with which the Soviet regime kept the massacre secret from the very German government it was supposed to impress.... A more likely explanation is that... should be seen as looking forward to a future in which there might again be a Poland on the Soviet Union's western border. Since he intended to keep the eastern portion of the country in any case, Stalin could be certain that any revived Poland would be unfriendly. Under those circumstances, depriving it of a large proportion of its military and technical elite would make it weaker."

In addition, Soviets realized that the prisoners constituted a large body of trained and motivated Poles who would not accept a Fourth Partition of Poland.