The FReeper Foxhole Remembers the Katyn Forest Massacre (Poland~1940) - October 13th, 2003

see educational sources | various compiled

[Darksheare]

The NKVD was famous for shootng Germans who were captured, or surrendered, to them.
That I was aware of.
Had also heard it stated that Stalin had thousands executed, but not like this.
Thankfully, he died of a stroke or such.
Alittle too late to help the Poles, but it at least saved others.

[manna]

Present!

[snippy_about_it]

Good morning manna.

[SCDogPapa]

Mornin' Snippy!!

[snippy_about_it]

There is much talk about the evil of Hitler but we can't forget Stalin and hopefully this thread points that out.

[snippy_about_it]

Good morning SCDogPapa, good to see you "fall in" to the Foxhole.

[texas booster]

There had been meetings in March 1940, during which the Soviet NKVD shared its well-practiced terror and extermination technology with the Nazi SS. (The only Nazi "improvement" over Soviet extermination methods was the use of poison gas.)

These sentences jumped out at me, since we have the spector of Nazi name calling fresh on the front page. In reality, there was little difference between the Nazi approach and the Soviet approach to conquered people.

Politics being what it is, history reviles the Nazi movement, but winks at the communist trail of tears. Occasionally you will hear a mention of some forgotten purge from the Soviet Union or Red China.

In reality, Stalin and Mao have both killed more innocent civilians than Hitler. When Saddam was looking for a leader to emulate, he chose Stalin and the NKVD. More brutal, almost as efficient as the Nazis.

"Never Forget" should be applied to the true history of Communism and its offspring. Great job!

[Valin]

On This Day In History


Birthdates which occurred on October 13:
1537 Jane Grey, Queen of England for 9 days
1754 Mary Ludwig Hayes American Revolutionary War heroine Molly Pitcher.
1769 Horace H Hayden cofounded 1st dental college
1853 Lillie Langtry [Jersey Lily], vaudevillian actress
1885 Harry Hershfield Cedar Rapids Iowa, cartoonist (Can You Top This?)
1889 Douglass Dumbrille Hamilton Ont, actor (Mr Deeds Goes to Town)
1890 Conrad Richter writer (The Light in the Forest)
1891 Irene Rich Buffalo NY, actress (Beau Brummell, Champ)
1902 Arna Bontemps Louisiana, black author (100 years of negro freedom)
1902 Franco Giorgetti Italy, cyclist (Olympic-gold-1920)
1909 Herblock (Herbert L Block) political cartoonist
1911 Ticker Freeman Paterson NJ, pianist (Dinah Shore Show)
1912 Hugo Weisgall Ivancice Moravia, composer (4 Impressions)
1915 Cornel Wilde actor (High Sierra, 5th Musketeer)
1917 Burr Tillstrom Chic Ill, puppeteer (Kukla, Fran & Ollie)
1917 Laraine Day Roosevelt Utah, actress (Dr Kildare, I've Got a Secret)
1920 Albert Hague Berlin Germany, actor (Mr Shorofsky-Fame)
1920 Nipsey Russell Atlanta Ga, comedian (Car 54, Barefoot in the Park)
1921 Harper MacKay Boston Mass, orch leader (NBC Follies)
1921 Yves Montand France, actor/singer (Z, Napoleon, Grand Prix)
1922 Alan Scott Haddonfield NJ, TV host/songwriter (Spin the Picture)
1924 Terry Gibbs Brooklyn NY, orch leader (Steve Allen Comedy Hour)
1925 Frank Gilroy American writer (Subject Was Roses)
1925 Lenny Bruce comedian, arrested on obscenity charges
1925 Margaret Thatcher (Tory) British PM (1979-90) Iron Lady
1927 Anita Kerr Memphis TN, singer (Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour)
1931 Ed Matthews Hall of Famer/Milwaukee Brave/HR hitter (512)
1936 Cliff Gorman Jamaica NY, actor (Boys in the Band, Angel)
1938 Jim McMullan Long Beach NY, actor (Dr McDaniel-Ben Casey)
1939 Melinda Dillon Hope Ark, actress (Close Encounters, Slap Shot)
1942 Pamela Tiffin Oklahoma City, actress (Viva Max!)
1942 Paul Simon Newark NJ, singer/actor (Kodachrome, 1 Trick Pony)
1946 Demond Wilson Valdosta Ga, actor (Sanford & Son, Baby I'm Back)
1946 Lacy J Dalton country singer (Blue Eyed Blues)
1948 Leona Mitchell Enid Okla, soprano (Musetta-La Boh‚me)
1949 Sammy Hagar singer-musician (Van Halen-Jump)
1959 Marie Osmond Ogden Ut, singer/actress (Paper Roses, Goin' Coconuts)
1961 Jerry Rice NFL receiver (SF 49ers) (Super Bowl XXIII, XXIV, XXIX); NFL individual record: touchdown receptions: career [131], season [22]; Super Bowl records: career: yards gained [215], points scored: [42], touchdowns scored [7], TDs in one game [3]...and counting
1962 Kelly Preston Hawaii, actress (Mischief, Twins, A Tigers Tale)
1965 Cherelle rocker (Affair-First Bite)
1969 Cady McClain Burbank Calif, actress (Dixie Martin-All My Children)

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Deaths which occurred on October 13:
54 Claudius Roman Emperor, dies
1601 Tycho Brahe greatest naked-eye observer, dies in Prague
1795 William Prescott American Revolutionary soldier, dies
1974 Ed Sullivan TV host (Ed Sullivan Show), dies at 73
1979 Clarence Muse actor (Sam-Casablanca), dies at 90
1988 Mike Venezia jockey, dies in 5th-race fall at Belmont Race Track, NY
1989 Jay Ward animator (Rocky & His Friends), dies at 69 of cancer

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Reported: MISSING in ACTION

1966 BORDEN MURRAY L.---GOLDSBORO NC.
1966 MEADOWS EUGENE T.---HIDDENITE NC.
[REMAINS RETURNED 11/94]
1967 MILLER EDISON WAINRIGHT---CLINTON IA.
[02/12/73 RELEASED BY DRV INJURED]
1967 WARNER JAMES H.---YPSILANTI MI.
[03/73 RELEASED BY DRV "ALIVE IN 98 "HONORABLE JAMES WARNER"]
1968 HUNT JAMES D.---MISSOULA MT.
1968 MASTERSON MICHAEL J.---EPHRAYA WA.
1968 ORELL QUINLEN R.---BARNESVILLE OH.
1969 GETCHELL PAUL E.---PORTLAND ME.
1970 CHESTNUT JOSEPH L.---MURFREESBORO TN.
[REMAINS RETURNED/IDENTIFIED 07/25/95]

POW / MIA Data & Bios supplied by
the P.O.W. NETWORK. Skidmore, MO. USA.

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On this day...
1307 French king Philip IV convicts Knights Templar of heresy
1399 Henry IV of England is crowned
1483 Rabbi Issac Abarbanel starts his exegesis on the Bible
1629 Dutch West Indies Co grants religious freedom in West Indies
1775 Continental Congress orders construction of a naval fleet
1792 Washington lays cornerstone of the Executive Mansion (White House)
1812 Battle of Queenston Heights
1843 B'nai B'rith founded in NY
1845 Texas ratifies a state constitution
1860 1st aerial photo taken in US (from a balloon), Boston
1864 Confederate Colonel John S. Mosby robs train near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
1903 Pirates beats Pilgrims (Red Sox) 5 games to 3 in 1st World Series
1914 Boston Braves sweep Phila A's, 1st sweep in World Series history (World Series #11)
1915 Boston Red Sox beat Phila Phillies, 4 games to 1 in 12th World Series
1919 Race riot at Elaine Arkansas
1921 NY Giants beat NY Yankees, 5 games to 3 in 18th World Series
1941 Nazis kill 11,000 Jewish children/old people
1943 Italy declares war on former ally Germany
1944 US 1st army begins battle of Aachen
1947 "Kukla, Fran & Ollie" premieres
1947 NHL All Star Game - All Stars beat Toronto Maple Leafs
1953 Burglar alarm-ultrasonic or radio waves-patented-Samuel Bagno
1957 German Dem Rep recalls the East Mark & issues new currency
1960 3rd presidential debate with Nixon in Hollywood & Kennedy in NY
1960 Pirate's Mazeroski's bottom of 9th lead off HR beats NY Yankees 10-9 in game 7 of 57th World Series
1960 Opponents of Fidel Castro executed in Cuba
1962 "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opens on Broadway, with Uta Hagen
1963 "Beatlemania" is coined after the Beatles appear at the Palladium
1964 Voskhod 1 crew returns
1969 Soyuz 8 is launched
1970 Angela Davis arrested in NYC
1971 1st world series night game (Pittsburgh 4-Baltimore 3) (World Series #68)
1972 Aeroflot Il-62 crashes in large pond outside Moscow, 176 die
1972 Uruguay to Chile plane crashes in Andes Mountain, (12/23 rescue)
1973 Teri Garr appears on Bob Newhart Show in "Emily in for Carol"
1978 James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King weds Anna Sandhu
1978 Tiros N, US's 1st 3rd generation weather satellite, is launched
1978 Graig Nettles at 3rd makes many spectactular plays in WS game 3 as Guidry beats Dodgers, after trailing 2 games to 0 Yanks win next 4
1980 Unprovoked slayings of 6 blacks in Buffalo, NY
1981 Vice President Hosni Mubarak elected president of Egypt
1982 IOC restores 2 gold medals from 1912 Olympics to Jim Thorpe
1982 NJ Devils 1st short handed goal-Don Lever
1984 Blackhawk Bill Gardner scores on 10th penalty shot against Islanders
1984 John Henry becomes 1st thoroughbred to win $6 million
1984 STS 41-G mission; lands at Kennedy Space Center
1986 25th NY, NL appearance in World Series (Mets vs A's) (World Series #83)
1987 1st military use of trained dolphins (US Navy in Persian Gulf)
1987 Costa Rican Pres Oscar Arias wins Nobel Peace Prize
1988 Concert at Masada ends Israel's 40th-anniversary fest
1989 Dow Jones down 190.58 points
1990 1st Russian Orthodox service in 70 yrs held in St Basil's Cathedral
1991 Blue Jay Cito Gaston is 1st manager ejected in a playoff game

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Holidays
Note: Some Holidays are only applicable on a given "day of the week"

Burundi : Hero of the Nation Day
Western Samoa : White Sunday (2nd Sunday) (Sunday)
Canada : Thanksgiving Day (Monday)
Florida : Farmers' Day (1915) (Monday)
Hawaii : Discoverer's Day (Monday)
US : Columbus Day (1492) (Monday)
Virgin Is & Puerto Rico : Friendship Day (Monday)
US : Sweetest Week (Day 2)
Home-Based Business Week Begins
Polish-American Heritage Month
Spinal Health Month

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Religious Observances
Ang, RC : Commem of St Edward the Confessor, king of England (1042-66)

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Religious History
539 (BC) The Persian armies of Cyrus the Great captured Babylon. (Babylon, under Nebuchadnezzar, was the former military scourge which had taken Judah into exile in 586 BC (see 2 Kings 25).
1670 In Virginia, slavery was banned for Negroes who arrived in the American colonies as Christians. (The law was repealed in 1682.)
1843 B'nai B'rith ("Sons of the Covenant") was established in New York City by a group of German Jews. It is both the oldest and the largest of the Jewish fraternal organizations.
1917 The Virgin Mary last appeared to three shepherd children near Fatima, Portugal. Six visions had occurred between May and October, each on the 13th of the month. (This last vision was attended by over 50,000 pilgrims.)
1988 The Bishop of Turin, Italy announced that the Shroud of Turin, long believed to be Christ's burial sheet, did not withstand scientific testing. It dated back only to 1280, and not to the time of Jesus' crucifixion (ca. AD 30-33).

Source: William D. Blake. ALMANAC OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1987.

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Thought for the day :
"He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet."

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You Might Be a Redneck if...
You think a woman who is "out of your league" bowls on a different night

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Murphys Law of the day...
Never stand between a fire hydrant and a dog.

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Astounding fact #79,037...
Tennessee is bordered by more states than any other.
The eight states are Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

[snippy_about_it]

Good morning Valin.

Thought for the day :
"He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet."

Good one.

[snippy_about_it]

..history reviles the Nazi movement, but winks at the communist trail of tears.

Well said texas booster, we don't hear enough about the evil of communism. The uneducated in our own country need to learn this lesson more than the rest of the world.

[Valin]

Good morning

Given that it IS monday I'd prefer to hold off a bit before making any judgements.

[U S Army EOD]

You got to remember Pol Pot from Cambodia, one of Jane Fonda's heros.

[snippy_about_it]

Where is your optimism? You got out of bed right? It's a good day. :)

[Prof Engineer]

ping

[SAMWolf]

Good Morning Snippy.

Excellent job on the Katyn Massacre. Beautiful Poem.

I heard about Katyn, the Uprising and the Soviet occupation from my Dad as a child when I was old enough to ask why he hated the Russians so much.

[Colonel_Flagg]

Good morning, all ..

A grim thread this morning but I hope you are enjoying your holiday. I'm supposed to have one but am here at the office instead. It's also moving week so there are millions of things to do and not much time in which to do them!

[HiJinx]

Ouch...what a depressing, heart-rending topic to research and report on.

Those of us who studied the Russians/Soviets have always known the depths of depravity to which they could sink. That a Katyn Massacre could and did happen did not surprise us. And yet, it did. Each time I learned something new about them, my stomach would do flip-flops.

This may be one of the things that has fueled my desire to see freedom and liberty flourish world-wide, and why I am so in favor of freeing opressed peoples everywhere...why the pictures of happy people coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan make me feel so good...

It's fitting that Poland was the first Soviet satellite to throw off the chains of opression.

[HiJinx]

And the thing that makes it relevant today?

Stalin is/was an admired role model for one Saddam Hussein.

[HiJinx]

When Saddam was looking for a leader to emulate, he chose Stalin and the NKVD. More brutal, almost as efficient as the Nazis.

You beat me to making the connection!

[SAMWolf]

Remembering Katyn

In Soviet documents recently obtained by the Hoover Institution, the details of one of the bloodiest crimes of Stalin's reign of terror have come to light.

For those who lived through World War II, and for many who did not, the Katyn Massacre carries a sinister resonance. The most notorious of Stalin's wartime atrocities, the massacre was falsely attributed to Hitler through a scarcely credible but widely believed piece of Soviet disinformation.

In April 1940, nearly twenty-two thousand Polish prisoners were rounded up, transported to Katyn and various other sites, and executed. They included army officers, civil servants, landowners, policemen, ordinary soldiers, and prison officers. They were lined up, made to dig their own mass graves, and shot in the back of the neck. The victims were never tried or presented with any charges. The executions were ordered personally by Stalin in a memorandum dated March 5, 1940, to Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB). Per Stalin's instructions, the prisoners were to receive the "supreme measure of punishment—shooting."


The full facts became widely accessible to researchers with the acquisition of millions of sheets of Soviet secret documents by the Hoover Institution, known as Fond 89. Many of these documents were made available to me while I was at work on The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. The full story is worth telling.

The mass grave in Katyn Forest was discovered by the occupying Nazi forces in 1943. The disinterment of more than four thousand corpses was an unexpected gift to Goebbels's propaganda machine, which broadcast the story to the outside world—to the embarrassment not only of Stalin but of his wartime allies Roosevelt and Churchill. Roosevelt dismissed the Nazi claims as "German propaganda and a German plot." Churchill was less explicit: "The less said about that the better."

There the matter lay—until March 3, 1959, when Aleksandr Shelepin, then head of the KGB, gave full details in a secret memo to Krushchev of the numbers executed. The total was 21,857 killed:

4,421 in the Katyn Forest (Smolensk region)
3,820 in the Starobelsk camp (near Kharkov)
6,311 in the Ostashkovo camp (Kalinin region)
7,305 in other camps and prisons in western Ukraine and western Belorussia

A curious but related episode deserves notice. In 1972, a private group in London resolved to build a monument to the victims of Katyn. The original plan was to place the monument in Kensington, one of London's best-known tourist areas. At first, the Council of the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea gave permission for the plan to go ahead. Permission was withdrawn, however, under pressure from the Foreign Office.

It is now known, through the Hoover Institution's Soviet archives, that the Foreign Office pressure was itself the outcome of pressure from Moscow. There was an exchange of telegrams on September 7, 1972, between the Soviet Politburo and the Soviet ambassador in London. The Kremlin's message started as follows:

Reactionary circles in England are again undertaking attempts for anti-Soviet purposes to stir up the so-called "Katyn Affair." To this end the campaign to collect funds for the construction of a "Memorial to the Victims of Katyn" in London is being made use of.
In his reply, the Soviet ambassador stated that the attention of the British government had already been drawn to attempts to whip up an anti-Soviet campaign based on "the inventions—long ago exposed—of the Goebbels propaganda machine concerning the so-called 'Katyn affair.'"

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Stalin's orders were unambiguous. The Polish prisoners were to receive the "supreme measure of punishment—shooting."

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On September 8 the Politburo drafted a further statement, which contained the following passage:

The above-mentioned anti-Soviet campaign cannot but arouse justified feelings of profound indignation in the Soviet Union, whose people made enormous sacrifices for the sake of saving Europe from fascist enslavement.
Foreign Office pressure on the borough resulted and permission was withdrawn. Four years later—in 1976—the Katyn memorial was in fact built, in the cemetery at Gunnersbury on the outskirts of London. The project was supervised by the National Association for Freedom (later, the Freedom Association). Presumably under pressure from the Foreign Office, the British Defense Ministry forbade former members of the British armed forces to don their uniforms for the launching ceremony. This negative order was ignored by several ex-servicemen, without further consequences.

On April 13, 1990, the Soviet authorities at last admitted responsibility for the massacres at Katyn and elsewhere, although the figure cited in the relevant statement—"around 15,000"—fell short of the real total by more than 6,000. The admission came in a statement by the Tass news agency, with the personal authority of then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The statement referred to only three of the prison camps involved: Smolensk, Voroshilovgrad, and Kalinin. It claimed that the authorities had knowledge of the killings through "recently discovered documents." "Direct responsibility for the crime" was ascribed to Beria. The statement ended "The Soviet side, expressing profound regret over the Katyn tragedy, declares that this was one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism."

At a meeting in Moscow that day, Gorbachev presented Polish president General Wojciech Jaruzelski with copies of the NKVD's lists of names of Polish internees in the three camps mentioned. The Polish government issued a statement declaring that the question of responsibility for the massacre had "weighed particularly painfully" on Polish-Soviet relations and that the "long-awaited" Soviet admission made possible a relationship based on "partnership and true friendship." The statement went on: "Reconciliation can only be built on truth." It is surely fair to add that the Tass statement—although useful for relations between the ailing Soviet Union and its Polish satellite—was true but not the whole truth. Only three of the localities involved were named, and the total given fell short of the true figure.

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In 1990, fifty years after the fact, the Kremlin finally admitted Soviet complicity in the killings in the Katyn Forest.

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The Polish statement was striking not only for its content but because it had been drafted under the authority of Jaruzelski—a communist leader installed under Soviet protection. In September of that year, he was forced to resign and in December he was replaced as president by the elected anticommunist leader Lech Walesa.

Postscript

In his 1959 memo to Krushchev, KGB head Shelepin noted that Soviet propaganda efforts to blame the Katyn massacre on the Germans had "taken firm root in international public opinion." To keep the truth from coming out, Shelepin recommended that all records pertaining to the murdered Poles be destroyed. In other words, "We did it, but the world believes the Germans did. Therefore, leave the story as its stands." Thankfully, the documents were not destroyed and we now know the truth about Katyn.

Brian Crozier