World War II Behind Closed Doors (39 page)

In Tehran, after Roosevelt's private chat with Stalin in which he said he wouldn't cause trouble over the Soviet demand to keep eastern Poland – a conversation the British didn't find out about until long after the conference was over – the American President then expressed ‘officially’, once representatives of the three governments had all sat down together, the hope that Stalin might reach some accommodation with the Polish government in exile in London.
Stalin quashed this notion at once – even suggesting, shamefully, that the London Poles were ‘in contact’ with the Germans and had ‘killed the partisans’.
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He went on to say that ‘the day before yesterday (when Churchill had his “matchstick” conversation with him about the shifting borders of Poland) there had been no mention of re-establishing relations with the Polish government. It had been a question of prescribing something to the Poles’. Significantly, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt uttered a word in defence of the Polish government in exile. There was no evidence to support Stalin's ludicrous charge that ‘the Polish Government and their friends in Poland were in contact with the Germans’. Yet the British Prime Minister and the American President did not protest.

Churchill did try to explain to Stalin, with great patience, how important the fate of Poland was to the British. ‘We felt very strongly about it’, he said, ‘because it was the German attack on Poland which had led us into war’. The three leaders then gathered around a map of Poland to discuss the border the Soviets wanted – along what Eden called ‘the Ribbentrop-Molotov line’ and what Molotov swiftly remarked ‘was generally called the Curzon line’. ‘Call it whatever you like’, said Stalin.

After a ‘prolonged’ study of the map, Churchill announced that he ‘liked the picture’ and that he ‘would say to the Poles that if they did not accept it they would be fools, and he would remind them that but for the Red Army they would have been utterly destroyed’. Crucially, Churchill then volunteered that he believed the new Polish state would be ‘friendly’ to Russia. Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union wanted a ‘friendly’ Poland. This apparently throwaway line from the British Prime Minister was almost as damaging to the interests of the Polish government in exile as the unilateral decision of the Big Three to shift their country to the West. The problem was that it was impossible to define ‘friendly’ – if the Poles ever did anything the Soviets disliked, they could be accused of acting in an ‘unfriendly’ way. The only way the Polish state could be permanently ‘friendly’ was to be a puppet of the Soviet Union. And so it was eventually to prove.

The meeting then moved on to the final subject to be discussed
at Tehran – the question of the future of Germany. Everyone present wanted to break up post-war Germany – the dispute was over the question of how many pieces it should be split into. Churchill suggested that Prussia, which he saw as the most dangerous region – should be detached from the rest. Roosevelt then launched into a plan to split Germany into five separate parts, plus two areas, the Kiel Canal and the Ruhr, which would be controlled by the international community. It was an astonishing idea; and one that came as a shock to Churchill, who had never heard such a wide-ranging plan suggested before.

Stalin, not surprisingly, liked Roosevelt's proposal more than he did Churchill's. He wanted Germany so fragmented as to present no military threat for the foreseeable future. Churchill, on the other hand, was alert to the danger of central Europe lacking strong states. Who, he must have been thinking, would stand in the way of the Red Army and the English Channel, once the war was won and the Americans had withdrawn?

The policy of the Big Three on the future of Germany – unlike the future of Poland – was not resolved at Tehran, although the relative positions of each of the protagonists had certainly been demonstrated. After this final meeting Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin attended a farewell dinner, said their goodbyes and left for home early the following morning.

The meetings at Tehran had lasted only from 28 November to 1 December, but in these four days historic decisions had been taken. The conferences that followed, at Yalta and Potsdam, would both exist in the shadow of Tehran. It would have proved virtually impossible – even if Roosevelt and Churchill had desired it – to backtrack on the fundamental issues of principle that had been decided here in Iran; most notably, of course, that Poland would shift to the West.

But Tehran is important not just for the epic political and military questions that were resolved, but also for the way both Churchill and Roosevelt – in particular Roosevelt – sought to make themselves amenable to Stalin. Partly, as we have seen, they felt it was essential to get on with the Soviet leader. Red Army
soldiers were still fighting the majority of the German forces – indeed, they would continue to do so until the end of the war in Europe. And during 1943 more Soviet lives were lost at Kursk and elsewhere on the Eastern Front than the British lost in the entire war. The Western Allies thus needed the Soviets to keep fighting – and consequently to keep dying.

But there was also a sense in which Roosevelt and Churchill must have felt constrained by their respective governments' own previous half-truths about Stalin. During 1943 Allied propaganda had continued to churn out wildly positive material about the Soviet Union and Stalin, of which
Mission to Moscow
was the most glaring example. Robert Buckner, the producer of the film, later described it as an ‘expedient lie for political purposes’.
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The trouble was that the general public formed their own upbeat view of Stalin and the Soviet Union based on ‘expedient lies’ such as this. Consequently Roosevelt – with an election coming up in less than a year – would have felt it unhelpful to his own political chances to contradict the positive gloss.

In any event, Roosevelt seemed happy enough to stick to the previous propaganda line on his return from Tehran. When asked by a journalist what ‘type of person Marshal Stalin’ was, he replied: ‘I would call him something like me…a realist’.
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And in his 1943 Christmas Eve broadcast to the American people, Roosevelt remarked: ‘I must say I got along fine with Marshal Stalin. He is man who combines a tremendous relentless determination with stalwart good humour. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people – very well indeed’.
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But Stalin was, as Roosevelt knew full well, a ‘realist’ who had shown in the past that he rejected the values that the American President held most dear – freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom from fear, to name but three. Roosevelt had openly condemned Stalin's regime just three years before, and although there were now straws in the wind to suggest that the Soviet system might possibly become less draconian in the future, the
American President ought to have known full well that Stalin was not a man ‘like’ him at all.

But the signs are that Roosevelt's gushing words about Stalin were not just politically expedient. As he had told his son, Elliot, in private at Tehran, he had genuinely found something to ‘like’ in Stalin and thought him ‘impressive’. Perhaps it was because the Soviet leader was a great listener – an attribute that suited the garrulous President – and, as we have seen, in manner and style Stalin did not seem to be a bloodthirsty tyrant at all. It was only if you discarded the surface appearances and listened carefully to what Stalin said that a darker picture appeared. At Tehran, the two Western leaders either didn't choose to see this, or else simply couldn't see it.

THE RETURN OF KATYN

While Stalin dined with Roosevelt and Churchill at Tehran, his security forces were hard at work trying to cover up the mass murder they had committed three years before at Katyn. The Red Army liberated Smolensk and the surrounding area in late August 1943, in the aftermath of their victory at Kursk. Within days the Soviets fenced off the murder site at Katyn once again, and the NKVD began excavating the bodies that had been reburied by the Germans after their own investigation into the crime earlier in the year had been completed.

The Soviet authorities knew they faced two practical problems in trying to pretend that the Germans had committed the murders. First, the Germans had gathered eye-witness testimony that blamed the Soviets for the shootings; and second, no documentation had been found on any of the Polish corpses that dated from after April 1940 – something that was at odds with the Soviet claim that the Poles had been murdered in the summer of 1941.

But neither of these difficulties was insurmountable for the Soviet secret police. First they added false documents to the genuine ones the Germans had already found. These included a
receipt for 25 roubles from Starobielsk camp in the name of Vladimir Arashkevich, dated 25 March 1941, and an icon on the reverse of which were an illegible signature and the date ‘4/9/41’. And it was an equally simple task for the secret police to deal with the matter of the incriminating testimony. One of the Germans' star witnesses had been a local forester, P. G. Kiselev,
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who had told of hearing ‘screaming’ and ‘shooting’ coming from the forest in the spring of 1940. Now Kiselev and his son were arrested by the NKVD and charged with collaborating with the Nazis. This was a serious charge, punishable by a death sentence or a long period of imprisonment.

A number of witnesses confirmed to the NKVD that Kiselev had given his testimony ‘freely’ to the Germans, and that no violence had been used to get him to tell his story. But in the face of threats from the NKVD, both Kiselev and his son changed their story and stated publicly that their testimony to the Germans had been forced out of them and that everything they had said was untrue. They now claimed that the Poles had been murdered by the Germans in the summer of 1941, not by the NKVD in the spring of 1940 as they had originally stated. As a result, the charges against Kiselev and his son were dropped. And the NKVD worked similar magic on other locals after charges of collaboration with the Nazis were set aside – people like Yefimov, Zubkov and Bazilevsky all now gave evidence that the Germans had committed the crime.

For five months the rewriting of history at Katyn was pursued by the NKVD. Only in January 1944 were the results made known to the world through the propaganda mouthpiece of an ‘investigation’ led by Nikolai Burdenko, the President of the Soviet Academy of Medical Science. The title of his commission of investigation is instructive, demonstrating as it does that the conclusion was predetermined before the investigation began. It was called ‘The Special Commission for Determination and Investigation of the Shooting of Polish Prisoners of War by German-Fascist Invaders in Katyn Forest’. Documents
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reveal that Burdenko was kept away from the forest until the NKVD had finished planting
their false evidence: he was not allowed to approach Katyn until January, and his report – based heavily on the ‘preliminary’ work by the NKVD – was then completed in a matter of only a few days.

The next stage in the Soviet deception involved publicizing the falsehood to the world. For that purpose the Soviet authorities needed the unwitting cooperation of foreign journalists. Just over a dozen – mostly Americans and British – made the journey to Katyn between 21 and 23 January 1944. They were accompanied by John Melby, third secretary at the American embassy in Moscow, and by Kathleen Harriman, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of the new ambassador, Averell Harriman, and were transported from Moscow in considerable style. ‘No press excursion to any part of Russia has been arranged with greater luxury than the Katyn party’,
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a report from the British embassy to the Foreign Office recorded. ‘The correspondents travelled in electric train, comfortable sleeping compartments and large saloon car. They were given very good food, and supplies of vodka, wine and cigarettes were plentiful’. Then, in a somewhat bitchy aside, the report concluded: ‘No doubt some of these amenities were provided for the benefit of Miss Harriman (now described here as the poor man's Mrs Roosevelt)’. A previous telegram from the British embassy to the Foreign Office, on 23 January, had already warned: ‘It is hard to believe that the Russian propaganda machine will refrain from drawing the obvious conclusion from the association of these two “official” Americans with the enquiry’.
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(The ‘obvious conclusion’ was that the presence of these two Americans would give the impression that the American government endorsed the Soviet view of Katyn.) At the bottom of the note a Foreign Office official scrawled: ‘This is not my business but it doesn't seem very wise’.

The correspondents, together with John Melby and Kathleen Harriman, arrived in Katyn between seven and eight o'clock in the morning on 22 January and left in the early hours of the following morning – so they had less than twenty-four hours to evaluate the ‘evidence’ the Soviets had uncovered. Immediately after the visit, Melby wrote a lengthy report describing the Soviet attempts
to blame the Germans for the crime and pointing out the obvious deficiencies in their case. In particular, the ‘witnesses’ produced by the Soviets were clearly problematic. It was obvious, wrote Melby, that ‘the witnesses were merely repeating stories that they had already told the Commission. The show was staged under hot and blinding klieg [film] light and motion picture camera…. Attempts by the correspondents to question the witnesses were discouraged…. All the statements were glibly given, as if by rote’. Melby formed the view that: ‘It is apparent that the evidence in the Russian case is incomplete in several respects, that it is badly put together and that the show was put on for the benefit of the correspondents without opportunity for independent investigation or verification’.
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Yet, incredibly, after stating these reasons why the Soviet investigation into Katyn was untrustworthy, Melby concluded: ‘On balance, however, and despite loopholes, the Russian case is convincing’.