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| Mass graves of Polish soldiers in the Katyń Forest. |
New evidence now shows that the United States "hushed up" Soviet guilt over the Katyń Massacre during the Second World War. It appears that the Roosevelt administration helped to cover up the Soviet guilt of the massacre. It is estimated that more than 22,000 Poles were killed by the Soviets under Stalin's orders. The Soviet Union invaded Poland at the start of the war and took thousands of Polish prisoners. Many of the Poles killed were apart of the Polish elite, which included military officers, politicians and artists. The killings took place in April of 1940 in the Katyń Forest and other areas nearby.
The Poles were all shot in the back of the head and their bodies were dumped in mass graves. The Soviet NKVD secret police were responsible for the executions. Documents released by the US National Archives in the last few days show that the US knew about the massacre but did not want to anger its wartime ally, Joseph Stalin. Apparently, the US government was sent coded messages by American prisoners of war in 1943. The prisoners were taken to the forest by the Germans to witness the scene of the massacre.
The Germans were blamed for the massacre for nearly five decades after the end of the war. The Soviets held the area around the time the Katyń massacre happened and not the Germans. German forces only moved into the area of Katyń later on. Doctors and experts asked by the Germans to investigate the massacre scene proved that the victims were killed around the time that the Soviets held the area. The Russians admitted their responsibility for the massacre in 1990 after the fall of communism in their country.
None of this new material and information released by the archives recently appeared in a special congressional hearing on the massacre from 1951-52. This indicates that the information on this matter was kept hidden deliberately. Nearly 1,000 pages of this new information will help historians and experts on the massacre determine what the US really knew about it. Had the truth on the Katyń massacre been known much earlier during the war, the situation in post-WW2 Europe may have been different. The famous say "The winners get to write history" is entirely true in this case.
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István
