World War II Behind Closed Doors (61 page)

THE FARCE AND TRAGEDY OF KATYN AT NUREMBERG

Once Stalin had told a monumental lie, then he followed that lie through, wherever it took him. And so, in the wake of the defeat of Germany, Stalin resolved to frame the Nazis publicly for the murders at Katyn. At the Nuremberg war crimes trials the Soviets brought charges against German officers who, of course, had nothing to do with the killings.

From the beginning the Western legal experts were wary of the Soviet request to include Katyn on the list of war crimes to be tried. The American chief prosecutor advised his Soviet counterpart to drop the case, but the Soviets refused.

The Soviets used the Burdenko Commission report as a basis for the prosecution, and began coaching a variety of witnesses on the lies that they should tell in open court. But not everyone on the Soviet side went along with the deception. The assistant to the Soviet chief prosecutor, a lawyer called N. D. Zorya,
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began to have doubts about the veracity of the material he was asked to present about Katyn. He had previously shown that he was uneasy about peddling untruths – in 1939 he had been demoted when he had announced that there were falsehoods in a case he had been told to prosecute. Zorya was thus precisely the wrong man, from the point of view of the Soviet authorities, to be involved with Katyn. So concerned did Zorya become about the Katyn ‘evidence’ that he asked if he could return to Moscow and discuss his doubts with Gorshensky, the General Prosecutor of the Soviet Union. He was refused permission and the very next day, 23 May 1946, was discovered dead in his room.

No one has ever established the exact cause of his death. But one of the Soviet translators at Nuremberg, T. S. Stupnikova, said she believed that his death was a ‘warning to our lawyers’ that ‘it is unacceptable to stumble’. In that sense, the exact manner of his death was less important than the suspected reason for it – that he had complained about the task he was set. And his life could have been ended, she speculates, in a variety of ways: ‘Did he commit suicide himself when he felt there was no way out? Or was it
suggested to him to end it all and never see his wife and child again? Or maybe he was simply shot by Soviet specialist in such methods – Beria's boys working at Nuremberg’.
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In July 1946 the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal formally examined the murders at Katyn. Each side, Soviet and German, had been limited to calling three witnesses. Those on the Soviet side had all been carefully prepared over the preceding weeks. Professor Viktor Prozorovsky, a leading Soviet forensic scientist, told the court – as he had told the Burdenko Commission – that there was little doubt but that the Poles had been murdered in the autumn of 1941. Dr Markov, a Bulgarian medical expert who had originally been part of the German commission of investigation in 1943 that had blamed the Soviets for the crime, now reversed his testimony and said that it was the Germans who were really responsible.

The only witness the Soviets called who had lived and worked in the area at the time of the German occupation was Boris Bazilevsky, an academic who had been deputy mayor of Smolensk. Like many of the ‘witnesses’ called to the Burdenko Commission the year before, he was someone who had collaborated with the Germans, and it was obviously therefore massively in his interests to please his new Soviet masters. And he certainly did his best, creating a fantasy of lies for the benefit of the Soviet case. He said that ‘in the spring of 1941, at the beginning of the summer, they [the Poles] were working on the restoration of the roads’.
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He also claimed that in the autumn of that year he had asked his own boss, Menshagin, the mayor of Smolensk, to ‘plead’ for the release of one of the Soviet prisoners whom the Germans held, only to be told by Menshagin that he had learnt from a German officer that ‘the Russians would be allowed to die in the camps while there were proposals to exterminate the Poles’. Bazilevsky also said that Menshagin added: ‘You should understand this in the very literal sense of these words’. Two weeks later, he asked Menshagin: ‘What was the fate of the Polish prisoners of war?’ And Menshagin conveniently replied: ‘They have already died. It is all over for them’. Bazilevsky then claimed he had overheard a German officer saying to Menshagin: ‘The Poles are a useless people, and exterminated
they may serve as fertilizer for the enlargement of living space for the German nation’.

The Soviet prosecutor told the court that Menshagin – obviously now the most crucial witness of all – could not be heard as a witness at Nuremberg because he had fled to the West with the Germans and had disappeared. This, like everything else in their Katyn presentation, was a lie. They knew exactly where Menshagin was – in a Soviet prison.

‘Menshagin, at the time of the Nuremberg trials’, says Anatoly Yablokov,
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a former Russian military prosecutor who investigated the Katyn massacres in the early 1990s, ‘was in an NKVD internal prison from 1946 to 1951. And then for another nineteen years he was kept in Vladimir prison in a single cell… because his name was used as evidence – false evidence’. For twenty-five years Menshagin refused to confirm the lies that the Soviet authorities had told about him – and suffered accordingly: ‘The fact that he was imprisoned for twenty-five years – for nineteen of them in solitary in a single cell, without any correspondence, letters, without meeting his relatives – this is a torture in itself…. His [Menshagin's] tough insistence [not to agree to the lies told at Nuremberg] inspired respect even from prison officials. They said that Menshagin was a man who wouldn't succumb to any pressure during interrogations. I feel deep respect for all people who refused to participate in these falsifications’.

Despite their best attempts to push through their fictional version of events at Katyn, the Soviets failed to frame the Germans for the crime. The inadequacies of the Soviet case were glaringly apparent. Bazilevsky, for example, appeared to have been coached in his responses when he was giving his evidence, and when the Soviet prosecutor tried to hurry him through his testimony he was admonished by the court. Also telling was the fact that, despite Bazilevsky admitting that he had collaborated with the Germans, he had not been punished by the Soviets.

But what finally caused the Soviet case to degenerate into legal farce was their inability to fix conclusively on just which German officer and which German unit they were blaming for the crime.
Although a ‘Lieutenant Colonel Arnes’ had been named in the Burdenko report as the man responsible for the murders, the Soviets could only find a German officer called Ahrens to put on trial – and even that allegation collapsed in the face of evidence from the defence. ‘The Prosecution has up to now only alleged that Regiment Number 537’,
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said Dr Stahmer, the defence counsel, on the second day of the hearing, ‘was the one which had carried out these shootings and that [it was] under Colonel Ahrens' command. Today again, Colonel Ahrens has been named by the Prosecution as being the perpetrator. Apparently this allegation has been dropped and it has been said that if it was not Ahrens then it must have been his predecessor, Colonel Bedenck; and if Colonel Bedenck did not do it, then apparently, and this seems to be the third version, it was done by the SD [the intelligence section of the SS]’.

As a result of this confusion, the crime of Katyn simply vanished from the list of offences tried at Nuremberg. No verdict was given, no judgement handed out. After the witnesses had been heard, there was only silence. It was not until Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the release of key archival material – including the infamous document signed by Stalin that led to the murder of the Poles – that the truth about Katyn was finally told to the world. An investigation into the crime was instigated by the Russian authorities in the 1990s, but no one was ever held to account for the murders.

THE FATE OF THE POLES

Once the war was over, the two hundred thousand and more Poles who had fought on the side of the Western Allies faced a difficult – almost impossible – choice. Should they return to Poland, a country now with changed national boundaries and under the domination of the Soviet Union? Or should they try to make a future for themselves elsewhere?

It was a choice made all the harder by the sense many of them felt that they had been discarded by the British. This belief that
they were no longer wanted was symbolized by the omission of all the Polish army units from the Victory Parade held in London in the summer of 1946. Since the British government now formally recognized the Soviet-backed regime in Warsaw, these Polish servicemen in Britain were something of an embarrassment. Only the Poles who had fought in the Royal Air Force were asked to take part in the parade, and they refused out of loyalty to their comrades. ‘We were like people who had done the hard work and whom nobody wanted any more’, says Wiesław Wolwowicz, who fought in the II Polish Corps at Monte Cassino. ‘As a sign of gratitude they didn't even invite us to that parade – so it was some gratitude. I don't love the British side for that. I remember it – you can't forget about it. It was inhuman on their part’.

Winston Churchill, now leader of the opposition, said in the House of Commons on 5 June, just three days before the Victory Parade, that he ‘deeply’ regretted that ‘none of the Polish troops, and I must say this, who fought with us on a score of battlefields, who poured out their blood in the common cause, are not to be allowed to march in the Victory Parade’. He also implicitly recognized the failure of the Western Allies to provide, as he had repeatedly promised they would, for a free and independent Poland. The Poles, he said, were now ‘held in strict control by a Soviet-dominated government who do not dare to have a free election under the observation of representatives of the three or four Great Powers. The fate of Poland seems to be unending tragedy, and we, who went to war, all ill-prepared, on her behalf, watch with sorrow the strange outcome of our endeavours’.

Fewer than 15,000 of the men in the II Polish Corps who had fought under the command of General Anders decided to return to Poland at the end of the war. For the vast majority there seemed, as Anders himself put it, ‘nothing ahead except a lifetime of roaming in exile’.
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Zbigniew Wolak
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was one of the soldiers in Anders' army who faced the tough choice of whether to go home or not. He had fought in the Home Army in Warsaw and been captured by the Germans. When he was liberated from a prison camp by the
advancing British forces he rushed to join the Polish units fighting in Italy. And thus, after the end of the war, and as a member of the British army, he found himself in England. It was here that the incident occurred that changed his life: ‘I was out walking, in uniform, in a street in Chester with my English girlfriend. And a car comes along, a Morris Minor, and a British gentleman gets out in a Harris tweed jacket. He comes up to me and says: “Lieutenant, may I ask you a question?” I said: “Yes”. He touches my Polish badge: “Just how long will you Poles want to continue eating English bread? Haven't you heard the war is over?” And my first impulse was to say: “Would you pose this question to the Poles who came in 1940, who came to help in the Battle of Britain?” That was quite a lesson for me – your friends don't want you when you are in trouble, and there is no friendship between nationalities…. The British were exhausted with the war. An average Englishman in Cheshire – he didn't understand…. They would tell us to go to hell…. At that time I did hold a grudge [against the British]…. At the time we were full of romantic ideas and were sentimental – now I understand that we can't hold any grudge… [now] I see that people everywhere have similar problems and you can't count on anybody. Even your own countrymen. Human beings are always alone with their problems – that's the way it is’.

This encounter with the Morris Minor driver in Chester was the catalyst that made Zbigniew Wolak resolve to quit Britain. He was warned by friends not to return to Poland, but he ignored their advice. ‘I said: “I'm alone. I have no family. I have no parents. I have nobody. And I don't accept this verdict of history that this is the end – that in spite of the rising we became a Soviet colony. And it should all be left [like that]. I want to be in Poland, and I want to share the fate of my generation”’.

So Zbigniew returned to Poland, wearing his British army uniform – and was immediately imprisoned by the secret police for twenty-four hours. He was made to write his life story – a list of the most important events and dates – again and again so that the interrogator could pick up on any inconsistencies. ‘And they told me directly: “Nobody wants you here in Poland. We don't need such
people”’. When he was released, it was with the knowledge that he was condemned to do ‘simple jobs and you can forget about studying’. Many years later, and after taking a series of menial jobs, Zbigniew did eventually manage to study at university. But he never felt secure and free in Communist Poland: ‘This feeling of marginalization and being watched remained for my whole life’.

Although some of the returning Poles who had fought for the British were subjected to terms of imprisonment and persecution, the majority were able to get jobs, however menial, and survive. But – like all the other Poles – they were not living as free citizens in the free Poland of their dreams, the Poland they felt Churchill had promised.

STALIN'S REWARD

Once the war was won, Stalin faced a fundamental choice about how the Soviet Union should function as a state and how he should act as a leader. How should he reward those who had helped win the war? How should he deal with his returning servicemen who had seen first hand the capitalist world? Would he react in a way that was consistent with the hopes of the West, and somehow ‘soften’ his rule?

No, he would not. The immediate post-war years brought the return of a Stalin driven by suspicion to the point of paranoia. Anyone who had touched the West was at risk. The returning Soviet soldiers who had survived the appalling conditions of German captivity were some of the first to suffer. Stalin had voiced the view during the war that ‘there are no Soviet prisoners of war – only traitors’; and, true to this philosophy, when those Red Army soldiers who had been captured by the Germans were released they were immediately imprisoned once again in an NKVD filtration camp, interrogated and then around half of them sent on to the Gulag.