Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 led to a brief reversal of the Kremlin’s attitude toward Poland. In an apparent effort to obtain Polish support in the struggle with Germany, the Soviet Union reestablished diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London, and signed an agreement on July 30, 1941 by which the Soviet-German partition treaties of 1939 were canceled, a general amnesty was granted Polish citizens imprisoned in the Soviet Union, and General Wladyslaw Anders was allowed to organize a new Polish army from the Poles in the Soviet Union. Efforts to create this army were hampered by the fact that about 10,000 Polish officers along with about 5,000 Polish intellectuals and professional persons, all of whom had been held in three camps in western Russia, could not be found. In addition at least 100,000 Polish prisoners of war, out of the 230,000 captured by Soviet forces in September 1939, had been exterminated in Soviet labor camps from starvation and overwork, and over a million Polish civilians were being similarly treated.

Constant obstacles were offered by the Soviet authorities to the efforts of General Anders to reconstruct a Polish army in the east. When rations were cut to 26,000 to feed a force of 70,000 soldiers and many thousands of Polish civilian refugees, Anders obtained permission to evacuate his force to Iran (March 1942). It was this group which fought so well the following years in Italy and in western Europe.

As soon as Anders’s forces left Russia, the Soviet leaders began to organize a group of Polish and Russian Communists into a so-called Union of Polish Patriots which sponsored a Polish-language radio station and a new Communist-controlled Polish army in Russia. In January 1943, Moscow informed the Sikorski government in London that all Poles originating from the provinces occupied by Soviet forces in September 1939 would be regarded as Soviet subjects.

While Soviet-Polish relations were deteriorating, the German radio suddenly announced, on April 13, 1943, that German forces in occupied Russia had discovered, at Katyn near Smolensk, Russia, mass graves containing the bodies of 5,000 Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940. Moscow called this a Nazi propaganda trick and declared that the Polish officers had been murdered and buried by the Nazis themselves when they captured the officers and the locality by overrunning this Soviet territory and its concentration camps in August 1941. When the Polish government in London requested an investigation of this crime at the site by the International Red Cross, the Soviet government broke off diplomatic relations with the Sikorski government on the grounds that it had fallen victim to Nazi propaganda because of anti-Soviet feeling.

The Katyn massacres were a subject of controversy for years. Today there is no doubt that the great mass of evidence indicates that these victims, numbering 4,243, met their deaths by being shot through the back of the neck in the early spring of 1940 and not August 1941 (or later), when the area was in German possession. This evidence, which clearly indicates Soviet guilt, includes the following points: (1) the victims were wearing the uniforms and boots issued to them at the outbreak of war in 1939, and these were in good condition, showing a minimum of wear as might be the case in April 1940, but could not have been true in August 1941; (2) all letters, journals, or documents on the bodies had dates previous to May 1940, and in no case later; (3) the victims were arranged in the graves in groups in the same order in which they had been removed from the Soviet concentration camp at Kozielski in March and April 1940; (4) the victims wrote letters to their families at home up to April 1940, but not later; (5) letters to victims from their families were delivered by Soviet authorities up to April 1940, but were returned to the senders as undeliverable after that date; (6) in private conversations various Soviet authorities at various times admitted the murders. There is much other evidence showing Soviet guilt in this affair, but it must not be forgotten that both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were determined to exterminate all Polish leaders and the Polish nation by reducing the leaderless Poles to the status of slave laborers and that Germany also would have killed these Polish officers if they had captured them, since the Germans did exterminate 4,000,000 Poles in this way during the war. Although the number of bodies at Katyn was less than 5,000, the number of officers murdered was almost twice this figure, the rest, apparently, having been drowned in the White Sea.

The crisis in Soviet-Polish relations in the spring of 1943 marks a turning point in the relations of the three Great Powers fighting Germany, although every effort was made to conceal this fact at that time. From March 1943 onward, the Soviet authorities did all they could to build up the Union of Polish Patriots as the center of aspirations of the Poles still suffering in their own country, while, at the same time, Washington began to pay the Polish government-in-exile an annual subsidy of $12.5 million to finance its underground organizations in Poland and its diplomatic relations with Latin-American countries. Within Poland itself, the London government soon had a secret army and a secret underground government, including a parliament, schools, and a system of courts. This government met in secret, made decisions, and executed sentences on disloyal Poles, especially on collaborators with the Nazis.

Nazi plans aimed at the eventual extermination of the Poles and the Polish nation. In the winter of 1939-1940, all Poles were deported, street by street with only a few hours’ notice, from the western areas annexed to Germany into the government-general. In the latter areas, under the rule of Hans Frank and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, all wealth which could be used by Germany was confiscated and removed; all Polish institutions of higher learning or culture were abolished, so that only elementary schools (and these conducted in the German language) were allowed; all outstanding persons were murdered; millions were deported westward to work as slave laborers in German factories; the food consumption of those who remained was reduced by German seizure of food supplies to a quarter of the daily need (to 600 calories); and various measures, such as separation of the sexes, were taken to prevent the reproduction of Poles. Under these circumstances it is remarkable that Polish spirit could not be broken, that hundreds of thousands of Poles continued to resist in guerrilla bands, in the underground “Home Army” under Generals “Grot” (Stefan Rowecki) and “Bor” (Thaddeus Ko-morowski), and that sabotage, propaganda, spying, and communication with the Polish government in London continued to flourish.

At the time these events were taking place, the people of the English-speaking world were almost totally ignorant of the diplomatic controversies behind the scenes and almost equally ignorant of the conditions of life in German-occupied Europe. On the other hand, they were fully aware of the victory in North Africa, of the conquest of Sicily, and of the invasion of Italy. The strategic decisions involved in these campaigns and, above all, the decision of September 1943 to reject Churchill’s plans for a Balkan campaign in order to concentrate on the cross-Channel offensive for 1944, were of vital importance in setting the form that postwar Europe would take. If the strategic decision of 1943 had been made differently, to postpone the cross-Channel attack and, instead, to concentrate on an assault from the Aegean across Bulgaria and Romania toward Poland and Slovakia, the postwar situation would have been quite different. This we can say with assurance even though we cannot say with any certainty what the difference would have been.