The Croatian view of the Katyn crime

Abstract

The murder of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn and other places of massacre was covered by a conspiracy of silence for decades. It was not until the changes that occurred with the escalation of conflict between the USSR and the United States of America and the democratic West that the murder of soldiers of the Polish Army, Border Defense Corps, and State Police officers saw the light of day. Western politicians knew that in early spring 1940, a special operation supervised by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) was launched in the camps where Polish officers and non-commissioned officers of the Polish Army, Border Defense Corps, and the police were imprisoned, with the aim of liquidating prisoners of war using Chekist methods. This fact was deeply hidden because for the leaders of the West, political interests and the alliance with Stalin were more important than support for allied Poland. Despite numerous reminders from the Polish authorities in exile, the case of Katyn and other places of mass killings of Polish citizens in the East remained taboo until 1951. However, the murder was known to the Polish authorities in exile and Poles in exile after the Second World War, physicians, and pathologists from the International Commission of the Red Cross, who came in 1943 to investigate the mass graves that were discovered after the occupation of the Eastern part of the USSR by German troops. However, the scrupulously documented discoveries of war crimes committed against Polish prisoners of war, the murder of 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers, police officers, and other prisoners of Polish nationality who had surrendered to the Red Army or had been arrested by the Soviet political police later during the occupation of the Eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic were disregarded for a long time. Russian propaganda that the German army was responsible for the massacre was both obligatory and official. This version of the event was circulated from the moment that the first data about Katyn were made public. The Russian narrative stated that only the Nazis were behind the murder of Polish soldiers and policemen. Only in the early 1990s did the authorities of the Russian Federation admit that Stalin gave the order to physically liquidate the prisoners of war, which was carried out by special Commissariat for Internal Affairs units. However, over the past few years, there have been Russian historians and journalists who have questioned the research to date.