World War II: Katyn Massacre U.S. Military Intelligence Reports

World War II: Katyn Massacre U.S. Military Intelligence Reports

1,817 pages of U.S. military reports and related material covering the Katyn Massacre.

The Katyn Massacre was a series of mass executions of about twenty-two thousand Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD in April and May 1940.

According to Nataliya Lebedeva's article, "The Tragedy of Katyn" (June 1990), from the Russian journal International Affairs, those killed at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains and 3,420 NCOs. Because of their social status also killed were seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, 131 refugees, university professors, 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers, more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 non-military pilots.

When Nazi occupation forces in April 1943 found the mass graves, German propaganda minister Josef Goebbels hoped to fire-up international revulsion over the Soviet atrocity. Two US servicemen, brought from a POW camp in Germany, were at Katyn in 1943, when Berlin held an international news conference there to publicize the atrocity.

The ranking officer was Col. John H. Van Vliet, a fourth-generation West Pointer. After returning to Washington in 1945, he wrote a report concluding that the Soviets, not the Germans, were responsible. He gave the report to Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, Gen. George Marshall's assistant chief of staff for intelligence who disregarded the report. Years later, Bissell defended his action before a Congressional investigation, contending that it was not in the US interest to embarrass an ally whose forces were still needed to defeat Japan.

In January 1944, Russia assembled the Burdenko Commission named after the prominent surgeon who chaired it. Predictably, it concluded that the Polish prisoners had been murdered in 1941, during the German occupation, not in 1940. To bolster its claim, the commission hosted an international press conference at Katyn on 22 January 1944. Three American journalists and Kathleen Harriman, the 25-year-old daughter of US Ambassador Averell Harriman, attended. After viewing exhibits of planted evidence, they endorsed the Burdenko Commission's findings. Ms. Harriman later repudiated her 1944 statement before the 1951 House select committee.

In 1944, President Roosevelt assigned Capt. George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyn. Earle did so, using contacts in Bulgaria and Romania. He too concluded that the Soviet Union was guilty. FDR rejected Earle's conclusion, saying that he was convinced of Nazi Germany's responsibility. The report was suppressed. When Earle requested permission to publish his findings, the President gave him a written order to desist. Earle, who had been a Roosevelt family friend, spent the rest of the war in American Samoa.

In 1949, an American journalist assembled a committee of prominent Americans, which included former OSS chief Gen. William Donovan and future Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, to press for an official inquiry, but it went nowhere.

In September 1951, the House of Representatives appointed a select committee to hold hearings. It was chaired by Rep. Ray J. Madden and was popularly known as the Madden Committee. Although not without political or propaganda overtones, the hearings were the most comprehensive effort to date by the United States to gather facts and establish responsibility. The committee heard 81 witnesses, examined 183 exhibits, and took more than 100 depositions.

An investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacre but refused to classify this action as a war crime or as an act of mass murder.

Documents in the collection includes:

A despatch from  A. J. Drexel Biddle, Jr. including a secret report from Polish Military Intelligence concerning the missing Polish Officers.

Counter Intelligence Corps and U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command reports detailing information known by the organizations about the Katyn Massacre.

A 1952 Army Report, "Information on the Katyn Forest Incident," in two versions, the originally release moderately redacted version, and a fully declassifed unredacted copy released in 2013.

An Army inspector general report on its handing of information about the Massacre.