Dan Snow's History Hit - The Katyn Massacre

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Dan explains what happened in the spring of 1940 when the Soviet secret police executed over 22,000 Polish prisoners of war at three secluded sites in the Soviet Union. Sanctioned by Stalin and the most senior members of the Communist Party, this flurry of mass killings has become known collectively as the Katyn Massacre. It drove a wedge between the Allied Powers and cemented the Polish government in exile against Stalin's regime. To this day, it remains an extremely charged topic for Russia and Poland. So what can atrocities like this tell us about the nature of Soviet occupation? And what parallels can we draw with the present day, as Russia continues the invasion of yet another of its neighbours? Dan is joined by Anne Applebaum, a Polish-American journalist and specialist in the history of Communism in Europe, to tackle the aftermath and legacy of this infamous event.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody and welcome to this explainer episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. It's April 1943, 80 years ago this month.

An attachment of Wehrmacht soldiers, soldiers from the German army, are sweeping through the Katyn forest near the occupied city of Smolensk in the Soviet Union. The invasion of Russia is now going badly for the Germans. The defeat at Stalingrad came just a few months earlier. The war-weary soldiers are scanning the trees around them anxiously for any signs of the partisan enemy. All they can hear is the creak of tall pine trees, the noise of the wind in the branches,

and the tweeting of birdsong. They exchange hushed whispers, and they get nervous as their feet crack twigs on the ground or make noises in the undergrowth. At one point the soldiers come across a clearing where the earth has been disturbed. The low vegetation that carpets the forest floor has been torn out, swept aside. There's an eerie stillness hanging over the place. Something has happened here. Something isn't right. As they approach,

rifles couched at the ready, they can make out the outline of a long ditch, even though it's been obscured by a couple of years exposure to the elements. These battle-hardened soldiers, who've seen the awful face of war and genocide in the Soviet Union

know a mass grave when they see one. Not wanting to linger long at this sinister spot, they hurry to get word back to their superior officers. That was 80 years ago this month, and these men were the first to come across evidence of what's since become known as the Katyn Massacre. A series of mass executions perpetrated by the Soviets in April and May of 1940 in and around the Katyn Forest in the Soviet Union. It was sanctioned by Stalin, the most senior members of his government in the Politburo, and it was carried out by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The victims, Polish officers and intelligentsia. They killed over 22,000 of them who had been

taken prisoner after Soviet forces had occupied eastern Poland. The Katyn Massacre confirmed the opposition of the Polish government in exile to Stalin's regime. It fomented divisions between the Allied powers. It's still an extremely charged topic for Russia and Poland. It's a source of tension between them to this day. So why did the Soviets commit such a brutal war crime? What effect did it have on the great allied alliance of the Second World War? And what parallels can we draw from the present day as Russia continues its invasion of yet another one of its neighbours, this time Ukraine, and we understand commits further war

crimes? Joining us to answer these questions, I'm very pleased to say, is the living legend Anne Applebaum, a Polish-American journalist and historian specialising in the history of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, one of the most high-profile, outspoken and politically engaged historians in the world at this time. We're really grateful to her for coming on the podcast and her insights are going to help us get to the bottom of this very complicated piece of history. Let's get into it. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, just one week after the Nazis and the Soviets, unlikely allies, signed a non-aggression treaty known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This bizarre partnership between two ideologically opposed powers was really just a marriage of convenience. In the short term, both of them had more to gain from cooperation than from confrontation. Their plan was to conquer and partition Eastern Europe between them. Simple as that. Poland would be the first and major target.

On the 1st of September, the Germans advance from the north, west, and southern borders of Poland, each spearhead basically heading for the capital, Warsaw. Over 2,000 tanks, supported by 900 bombers, protected by 400 fighter planes, and 1.5 million men streamed into Poland in a massive series of assaults that enveloped and destroyed Polish defenders. They had tactical and numerical advantages over the defending Poles,

who were quickly overwhelmed. Massive German air superiority was decisive as well. Polish communications and supply lines were disrupted, and major cities heavily bombed. The Poles fought incredibly bravely, quite effectively. There were some short-term victories, as you'll know if you listened to the podcast I recorded with Roger Morehouse a couple of years ago all about this.

Go and look that one up in the feed. But they were facing enormous odds. By the 12th of September, nearly all of Western Poland had fallen. Warsaw, the capital city, was holding out. The Polish plan was to retreat, try and keep their coherence, and move to a slice of land called the Romanian Bridgehead, which was a kind of last-ditch attempt to hold out in case the Allies got their act together, France and Britain, and were able to send reinforcements. However, this plan, desperate as it was, was completely thrown in disarray when on the 17th of September, the Red Army crossed into Poland from the east. The sudden, overwhelming influx of something like 800,000 soldiers destroyed any remaining hope of a Polish

victory. And it was at this time that the Polish government saw the writing on the wall, ordered an emergency evacuation and headed south to neutral Romania and Hungary before making their way to France and ultimately setting up shop in London. While Britain and France had stayed true to their words and declared war on Germany on the 3rd of September, their support was inconsequential on the battlefield. After just a month, the whole of Poland had been captured. The Nazis and Soviets had split the country into two spheres of influence, divided up by the Bug River. Both sides clamped down on what they saw as dissenters. Nazi-controlled Western Poland would become the site of many of the largest and most notorious extermination camps,

specifically built to realise the, quote, final solution to the Jewish question. Names like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec are burned into our collective memory. And Hitler wanted to eliminate Poland's three and a half million Jews. There's no doubt this was his aim from the start. But he also needed to thoroughly subjugate the country, stamp out Polish nationalism. And to that end, he ordered the arrest, the mass murder of Polish officers, political opponents, and any citizens, prominent citizens, who threatened his regime in any way. Now, this plan would eventually spread far beyond Poland. It was implemented across, to varying degrees, Nazi-occupied countries in Eastern Europe.

There was genocide, ethnic cleansing on a gigantic scale. For those not killed, they could look forward to a future of forced labour. Something like nearly three million Polish citizens were deported to Germany as forced labourers during the Second World War. Over in the east of Poland in 1939, now under Stalin's guardianship, things really weren't much better. Conquering Soviet soldiers sort of ran rampage, they looted their way through Poland, they killed thousands, they committed huge numbers of sexual assaults. When told about this rampant bloodshedding, Stalin said, if there is no ill will, they can be pardoned. So it's basically carte blanche to behave however they wanted.

While the Nazis tried to justify their policies with the warped theory of racial supremacy, the Soviets relied on ideology. They implemented a campaign of Sovietization, so an attempt to make the Poles adopt the way of life, the mentality, the culture of the Soviet Union. As a first step, millions of citizens were forcibly made Soviet subjects, and there were show elections conducted by the security services, the NKVD. The Soviets also inflamed ethnic tension in the country. Minority groups were incited to commit acts of violence against Poles, whom they portrayed as citizens of an exploitive, capitalist state. They encouraged mob killings, community justice, and it's not really known how many people died as a result of this Soviet-inspired

terror, but it was huge numbers of people. Then came persecution. In order to prevent any kind of resistance movement from forming, there were waves of arrests, there were summary executions. Again, Polish military officers were targeted. Police, the priests, the intellectuals, the elite of society, they wanted to decapitate Polish society. And because it was the contention of the Soviets, they'd never recognised the Polish state as legitimate. Captured Polish soldiers were treated as rebels rather than prisoners of war, making their treatment worse than it might otherwise have been. Anyone connected with the pre-war Polish state was deemed a subversive

who'd committed a crime against revolution. Hundreds of thousands of these people were arrested, they were imprisoned, many deported to Siberia and other remote parts of the USSR, and many of them would be dead within a few years. Here's Anne Applebaum to shed some light on the initial stages of the Soviet occupation and the historic relationship between Russia and Poland. Anne, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. We're so used to Russians now demeaning the Ukrainian nationality itself, denying their kind of personhood as distinct from Russianness. Is there an element of that going on with Russia's relationship with Poland as well, which for many generations was incorporated into the Russian Empire?

It's a good question. It's a little bit more nuanced. I'm sitting in Warsaw, a few hundred yards away from one of the most prominent monuments in the city, and it's the monument to the Polish conquest of Moscow, 17th century. So there is a long history going back to the Middle Ages of competition and conflict between Poland, or as it was then, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was a kind of pre-modern empire, and Muscovy. And there have been different people in charge at different times. It's true that the Russian conquest of Poland in the 18th century, the division of Poland

between Russia, Austro-Hungary and Prussia, is really what made Russia into a European empire. It gave it its European borders and gave it much more influence in the West. There's a feeling in Russia that those Poles are kind of our natural subordinates, not so much that they're the same people. It's not quite the same emotion that they have about the Ukrainians. But there's competition going back many centuries. You talk there about the conquest of the 18th century. Well, after enduring the Russian Revolution, during the Russian Civil War, the Russians

again attempt to conquer Poland. And then we get to 1939. Everyone talks about Hitler's great invasion of Poland that starts the Second World War in Europe. Remind me what just happened a couple of weeks later. Yes. So on the 17th of September, the Soviet Union also invaded Poland. So Germany had invaded from the West on September the 1st, and then the Soviet Union invaded 17 days later from the east. And in effect, this was a new partition of Poland. Poland had been broken up by great powers in the 18th century, put back together after World War I. And this was a new partition. It had been agreed to secretly in a secret pact between Stalin and Hitler. And it was meant to erase Poland from the map once again.

This anniversary that we're talking about now, it shows that that erasure from the map was more than just physical moving lines on the Atlas. Tell me about what the Soviets did when they entered Poland. How did they go about trying to erase Poland from that map? It's actually a great question because there are a lot of parallels to what they did in Eastern Poland, as well as the Baltic States in 1939 and in the first part of the war. And then again in 1945 after the war, there are many parallels with what they're doing in Ukraine today. When they invaded what was then eastern Poland, their initial effort was to destroy elites, attack mayors, chiefs of police, intellectuals, lawyers, anybody who had a leading role in society was liable to be arrested. Any of them were liable to be deported to Siberia.

The idea was to kind of cut off the sort of top layer of society as they defined it. And in some cases, they actually arrived with lists of names. So they had names of people who they were looking for when they entered what were then Polish cities. And the Kantan Massacre was, in a certain sense, an extension of that same idea. The people who were massacred were reserve officers. That meant that they were people from many different walks of life. They were doctors, they were lawyers, they were senior figures in society. And by murdering them, Stalin was trying to eliminate the Polish elite, the part of the society that he believed carried or dictated the

national idea. It was at this time that the Katyn Massacre took place. The NKVD assumed responsibility for just over 300,000 Polish prisons of war that had been captured by the Red Army, they had set up an extensive network of camps with abysmal living conditions to house them. To get a sense of the hardship that they were living under, of 12,000 Poles sent to labour for the Dolstroi organisation that was responsible for road construction, gold mining in the Russian Far East, only 583 survived to be released in 1942. On the 5th of March 1940, the fateful order was issued. The infamous head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria, was sanctioned in writing by Stalin and five other key members of the Soviet Politburo to execute over 22,000

Polish, as they described, nationalists and counter-revolutionaries. The goal was simply to remove Poland's most effective dynamic officers in case they should ever somehow reform their military. Prisoners of war, who until this point assumed they'd be eventually released unknowingly underwent interrogations that decide whether they were to live or die. Those who demonstrated resistance to a pro-Soviet mentality anyway were declared enemies of the Soviet state and they were marked for execution. What do we mean by the Katyn Massacre? Was it one evening in a forest somewhere? Was it a more bureaucratic process of killing these people in different locations simultaneously? What should we think about when we hear that expression? First of all, we should think about mass murder.

You know, we usually think of mass murder in terms of concentration camps and gas chambers. This was another form of mass murder. So there were some 22,000 officers and other prisoners of war were being kept in three different camps. After Stalin gave the order, they were taken en masse in the middle of the night and then later throughout. They were thrown into pits and they were given mass graves. And it was all done very fast. It was all done in just a few days. And the idea was to do it quickly, to leave no traces, and then to cover up the murderer as quickly as possible. Was this happening in various places at the same time? Yes, there were three different sites. So there were three different places where the massacres took place. These are people who had somehow survived the kind of first wave of murders and executions. Have they just been in custody since 1939? Why was the decision made to execute them now? I don't know what the reason for that particular moment was. As I understand it,

Stalin simply made the decision that they couldn't live because they were a potential future Polish leadership class. They were the people who would have led a Polish army. They would have led a Polish society. They would have led a Polish underground. These were the potential leaders. As I said, they were doctors, they were lawyers, they were military officers.

They were people who had something to do