The Katyn Massacre and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the Soviet- Nazi Propaganda War

Abstract

This paper investigates a possible connection between the razing of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto by the Nazis in April 1943 and the execution of the Polish officer corps by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest sometime between March and May 1940. (Plates 36 and 37) Unlikely as it may at first seem, the available documentation indicates that these two grisly events were played off against each other by the Soviet and Nazi propaganda apparatuses, with a view to extracting from them additional benefits for their perpetrators.

Although the countries occupied by the Germans were almost hermetically sealed, reports of the horrors nevertheless trickled out. The rest of the world tended at first to regard them as ‘atrocity stories,’ products of war propaganda.... It was impossible to believe that outside of madhouses there might be human beings whose brains were capable of even planning the extermination of an entire people, let alone executing the plan.

Werner Keller, Diaspora: The Post-Biblical History of the Jews¹

The testimony of Colonel John Van Vliet was ringing in my ears: the Top Secret document prepared by Colonel Van Vliet at the Pentagon, concerning the report of his visit to the Katyn murder site which confirmed the Communist guilt, could not be found. My thoughts turned to Ivan Krivosertsov, the only Russian witness of the Katyn massacre, who was mysteriously hanged near London, England; his killers could not be identified either.

Thaddeus Wittlin, Time Stopped at 6:30: The Untold Story of the Katyn Massacre²

The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Hoover Institution (Discretionary Grant Program, Department of State, Soviet-Eastern European Research amp; Training Act of 1983, Public Law 98–164, Title VIII, 97 Stat. 1047–50) in funding the research presented in this paper.