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Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Annals of Communism Series)

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This single volume has everything: History of the events leading up to and including the Massacre, the decades of western silence and Soviet denial, Soviet admission of responsibility, the 1943 and 1990's forensic investigations, and implications for Polish-Russian relationships. In view of the fact that the Russians are once again hardening their attitudes regarding Katyn, this book is more relevant than ever.

Photographs are included, and many documents are printed in their entirety. These include the chilling March 5, 1940 NKVD one that contains the order to shoot the Polish internees. (pp. 118-120). An earlier NKVD document includes a complaint about the Polish prisoners being religious. (p. 86). Obviously, the Katyn Massacre had encompassed religious martyrdom in addition to genocide. Another document (pp. 344-345) contains the decades-belated Soviet admission of guilt. Still another Soviet document mentions a total of 21,857 victims. (pp. 240-241).

This volume includes an examination of "counter-Katyns", wherein Poles are accused of killing Soviet captives in the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik War. These, in actuality, are unintentional deaths of Soviets in captivity and are comparable to frequencies of Polish deaths in Soviet captivity during this war. (p. 263, 510, 533).

I found some parts of this book particularly fascinating. One of these is an account of the battle to hide the mementos of the victims, taken by the Germans in 1943, and to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Soviets and their Polish-Communist stooges. Amazingly, some of them survived the four decades of the Soviet puppet state. (pp. 225-226). There are also the eye-opening interviews with some of the Russian eyewitnesses of the Massacre still alive in the early 1990's. (pp. 124-129, 133-135).

The end of this book includes a biographical glossary of important personages. This contains information beyond Katyn. For instance, we learn that Edward Smygly-Rydz, the Commander in Chief of Poland's unsuccessful 1939 defense against the German-Soviet aggressors, snuck back into German-occupied Poland and lived under an assumed name until his death in 1941 from heart disease. (Other accounts have him shot by the Germans, who supposedly didn't realize his actual identity.). The entry on AK-Commander Stefan Rowecki "Grot" states that, after he fell into the hands of the Germans, he rejected a proposal to form a Polish collaborationist battalion that would fight on Germany's side against the Soviets. If true, this is further refutation of the No-Polish-Quisling-because-the-Germans-never-wanted-one argument.

The Polish people suffered dearly in the Second World War. Three Million Jewish Poles were murdered. Millions of other Poles were forced from their lands in West Poland and relocated. When the Poles rose in Rebellion in 1944 in Warsaw they were brutally crushed and 80% of the city was levelled. These stories have been told in the important book Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw. But there is another story that has gone untold. During the Second World War the German army came across the Katyn massacre sites and blamed Stalin for the atrocity in which 14,500 Polish officers and another 7,300 other political prisoners were murdered by the Soviet secret police. However the world beleived the Soviets when it blamed the atrocity on the Nazis. But it turned out it was not the Nazis.

This book is a testament to this famous story and documents relating to the case by leading researchers into the mass murder. A famous incident that has long been forgotten this book finally brings it back to light.

Seth J. Frantzman

It is an excellent historical review of that not widely known episode of
Soviet genocide and deceit.

This work is long overdue. Finally, a full documentary study of what actually occurred.
Sheds new light on all the duplicity and the betrayal of Poland by the Allied powers.