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God's Eye: Aerial Photography and the Katyn Forest Massacre

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This work honors the work of Polish-American photo-interpreter Waclaw Godziemba-Maliszewski, whose painstaking work was exploited by others without proper attribution or credit. Aerial photography, originally done for military-intelligence purposes, was put to a very different use. Patches of aerially-recognizable disturbed ground take around 140 years to disappear. (p. 43).

Boxes of declassified captured Luftwaffe photos happen to include the Katyn area, which is located only 13 km west of militarily-significant Smolensk. The pioneering work of Robert G. Poirier, an outstanding CIA photo-interpreter, showed that the Katyn area showed no changes in 1941 until just before the Soviet retreat, consistent with attempts to hide something. (p. 1). Luftwaffe photos after the 1943 German retreat, continuing up to June 1944, progressively show the disappearance of the memorials, and the Soviets using bulldozers to re-exhume the bodies and destroy other evidences of their crime with great urgency. (pp. 2-3).

Maliszewski subsequently built upon Poirier's work, deducing the existence of previously-overlooked Katyn burial sites (p. 52), as well as the sites probably used by the Burdenko commission. (pp. 135-136). Later, the unheralded Maliszewski helped pinpoint the Katyn burial sites for the early-1990's exhumations (pp. 50-52), despite the half-century of local changes and Soviets' deliberate relocation of many local markers in order to misdirect those looking for the burial sites.

Fox provides many seldom-told tidbits of information in his narrative. For instance, in one of the Katyn burial pits, 200 victims had been comprehensively tied up--for apparently resisting. (p. 77). Surviving Russian perpetrators provided other details--such as the NKVD's use of German revolvers because the Russian ones tended to quickly overheat with prolonged use. (p. 95).

Fox clarifies the extent of Jewish victims who, at 276 identified and 700-800 possible total, represent up to 15% of Katyn victims: "The fact that many of the officers were members of professions such as medicine (fifty percent of Poland's prewar physicians were Jews) accounted for the disproportionate amount of Jewish officers compared to their numbers in the general population." [10%]. (p. 22).

Emphasis, especially among the photos shown in the back of the book, is given to the WWII-unknown murder sites near Kharkov (Starobielsk victims: e. g., pp. 43-44) and Miednoje/Kalinin/Tver (Ostaszkow/Ostashkov; e. g., pp. 48-50). The Kharkov murder location first came to general Polish attention when some Polish workers, building a hotel near Kharkov, came across a bazaar at which Polish military medals and buttons were being sold. (p. 43).

A "mini Katyn" occurred in 1944 at Trzebuska near Rzeszow, where the NKVD murdered about 150 AK officers, soon after disarming them. (pp. 60-61)[According to some accounts, the victims' throats had been cut so as to avoid alerting the nearby Polish population by gunshots.]