In September of 1939, Germany invaded Poland from the west and the USSR invaded from the east in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. More than one hundred thousand Polish prisoners, mostly soldiers but also civilian officials, were captured and interned in occupied territory and in western provinces of Belorussia and Ukraine. Upon capture, they did not know their extreme danger. They hoped to be treated as normal POWs.
Two years earlier, Stalin began his "national operations” against ethnic Germans, Latvians, Koreans, Lithuanians, and other minorities working in strategic industries or located in border areas. Stalin feared that the multi-ethnic Soviet Union was a breeding ground for fifth-columnists, who would aid the enemy in case of war. Among his least favored ethnic minorities were Poles, the subject of Stalin's second national operations decree of August 9, 1937, which ordered the imprisonment or execution of members of underground Polish military organizations, political immigrants, and "anti-Soviet nationalistic elements.”
For Stalin, the concentration of Polish officers and civilian officials in his own POW camps ofi'ered a tempting opportunity to wipe out another potential source of enemy support using the most reliable method—execution. Moreover, he had a highly efficient ally in charge of his NKVD, who knew how to carry out such operations and to keep them quiet. Lavrenty Beria, the head of the NKVD since November of 1938, was already in charge of the national operations being conducted in the Soviet borderlands. He understood well what his boss wanted and was only too ready to come up with suitable proposals.
The Katyn smoking gun is not hard to find. The most important decisions of the Soviet Union were made formally by its highest ruling body, the Politburo, which in 1940 was a puppet of Stalin. A decision as important as the execution of thousands of Polish POWS would have had to emanate from the Politburo.
Politburo "meetings” (often there were no meetings; rather, members were asked to vote in writing or by telephone) dealt with "questions” posed by various agencies of government, such as the justice ministry, the industrial ministries, or Beria's NKVD. Such "questions” were posted in the form of written proposals or draft decrees and were approved either in the Politburo meeting or by circulating the question to various Politburo members for their signatures. The Politburo's (Stalin's) execution order for Polish officers, therefore, had to be present among Politburo documents.
True to expectations, the Katyn file shows that, on March 5, 1940, Beria addressed a "question of the NKVD” to Stalin, informing him that 14,736 Polish "officers, officials, police officials, gendarmes, and prison officials” were being held in camps in occupied Polish territory and 18,632 similar persons were being held in camps in the western provinces of Ukraine and Belorussia. Beria's "question” was to the point: "Taking as true the fact that all of them are hardened and unredeemable enemies of Soviet power, the NKVD recommends that their cases be examined in special order with the application of the highest measure of punishment—shooting.” The case reviews should be done "without summoning the arrested parties and without the posting of charges.” In effect, Beria's "question” was for approval to summarily execute as many as 34,000 Polish prisoners of war. A note on Beria's memo, handwritten by some faceless bureaucrat, listed his proposal as the "second question of the NKVD” on the Politburo's agenda of the same day.
Clearly, Beria did not suddenly come up with this proposal on March 5, 1940, for a Politburo meeting later in the day. Stalin and
Beria met one-on-one regularly in Stalin's private office. This is where they would have agreed to the Katyn massacre. It was Stalin's practice to implicate his fellow Politburo members in such matters, despite their perfunctory participation. The other Politburo members knew the Katyn decision was already taken when they saw Stalin's bold signature scrawled at the top of Beria's "question.” The signatures of three other Politburo members (Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoian) are also affixed to Beria's proposal. Presumably, they were in the building on that day to sign. Two other Politburo members (Kalinin and Kaganovich) were canvassed by telephone and their positive votes are recorded by someone's hand in the left margin of Beria's memo. The Politburo records show that the question was formally approved as "Question no. 144 of the NKVD” in protocol no. 18 of the Politburo session of March 5, 1940.
The excerpt from the Politburo minutes was directed to Beria, placing the responsibility on the first special department of the NKVD to carry out the executions. The document was labeled top secret, requiring recipients to return their copies within 24 hours. Copies were placed in the top secret "special files” of the Politburo, where they remained for Stalin's successors.
The executions began one month later. Beria was a meticulous planner, and his efficiency improved with each operation. Later in May of 1944, he was to boast to Stalin about one of his most successful operations, carried out in two days: "Today, May 20, the operation of deportation of Crimean Tartars was completed. Exiled and transported in echelons 180,014. Echelons sent to new places of settlement in Uzbek republic. There were no incidents in the course of the operation.”2 The Katyn operation was on a much smaller scale, but it needed care. Special tribunals had to be set up in the various camps; executioners had to be assembled, the victims had to be transported to the place of execution, clerks were needed to prepare the case files and to compile execution statistics. An adequate supply of vodka had to be brought in for those who did the actual shooting. Unlike the Nazis, the NKVD used its own officers as executioners, not ordinary soldiers who were likely to tell their friends and relatives. Above all, strict secrecy had to be maintained.
Beria's efficiency was evident in the Katyn operation. His special
NKVD forces processed and dispatched some 22,000 Polish prisoners between April 3 and May 19, 1940, for an average of over five hundred executions per day. Bodies were buried in covered ditches by special NKVD detachments until discovered by occupying German forces two years later.
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