World War II: Newly released documents from the U.S. National Archives reveal that the U.S. government helped covering up the Soviet 1940 massacre on some 20,000 Poles at Katyn and other places — not just during the war, but even afterwards.
One of the Katyn mass graves during its excavation in early 1943. (Click to enlarge; source: Wikipedia)
In early 1943, German occupational forces were informed by local peasants that during their brief occupation of eastern Poland between late 1939 and mid-1941, the Soviets had shot thousands of members of the Polish political, intellectual and military elite and had buried some of them in mass graves near the Polish town of Katyn. The Germans formed an investigation committee which included forensic scientists from neutral countries, plus, as witnesses, prisoners of war from enemy nations, among them also a U.S. national. Newly released documents show that this PoW managed to convey what he had seen to the U.S. government using secret radio messages. Hence the Roosevelt administration knew since early 1943 that the German claims about the Soviet massacre were basically correct. (See Randy Herschaft, Vanessa Gera, “AP Exclusive: Memos show US hushed up Soviet crime,” Associated Press, Sept. 10, 2012; this item has been published by basically all major news outlets, as googling it will prove, for instance here.)
But when the Germans published their findings about this Soviet mass murder, the Allied nations reacted with a massive counter propaganda, accusing
Germany of committing mass atrocities themselves. Among it was a British claim that at the Auschwitz camp the Germans would kill every single day as many
people as they had found at Katyn. The Soviets staged show trials at Kharkov and Krasnodar that accused Germans and their collaborators of having murdered
thousands of innocent people while occupying Soviet territory. (See G. Rudolf. T. Dalton, Lectures on the Holocaust, 2nd ed., The Barnes Review, Washington 2010, pp. 257, 271f., 308f.)
The newly released documents also show that Roosevelt’s cover-up didn’t stop after the war. Rather, it continued to some degree until 1990, when the Soviets finally released their secret documents on Katyn and admitted to having been the perpetrator.
Why?
Why would the U.S. collude with the Soviet Union to cover up that massacre? During the war, it was all about the necessity of maintaining a united front against Germany and Japan. But afterwards, during the Cold War, why did the U.S. still side with the “Evil Empire”?
Well, it’s not that easy. Russia had been a totalitarian regime since 1920. Hence, at a time when Hitler’s National Socialist party was established in Germany, the Soviets had already murdered hundreds of thousands. They had murdered millions by the time Hitler rose to power in 1933.
How did the Roosevelt administration react to this when it came to power in 1933? They resumed diplomatic relationships with Soviet Russia and subsequently maintained a very cordial, supportive relationship with Stalin’s regime. Yet the relationship with Germany steadily deteriorated in those years due to Roosevelt’s acerbic hostility toward the Hitler regime.
By the time war broke out between Poland on the one hand and Germany and the Soviet Union on the other hand (in September 1939), the Soviets had murdered several tens of millions, and the U.S. administration knew the basics of this human catastrophe. At that time, about one hundred individuals had fallen victim to Hitler’s regime (during the so-called Röhm Putsch in 1934 and the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938). Guess which diplomatic relationship deteriorated after September 1939? Only those between the U.S. and Germany, yet not those between the U.S. and Soviet Russia.
Next, whereas Hitler did nothing after the war against Poland, Stalin attacked Finland in late 1939 and robbed it of its eastern territories. When Germany and France opened the hot phase of the war in Western Europe in the spring of 1940 (a war declared by France, not by Germany), Stalin invaded and annexed Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, and took Bessarabia from Romania without provocation and with brute force. Yet instead of perceiving Stalin as the greater threat for world peace and for the entire humanity, which he ultimately was, the U.S. (and ultimately the entire world) went to war with Germany and chummed up even closer with Stalin.
Mass Grave at Katyn as excavated by German forces in the spring of 1943. (Click to enlarge; source: Wikipedia)
Then, when war broke out between Germany and the USSR in the summer of 1941, the U.S. decided to support Stalin unconditionally, both economically and by way of propaganda to help the Soviet war efforts. As of that time, Hitler’s death toll was a tiny fraction of Stalin’s victims. And today, the sum of all victims of communism, including those in China and the killing fields of Cambodia, number many tens of millions.
So why did the Roosevelt administration team up with the “Evil Empire,” with the biggest and most murderous country in the world? And why did all subsequent U.S. administrations until today tried to cover up aspects of this fact?
Power corrupts. And corrupt people making bad decisions with cataclysmic repercussions always try to find ways to justify their deeds and hide their mistakes. The U.S. depends on the myth of World War II having been a war between “good” and “evil,” where the U.S. brought freedom and democracy to the world — except for Katyn and a zillion other places of communist (and Allied) mass murder, slavery and oppression. Hence the U.S.’s self-perception itself is based on a profound lie. It’s the same lie that drives the U.S. into one war after the other: We are the good guys, and everybody opposing us deserves to be bombed to hell.
Iran may be the next victim of this grand delusion — and on we march, until the second “evil empire” collapses under its pack of lies…
Ripple Effects
The news about Roosevelt’s cover-up of this Soviet crime has yet another repercussion: apparently the United States had an operating network of secret radio transmission stations in German occupied Europe which could be used by U.S. spies and soldiers held in German captivity to relay secret messages. It will be interesting to find out whether those radio transmitters were ever used to convey any messages about GERMAN atrocities, for example in connection with the Holocaust. As far as this writer knows, no such radio messages have so far been released. It is hard to conceive how the U.S. administration would not have been informed about this “crime of the century” while it was allegedly unfolding. Maybe it turns out that Roosevelt covered up this crime, too, because Hitler was his secret ally…
