Buried Truth: The Katyn Massacre and History's Greatest Cover-Up

You are now listening to World War 2 Stories. I'm your host Steve Matthews. Today, we're going to explore one of history's most chilling atrocities and the remarkable half-century conspiracy to conceal it from the world. This is the story of the Katyn Massacre – a crime so devastating and politically inconvenient that governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain would spend decades burying the truth alongside its victims.

In the spring of 1940, approximately 22,000 Polish military officers, police commanders, intellectuals, and civil servants were systematically executed with a single bullet to the back of the head. Their bodies were dumped into mass graves in the forests of western Russia. The perpetrators weren't the Nazis, as the world would be told for decades, but rather the Soviet NKVD – Stalin's secret police – acting on direct orders from the highest levels of Soviet leadership.

The subsequent cover-up would span fifty years, involve three superpowers, and demonstrate the brutal calculus of wartime alliances and Cold War politics. This is a story about how truth becomes the first casualty of war, and how sometimes, even the victors participate in burying history.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
You are now listening to World War Two stories.
I'm your host, Steve Matthews. Today we're going to explore one
of history's most chilling atrocities in the remarkable
half century conspiracy to conceal it from the world.
This is the story of the Cat Massacre, a crime so devastating
and politically inconvenient that governments on both sides

(00:22):
of the Iron Curtain would spend decades burying the truth
alongside its victims. In the spring of 1940,
approximately 22,000 Polish military officers, police
commanders, intellectuals and civil servants were
systematically executed with a single bullet to the back of the
head. Their bodies were dumped into

(00:43):
mass graves in the forests of western Russia.
The perpetrators weren't the Nazis, as the world would be
told for decades, but rather theSoviet NKVD, Stalin's secret
police, acting on direct orders from the highest levels of
Soviet leadership. The subsequent cover up would
span 50 years, involve 3 superpowers, and demonstrate the

(01:07):
brutal calculus of wartime alliances and Cold War politics.
This is a story about how truth becomes the first casualty of
war, and how sometimes even the victors participate in burying
history. The doomed Polish officers.
To understand the cat and massacre, we need to travel back
to September 1939. While the world's attention was

(01:31):
fixed on Hitler's Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland from the
West, a second invasion was unfolding from the east.
The Soviet Union, having secretly agreed to divide Poland
with Nazi Germany in the MolotovRibbentrop Pact, sent the Red
Army across the Polish border onSeptember 17th.
As Poland collapsed under this 2front assault, approximately

(01:53):
240,000 Polish soldiers fell into Soviet captivity.
Most were common soldiers who would eventually be released or
pressed into labor, but about 15thousand officers were separated
and sent to three special prisoncamps, Kozelsk, Starebelsk and
Ostichkov. These weren't just military men.

(02:16):
In Poland's mobilization system,the officer corps included the
nation's educated elite, professors, doctors, lawyers,
engineers, writers, and civil servants who held reserve
commissions. By capturing them, Stalin had
effectively imprisoned a significant portion of Poland's
leadership class. The prisoners initially believed

(02:39):
their captivity would be temporary.
They were allowed to write letters home until March 1940.
Many kept Diaries documenting their daily lives and expressing
hope for eventual release. These written records would
later become crucial evidence. The mood in the camps was one of
uncertainty but not despair. Poland had been conquered before

(03:03):
in its troubled history, and these men, representing the
intellectual and cultural backbone of Polish society,
expected that they would eventually be exchanged or
released. As it happened in previous
conflicts, none could have imagined that at the highest
levels of the Soviet government their fate had already been
sealed. The Death Order On March 5th,

(03:25):
1940, a fateful document crossedStalin's desk.
It was a memorandum from Lafferty Beria, the feared head
of the NKVD, proposing the execution of 25,700 Polish
prisoners. Beria argued that these Poles
were dedicated and incorrigible enemies of Soviet power who

(03:46):
would inevitably engage in anti Soviet activities if released.
The document was explicit in itsrecommendation.
Execution by shooting. Stalin approved the order with
his signature, as did key members of the Soviet Politburo,
including Climate Varashilov, Vyatoslav Molotov and Anistus
Macolian. With a few pen strokes, they

(04:09):
condemn thousands of men to death.
The NKVD moved with chilling efficiency.
Beginning in early April 1940, prisoners from all three camps
were told they were being transferred to another location.
Small groups of 30 to 50 men were loaded onto prison vans or
trains. Their personal information was

(04:30):
carefully recorded and their possessions inventoried, a
bureaucratic thoroughness that would later help identify the
victims. The killing process was
methodical and identical across multiple execution sites.
At Caton Forest near Smolensk, prisoners were brought to a
villa called the House of Special Purpose.

(04:51):
Each man's identity was verifiedbefore he was led into a cell
with acoustic panels to muffle sounds.
Their NKVD executioners used German wall of their pistols to
deliver a single shot to the back of the head, a technique
favored for its efficiency and reliability.
Bodies were then loaded onto trucks and transported to

(05:12):
prepared pits in the forest. The executioners worked in
shifts, killing approximately 300 men each night.
Similar procedures were followedat execution sites near the
Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons. By mid-May 1940, the operation
was complete. Approximately 22,000 Polish

(05:33):
prisoners had been executed. 4421 from Kozolsk, buried at
Katyn, 3820 from Starebelsk, buried near Kharkiv, 6311 from
Ostashkov, buried near Colleen and slashed fur, and
approximately 7000 others from various prisons in western

(05:54):
Ukraine and Belarus. The graves were carefully
concealed young pine trees planted above them to hide the
disturbed earth. The operation was assigned the
highest security classification,with documentation limited to
those directly involved. For the families of these men
back in occupied Poland, there was only silence.

(06:17):
Letters went unanswered. The prisoner simply vanished.
The German discovery. Fast forward to 1943, the tide
of war had shifted dramatically.Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's
massive invasion of the Soviet Union launched in June 1941, had

(06:37):
initially pushed deep into Soviet territory.
By early 1943, though, the Germans were on the defensive
following their catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad.
In April 1943, German forces occupying the Smolensk region
received an intriguing report from local Russians about mass

(06:57):
graves in the Canton forest. Initial excavations revealed
bodies in Polish military uniforms.
Recognizing the propaganda valueof such a discovery, Nazi
officials ordered a full investigation.
On April 13th, 1943, German radio announced the discovery to
the world, claiming they had found the bodies of 12,000

(07:21):
Polish officers murdered by the Soviets.
The actual number at the Katyn'ssite was lower, around 4400,
though the total killed across all sites did exceed 20,000.
Joseph Goebels, Hitler's propaganda minister, immediately
recognized the opportunity. In his diary he wrote, We are

(07:42):
now using the discovery of 12,000 Polish officers murdered
by the GPU Soviet security police for anti Bolshevik
propaganda on a grand scale. We sent neutral journalists and
Polish intellectuals to the spotwhere they were found.
Gobel's strategy was clear. Use Katyn to drive a wedge

(08:03):
between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, potentially
fracturing their coalition against Germany.
The Germans invited an international Commission of
medical experts from 12 countries, mostly neutral or
Axis aligned, to examine the bodies.
They also brought in representatives from the Polish
Red Cross and observers from theInternational Red Cross.

(08:26):
The forensic evidence appeared damning for the Soviets.
First, the state of decomposition indicated the
victims had been dead for at least three years, placing the
killings in 1940 when the area was under Soviet control, not
German. Second, the victims uniforms
contained winter clothing, Polish money, Diaries, letters,

(08:49):
newspapers, and cigarettes dating from late 1939 to March
1940, with nothing dated after April 1940.
Third, the victims hands were bound with a distinctive type of
rope manufactured in the Soviet Union. 4th The execution method
matched known NKVD techniques. 5th Spent German ammunition

(09:13):
casings were found at the site, but they were 7.65mm, while
their bullets manufactured in Germany and sold to the Soviet
Union in the 1930's. The Commission's conclusion was
unambiguous. The Polish officers had been
killed in the spring of 1940 when the territory was under
Soviet control. The Soviet counter narrative The

(09:36):
Soviet response was immediate and forceful.
On April 15th, 1943, Moscow radio denounced the German
claims as monstrous inventions. 3 days later, Pravda, the
official Communist Party newspaper, published an article
titled The Hitler Liars, claiming the Polish prisoners

(09:56):
had been working on constructionprojects near Smolensk until
they were captured by the Germans in 1941.
According to the Soviet version,the Germans had killed the Poles
themselves, and we're now tryingto blame the Soviets.
The fact that Germany had discovered other Soviet mass
execution sites in the Baltic states lent some initial

(10:17):
credibility to their claims about Katten.
Stalin personally sent a messageto Churchill and Roosevelt
calling the German claims a heinous fabrication.
He insisted that all Polish prisoners had been released
after the 1941 Soviet Polish agreement following Germany's
invasion of the USSR, and suggested they might have fled

(10:39):
to Manchuria. Behind the scenes, the Soviet
NKVD was frantically working to establish their counter
narrative. A special Commission headed by
Nikolai Berdinko, chief Medical examiner of the Red Army, was
established to investigate once the Soviets recaptured the Caten
area in September 1943. The Berdinko Commission's

(11:02):
investigation was a masterpiece of deception.
The Commission relocated bodies from other graves to the Cat
Insight. Planted evidence in the pockets
of corpses, including letters innewspapers dated after May 1940.
Forced local witnesses to testify that they had seen
Polish prisoners alive in the area in 1941.

(11:23):
Coerced Soviet controlled Polishcommunists to support their
findings. Changed the estimated time of
death by manipulating forensic techniques.
On January 24th, 1944, the Commission issued its report
claiming the Germans had executed the Poles.
In autumn 1941, this became the official Soviet position for the

(11:45):
next 46 years. Western allies choosing
strategic silence. Here's where our story takes its
most troubling turn. By 1943, the Western allies,
Britain and the United States were in a difficult position.
The Soviet Union was bearing thebrunt of the fighting against

(12:06):
Nazi Germany. The success of the Allied war
effort depended on maintaining the coalition with Stalin in
Britain. Mounting evidence of Soviet
guilt reached Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The British ambassador to the Polish government in exile, Owen
O'Malley, conducted his own analysis and concluded the

(12:26):
Soviets were unquestionably responsible.
In a secret memo to the Foreign Office dated May 24th, 1943,
O'Malley wrote There is now available a good deal of
negative evidence, the cumulative effect of which is to
throw serious doubt on Russian disclaimers of responsibility
for the massacre. The men now found a cat and had

(12:49):
been in Russian hands in 1940, and the Russians have never
produced a single one of them, dead or alive, from that time to
this. Churchill, after reading
O'malley's report, acknowledged Soviet guilt privately, but took
no public action. He later told the Polish Prime
Minister in exile, alas, the German revelations are probably

(13:11):
true. The Bolsheviks can be very
cruel. Yet publicly, Churchill
maintained A diplomatic silence,prioritizing the anti Hitler
coalition. He pressured the Polish
government in exile to drop the matter, writing to them, If they
the Poles are dead, nothing you can do will bring them back.

(13:33):
In the United States, President Franklin D Roosevelt received
similar intelligence but chose an even more active approach to
suppressing the truth. When Navy Lieutenant Commander
George, Earl Roosevelt's former special emissary to the Balkans,
presented the president with evidence of Soviet guilt,
Roosevelt reportedly rejected itoutright, saying, George, this

(13:57):
is entirely German propaganda. I am absolutely convinced the
Russians did not do this. When Earl requested permission
to publish his findings, Roosevelt forbade it and
effectively exiled him to Samoa for the remainder of the war.
More damning still was the treatment of U.S.
Army officers who had witnessed the German exhumations.

(14:19):
In May 1943, two American prisoners of war, Lieutenant
Colonel John H Van Vleet and Captain Donald B Stewart, were
taken by the Germans to observe the Cat Insight.
Based on the evidence they saw, both became convinced of Soviet
guilt. After their liberation in 1945,

(14:40):
Van Fleet submitted a report to military intelligence concluding
the Soviets were responsible. This report mysteriously
disappeared within the US government, not to be found
until congressional investigations in the early
1950s. Stewart's separate report met a
similar fate. Kathleen Herrmann, daughter of

(15:01):
U.S. ambassador to Moscow Avril Herrmann, was taken on a Soviet
guided tour of Caton in January 1944.
Despite seeing only the manipulated evidence presented
by the Burdinko Commission, her report dutifully supported the
Soviet version, a report her father later admitted was
influenced by Soviet stage management.

(15:22):
The pattern was clear at the highest levels of both the
British and American governments.
Evidence of the Cat and massacrewas systematically suppressed to
maintain the wartime alliance with Stalin.
Post war silence and persistenceof the LIE. after World War 2
ended, the Cat and LIE persisted.
At the Nuremberg trials in 1945 to 46, Soviet prosecutors

(15:47):
actually tried to charge the Germans with the Cat and
Massacre. The effort ultimately failed
when the evidence proved unconvincing, but the Allies
agreed to drop the matter from the proceedings entirely,
neither confirming nor denying Soviet responsibility.
In Poland, now a Soviet satellite state, the communist

(16:08):
government parroted the Moscow line.
School textbooks taught that theNazis committed the massacre.
Anyone suggesting Soviet culpability faced harassment,
loss of employment, or imprisonment.
In 1951 to 52, the US House of Representatives established a
special congressional committee,known as the Madden Committee,

(16:30):
to investigate Catton. After hearing testimony from
survivors, witnesses, and experts, the committee concluded
that the NKVD had executed the Polish officers on direct orders
from the Soviet government. Despite these findings, official
U.S. policy remained reluctant to publicly accuse the Soviets.

(16:51):
During the heightening Cold War tensions, the captain issue was
treated as a historical footnoterather than an act of diplomatic
concern. Inside the Soviet Union, efforts
to erase the evidence continued.In 1959, KGB Chairman Alexander
Shelopin sent a memo to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev

(17:12):
recommending the destruction of all documents related to the
execution of Polish prisoners. Shelopin wrote.
For the Soviet organs of state security, no operational
necessity for the further preservation of these materials
exists. Their destruction would appear
expedient, Khrushchev approved. But fortunately for historical

(17:34):
truth, not all documents were actually destroyed.
Some crucial evidence remained in sealed Communist Party
archives throughout the 1970s and 1980's.
The truth about Katten was kept alive largely through the
efforts of Polish emigres and a few dedicated Western
historians. In Poland itself, underground

(17:56):
publications circulated the facts about Katyn becoming a
symbol of resistance to Soviet domination and communist lies.
For the families of the victims,the decades of denial only
compounded their grief. They knew their loved ones had
disappeared in Soviet custody in1940, yet were forced to accept

(18:16):
the official narrative that blamed the Germans.
With no opportunity to properly mourn or commemorate the dead,
truth emerges. Gorbachev's admission.
As the Soviet system began to unravel in the late 1980s,
cracks appeared in the cat and deception.
Polish authorities started pressing Moscow for answers.

(18:38):
The families of victims formed associations demanding the truth
within the Soviet Union itself. Reforms under Mikhail
Gorbachev's policies of glasnostopenness and perestroika
restructuring created space for historical reconsideration.
On April 13th, 1990, exactly 47 years after the German

(19:01):
announcement of the discovery ofthe mass graves, the Soviet
Union officially acknowledged responsibility for the cat and
massacre. The admission came in the form
of a task news agency statement.The archival materials that have
been discovered, taken together,permit the conclusion that Beria
and Mirkilov and their subordinates bear direct

(19:22):
responsibility for the evil deeds in the cat and forest.
The Soviet side expresses deep regret over the cat and tragedy,
declaring it one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism.
While historic, this statement still characterized Katyn as a
crime of Stalinism rather than adeliberate state policy.
It wasn't until October 1992 that Russian President Boris

(19:46):
Yeltsin handed over to Polish President Lequales of the
Smoking Gun a copy of Berrius March 5th, 1940 execution order
bearing Stalin's signature and those of other Politburo
members. Yeltsin also provided copies of
the transfer lists showing exactly which Polish officers
were sent to their deaths and when.

(20:06):
After half a century, the truth was finally officially
acknowledged, the aftermath and legacy the fall of communism
allowed for proper commemorationof the cat and victims.
Memorial cemeteries were established at Caton, Kharkiv
and Mednoy, near Tur, where mostof the victims lay.

(20:28):
Polish families could finally visit the sites where their
loved ones were buried. In 2000, the Russians opened an
official memorial complex at Caton.
Though tensions remained over how the massacre was portrayed
inside Russia, Caton was increasingly framed as one of
many Stalinist atrocities afflicting both Poles and

(20:48):
Russians, rather than a specificcrime against the Polish nation.
Legal accountability proved moreelusive.
In the 1990s, Russian prosecutors opened an
investigation into the massacre,but in 2004 they abruptly closed
it, classifying most materials as state secrets.
The investigation concluded thatthe killings were an abuse of

(21:11):
power, but not genocide or a warcrime, meaning they were subject
to a statute of limitations. The Russian government refused
to recognize the victims as subject to rehabilitation under
Russian law, technically leavingthem classified as criminals who
had been sentenced to death. These half measures fueled
ongoing tensions between Poland and Russia.

(21:34):
In 2010, a significant moment ofreconciliation seemed possible
when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin invited his
Polish counterpart Donald Tusk to attend a joint commemoration
at Caton. Tragically, on April 10th, 2010,
an aircraft carrying Polish President Let Kaczynski, his
wife and dozens of high-ranking Polish officials crashed while

(21:58):
attempting to land near Smolenskon route to a separate cat in
commemoration. All 96 people aboard were
killed. While investigations concluded
the crash was accidental, causedby pilot error in bad weather,
the coincidence of another Polish tragedy near Catton took
on symbolic dimensions in Polishconsciousness.

(22:19):
In recent years, Russia has taken steps backwards in
acknowledging responsibility. In 2021, Russian courts
downgraded the protected status of the Caton memorial site.
While state media occasionally reverts to Soviet era talking
points questioning Russian culpability.
The Significance and Lessons of Caton The Caton massacre and its

(22:42):
cover up holds several profound lessons that resonate far beyond
this specific historical event. First, Katyn demonstrates how
political expediency can override justice and truth even
among democratic nations. The Western Allies, fighting a
war ostensibly for freedom and against tyranny, made a
calculated decision to suppress evidence of mass murder to

(23:05):
maintain their alliance with Stalin.
This moral compromise raises uncomfortable questions about
the sacrifices of principle thateven democracies may make in the
name of strategic necessity. Second, the persistence of the
cat and lie for half a century shows the power of state
propaganda when backed by institutional force.

(23:27):
Despite overwhelming forensic evidence and thousands of
witnesses, the Soviet narrative managed to remain the official
version of events across the Eastern Bloc for decades.
This illustrates how authoritarian regimes can
sustain false narratives not through persuasion, but through
control of information and the threat of punishment for
dissent. 3rd Catton reveals the enduring power of truth to

(23:51):
resist suppression. Despite enormous pressure, the
facts about Catton were preserved through the efforts of
survivors, families, emigrate communities, underground
publications, and committed historians.
Their persistence ensured that when political conditions
changed, the truth was ready to emerge.

(24:11):
This demonstrates that while power can suppress truth
temporarily, it cannot eliminateit permanently. 4th The CAT and
story highlights how historical crimes left unaddressed can
poison international relations for generations.
The massacre itself lasted only a few weeks in 1940, but its

(24:31):
cover up in the subsequent diplomatic maneuvering have
affected Polish Russian relations for over 80 years and
continue to do so today. Finally, CAT and stands as a
warning about the deadly logic of totalitarianism.
The massacre was not a spontaneous atrocity or wartime
excess, but a calculated policy decision made at the highest

(24:54):
levels of government. The cold bureaucratic language
of various execution order in the systematic way it was
carried out reveal how totalitarian systems can
transform mass murder into an administrative procedure for the
families of the victims. The half century denial of truth
was a second trauma layered uponthe 1st.

(25:15):
Not only had they lost loved ones, but they were forced to
participate in a lie about how that loss occurred.
When facts finally emerged after1990, many of the immediate
family members, parents, wives, siblings had already died, never
knowing the full truth or seeingjustice done.
Perhaps the most poignant symbolof Cat and significance is the

(25:39):
physical evidence recovered fromthe mass graves.
Executioners had failed to remove personal items from many
victims. Excavations revealed Diaries,
letters, photographs, religious medals and personal mementos,
intimate connections to the lives these men had led in the
families they left behind. One officer, Major Adam Solsky,

(26:03):
kept a diary until the very day of his execution, his final
entry, dated April 9th, 1940, reads.
They searched us thoroughly. They took my watch, which showed
63830 Polish time. They asked about my wedding
ring, which I the entry ends midsentence.

(26:25):
Hours later, Solsky was dead, his body dumped in a mass grave
at Catton. That incomplete diary entry,
preserved for decades and now displayed in Polish museums,
captures what makes Cat and so devastating.
It represents not just lives ended, but futures denied,
stories interrupted and truths suppressed.

(26:48):
The ellipsis and Salzsky's finalword symbolizes all that was
lost at Caton. Not just 22,000 lives, but the
contributions these men would have made to rebuilding Poland,
the families they would have raised in the half century when
their true fate remained officially denied.
Today, as we confront an era of alternative facts and

(27:09):
information warfare, the cat andstory serves as a powerful
reminder that truth, while it can be buried for decades, has a
resilience that outlasts political expediency.
The fact that we now know what happened at Caton, that we can
speak freely about Soviet responsibility in Western
complicity, represents a kind ofbelated justice for the victims,

(27:31):
as British diplomat Owen O'Malley, one of the first
Western officials to conclude Soviet guilt, wrote in his 1943
report. We have in fact, perforce used
the good name of England like the murderers used the
Littlewood of Caton to cover up a massacre.
That moral self examination is perhaps the most valuable legacy

(27:52):
of this tragic episode. Acknowledging not just the crime
itself, but the subsequent coverup in our own nation's
complicity in it helps ensure that such compromises of truth
in the name of political convenience become less likely
in the future. For the victims of Katyn, the
truth came too late. For the rest of us, their story

(28:13):
stands as a powerful reminder that historical truth matters,
not just as an academic exercise, but as a moral
obligation to both the dead and the living.
This has been World War Two stories.
I'm Steve Matthews. Join us next time as we continue
exploring the moments that shaped the greatest conflict in

(28:34):
human history.