The Katyn Forest Massacre vs. Oflag VII-A Murnau

Katyn

The Katyn Forest Massacre is a familiar subject in the account of Soviet atrocities during World War Two.  It involved the murder of several thousand Polish POWs who were captured during the Soviet invasion of Poland.  The number varies by account but General Pavel Sudoplatov puts the number at 25,700.  Less well known is the German prisoner of war camp, Oflag VII-A Murnau.  This camp contained 5,000 Polish officers captured during the German invasion of Poland.  The Germans captured a total of 18,000 Polish officers during their invasion of Poland.  Oflag VII-A Murnau was regularly inspected by the International Red Cross.

Oflag VII-A

FDR and Churchill were aware of this Soviet atrocity as early as 1943.  A British diplomat, Owen O’Malley, was dispatched by Churchill to study the subject in the spring of 1943.  He concluded the Soviets were guilty.  FDR asked former Pennsylvania Gov. George H. Earle, to investigate.  He presented evidence of Soviet guilt at Katyn to Roosevelt personally in 1944.  In addition U.S. Army Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet, and other prisoners of war held by Nazi Germany were brought to the Katyn Forest to witness the exhumation of the Polish officers.  Van Vliet was convinced he was looking at a Soviet atrocity.  On May 22, 1945, Van Vliet presented what he knew to the head of military intelligence, Gen. Clayton Bissell. The general classified the report Top Secret, and ordered Van Vliet to remain silent on the issue.  In addition to Lt. Col. Van Vliet, Army Capt. Donald B. Stewart witnessed the exhumation. He  sent a coded message in 1943 to military intelligence indicating that he and Van Vliet believed the Soviets were guilty of the massacre.  Stewart was also ordered to remain silent on the issue.

Western leadership was undoubtedly aware that the Soviets were responsible for this atrocity just as they were aware of the engineered Ukrainian famine.  It is understandable that Western leaders promoted the Soviet line during the conflict with Germany.  The Red Army was taking the lion's share of casualties.  However, this line was maintained well after the war.  A Katyn memorial was unveiled in 1976 at Gunnersbury Cemetery in London.  Construction of the monument was delayed for several years because British governments objected to plans by the UK's Polish community to build a monument.  They did not want to antagonize the Soviets.  This coverup was not fully discredited until the Soviets admitted their role in the massacre in 1990.  The U.S. National Archives retained various sources for Katyń material as classified until 2012, 72 years after the event. 

In 2010 a letter to Stalin from Minister of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union Lavrenty Beria dated 5 March 1940.  The letter proposed the mass execution of thousands of Polish POWs.  It was signed off on by Joseph Stalin. The man in charge of the execution - former head of one of the Directorates of the NKVD, Pyotr Soprunenko - was still alive and well in Moscow on a good pension in the 1990s. While low level Nazi camp guards were being pursued well into the 21st century, high level Soviet officials responsible for greater crimes were still receiving their pensions.  Pyotr Soprunenko and Vladimir Tokaryev, participants in the Katyn massacre, were still receiving pensions in their 80s`. 

Germans are frequently accused of not knowing about the holocaust.  Yet most Westerners are unaware of policies followed by their own governments in spite of the fact that they have a free press.  Western leaders were often complicit in Soviet crimes and in fact committed crimes of a similar magnitude. In 1942 Churchill wrote to FDR, "I expect that a severe process of liquidating hostile elements in the Baltic States, etc., was employed by the Russians when they took these regions at the beginning of the war."  The Western leaders were well aware of Soviet behavior.

Not all prisoners of the Wehrmacht faired as well as those in Oflag VII-A Murnau.  Soviet prisoners suffered a horrendous death rate.  The Wehrmacht captured approximately three million POWs in the early stages of the war.  S. P. MacKenzie reported that German "released on parole all the Dutch, the Flemish Belgians, nine-tenths of the Poles, and nearly a third of the French captives.”  The Germans allowed ICRC visits to their Polish POW camps.  The International Red Cross was never allowed to inspect POWs by the Western powers.

Would you prefer to be an average Frenchman in Nazi occupied France or a German in French occupied Germany?  Would you prefer to be an average Czech in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia or a German in liberated Czechoslovakia?  Would you prefer to be a German soldier surrendering to U.S. forces or a G.I. surrendering to the Wehrmacht?  If you answer that you would prefer to be the German in these situations you know nothing about this period.