Katyn and ‘The Good War’
The decapitation of the Polish government last weekend, including President Lech Kaczynski and the military leadership, on that flight to Smolensk to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, brings to mind the terrible and tragic days and deeds of what many yet call the Good War.
From Russian reports, the Polish pilot waved off four commands from air traffic control to divert to Moscow or Minsk. The airfield at Smolensk was fogged in. There is speculation that Kaczynski, fiercely nationalistic and distrustful of Russians, may have defiantly ordered his pilot to land, rather than delay the 70th anniversary of Katyn. The symbolism is inescapable.
For it was Polish defiance of Adolf Hitler's demand to negotiate the return of Danzig, a German town put under Polish control after World War I, that gave birth to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which led to Katyn.
After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, ignited the war, Joseph Stalin attacked Poland from the east on Sept. 17, capturing much of the Polish officer corps.
In April 1940, on Stalin's order, the Soviet Secret Police, the NKVD, murdered virtually the entire leadership of the nation, including 8,000 officers and near twice that number of intellectuals and civilian leaders. Some 4,000 were shot with their hands tied behind their backs in Katyn Forest.
The Germans unearthed the bodies in 1943 and invited the Red Cross in to examine the site. Through newspapers found on the corpses, the date of the atrocity was fixed as more than a year before the German Army invaded the Soviet Union.
When Polish patriots, whose sons had flown with the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, went to Winston Churchill to demand that he get answers from Stalin about the atrocity, he brushed them off.
"There is no sense prowling around the three-year-old graves of Smolensk," said the Great Man.
At Stalin's request, Churchill bullied the Poles into acceding to Soviet annexation of all the Polish land Stalin had been awarded for signing his pact with Hitler.
At the Nuremberg trials, the Russian delegation, led by Andrei Vishinsky, the prosecutor who did Stalin's dirty work in the purge trials, charged the Germans with the massacre.
This presented a problem for the Americans and British who knew the truth. They finessed the issue by leaving the charge unresolved.
Before, during and after the Nuremberg trials that would convict the Nazis of "crimes against humanity," one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history was being committed. Fifteen million Germans—old men, women, children—were driven like cattle out of ancestral homes in Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Silesia and the Sudetenland.
As human rights champion Alfred de Zayas wrote in his courageous "Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans From the East," perhaps 2 million died in the exodus. Few German women in Eastern Europe escaped rape.
The Allies turned a blind eye to the monstrous atrocity, as ancient names vanished. Memel became Klaipeda. Prussia disappeared. Koenigsberg, the city of Immanuel Kant, became Kaliningrad. Danzig became Gdansk. Breslau became Wroclaw.
"The Germans deserved it, for what they did," comes the retort.
Undeniably, the Nazi atrocities were numerous and horrible—against Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews.
Yet, it was innocent Germans who paid for the crimes of the guilty Germans.
What happened in Eastern and Central Europe from 1939 to 1948 provided proof, if any more were really needed, of the truth of W.H. Auden's insight in his poem "September 1, 1939": "Those to whom evil is done do evil in return."
At war's end, Churchill and Harry Truman agreed to repatriate 2 million Soviet prisoners of war to Stalin, none of whom wished to go back. For return to Russia meant death at the railhead or a short brutal life at slave labor in the Gulag Archipelago.
Operation Keelhaul was the name given the Allied collusion with the Red Army in transferring these terrified POWs back to their deaths at the hands of the same Soviet butchers who had done the murdering at Katyn.
On Sept. 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany to restore the integrity and independence of Poland. For this great goal they converted a German-Polish clash that lasted three weeks—into a world war lasting six years.
And was Poland saved? No. Poland was crucified.
As a consequence of the war begun on her behalf, millions of Poles—Jews and Catholics alike—perished, the Katyn massacre was carried out, the Home Army was annihilated, the nation suffered five years of Nazi rule and almost half a century of communist persecution.
The tragedy of today is that it was men of the postwar generation, like Lech Kaczynski, who kept the faith of their fathers and led Poland out of that darkness into the sunlight of freedom, who died seeking to pay homage to their fathers who suffered one of the greatest crimes of that bloodiest of centuries.
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"Undeniably, the Nazi atrocities were numerous and horrible—against Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews."
Pat, please count Serbs and Romas (Gypsies) in that group. The Nazi puppet state of Croatia killed 700,000 Serbs in Jasenovac.
To this day I cannot believe our rulers supported Hitler's former allies against the people who had helped defend Europe from the scimitar for hundred of years.
Andzej Wajda's 2007 film "Katyn" is wonderful and horrifying film. It also has a subtle message of Christianity's triumph over communism.
Katyn, what an accursed place.
"Innocent Germans." Hmmm. I'll have to think about that one for awhile.
@5: I don't think the bombing of innocent Cologne civilians in retribution for the crimes of their National Socialist counterparts counts for nothing. Must we go through this every time? Yes, Germany started World War II, and yes, Winston Churchill was probably the best statesman a reeling Britain or, for that matter, an increasingly decadent America, could have turned out at the time, but neither Churchill nor the U.S. military is above reproach for certain theaters in that war.
This piece is nearly Biblical in its sweep and depth. I hesitate to say anything lest I do an injustice to the story of those to whom so much injustice has already been done. Yet, if I can't say anything for these people - for the "Fifteen million Germans—old men, women, children— [who] were driven like cattle out of ancestral homes in Prussia, Brandenburg, Silesia and the Sudetenland." - I should donate my computer to a needy scholar and close my mouth forever. As a descendent on my father's side of German and Hungarian speaking Austro-Hungarians, who came from what was known as the Banat, a region in the west of today's Romania, Mr. Buchanan's description of the post-war purging of Germanic peoples brought tears to my eyes and a grimace of pure hate to my face.
I went to Bucharest in the Spring of 1990, less than three months after Ceaucescu's helicopter had fled the city in a hail of gunfire, to complete a project of family historical detective work I'd made an abortive attempt at ten years earlier. Fresh bullet holes were everywhere, from the balcony and interior walls of my hotel overlooking the main square to nearly every building in the city center. The city was returning to normal, but people were still wandering around the scene with bewildered looks on their faces, much like Americans would at Ground Zero, and busloads of country people were still being wheeled in and dropped off in front of the balcony where the dictator was publicly defied and attacked during a speech, the spark that ignited the revolution. Students in the university cafeteria talked, when they could bear to spend a moment not sucking wantonly on a cigarette, of who was really behind the coup, who was really running the country now, and what beasts the striking miners (who had beaten some students) were. On walls everywhere was scrawled the graffito of the hammer and sickle and the swastika separated by an equal sign. The state library was still guarded by Kalashikov-armed soldiers, who neither knew what they were guarding nor from whom they should defend it, and to whom I was first an object of curiosity, then an annoyance, and finally, after several trips to the records room, a suspicious character. My next to useless research skills made progress slow anyway, and by the fiftieth time I'd peeked at the soldier to see if he was peeking at me, it was closing time and I had yet to reach back past my grandfather's generation of Jacobis.
But the frustrations of the capitol were as nothing compared to what I found in the hinterland, at the hamlet of my grandfather's birth. This village was marked on my modern Romanian map as (spelling from memory) St. Mihiel Aleman, and in all earlier references and spellings it preserved the link to the Archangel and to Germans. Two or three dirt lanes trailed off from the main road, a pair of horses ambled up and down them unminded; in a sloping field above the main road's crossing, several lichen encrusted pillboxes faced this way and that, testimony to uncertain times past . Down one of these lanes I found a row of houses, most of which appeared unoccupied, each surrounded by an acre or so of garden, each with a German family name chiseled into the lintel; names I had heard mentioned as the grownups talked in the old house by the North Branch of the Chicago River when Grandma was still alive.
I approached one of these, in which a middle aged woman was working in the garden. Summoning up my few remembered words of German, I established that there were still Germans living there and made it known I was interested in meeting an elder. An old man came to the door and I tried, but mostly failed, to get him to talk. I had little hope of retrieving much of his or the town's undoubtedly painful history; I just longed to hear a few of the words my grandfather, who died before I was born, must have spoken, as they would have sounded from his mouth. I have not forgotten, however, the look of pain that crossed his face when he understood I was asking about the other, empty houses. The woman said he and many others from the village had been taken away by the Russians, but how he had survived and made it back I could not make out, nor if it had been the Russians or the Romanians who had driven out their former neighbors. That they had been forced out there was no doubt. And they were afraid, too, since I was drawing attention to their Germaness. For forty-five years they had lived in fear, fear of the next army, or the secret police, or band of thug neighbors.
All this past week, the black mourning banner-draped red and white Polish flag was flying everywhere in Chicago. Sombre Poles gathered in the old bastion churches of their former neighborhood along Division Street and Noble Avenue, a neighborhood my father told me German speaking youths could enter only at their peril during his pre-World War One childhood, and marched en masse downtown to Holy Name Cathedral, bathed in media attention and sympathy. Less than a mile to the north, where my grandfather had brought his brood of eight at the dawn of the 20th century, seeking the shelter of another place under the protection of the Archangel, our family went to mass amongst the current parishioners of Saint Michael's In Old Town, as it is now styled. From all outward appearances, it seemed only his grandson, and perhaps, if I teach them well, his great-grandsons, knew or cared anything about innocent peoples preyed upon by one empire after another, batted between armies like human shuttlecocks; nor about those empty houses out on the plains of the invasion routes.