Original subtitles

In the north west of Russia lies Katyn Forest,

beneath which lie over 4,000 Polish officers

slaughtered in 1940

by the Soviet secret police, NKVD.

Lying alongside them are many other human remains.

They are Soviet civilians

executed in the same way just a few years earlier.

The Katyn Massacre is only a fragment of truth,

 a tiny faction of the heinous crimes

committed in the USSR for over a decade

by Stalin's executioners.

Unshakable disciplined executioners that worked in the shadows

and whose story, methods and names

can now be revealed.

STALIN AND THE KATYN MASSACRE

On 1 September 1939,

Nazi Germany started the blitz

and invaded Poland.

The Polish frontlines were soon annihilated.

Warsaw  After a week,

Warsaw was under siege

regularly bombarded by German airstrlkes and gunfire.

In the midst of the chaos, somewhere east of Warsaw,

Captain Jozef Czapski

roamed with his squadron.

Czapski was a reserve officer.

In civilian life, he was a painter.

"We were exhausted

 "but determined to fight the Nazis", recalled Czapski.

"We tried to assemble our men,"

"little did we know we were about to be victims"

"of one of the biggest betrayals of the 1900s,"

A few weeks earlier, Stalin and Hitler

signed a non-aggression pact that stunned the world.

But nobody knew that the dictators had secretly agreed

to share Poland.

And Stalin wanted his piece of the cake.

On 17 September the Red Army

invaded the east of Poland

and took the Poles, in disbelief, by surprise.

Cornered 230,000 Polish soldiers

and officers were captured

and disarmed by the Soviets.

Captain Jozef Czapski

joined a line of POWs.

"Our guards said nothing

and threatened stragglers," stated Czapski.

"They took us west, towards Tarnopol."

In Tarnopol, like in all eastern Poland,

a large part of the population was from Ukraine and Belarus

Two ethnic minorities seeking independence.

Ukrainian population

welcomed the Red Army as liberators.

Soviet soldiers handed out Ukrainian newspapers

announcing that the USSR considered them as brothers

and that they were protected by Russia.

The propaganda ridiculed

the Polish Minister of foreign affairs.

"Улица вспоминает пана Бэка:

Какой гибкий был пан."

And ridiculed the head of the Polish Army.

"Пан Рыдз-Смиглы гуляет по Парижу".

"Then", says Czapski,

"We continued east,"

"towards to the Soviet border."

Another reserve officer,

Jewish doctor Salomon Slowes,

was also captured.

They crossed the Soviet border by truck.

 The trip lasted several days

and they took Salomon Slowes somewhere in Russia.



"We were lined up in a huge field", he recounted.

"A long line of soldiers"

"meandered in the middie of nowhere."

"Each waited to give their name,

rank and ID number."

"I was next, when a guy in front of me"

"proudly announced to the Soviet soldiers"

"that he was a communist"

 "Shut it, an officer answered,"

 "We've got rid of greater communists than you."

"Our gaze fell upon this poor man,

the journey to his dream country had filed with gloom."

As for Captain Czapski,

he was isolated

and locked up in an odd prison

along with thousands of other Polish officers.

This was Starobielsk monastery

close to the Soviet town of Starobilsk.

On many walls," told Czapski,

"there were deep cavities bored by bullets."

"The guards calmly told me"

"that the nobility was executed there during the civil war."

"That's all I got."

"Unless barking orders, our guards remained silent."

"In Starobielsk", recounted Czapski,

"loudspeakers would be used continuously"

"to play Chopin and Mussorgsky full blast."

"Over time it plunged the POWs"

"into a sort of depression."

"We lived on top of each other in the huts"

"and many had to slip under the bunks"

"not to sleep outside."



Like Josef Czapski

over half of the POWs were reserve officers,

civilians in uniform:

physicians, engineers,

teachers, lawyers,

senior civil servants, architects,

writers and artists.

In total, 3,800 Polish officers

were crammed into Starobielsk.

As for military doctor Salomon Slowes,

he ended up in another monastery prison.

It was in Kozielsk, Russia

"Loudspeakers continuously played music peppered with slogans,"

remembered Salomon Slowes,

"and it got to us."

"We were like in a prison camp unlike anything we knew."

To pass time, he drew this new world.

The church in the centre

surrounded by huts thrown together into which the POWs crammed.

Kozielsk held 4,500 Polish officers as POWs.

There was also a third monastery prison.

It was in Ostashkov, on a little island in a lake.

in northern Russia.

Held there were 6,500 Poles.

Like their fellow Poles in Starobielsk and Kozielsk

they had no idea what the Soviets had planned.

They were in the clutches

of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs,

the NKVD.

An implacable repressive machine

of men and women

blindly devoted to the Party's cause.

Its bloody legacy began 22 years earlier,

in 1917.

It was the Cheka's successor,

the secret police established in 1917 by the Bolsheviks

just after they took power.

It was led at the time

by a Bolshevik of Polish descent

called Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Cheka stands for All-Russian Extraordinary Commission

for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

Upon its creation,

it only numbered 600 hard-line Bolsheviks.

As the Russian Civil War raged between Whites and Reds,

the Chekists had to enforce

the party's dictatorship in conquered areas.

Kiev, Summer 1919  Some months later,  the Whites took Kiev from the Red Army,

and revealed the Cheka's methods to the world.

Proven or suspected opponents,

sometimes mere onlookers and passers-by,

were executed after being stripped

then thrown in mass graves.

The Chekist's aim was

to speed up executiion of the old world

an event that was inevitable to the Party.

"Our action", said Dzerzhinsky,

"must be assumed by the Party as a method"

"to create the Communist man."

But this had to remain secret.

The way of achieving a proletarian dictatorship

was nobody's business.

If not for the Civil war,

these mass graves would have remained hidden.

The head of the Chakists led his troops by example

as stated by Dzerzhinsky in a letter to his wife:

"No time to think about you."

I'm exhausted and never stop."

"Я даже расстреливаю виновных собственноручно."

"Мои руки в крови."

На протяжении 1918,

чекисты арестовали и казнили 3.000 священников,

иногда заливая расплавленный свинец им в рот

чтобы искупить их "грех" (веру в Бога).

That was how the Cheka turned deserted monasteries into prisons

and places of execution.

Lubyanka Square, Moscow  Place Loubianka, Moscou Lubjanka-Platz, Moskau

In early 1920 the Cheka set up offices in Moscow

In a huge building in Lubyanka Square.

The basement was turned into holding cells and an execution site.

The following year, with the civil war over,

Cheka grew from 600 agents

to 260,000 agents.

The last published figure.

After this, Cheka numbers were kept secret.

They locked down towns.

Many people were arrested for unknown reasons.

They vanished.

It was as if they never existed.

From 1922,

Cheka took the name GPU,

standing for State Political Directorate.

But Dzerzhinsky and his men

still called themselves Chekists".

The GPU attracted opportunists

not afraid to get their hands dirty

or simply enjoyed doing so.

Such as Lavrentiy Beria.

Born in Georgia into a poor family,

a man with precocious talent.

Aged 18 when the Revolution began,

he decided to infiltrate Georgian nobility

by posing as an anti-Bolshevik activist.

He then reported back to the Cheka

the names of the nobility to be executed.

The young manipulator was soon recruited

by the Georgian Cheka

where he rose through the ranks at lightning speed.

Following in Dzerzhinsky's footsteps,

Beria was a young local leader who commanded respect

by torturing and taking out the most important suspects.

Felix Dzerzhinsky died of a heart attack.

He was immediately replaced by two Chekists.

Vyacheslav Menzhinsky,

a man with heart problems,

and his deputy, Genrikh Jagoda,

who would be tasked with most of responsibilities.

The Party held a majestic funeral for him

in line with his contribution.

Dzerzhinsky left behind a repressive machine,

that was also merciless and paraioid,

which even terrorised its own members.

Every Chekist, regardless of rank,

worked with the threat of a case file

that recorded their past, weaknesses and errors.

Any of them could be arrested or interrogated at any time.

 Tbilissi, Georgia

As for the model Chekist, Tiflis, Georgien

As for the model Chekist,

Lavrentiy Beria, he continued his ascent.

The tireless worker

was in 1927 appointed

head of the entire Georgian GPU.

Now an absolute master in his kingdom of Tbilisi,

Beria was blinded by ambition.

Thq Georgian had even put down markers at the Kremlin

with a Politburo member as chaperone,

Anastas Mikoyan.

He was an acconplice to another Georgian

who had just removed all his opponents from power:

Joseph Stalin.

From 1929,

Stalin gradually established his personal tyranny

and the Chekists had to shift into high gear.

The leader first sought collectivisation

of Soviet agriculture.

To get 110 million peasants,

three quarters of the country's population,

to abandon their land and join collective groups,

the Chekists had to be very persuasive.

This led to the GPU executing 30,000 peasants

after being labelled "kulaks":

reach peasants.

For the country, a rich peasant was one with a cow,

but those described in propaganda were nothing but a fantasy.

The resistance to collectivisation was particularly strong in Ukraine,

the Soviet Union's breadbasket

To overcome this, the Chekists deported

some 110,000 Ukrainian peasants

primarily to the special prison

on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea.

They were to be rehabilitated through forced labour.

So many deportees were uprooted from their land

that in 1931 the GPU created

a new arm to its repressive arsenal:

Gulag.

In two years, the Chekists crushed the resistance

to collectivisation.

But collectivisation did not work.

Production fell dangerously low

while harvests were subject to completely disproportionate

requisition quotas.

After a disastrous harvest in Ukraine,

the collective farms were forced to give their grain to the state.

They had nothing to sow for the following year.

A terrible famine hit Ukraine

yet Stalin demanded

that the quotas were upheld.

On 20 November 1932

the collective farms unable to pay in grain

had to pay in meat.

But there was no longer meat.

A week later the Chekists had to register the villages

unable to meet the quota on the "black board".

Their last grain reserves confiscated,

the peasants were banned

from leaving their village to stock up.

As for the consequences of this sentence,

Chekists could not state it in writing.  Nobody was to know their methods for breaking the resistance

and the secret had to be kept.

But in spring 1933,

British journalist Gareth Jones

Managed to enter Ukraine without detection.

Since 1929,

Gareth Jones had done three reports from the field.

The land was unrecognisable.

The land was strewn with bodies that people had stopped burying.

When the journalist entered this region

cut off from the rest of the USSR,

the Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 10,000 per day.

With no other option, sometimes,

the youngest was killed to feed the family.

Even mothers gave their life

and begged their children to eat them.

 This was so widespread

that the GPU executed 3,000 peasants for cannibalism.

With his detailed articles in The Guardian,

Gareth Jones revealed the extent of the famine

and accused the Kremlin of being directly responsible.

Moscow vehemently denied its existence

and accused the journalist of anti-Communism.

The truth revealed by Jones

hit a brick wall in the form of propaganda

that hammered home the official version:

collectivism was a complete success.

The state used images to support its lie

in overwhelming proportions.

While propaganda showed combines in mass,

there were in fact none.

And while it said Ukraine had an excellent harvest,

it was in fact disastrous

and people were starving.

This was how the USSR managed

to murder in cold blood four million Ukrainians

disconcertingly in secret.

In 1934, the head of the GPU,

Vyacheslav Menzhinsky,

died himself of a heart attack.

His deputy, Genrikh Yagoda,  took over the GPU,

soon renamed to the NKVD.

The NKVD was the backbone of a Soviet Union

that commanded propaganda in unprecedented proportions.

The Chekists were the guardians

of an impregnable mass of lies.

They would now establish Stain's total domination.

Pre-revolution Lenin supporters were previously untouchable,

known as the old Bolsheviks,

but they were the next target.

Genrikh Yagoda, inspecting the Gulag's work here,

had to take out the most important and fast.  Yagoda ordered the NKVD to arrest them

based on false evidence.

He then held show trials

at the end of which the defendants, psychologically defeated,

confessed to their imaginary crimes and were executed.

"We have made great progress."

"Firstly,"

"we live more comfortably."

"Life is more joyful."

"And joy ensures success at work."

Lavrenty Beria, head of the Georgian NKVD,

was now one of Stalin's confidants.

He was in charge of Stalin's private security

when he was on holiday in his native Georgia.

Beria, seen here with Stalin's daughter on his lap,

distingushed himself

through the execution of Georgia's Old Bolsheviks.

This ambitious Chekist had the ideal profile

to lead the Soviet NKVD one day.

But in 1936,

Stalin chose another product of the NKVD

to replace Genrikh Yagoda

and guarantee the next stage:

Nikolai Yezhov.

A paranoid perverted being,

riddled with so many diseases

it was a wonder he was still standing.

On Stalin's orders Nikolai Yezhov executed

almost all the Red Army's generals

and two-thirds of the Party's Central Committee.

But this purge by the Soviets

was just the tip of the iceberg of an operation as excessive

as it was concealed.

On 30 July 1937

Operation Order

No. 00447 of the NKVD

extended the purge to the wider Soviet society

by setting quotas for each region.

In total 200,000 so-called "criminals" and "saboteurs"

were to be deported to the Gulag

and 70,000 were to be executed.

But the NKVD's regional heads

competed zealously to exceed the quotas.

They sent hundreds of requests to the Kremlin

to increase deportations and executions.

These were approved daily

and without hesitation by Stalin

and the Politburo's five other members:

Voroshilov,

Molotov,

Mikoyan,

Kaganovich

and Kalinin.

Most people were arrested at night

and taken to one of the many NKVD prisons.

Confessions were obtained through torture

which was officially authorised by Party leaders.

The number of "accomplices" was also obtained by torture.

They were then arrested.

For the next phase, the NKVD used professional killers

led by Vasily Blokhin.

A former shepherd known for

his talent to kill in cold blood.

Blokhin was appointed by Stalin

as chief executioner.

His role specifically included

personally executing the high-profile Party members.

Executions were often done at night in a soundproof cell.

The victim would be held by two NKVD agents

as a third shot them in the back of the head.

Blokhin and his men didn't like using the Nagant revolver,

the Chekist's main arm,

due to it being heavy and heating quickly.

They preferred German Walther pistols,

an efficient and reliable weapon with a 7.65 calibre

that minimised blood splatter.

Thanks to Walther pistols, victims could be executed

like clockwork,

every two minutes if it was a busy day.

The bodies were then taken away by truck

either to be burned at the all-night crematorium

or to be thrown in mass graves

dug in secret

often in woodland.

They were then filled in using bulldozers.

The NKVD would plant

saplings immediately after,

often firs as they grow fast.

There was soon no trace of what happened.

This methodical organisation

enabled the NKVD to secretly execute

some 750,000 Soviets in a year and a half.

To fight traitors, murderers, fascist intelligence agents

and capitalism restorers,

the Party has appointed as the NKVD chief

a devout son, friend and supporter of our comrade Stalin:

Nikolai Yezhov.

Nikolai Yezhov was the subject of a true cult of personality.

But it did not last.

Stalin would accuse him

of letting traitors infiltrate the NKVD.

This led Yezhov to start purging the NKVD

This led Yezhov to start purging the NKVD

and the Chekists began executing each other.

In this madhouse, some even died shouting:

"Glory to Stalin".

This self-destructive circus was nothing but a manoeuvre by Stalin

to purge the purgers.

He was covering his tracks.

On 15 March 1938

former NKVD head, Genrikh Yagoda,

was taken to Lubyanka's soundproof cell

were Nikolai Yezhov awated.

He had never betrayed the Party

but he was now disposable.

He could one day become a liability.

Vasily Blokhin

executed his former boss in front of his new one.

A year later Stalin demoted Nikolai Yezhov

and appointed Lavrentiy Beria

He well knew that those who survived

were collaborators Stalin saw use in,

so did his all to prove how essential he was.

With this aim on 17 September 1939,

when the Soviet Union began its invasion of Poland

Beria methodically planned Sovietisation of this territory.

He ordered the Red Army to give the NKVD,

at predetermined points,

all the captured Polish officers.

Kozielsk, January 1940 

Salomon Slowes and his comrades had been prisoners in Kozielsk

for four months at the time.

"We were now allowed to write to our families"

"even if the address Kozielsk was secret."

"Our family must write to Gorki Rest House,"

"Moscow, P.O. Box 12."

"The NKVD often held conferences on socialism"

"and policy training courses."

"We had to study Party history,"

"discuss Stalin's and Molotov s speeches"

"which were broadcast via camp loudspeakers."

"And often at night,"

"educational films were projected for us"

"Like 'Battleship Potemkin'."

"Battleship Potemkin" by Sergey Eisenstein

"A film I found nterastrg but much too theatrical."

As for Jozef Czapski,  he was still imprisoned at the Starobielsk monastery.

"Some nights, we were interrogated"

"individually, recalled Czapski.

"It wasn't about torture,"

"the NKVD just wanted to know everything about us,"

"our families, beliefs, commitments."

"I was once pulled out of bed at 1 o'clock in the morning."

"So, you worked as a painter in Paris"

"for eight years?" Chekist asked.

"Yes. From 1924 to 1932."

"Where your orders from your Minister of foreign affairs?"

"No. He didn't know I was there"

"What order did you get from his deputy?"

"None. He didn't know either."

"You think I'm stupid?"

"You had to draw up a map of Paris"

"and send it to your minister"

"You can get a map on any street in Paris"

"You are lying. Never lie to the NKVD, Captain Czapski"

Many officers saw it as a farce.

Nobody imagined it was a way to select

who would live and who would die.

Meanwhile, half of Poland occupied by the Red Army

was officially annexed by the USSR.

To oversee the operation

Stalin sent a fresh member of the Politburo

Ukrainian Nikita Khruschev.

Nikita Sergueievitch Khrouchtchev Nikita Sergej ewitsch Chruschtschow

"The changes don't look much at first sight...

The same windows,

but the signs are in Ukrainian,

and their management is now under

that of government officials."

They were wiping Poland off the map.

Sovietising the people.

"In Western Ukraine we have opened 13 high schools."

"Professor Kirill Studinski"

"was shown the door by Polish authorities."

"He's now a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences,"

"and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR."

"Life has changed:"

"new citizens don't simply go to school,"

"they want to instruct, learn"

"and understand the world."

While model students studied,

NKVD carefully drew the list of Poles

who were "unsovetisable":

members of non-Communist partes and student unions,

police and all armed officers,

anyone that had bean abroad,

government heads of service and those superior,  journalists, artists, members of the clergy,  industrialists, business owners,

and hotel and restaurant owners.

Lubyanka, NKVD Headquarters  4 February 1940  Beria scrupulously studied the reports

sent by commanders at Kozielsk,

Starobielsk and Ostashkov.

After five years' detention,

the Poles were unsurprisingly deemed

impervious to the work of political education.

They formed intellectual resistance groups

and illegal religious services.

Some even openly described the USSR as an imperial state.

It was time for Beria to go down to the Lubyarka basement

and into the execution cell.

He found his predecessor Nikolai Yezhov there.

He had admitted his crimes

after being tortured, as was custom.

Yezhov was probably worried about his daughter Natalia

who he had adopted after ordering the killing of her Chekist parents.

Six-year-old Natalia

was now an orphan for a second time.

The implacable Vasily Blokhin

executed another former head of the NKVD

watched by the new head.

A month later, on March 1940,

Beria's proposed No. 794/B

sent to his comrade Stalin

sealed the fate of the Polish officers.

"They are enemies of the Soviet Union"

"and are filled with hate for the Soviet system."  Beria suggested dealing with

the execution of 14.700 Poles

imprisoned in three monasteries,

as well as that of 11.000 officers and civilians 

held in Soviet Poland.

"It's agreed" he concludes,

"that the appropriate punishment"

"should be death y shooting."

As always, the execution request

was approved by all members of the Politburo present

and was signed by Stalin,

Voroshilov,

Molotov and Mikoyan.

Two absent members, Kalinin and Kaganovich,

gave their approval by phone.

Nikita Khrushchev in Ukraine and could not be reached.

The session was held at 2:10 in the morning.

The norm.

For the mission to go smoothly,

the Poles had to think until the end

that they would soon be released.

From 5 April 1940,

the POWs at Ostashkov monastery

were gradually evacuated by windowless trains

to Kalinin prison.

Vasily Bolkhin awaited them there.

This was disclosed only years later

by the NKVD officer running the prison,  Dmitry Tokarev

Testimony of Dimitry Tokarev recorded in 1992

"I was terrified when Blokhin, Siniegubov and Kriwienko"

"came into my office"

"and said:"

"Come on then.

Let's get to it!"

"It was dangerous to refuse, so I agreed."

"The door leading to the hall

"had been covered with felt"

"to muff e the sounds of gunfire."

"The prisoners went down the hall,"

"turned left"

"and into the "red" room."

"In that room,"

"their identity was checked"

"to avoid any errors."

"Once certain"

"it was the right person,"

"they were handcuffed,"

"and taken"

"to the execution cell,"

"One of the doors of the execution cell"

"led to a yard."

"The bodies were taken out"

"through this door"

"and loaded on to trucks."

"On the first night"

"they executed 300 people."

"But as the executions"

"had to stop at dawn,"

"Blokhin gave orders"

"to take prisoners"

"in groups"

"of a maximum of 250."

There were executions every night

until 22 May 1940.

There was only one day of respite, May 1st,

Labour Day.

There were 6.287 executions at Kalinin.

The POWs at Starobielsk monastery

were taken by winndowless trains to the town of Kharkov.

They were then taken to the NKVD prison

where there were executions every night for six weeks.

There were 3.896 executions at Kharkov.

As for Kozielsk POWs,

they were taken by windowless trains to the town of Smolensk.

Then they were taken by truck to Katyn forest

as retold by Andrzej Wajda

whose father was murdered in Katyn forest.

Some officers were taken to a dacha

used as an NKVD rest house.

But most were executed directly by the mass graves.

Contrary to the other executions and for unknown reasons,

the killings at Katyn were done out in the open in broad daylight.

There were 4.404 executions.

This was the Katyn Massacre.

But this wasn't the full grim toll.

The NKVD also deported

officers and civilians arrested in Poland to prisons in Kiev,

Kharkov and Minsk where they were executed.

An additional 7.305 executions.

In a month and a half the NKVD executed

a total of 22.000 Polish officers and Polish nobility.

Via the Top Secret order of 26 October 1940,

Beria gave a reward of a month's salary

to the NKVD agents that executed Poles.

This order stated the killers' names

including Vasily Blokhin,

who oversaw the execution of the Ostashkov POWs

along with Nikolai Siniegubov

and Mikhail Kriwienko.

The order also mentioned Fedor llyin,

Iosif Gribov,

Timofei Kupriy,

Ivan Feldman,

Ivan Stepanov.

Two sets of brothers:

Nikolai and Vladimir Kostyuchenko,

and Ivan and Vasily Shigalev,

two twisted alcoholics Blokhin kept an eye on.

And there were two women: Serafima Kuznetsova

and a Bulakhova, whose first name wasn't mentioned.

A total of 40 Chekists

executed 22.000 people in six weeks.

This deserved nothing less than a bonus.

But the NKVD's operation did not stop there.

They had to erase all traces.

Katyn" d'Andrzej Wajda (2007) "Das Massaker von Katyn" von Andrzej Wajda (2007)

Take two.

- Yes, sir. - Let's go, quick.

Open up!

- Elzbieta Aleksandrowna? - Yes.

Wife of Polish Army officer Kazimierz Ignatowicz?

- Yes. - Pack your things.

In just two nights, entire families of the executed,

some 60.000 people, were arrested and sent to the Gulag.

Why is the girl crying?

Don't cry! Don't you want to see your daddy?

You're going to your husband.

Barely deported, four officers' children wrote to the Kremlin.

"Dear Stalin our Father,"

"we are writing to beg you to return our dads"

"working in the Ostashkov camp."

"Life is hard for us now."

"Our mothers aren't well and we're starving."

"We are humbly asking you, Father Stalin, not to forget us."

"We promise to be good Soviets,"

"yet it's hard to live without our dads."

"Bye, Stalin our Father"

This first wave of 60.000 arrests and deportations

was followed by two much bigger waves.

A total of one million Poles

deemed "unsovietisable" were deported to Kazakhstan and Sibeia.

They were met by thousands of Soviet peasants

deported since 1930

who had no intention of helping them.

Among the destitute,

the first victims were youngest children.

Jozef Czapski was part of the last transferred from Starobielsk.

To his great surprise he wasn't released

but taken to another NKVD monastery

in Gryazovets.

He joined 395 officers

from the three monasteries,

the only survivors of a mass murder

to which they were obvivious.

Salomon Slowes was also among the 395 who miraculously survived.

They struck up a friendship.

Neither of them understood

why they weren't freed Like the rest of their comrades.

So as not to go mad,

Czapski held conferences on Marcel Proust.



Day after day with his comrades, he recited from memory

the seven volumes of "In Search for Lost Time".

It will never be known why

the NKVD spared a handful of Poles.

One can only assume that the Chekists

considered that these men might come in handy one day.

One year ater  A year later, a dramatic turn of events changed everytHng.

Hitler terminated his pact with Stalin

and invaded the USSR whose front was wiped out.

The Red Army's collapse was so devastating

that the world expected the Nazis to take Moscow in months.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

whose country was fighting alone against Hitler

offered to provide the USSR with any help it needed.

Churchill decided to draw a line under his profound anti-Communism

and offered Stalin an alliance

that the dictator in dire straits gladly accepted.

But the UK was allied to Poland's government-in-exile

run by Wladyslaw Sikorski

who demanded all Poles deported to the Gulag be freed

and that Poland's pre-1939 borders be restored.

Churchill, determined to bring his allies together,

invited Poland and the USSR to come to an agreement.

Stalin represented by Ambassador Ivan Maisky,

recognised the Polish government-in-exile.  The Poles deported to the USSR had to be released,

or given amnesty in USSR terms.

The most able formed an army

of Poles in the USSR to fight the Nazis.

But the agreement made no mention whatsoever of Poland's borders,

with Stalin refusing to commit at the time.

After some hesitation and pressure from Churchill, who asked him

to have faith in Stalin's sincerity,

Sikorski signed the agreement.

Totskye military camp, October 1941  The Polish POWs began leaving the Gulag

and were sent to Totskye camp on the edge of the Urals.

Exhausted and starved,

Soldiers and refugees had to throw together

the new Polish Army.

Winter 1941 came early.

People were housed in tents with temperatures as low as -30 degrees.

93.000 of them would die of exhaustion and illness

the year after their release.

The new Polish Army was formed and commanded

by General Wladyslaw Anders.

Captured in September 1939,

General Anders languished for two years in the Lubyanka

where he was often tortured.

He was freed personally by Beria, who said to him:

"Let bygones be bygones."

"Do yo want some tea or cigarettos?"

Anders didn't need long to understand

that he missed thousands of officers.

Almost all his general staff

from 1939 was now missing.

Now released, Jozef Czapski and Salomon Slowes

joined General Anders at Tokstoye camp

and told him what they knew about the monastery evacuations.

And the plot thickened.

Had the POWs been handed over to the Germans, as Slowes suspected?

Anders alerted Sikorski in London,

but the International Red Cross assured him

that no Polish POWs had been found in German camps.

Anders deduced that his men were still in the USSR

and demanded the Kremlin explain.

The Kremlin responded via Molotov,

who signed the officer's execution order,

that the POWs had been freed as had been agreed.

End of story.

Moscow, December 1941  But Sikorskii intended

to shed light on the officer's disappearance

and settle the matter of Poland and the USSR's borders.

Sikorski was first seen by Kalinin,

who had also signed the execution order.

Kalinin assured Sikorski and Anders

that he had no idea were the missing were.

As for the borders, that was the boss's area.

And the boss was in a good mood.

"Let's not lock horns over a matter of borders,"

he declared to the Poles as he postponed

talks on the issue.

He was then confronted with the issue of missing officers.

Stalin denied all knowledge of this

but promised to ask Beria to find them.

Urals, Totskoye Camp  But in reality Stalin wanted to get rid of the Poles

by sending them to the front line

with no training or equipment...

Anders cateqorically refused.

In retaliation, the USSR halved the rations

Moreover, Anders had had enough

of being strung along on the matter.

In August 1942

he decided to relocate his army to Iran.

He offered his services to the British troops there.

General Anders told Jozef Czapski

that he was sure the officers

had been executed by the NKVD.

But Czapski, obstinate, refused to believe it.

Meanwhile, the USA had etered the war

against Nazi Germany.

The world's top economy

had given a blank cheque to the war effort

and devoted all its industrial capabilities.

Stalin could now count on an additional ally

and would soon benefit

from the influx of US equipment.

It was good timing as he was taking back control.

The Soviet's tenacity surprised time and again the Nazis

которые были вовлечены

and known in their repugnant terminology

as "Jewish Bolshevism".

They exterminated Soviet Jews in mass

and in unprecedented horror.



The Wehrmacht was also ordered to prey on this people,

to be starved to death and replaced by German settlers.

Driven by despair,

the Soviet peasants formed resistance groups

that constantly attacked the German rear.

As for the NKVD,

it reformed the Red Army in its own way.

In line with an order from Stalin,

Beria formed blocking units

that executed those reluctant and deserters.

It wasn't rare for Soviet soldiers

to go into battle held at gunpoint by the NKVD

to enforce Stalin's order:

"Not a step back!"

In February 1943,

Red Army won decisive battle in Stalingrad.

It was certain:

the USSR was going to bring down Nazi Germany.

The US, overcome with "Sovietmania",

affectionately nicknamed Stalin "Uncle Joe".

In the UK, he was almost as popular as Churchill.

Faced for the first time with looming defeat,

the Nazis tried behind the scenes

to make peace with the US and UK,

and why not obtain in the name of anti-Bolshevism

their matherial support to push back the Red Army?

Goebbels, minister of propaganda,

deployed all possible means to rock the alliance

between the US and UK and Stalin.

And, soon, his services

reported back to him with intelligence he believed

would prove to the US and UK that the real danger

was Jewish Bolshevism

and its master, Stalin.

Berlin, 13 April 1943

On 13 April 1943,

Goebbels told the world that the German Army

had discovered in Katyn Forest

the bodies of the missing Polish officers,

executed by the NKVD.

"An odious Jewish Bolshevik crime," stated Goebbels,

before revealing the names of those identified

and the execution period:

April 1940.

Two days later, Moscow denouneed a German-Fascist lie

and stated they were executed by the Nazis

in July 1941.

General Anders' Army  The German ravelation unlocked the mystery

that had consumed Anders' men for two years.

Jozef Czapski was devastated.

Still, a haunting question remained:

who had done it?

Many soldiers wanted to believe the Soviet version.

Katyn could be used

in true Nazi style to manipulate.

But could they really be certain?

General Anders pressured Sikorski to hold urgently

an independent investigation to put an end to the doubt.

Sikorski was torn between his wish to know the truth

and the need to handle Stalin

so as to protect Poland's interests.

But some officers identified by the Germans

were the family of his ministers

who also wanted to know the truth.



Sikorski was quickly summoned by Churchill

to 10 Downing Street.

The Prime Minister was extremely tense.

"We need your full support," said Sikorski.

 "You know I'm behind Poland," replied Churchill.

"It is perhaps true," Churchill continued,

"but this is a trap set by Goebbels to pit us against Stalin."

"A luxury we cannot afford."

Churchill said, "Be careful and realistic."

"Do not publicly question Stalin's word."

"Too late," replied Sikorski,

"Stalin may not like it,"

"but we have requested an investigation"

"by the Red Cross."

The Polish request was a clear betrayal

to the US and UK.

What right did the bloody Poles have

to doubt Stalin's good faith

and contribute to Goebbels' conspiracies?

A particularly furious editor

would even write:

"On the off chance the Poles were killed by the USSR,"

"then they deserved it!"

And Roosevelt

was sure that Stalin

was not capable of such an atrocity.

Far from being bothered by the Katyn find,

Stalin saw it as an opportunity to get rid of the Polish government.

And the USSR

announced it was severing diplomatic ties

with Sikorski's government,

"a Hitier collaborator," declared Molotov.

Roosevelt and Churchill,

terrified Stalin would leave the alliance,

could no longer support Sikorski.

They had to settle the matter of Poland's borders

without upsetting Stalin.

Katyn was a crime scene under Nazi control.

Polish medical examiner Marian Wodzinski,

head of Cracow Institute of Forensic Medicine

was appointed by Sikorski's government in London

to accompany the Polish Red Cross at Katyn.

"It was 9:30 am," Wodzinski recalled.

"Despite the cold, an awful odour made the air unbreathable."

"Then suddenly, we saw the bodies in No.1 mass grave."

"The Germans had left several layers of bodies clearly visible."

"We were speechless."

"After retracing our steps."

"we sat in silence all morning to recollect ourselves."

"The only way to find the culprit," said Wodzinski,

"was to determine the date of the killings."

The Polish team got to work.

The bodies were exhumed by Russian POWs.

The bodies were so packed down,

they were difficult to separate without damaging.

The upper layers were moulded together into a fatty block,

showing that the bodies had not been moved

since being buried.

Each body was searched.

Personal papers, cards and newspapers were sent to a cabin

where a German team recorded and translated then

"We could access them," recalled Marian Wodzinski,

"even though the Germans wanted them as evidence."

"No document was dated"

"after 20 April 1940."

Many officer's hands had been tied

and many showed bayonet wounds on their arms and legs.

"The tied hands and bayonet wounds", noted Wodzinski,

"showed that certain victims had put up a fight."

The bodies had different uniforms.

There were no signs of insects

on the bodies or the clothes.

This meant it had happened during the cold season

and not during summer 1941 as the Soviets had stated.

It soon became clear that all the executions

had been done with 7.65 mm bullets

 made in Germany

and used exclusively with German pistols

made by Walther.



"This discovery," recalled Dr Wodzinski,

"had dumbfounded the Germans"

"who had no idea how this could be possible."

When Goebbels heard,

he was appalled and ordered:

dass sie absolut geheim bleibt..."

meaning it must remain secret.

But being impossible to conceal,

the Wehrmacht covered its back

by revealing that Germany had sold

a large amount of Walther pistols to the USSR in the 1930s.

To create the illusion of impartiality,

Goebbels decided to gather best medical examiners

from 12 German-controlled countries.

They arrived at Katyn on 30 April 1943.

Professor Orsos from Budapest

interrogated in Russian locals living nearby,

selected by the Nazis

and who claimed to have heard the sound of non-stop gunfire

in spring 1940.

Some said they had seen Polish officers

get off windowless trains at the small Gniezdowo station

and taken by the NKVD towards Katyn.

According to witnesses, it had been

a common execution site fort the Cheka since 1918.

Even if it sounded like a recitation,

this last statement

was confirmed by No.8 to No.11 Graves.

They held older remains

of murdered civilians shot in the head.

"Professor Orsos," recalled Marian Wodzinski,

"conducted a thorough autopsy that I attended."

"He focused on the skull"

"to determine the burial time"

"by the number of layers of calcium deposits inside."

"I agreed with him," Wodzinski stated.

"They were buried three years earlier."

"The only truly neutral medical examiner,"

"the Swiss Professor Naville," recalled Wodzinski,

"focused on the vegetation next to graves."  1197 "Young pines had been planted on the mass graves."

"A cross-cut revealed it had been done three years earlier"

"durng 1940."

Marian Wodzinski and the other medical examiners

had no doubt about the crime period

given so much reliable evidence:

April 1940.

It could only be a Soviet crime.

Marian Wodzinski spent five weeks at Katyn

to try to identify as many victims as possible.

Among them he would identify two of his best friends.

Out of the 700 autopsies he did,

he noted an astounding consistency

in the gunshot wounds.

Only two per cent of shots required a second attempt.

The killers were surprisingly experienced

with precise and repetitive actions.

Seventy per cent of the 4.400 bodies

were identifed

and numbered before being reburied.

All the victims were exclusively from Kozielsk monastery.

The fate of those from Ostashkov and Starobielsk

rermained a total mystery.

On 7 June 1943,

the work of Marian Wodzinski and the Red Cross

had to be definitively stopped.

The Nazis were losing Smolensk

and in just a few weeks

Katyn would once again be in Soviet hands.

Wodzinski passed his findings on to the Polish resistance,

which sent them to London.

In July 1943

the Foreign Office gave Churchill a top secret report

that concluded that Katyn was a Soviet crime.

Churchill passed the report on to Rossevelt,

adding the comment:

"Here are the facts."

"We must never speak of this"

"Katyn is of no practical use."

"Please send this back to me after reading it."

Iran, December 1943

"On the way to Tehran."

"Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt plus their staffs all came by air,"

"Soviet's great leader going abroad for the first time in over 30 years."

Soviet Union Embassy in Tehran

Upon arriving Stalin was seething against Churchill and Roosevelt,

who still hadn't sent troops to Europe.

And he learned it wouldn't happen any time soon.

Another reason to please him regarding Poland.

Churchill proposed a solution.

The British PM laid three matches on the table,

representing Poland.

He took the match on the right and placed it on the left,

representing a shift west of the Polish territory.

Stalin would keep his 1939 conquest

and, to compensate, Poland would get part of the German territory.

Stalin agreed.

Millions of Poles and Germans had to be relocated

but as Stalin said: "Nationalities are just a matter of transport."

Roosevelt simply asked Stalin

to keep the pact secret

until the US Presidential Elections in 1944,

so as not to lose the vote of the Polish community.

First surprised by this democratic subtlety,

Stalin gladly agreed

to do the US president this favour.

Katyn, January 1944  "In January 1944 the Soviet government returned"

"to the tragic Katyn Forest scene near Smolensk."

The Katyn bodies were once again exhumed

and autopsies performed by an all-Soviet expert panel,

which concluded that the Poles had been executed in 1941

while the area was under German control.

"The executions were carried out by Hitier sympathisers."

"Each officer was shot in the head."

"A hallmark of Fascist executioners."

The witnesses confirmed they talked under Gestapo duress

and recanted their statements.

While Nazis returned to Berlin

with all the documents from Katyn,

the NKVD presented new evidence:

"Several documents found at the site"

"were dated after 1940."

"Here is a letter from an officer"

"addressed to his family and dated 20 June 1941."

"And Goebbels said the Poles were executed in 1940!"

"Another letter was dated"

"September 1941."

The NKVD managed to sow seeds of doubt

and confusion

among sceptical Western observers at the site.

Katyn appeared to be a Nazi crime.

Nazi Germany surrendered

Poland

The war was over and, as agreed,

Polish borders shifted west.

Stalin appointed a Communist leader, Boleslaw Bierut,

that the Poles quickly nicknamed "Little Stalin".

The Chekists terrorised the people

and eliminated any who opposed the Communist Party.

No Pole dared speak of the Katyn Massacre

for fear of being arrested or worse...

At the Nuremberg Trials,

the Soviet prosecutor maintained

that Katyn was a Nazi crime

to achieve recognition

from the world of the USSR version of events.

But the judges deemed the evidence presented by Moscow insufficient.

The court refused to rule on the Katyn affair!

In international law, Katyn remained a mass crime

with no ruling or conviction.

A huge setback for the USSR

which showed that their version was very weak.

..IP I

Mr Czapski, do you object to being photographed?

- No. - No objection to photographs.

In true McCarthyism, the House of Representatives

formed a committee

to investigate Katyn.

A political refugee in France,

Jozef Czapski was called to give evidence

and gave a long deposition

at the end of which, the president asked:

To say who, what government,

is responsible for the massacre

at Katyn in your opinion.

First of all, there no doubt in my mind

that these men were murdered by the Soviets.

Thank you for your testimony.

I must state my second point.

Secondly,

we keep forgetting that Russia is

the most central country in the world

whenever it comes to issuing orders or directives or policy

Full responsibility of this crime does not rest with some NKVD sadists

but it rests with Beria and Stalin.

I want to thank you for testifying here today.

The Select Committee found the USSR guilty.

This finding still lacked proof.

The White House and CIA

refused to release classified information.

As the Cold War raged, neither Washington

nor London wanted to provoke Stalin over Katyn unnecessarily.

Moscow

March 1953  With Stalin dead, Poland's surviving officers and the victims' families

had hopes that the truth would come out about Katyn.

As for the Politburo members, they were both relieved,

with Stalin's tyranny and paranoia in the final years

sowing terror among them,

and also concerned for their own lives.

Head of the Chekists for 15 years,

Beria cunningly escaped Stalin's wrath.

Chief of home and foreign security,

with incriminating files on the entire Politburo,

he already acted as he was the new boss.

But Stalin's other henchmen were scheming against him

and ordered his arrest.

Lavrentiy Beria was shot in the head

on 23 December 1953.

The Chekist tradition had been upheld.

For the new boss, Nikita Khrushchev,

Katyn was a delicate state secret  that had to be kept at all cost.

In 1959,

Alexander Shelepin, Beria's successor,

proposed in a top secret letter addressed to Khrushchev

to destroy every single document

of the 21.857 Poles

executed by the NKVD in April 1940.

"These documents," wrote the KGB boss

"could one day bring this operation to light,"

"and cause undesirable consequences for our country."

Nobody knows if Nikita Khrushchev

authorised the evidence's destruction.

Moscow 1964

In 1964, Khrushchev's successor

Leonid Brezhnev inherited the secret.

Like any good propagandist, he decided to put up a smokescreen.

He established an annual memorial day

for the Khatyn Massacre

with an "H",

A small village in Belarus

whose inhabitants were burned alive by the Nazis.

Brezhnev invited President Nixon

who officially visited the memorial in 1974.

In response the Poles in exile in London

decided to build a memorial in the UK capital

sombrely named "Katyn 1940".

The reference to 1940 aroused the wrath of Brezhnev

who warned the UK to prevent this "provocation",

But the UK government, despite its best efforts,

was unable to stop the construction of the memorial

unveiled in 1976.

One of Churchill's grandsons, a Common's minister,

placed a wreath on behalf of his family

yet the opening ceremony was

largely glossed over by the British media.

Gdansk, 1980

In 1980, the Solidarność trade union

led a major uprising

against the Polish Communist regime

that was on the brink of collapse.

Genera Jaruzelski came out of the woodwork.

Jaruzelski was just a child when, like a million fellow Poles,

he was deported to Siberia.

He often wore dark sunglasses

after suffering snow blindness.

He was trained at a Soviet officer school.

With unfaltering dedication to Moscow,

he became head of the Polish regime.

He proclaimed martial law

and imprisoned the leaders of Solidarność.

Moscow 1985

In 1985

Mikhai Gorbachev became the new Soviet leader

and tried with all his energy to reform the Soviet Union.

Two years later, before an official visit to Poland,

Gorbatchev asked to see the classified documents

related to Katyn and the 1940 Polish operation.

After reading the files signed 47 years earlier by the Politburo,

Mikhai Gorbachev replaced the seals

and ordered the affair to be buried once again.

Warsaw, 1988

In 1988

new strikes led by Solidarność ended in violence

and the situation was no longer under control.

In February 1989

Jaruzelski agreed to hold talks.

18 June 1989

On 18 June, after the election,

partly opened to parties other than the Communists,

rejection of the regime was so apparent

that Jaruzelski had no choice

but to call on a Solidarność leader,

Tadeusz Mazowiecki,

who became the first prime minister

that was non-communist in Eastern Europe.

Some weeks later, pressured by the people,

Jaruzelski gave Gorbachev an ultimatum:

he would cancel his official visit to Moscow

if the Kremlin didn't admit the truth about Katyn.

This blackmail would have meant

his sectioning under Brezhnev

and his murder under Stalin

but Gorbachev promised to release some information

in the hope Jaruzelski wouldn't cancel.

Gorbachev was in fact himself

losing his grip on the Soviet Union,

torn between the Party's progressives

demanding more reforms

and the conservators wanting to end it all.

In this chaotic context,

Soviet academics

went as far as publishing in the official press

an article attributing Katyn war crime to the NKVD.

Katyn was now an open secret that the Soviet government,

on its last legs,

could no longer protect.

On 13 Apr 1990

Moscow acknowledged the Katyn Massacre

via a simple press release that put the blame on Beria

and absolved the Soviet Union of all responsibility.

Not until the collapse of the Soviet Union

would the Russian President Boris Yeltsin

make the secret order public,

which clearly showed that the USSR was guilty.

Finally, the last secret,

the burial sites of the Ostashkov

and Starobielsk victims were revealed.

Those from Ostashkov were buried

in the Mednoye village mass graves nearby Tver city.

Those from Starobielsk were buried in Ukraine's Pyatykhatky mass grave.

Just next to a recreational area

for KGB staff and their children.

He wasn't shooting, he was working."

Vladimir Zazubrin, 'The Chekist', 1923