The Katyn Massacre 1940: History of a Crime

by Thomas Urban

Overview

In the spring of 1940, Stalin‘s NKVD executed 22,000 Polish officers, ensigns and state officials near the Russian village of Katyn and other places. When Wehrmacht soldiers discovered some of the graves three years later, the Soviets succeeded in convincing US President Roosevelt of the German perpetration.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no clear picture of the crime, and therefore made no public comments. Using thousands of recently released US documents, this book refutes the popular thesis that the Western Allies deliberately lied about the Katyn case in order not to endanger the alliance with Stalin.

As well as consulting Polish and Russian documentation on this war crime, for the first time, the diaries of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who wrote a great deal about Katyn, have been examined.

Completely new for research is the role that Hitler's opponents in the Wehrmacht played in solving the crime: at the Nuremberg trial they convinced the US delegation that the executors were not from the SS, but from the NKVD.

Nevertheless, it took until 1990 for Kremlin chief Gorbachev to admit Soviet responsibility. Today in Putin's Russia, however, there is a tendency once more to keep quiet about the crime or even to blame the Germans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526775368
Publisher:	Pen and Sword
Publication date:	01/31/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	735,938
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Thomas Urban was a correspondent for the major German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung in Warsaw and Moscow from 1988 to 2012 and was an eyewitness to the great upheavals in Eastern Europe. He is the author of books on the history of this part of Europe, including the Berlin years of Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, on German and Polish footballers as objects of Nazi and Communist propaganda, and is the co-author of a biography on Pope John Paul II.

Table of Contents

Foreword to the German Edition (2015) vi

Foreword to the UK Edition (2020) xi

Chapter 1 Attacks from West and East 1

Chapter 2 Caught in a Devastated Monastery 10

Chapter 3 Journey to Death 20

Chapter 4 Futile Search for the Missing Officers 30

Chapter 5 Discovery of the Mass Graves 45

Chapter 6 Goebbels' Wedge between the Allies 55

Chapter 7 The Dilemma of the Poles 65

Chapter 8 Failure of the Nazi Campaign in the West 76

Chapter 9 Isolation of the Polish Government in Exile 91

Chapter 10 Burdenko's Report 118

Chapter 11 Persecution of Annoying Witnesses 141

Chapter 12 Defeat of the Kremlin in Nuremberg 153

Chapter 13 Cold War and Realpolitik in the West 172

Chapter 14 Fakery and Oppression in the Eastern Bloc 196

Chapter 15 Gorbachev's Errors and Tricks 214

Chapter 16 From Cooperation Back to Confrontation 226

Epilogue 239

Endnotes 242

Bibliography 271

Index of People 274

Index 278

Editorial Reviews

"Author Thomas Urban succinctly guides the reader through the multiple investigations, as well as the numerous conflicting claims and counterclaims as to who was responsible for the massacre."

HistoryNet