Mass murderers discover mass murder: the Germans and Katyn, 1943.

AuthorLedford, Kenneth F.
PositionConfronting Complexities Through the Diversity of International Law

After the German army in 1943 discovered the graves of murdered Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, Joseph Goebbels embarked upon a cynical publicity campaign to spread before the world the perils of Bolshevik success. But the Nazi discovery of Soviet crimes against leaders of Polish state and society elided the reality that from the very beginning of the German invasion of Poland, the SS had carried out identical mass murders of Polish intellectuals and other social leaders. Goebbels's campaign amounted to mass murderers "uncovering" mass murders on the part of their adversaries and seeking cynically to use that "shocking" discovery to the advantage of the Third Reich. This essay situates the Nazi campaign to mobilize the Katyn discovery to German advantage in three steps. First, it sketches the events leading up to the Katyn massacre in April 1940 and the Nazi discovery of the victims in late March 1943. Second, it examines the course and substance, as well as the immediate consequences of Nazi propaganda exploitation of the Katyn massacre to promote Goebbels's ends. And third, it adverts to the impact of that propaganda campaign on the Allied war effort, on the Polish government in exile in London, and thus on the course of wartime and post-war Cold War history. To conclude, it situates Katyn in the bloody twentieth-century history of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine as the cockpit of genocide that Timothy Snyder has called the "Bloodlands."

  1. INTRODUCTION II. THE MASSACRE AT KATYN AND THE NAZI DISCOVERY III. THE PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN AND ITS IMPACT IV. CONCLUSION: KATYN AND THE "BLOODLANDS" I. INTRODUCTION

    On April 9, 1943, Joseph Goebbels exulted in his diary:

    Polish mass graves have been found near Smolensk. The Bolsheviks simply shot down and then shoveled into mass graves some 10,000 Polish prisoners, among them civilian captives, bishops, intellectuals, artists, et cetera.... Gruesome aberrations of the human soul were thus revealed. I saw to it that the Polish mass graves be inspected by neutral journalists from Berlin. I also had Polish intellectuals taken there. They are to see for themselves what is in store for them should their wish that the Germans be defeated by the Bolsheviks actually be fulfilled. (1) Goebbels resolved to incorporate this grisly discovery into his ongoing "anti-Bolshevik" propaganda focus of the late winter and spring of 1943, which aimed to distract attention from the reeling retreat of the Wehrmacht in the east after the crushing defeat at Stalingrad in February and the Afrika Korps in North Africa. (2) He saw a chance to use this news to address three audiences: the Polish population in the "General-Government;" the western Allies of the Soviet Union, Britain and the U.S.; and the increasingly pessimistic German population in a campaign of "Strength through Fear" (Kraft durch Furcht). (3)

    Goebbels embarked upon a publicity campaign to spread before the world the perils of Bolshevik success: "One hardly dares to imagine what would happen to Germany and Europe if this Asiatic-Jewish flood were to inundate our country and our continent. All hands must be put to work to the last breath to prevent such a misfortune." (4) He undertook a multi-pronged propaganda campaign to unearth the facts about the murdered Polish officers uncovered in the Katyn Forest, and he framed a narrative that aimed to disrupt the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. But Goebbels failed in his primary goal of driving a wedge between the western Allies and the Soviet Union. And the entire propaganda campaign embodied a cynicism breathtaking even for Goebbels, for the Nazi "discovery" of Soviet crimes against leadership segments of Polish state and society elided the reality that from the very beginning of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Action Groups (Einsatzgruppen) of the SS carried out mass murders of Polish intellectuals and other social leaders identical to the Soviet crime that the Wehrmacht uncovered at Katyn. Goebbels's campaign amounted to mass murderers "uncovering" mass murders on the part of their adversaries and seeking cynically to use that "shocking" discovery to the advantage of the Third Reich. (5)

    This essay will situate the Nazi campaign to instrumentalize the Katyn discovery to German advantage in three steps. First, it will sketch the events leading up to the Katyn massacre in April 1940 and the Nazi discovery of the victims in late March 1943. Second, it will examine the course, substance, and immediate consequences of Nazi propaganda exploitation of the Katyn massacre to promote Goebbels's ends, and advert to the impact of that propaganda campaign on the Allied war effort, on the Polish government in exile in London, and thus on the course of wartime and post-war Cold War history. Finally, it will position Katyn in the bloody twentieth-century history of east-central Europe as the cockpit of genocide that Timothy Snyder has called the "Bloodlands." (6)

  2. THE MASSACRE AT KATYN AND THE NAZI DISCOVERY

    Timothy Snyder's persuasive new synthesis of the history of east-central Europe in the middle of the twentieth century argues that the region from central Poland to western Russia (through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States) experienced a coordinated orgy of political mass murder from 1932-33 until the end of the war in 1945, and oppression thereafter until Stalin's death in 1953, a horror whose extent and enormity has been overshadowed by accounts of the focused murder of Jews in the Holocaust. (7) Current scholarship thus rightly returns the murder of the Polish intellectual and social elite in the professional and reserve officer corps at Katyn and elsewhere to its integral place as an episode within three decades of criminality. Katyn's recontextualization not only settles long-open arguments about its facts, but also explains better how it could have occurred. Snyder details in excruciating clarity Soviet enmity toward Poles and Poland that extended back to the Polish-Soviet War of 1920-21, Stalin's focus on the murder of Polish citizens of the Soviet Union during the Great Purge of 1937-38, and the eagerness of the Soviets to extend their border westward at the expense of Poland that led to the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. (8) This broadened context also clarifies how the NKVD enjoyed literally millions of opportunities to perfect the logistical and bureaucratic techniques necessary to render individualized mass murder by pistol shot to the nape of the neck both efficient and expeditious. (9)

    The more immediate context of the Katyn massacre, of course, was the successive invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939. After the conclusion of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in Moscow on August 23, the German invasion of Poland on the night of August 31-September 1 was a foregone conclusion. (10) But the Soviet invasion of Poland from the east on September 17--clandestinely agreed to in the "Secret Additional Protocol"--revealed the broader extent of the Nazi-Soviet alliance. (11) On September 28, their conquests complete, Foreign Ministers Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Demarcation, modifying the previously agreed-upon territorial division, extending the western border of the Soviet Union westward into interwar Poland, and delivering at least 100,000 Polish prisoners of war into Soviet captivity, including the officers who died at Katyn. (12)

    But from the very beginning of their own invasion of Poland, the Nazis had planned mass murder of Poles. Hitler had instructed his army commanders on August 22 that "the annihilation of Poland is in the foreground. The goal is the elimination of the living forces, not the attainment of a certain line." (13) So troops of the German Wehrmacht killed Polish soldiers who had surrendered, murdered civilians, raped, and plundered. But Nazi racial fixation on elimination of "inferior races," including Poles, had also led to the organization of SS "Action Groups" to accompany the...

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