Secrets of Katyn Forest: What's Really Buried There?

Diana West ^ | January 17, 2014 | Diana West

[Revolting cat!]

Communism murders, democracy buries.

[The Antiyuppie]

“As With All Coverups The Truth Will Eventually Be Revealed.”

2017-18 should be interesting. Out-of-work Dem hacks will want that book advance money.

[dfwgator]

[WXRGina]

WOW!

[WXRGina]

Communism murders, democracy buries.

And they both seek to destroy the prized representative Republic.

[jmacusa]

I’m not one of those ‘’few Americans’’who has never heard of the Katyn Forest Massacre. I’ve studied WW2 history since I was in junior high forty-five years ago. The USSR was an ally of Nazi Germany when this happened.

[WXRGina]

Yes, I can see you are very knowledgeable.

[sickoflibs]

RE :”At war’s end, newly liberated Van Vliet sped home with his eyewitness account of Soviet guilt. On May 22, 1945, Van Vliet presented what he knew directly to the head of military intelligence, Gen. Clayton Bissell. The general tagged the report Top Secret, and, as Van Vliet later told Congress during its investigation of Katyn in the early 1950s, “then dictated the letter directing me to silence.”

This is very interesting news to me.

So how long did it take during the Cold War for the US to blame the USSR for the massacre?

Maybe I should know this, I actually took a history course in college called WWII as a elective but that was long ago.

The Cold War was still on back then.

[dfwgator]

The USSR was an ally of Nazi Germany when this happened.

Absolutely. As far as I am concerned, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are responsible for the start of the European war, it could not have happened without the Non-Aggression Pact. And when they signed it, they both knew it meant war.

[Fiji Hill]

At war’s end, newly liberated Van Vliet sped home with his eyewitness account of Soviet guilt. On May 22, 1945, Van Vliet presented what he knew directly to the head of military intelligence, Gen. Clayton Bissell. The general tagged the report Top Secret, and, as Van Vliet later told Congress during its investigation of Katyn in the early 1950s, “then dictated the letter directing me to silence.”

Good old Clayton Bissell!

In his reminiscences, Way of a Fighter: The Memoirs of Clair Lee Chennault (New York: Putnam, 1949), General Chennault, who organized a group of volunteer American pilots to fight the Japanese in China that later became the Fourteenth Air Force, had some choice words for Bissell, who was his commanding officer for a time.

He described Bissell as a boneheaded martinet who was so hated by his subordinates that they told their Chinese colleagues that "nuts to Bissell" (it was actually a much stronger statement) was an American greeting. When the Chinese greeted Bissell with that expression, "he was not amused."

[pierrem15]

The book "Ordinary Men" is a hard read also-- it's about a German reserve military police unit used to hunt down Jews for deportation to the death camps or just kill them outright.

There are lots of complaints about the uncooperative actions of the Polish police or Polish civilians: knowing a ghetto was about to be deported, all the Polish police would call in sick. Some heart-rending stories about Poles married to Jews who chose death with their spouses rather than leave them or Poles who hid Jews or fed Jews hiding in the forest (an offense punishable by death).

I've never met a Pole who lived in Poland during the war who couldn't rattle off a catalog of horrors that would make your hair stand on end. My mother in law, for example, who was forced as a child to watch the Germans machine gun 300 civilians in a reprisal action-- she said she never would have imagined that human blood could run like water through the gutters.

[Revolting cat!]

There is a completely unknown episode from 1937 when Stalin order the elimination of Poles living in the Western Territories of the Soviet Union. 110,000 people were murdered (and possibly as many as 150,000). A book about this crime has just been published in Poland.

[sauropod]

Try reading “Hitler’s willing executioners” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (I think).

I read it probably 10 years ago or so. Probably the toughest book I have ever read.

[jmacusa]

Well Russia did invade Poland after the Germans first made sure all the heavy was done and there was their near disastrous war with Finland if you consider that starting the entire European war, yeah you could say that. Stalin didn't send Hitler troops when he invaded Belgium and France and neither did Hitler ask him to. The Red Army would have been all but useless anyway. Stalin's ambitions were more local. Like reclaiming Finland which the Russian's felt was theirs historically and snapping up the Baltic countries. Stalin was an opportunist really.

[dfwgator]

Stalin also counted on the armies of Britain, France and Germany bleeding each other dry, which would have allowed a built up Red Army by around 1943 to swoop in and take over Europe.

One thing Stalin didn’t count on, France falling in six weeks....he had to know by then it was only a matter of time before Hitler turned his sights on him....but Stalin wasn’t ready in 1941.

[logitech]

I think a lot of people see these horrible incidents as ancient history.

I’m glad there are still some telling the stories.

It can happen again.

[jmacusa]

As paranoid as Stalin he kept ignoring warnings he was being given by Churchill and other Western leaders that Hitler was going to attack him. He thought it was a capitalist ruse to get him to start a war with Germany.Even as Germany was massing troops on the eastern border of Poland and Stalin knew of reconnaissance over-flights by the Luftwaffe he still didn't believe war was coming. Up until almost the last hour before the Germans attacked the last Russian train full of materials and goods as per their trade agreements with the Germans left Russia for Germany. Stalin refused to see what was coming.