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The Invasion of Poland
Scientific, Intelligence, and Other Contributions
North Africa and Italy
Normandy
Operation Market-Garden
The Warsaw Uprising
After the War
Well done! No people fought harder than the Poles, and no country paid a higher price than Poland - only to be betrayed both in the east and the west.
I am not Polish, but for six years I have gone there a dozen times - a great country, and in the words of the national anthem: "Poland hasn't perished yet!"
In other words, when the Poles were seizing Berlin, other Allies were helping a bit, too.
It's :). No harm intended.
The way I understood it, it was a gay British guy who broke enigma...guess the Limes and the gays will be up in arms now. As for military...Poland might have been under a military dictator (who was busy erasing all evidence of Orthodox Christians in eastern Poland) but as a modern military of the era, they were a joke. If the Soviets had not attacked, the Poles would still have fallen...it would have just taken the Germans a bit longer and cost a bit more. As for resistence...quite a few Poles were in the SS and quite a few took it as an opportunity to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and other less desirables. Lets keep history in perspective, shall we?
Other "Allies" did almost everything to betray and humiliate the Polish nation. The still do. But what can you expect from the human swines?
Alan Turing, British mathematician, headed the code breaking effort at Bletchley (?) Park. The first Enigma was a three rotor cipher machine liberated by the Poles in '39. Later Enigma was developed into a four rotor and 12 (?) rotor machine. A British telephone engineer named Flowers developed the first programmable computer for Turing. The computer was code named Colossus and was kept secret until the mid '70's because the Soviets were using a version of the 12 rotor Enigma machine. At least this is the truth according to PBS as of 31 August 2001.
Today, there is no country in Europe that wants to be more like Americans then Poles. For this they are largely ostracised by our "friends" the western European nations.
Alan Turing was a smart fellow and helped us figure out that with survalance of enemy communacations you could win wars a lot easier. The Bletchley Park project is the reason why we have an NSA.
How Mathematics Saved the World: The Allies' decryption efforts during WW II
When Adolf Hitler approved the Enigma ciphering machine for use in his plan of world domination, he made a fatal mistake in assuming it was unbreakable. Overconfidence was perhaps the enemy's greatest fault; it ultimately led to their defeat. Military intelligence took on a whole new meaning in World War II. The enemy had made use of a new technology, encrypting their messages using electronic devices, making their communication almost air tight. Encrypting one's secret correspondence was not a recent invention. Julius Caesar was doing it as early as 50 BC. But the use of machines brought cryptography to a new level, since machines are much better at performing simple, monotonous tasks than we are. Hitler did not expect his foe to be able to read his orders. He underestimated the resourcefulness of desperate men, namely the Poles. Under threat of attack from the Nazis, they employed brilliant mathematical strategy to solve Hitler's Enigma. Only recently has the effect of cryptanalysis on WWII been brought to the fore. The Allies thought their intelligence victories so monumental, that they insisted on keeping the details secret for more than twenty-five years. It was only in the mid-seventies and eighties that the respective governments began to release information on how they were able to read the enemy's most secret transmissions. This paper will summarize the decryption efforts of the Allies, and show how important these efforts were to the cause. The Allies did not know it at the time, but the Poles had started them on the road to victory.
Cryptography is the art of encoding and decoding messages, or text. The original, unencoded text is called 'plaintext', which is readable by humans. The encoded text, usually unreadable by humans, is called 'ciphertext'. Encryption is the procedure that turns plaintext into ciphertext, while decryption turns ciphertext into plaintext. The 'cipher' or 'encryption algorithm', encrypts a series of plaintext. One method of encoding involves using a 'cipher key' (or just 'key'), which is usually just a short piece of text (1-10 letters will usually suffice). In this method, the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt the text. One cannot perform any encryption or decryption without both the key and the cipher (algorithm). In the case of the Enigma encoding machine, it was not enough to know how to solve the encrypted message; one also needed to know the key with which the message was encrypted.
In 1919, Dutchman Hugo Koch invented a machine capable of encrypting messages by typing onto a keyboard, which would produce encoded text out the other side. The difference between this and other coding machines is that the same letter would not necessarily encode to the same character every time. For example, suppose you typed the letter 'a', and 'g' came out the other side. The next time you typed 'a', a 'u' may come out the other side, rather than the 'g' that you might have expected. This made ciphertext very difficult to decrypt, since frequency analysis (seeing which character repeats most often, and then guessing that to be whatever character occurs most often in whatever language you are dealing with) solved nothing. Koch found little interest in his machine, and so he sold it to a German engineer named Dr. Arthur Scherbius. Scherbius improved the machine, and began shopping it around. He renamed it the Enigma, and sold it to the German government. At first the German military was reluctant to put the Enigma into use. However, after assurances by their team of cryptologists that the machine was literally impossible to break (they claimed it would take a team of cryptologists over four billion years to find the cipher key for any given encryption), they began mass production of it. Like tanks and ammunition, manufacture of the Enigma was disguised in factories whose products were supposed to be non-military goods. (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," pp. 31-48) Hitler was putting his puzzle together and it was clear that he considered the Enigma a big piece.
Meanwhile, in Poland, the military saw the need to develop a cryptography unit. They were suspicious that the Germans were reading their Air Force messages, and felt this was an area that needed concentration. They organized a cryptography course for students of Poznan University. Three students of particular interest qualified for, and enrolled in the class: Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Róycki. Rejewski graduated from Poznan with a Masters in Philosophy (essentially a mathematics degree at the time), and went to Göttingen University in Germany for training in the actuarial field. He stayed only a year, returning to Poznan in October of 1930. While in Germany, Rejewski had noticed a feeling of ill-will toward Poland, which escalated when Hitler came to power. When Rejewski returned, he found his former colleagues decrypting German ciphers for the Polish Cipher Bureau in the basement at Poznan University. He joined them in their attack on the messages. By 1931, they noticed a change in the German encryptions, and were unable to decrypt any further messages. The Enigma, for the time being, had them stumped. (Kozaczuk, pp. 1-6)
Though the Poznan cipher group was soon disbanded, Rejewski, Zygalski, and Róycki all accepted full-time employment with the Polish Cipher Bureau, Biuro Szyfrów (BS-4), in Warsaw. The three mathematicians made progress, but were still unable to decrypt the intercepted messages. Meanwhile, the British and French were experiencing even more difficulties. They too had noticed a change in the German encrypted communications. A huge break into the mystery came when Captain Gustave Bertrand, chief of French radio intelligence, was approached by a German officer who claimed he had information for sale. The spy, Hans-Tilo Schmidt, was the younger brother of a high-ranking officer in the German military. He went by the codename "HE," which in French would be pronounced 'ashh-e'. The French simply referred to him as Asche, and this is how he is referred to in most texts. Once Asche was cleared by French intelligence, he supplied them with two key documents: an operating manual for the Enigma, and several encryption keys to Enigma ciphers. Betrand presented these to his cryptography unit, who shrugged their shoulders. So Betrand went to the British, but they too claimed that it was not enough to solve Enigma. Captain Bertrand had heard of the success of the Polish cryptanalysts, and so he passed the stolen information on to them.
Rejewski was ecstatic to receive this from the French, much to Betrand's surprise. French intelligence continued to correspond with Asche, and in turn continued to pass this information on to the Polish Cipher Bureau (BS-4). Bertrand could not understand why the Poles were so happy to receive the documents, since they reported no success. Rejewski and his crew were having an enormous amount of success; however, they did not report this to the British, since they were not yet convinced it was necessary. In December of 1932, Marian Rejewski solved the German military Enigma. His solution was mathematical in nature, but when combined with the stolen documents provided by the French, it was enough for him to construct a working model of the machine. By January of 1933, the Poles could read German military transmissions. (Kozaczuk, p. 21) Rejewski's method, however, was time-consuming. The most troublesome task was that of finding the cipher key for an individual message. In 1938, as the war drew near, Rejewski, Zygalski, and Róycki, constructed a machine capable of computing the encryption key within two hours. They called this machine 'the bomb' (in some texts it is referred to as the bomby, or bombe). Thus, the Luftwaffe version of the German Enigma could be read regularly.
In September of 1938, Asche ceased contact with the French. He had been transferred to a different job in the military. (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 78) The situation surrounding his death is somewhat cloudy. Kahn reports that a French intelligence agent, captured and tortured by the Germans, gave up Asche's identity. He was then arrested, convicted of treason, and shot in July 1943. (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 115) Hawker claims that Asche was indeed convicted of treason by the German government, but claims that he committed suicide in his jail cell in 1942. (Hawker, "Breaking the Code.") In any case, Hans-Thilo Schmidt (Asche), though he was payed handsomely by the French government, is owed a debt of gratitude by the Allies.
On January 9, 1939, British, French, and Polish representatives of their respective intelligence agencies met in France to discuss their progress in decrypting Germany's transmissions. None of the three reported success, though they did share what they knew, and agreed to share the decryption load. The Poles still did not tell the French and British that they had solved Enigma. In the summer of 1939, Hitler declared the non-aggression pact of 1934 between Germany and Poland nullified. The scientists at BS-4 knew an attack was imminent, and that it was imperative that they pass the Enigma information on to the Allies. They had come to a stand-still in reading the messages, and felt they needed the Allies' help anyway. The Nazis had altered the Enigma, adding two more rotors to the choice, increasing the possible choices of encryption keys by a power of three. So on July 24, 1939, BS-4 invited Britain and France for a meeting in Warsaw. Here they divulged all that they knew about the German military Enigma, including a demonstration of the model Rejewski had built. The British in particular were amazed, and immediately sent for engineers. The Poles, however, informed them that this was not necessary since they had reconstructed two more Enigmas, one for the British and one for the French. Soon after the meeting, the two Polish-constructed Enigmas arrived in France, and the French sent one to Britain. Kahn remarks that, "Once again, as in World War I, Britain had obtained the means for solving her adversary's messages through a gift from a loyal ally." (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 81) One month later, on September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Rejewski, Zygalski, and Róycki narrowly escaped to Romania, but not before they were forced to destroy all their equipment and files, for fear that the Nazis would find out what they had accomplished. From Romania, they contacted Bertrand, who immediately had them transported safely to France, so that they might continue the attack on German encoding. (Kozaczuk, pp. 70-72)
There is a lot of misinformation floating around about who solved the Enigma first. Authors and former intelligence officers such as Kenneth W.D. Strong and Frederick W. Winterbotham distort the truth, claiming that it was the British who solved Enigma, with a little help from the Poles. (Jedd, section 2 on "the Enigma") William Stevenson's biography of former head of British Intelligence Sir William Stephenson (the similarity in names is purely coincidence) also glorifies the achievements of the British. Stevenson claims that the Polish gift of Enigma to the British had been stolen from a German military truck, not mastered and then rebuilt. (Stevenson, p. 49) Kozaczuk, among others, criticizes Stevenson's account as biased and exaggerated, describing his remarks on Enigma as "most charitably characterized as history-fiction." (Kozaczuk, p. 327) The majority of historians seem to agree that Poland was responsible for the initial solution of the Enigma. Indeed, Britain was reading the commercial version well before the outbreak of war, but this version cannot compare to the military version in use by the Nazis. (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 87) David Kahn is a well respected author, who has published many books and articles on the subject of the Enigma. (See Jedd's commentary on "Seizing the Enigma") He writes, "The solution was Rejewski's own stunning achievement, one that elevates him to the pantheon of the greatest cryptanalysts of all time." (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 66) James Rusbridger, another respected author on the subject, supports Kahn and Kozaczuk when he writes that the British and French were nowhere near solving the Enigma until the Poles helped them out in July of 1939. (Rusbridger, "Winds of Warning," p. 8) Glenn Zorpette and Józef Garliski also support Kozaczuk in his claim that "the solution of Enigma, in all its evolving manifestations during the years 1933-39, was a purely Polish achievement." (Kozaczuk, p. 95) Kozaczuk goes on to comment on the British's lack of acknowledgement for Polish contributions, "If the behaviour of the British can be explained by the imperatives of wartime secrecy, then certainly the passing over of the Poles' contributions until recently in contemporary publications is, to say the least, incomprehensible." (Kozaczuk, p. 208)
By the time of the invasion of Poland, Hitler was using roughly 40,000 Enigmas. (Kozaczuk, p. 61) The Nazis had, as mentioned, altered the machine by adding two rotors, making the total number five. This made decryption significantly more difficult, and for almost eight months the Allies were unable to decode radio intercepts. The three Poles mentioned earlier were now working for the French code and cipher agency, which was codenamed 'Bruno.' From here they corresponded with Britain's center for cryptography, the now famous Bletchley Park. The intelligence operation at Bletchley was codenamed Ultra. Ultra had benefited greatly from earlier assistance from the Poles, not to mention the Enigma it had received from them. Bletchley employed about 120 people, though this number would jump to nearly seven thousand in 1944. (Hinsley, p. 15) The British had followed the Poles' lead, hiring cryptologists with stronger mathematical backgrounds. These men and women (women cryptologists at Bletchley included Hilary Brett-Smith and Mavis Lever) had several decryption projects on the go by 1939. They were working to break the new 5-rotor Luftwaffe Enigma, as well as the naval version of the machine, which was wired differently. By May of 1940, they were once again reading the Luftwaffe's transmissions, but had still not been able to aid the Battle of the Atlantic by solving the naval Enigma. (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 103)
In February of 1940 the British received a lucky break involving captured vital information from the German U-Boat U-33. It seems one of the captured German seamen, terrified and confused by the attack, had forgotten his captain's orders to throw the Enigma rotors into the sea. The boarding crew from the British vessel Gleanor confiscated the rotors, and shipped them to Bletchley immediately. This, combined with cipher keys captured from the German ship the Krebs in March of 1941, enabled the British to finally crack the Nazi naval Enigma. (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," pp. 136-137)
Though by late 1941 the Allies were capable of reading the German's naval messages, they did not have the manpower to do so with enough efficiency to contribute to the war effort. Churchill's visit to Bletchley Park on September 6, 1941, gave the cryptologists the break they needed to prove how important their contributions could be, if only the government could supply more resources. Churchill agreed, and provided them with more finance and man power. Correspondence with the United States in January, 1941 led to a strong intelligence alliance. The code-breaking efforts of these two nations, and France until its invasion in May of 1940, greatly influenced the outcome of the war, as will be discussed later. By 1943, the Allies could read German naval messages regularly. This monumental effort would change the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic. "This triumph, the result of hard work by brilliant people hidden in the shadows and the daring of men at sea, was the greatest extended intelligence exploit of all time." (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 242)
While the Polish, French, and British were primarily working on Germany's ciphers, the US Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) was hard at work on the Japanese version of the Enigma. Codenamed 'Purple' by the Americans, this machine cipher was a modified version of the Enigma which the Japanese called '97-shiki-O-bun In-ji-ki.' The SIS, headed by William Friedman (1891-1969), broke this cipher in September of 1940. Although Friedman himself is often given credit as being the man who broke Purple, it was actually a team effort; one should not leave out Frank B. Rowlett's name, who was the head cryptologist. (Prados, p. 164) The SIS had already broken a previous version of Purple, which they had codenamed 'Red.'
Author John Prados believes that the solution of Purple was even more impressive than that of Enigma: (note that 'machine A' refers to Red, while 'machine B' refers to Purple) "The break into Purple is especially remarkable both because the B machine was highly sophisticated - much more sophisticated than the German's Enigma - and because the code was solved entirely by mathematical analysis." (Prados, p. 164) Prados's comments are incorrect for two reasons. Firstly, Enigma was solved by pure mathematical analysis, Rejewski had done it in 1932 (see earlier discussion on who cracked the enigma). Secondly, solving a problem mathematically is no more impressive than if one were to build a machine to solve the same problem. Either way, Enigma was broken, whether or not it was solved by mathematics does not make it any more or less impressive. Prados also believes that the solution of Purple is more remarkable because the "Americans solved Purple all by themselves." (Prados, p. 164) Prados is wrong again. Kozaczuk's comment on the solution of Enigma being purely a Polish achievement has already been backed up in an earlier paragraph. It is possible that Prados is referring to the British's continuing efforts to keep reading the ever-changing Enigma. Even if this is so, is the reading of Enigma less impressive because a country employs an alert foreign policy?
While the US Army was solving the Japanese Purple machine, the Navy was working hard on the Japanese naval version of the Enigma, which was codenamed 'JN-25.' The solution to this machine came just after that of Purple in the fall of 1940. Also, right around this time, the US Army and Navy agreed to share all cipher information on their respective projects; the US version of Ultra was codenamed project 'Magic'. The communication between Magic and Ultra prior to 1941 had been sporadic at best, with neither side revealing any information of great importance. This changed in January of 1941, when the two sides started an intelligence alliance that would change the tide of the war. The British traded the solution of the Enigma for the American solution of Purple. (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 80) They also agreed to share all further intelligence on the enemy's ciphers. The British agreed to train Americans in the art of code-breaking, since the US was in short supply of cryptanalysts.
More important than the solutions of Enigma and Purple is the solution of Tunny. (Zorpette, p. 49) This German machine has received much less attention than the other two because of the intense security which has shrouded the details in secrecy until only recently. Tunny was the codename given to the machine the Germans called 'Schlussel-zusatz 40.' It was manufactured by a German company called Lorenz, and it therefore sometimes referred to as the Lorenz-machine. This electronic cipher was used to encrypt top secret messages from German high command, many of which came directly from Der Fuhrer himself. On August 30, 1941, a German radio operator made a crucial mistake which allowed the Allies to solve Tunny. Upon sending a four-thousand character message, he received a request from the receiving station to please re-send due to an error. He then made the mistake of resending the message using the same start settings for Tunny, which was against Nazi procedure. Bletchley, who had intercepted both messages, simply compared the two for subtle differences, which allowed them to decrypt the message. (Fox and Webb, p. 40) Professor Max Newman and Tommy H. Flowers designed an electronic device, based on the theoretic work by Alan Turing, which would mechanize the solution of Tunny. They named the machine Colossus, and since its invention in 1943 predates that of the ENIAC, it has been argued as the world's first electronic computer. (Zorpette, p. 48) Colossus and its successor Mark II, were incredibly efficient at performing the tasks they had been designed for. For example, even today's Pentium computer cannot compete with the tasks that Colossus and Mark II were programmed to do. (Fox and Webb, p. 43) The reason so little information about Colossus is known is because Prime Minister Churchill had it destroyed and its blueprints burned, for fear that the enemy would discover it. (Fox and Webb, p. 39) The existence of Colossus was not even confirmed until 1976. Today, Tony Sale, an ex M15 intelligence agent, is attempting to rebuild what he feels was the world's first electronic computer. There is also a science-fiction movie and play based on Colossus.
Allied solutions of both German and Japanese cipher machines were ingenious, innovative, and highly technical, but did they affect the outcome of World War II? Sufficient evidence exists to answer with a resounding 'Yes.' While there are a few authors who claim the battles were won by guns and bombs alone, most claim that military intelligence was every bit as important, if not more. Chief of British Security Coordination (BSC), Sir William Stephenson, put it well when he told Churchill, "If we can read their signals, we can anticipate their actions." (Sir William Stephenson in Stevenson, p. 30) In fact, Allied decryption efforts were responsible for several key victories against the enemy.
The naval forces involved in battles in the Atlantic and Pacific ocean were particularly reliant on transmissions from headquarters to dictate their actions. Subsequently, any insight into an enemy's transmissions would provide a great weapon, both for offensive and defensive confrontations. The German U-Boats communicated with Nazi high command using Enigma-encoded radio messages; the Japanese used JN-25 to do the same with their military leaders. The ability to read these ciphers allowed the Allies to predict an Italian naval strike on March 27, 1941, and so they were ready for the Battle of Matapan. This key Allied victory drove the Italians from the Mediterranean. (Kozaczuk, p. 168) Garlinski supports the claim that Ultra had a substantial impact on the results at Matapan (Garlinski, p. 129), as does Hinsley. (Hinsley, p. 17) David Kahn adds the Battle of Midway (June 4, 1942) to the list of key naval victories influenced by allied code-breakers. (Kahn, "The Intelligence Failure...", p. 151)
Controversy arises when authors such as Hinsley and Zorpette claim Ultra aided in the sinking of the great German warship Bismark on May 27, 1941. Hinsley argues that Allies' decryption efforts played a large part in the Bismark's defeat. (Hinsley, p. 17) Zorpette agrees. He claims that Ultra had deciphered Luftwaffe Enigma messages detailing an unspecified mission over Brest, which the allies guessed to be the protection of the Bismark. (Zorpette, p. 47) Although the ship was sunk only 800 miles off Brest, Kozaczuk claims that Ultra had nothing to do with the victory, since the British could not read naval ciphers at that time. (Kozaczuk, p. 195) Since it is not exactly clear when in 1941 the Allies cracked the German naval Enigma, the controversy remains unsolved.
In April of 1943, US code-breakers intercepted a Japanese message which described the location of an inspection by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Yamamoto was loved by the Japanese navy, and was responsible for many Allied defeats. The decrypted message revealed that he would be landing in the Solomon Islands on April 18. American fighters took off from Guadalcanal's Henderson Field, intercepted, and destroyed the plane carrying Yamamoto. This assassination struck a tremendous blow to Japanese morale. The loss of Yamamoto, a brilliant leader and strategist, significantly aided the Allies' struggle in the Pacific Ocean. (Rusbridger, "The Sinking...," p. 9) Both Rusbridger and Kahn (Kahn, "The Intelligence Failure ...", p. 151) list the assassination of Admiral Yamamoto as one Magic's greatest accomplishments.
July of 1943 saw the invasion, and subsequent conquering of Sicily, Italy by the Allies. Codenamed 'Husky,' this invasion was largely based on Enigma decrypts. (Kozaczuk, p. 175) Included in this invasion was a planned assassination of German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, whose location was revealed by Enigma decrypts to be the San Dominico Hotel in Laormina. The British bombed this hotel, but Kesselring was in Rome at the time (though he was staying at the San Dominico while in Sicily). In any case, the conquest of Sicily triggered the collapse of Benito Mussolini's Fascist government. It struck a huge blow to the Nazi war effort, and was mostly due to projects Ultra and Magic. (Kozaczuk, p. 175)
Hitler's V-1 rocket was a weapon he planned to use as an aid in his destruction of Britain. Nicknamed the Vengeance Weapon by Nazi propagandists, it threatened the safety of Britain's citizens, as well as its military. The Allies were aware that Hitler was building the V-1, and they longed to destroy it before Hitler could do any damage. Enigma decrypts revealed Peenemünde, Germany, as the launch sight. In August of 1943, the Allies bombed Peenemünde and set the production of the V-1 back six months. (Kozaczuk, p. 186) Had the Nazis been able to launch the V-1 as planned, the Allies may not have been able to launch Operation Overlord, the invasion of France. Hitler himself said of V-2 (V-1's successor), "If I had had this weapon in 1939 we would not be at war now." (Adolf Hitler in Jedd, paragraph 6) Although Hitler did eventually build and use both the V-1 and V-2, one can easily see how Enigma decrypts aided the war effort in this situation.
Operation Overlord was the codename given to the planned invasion of France by the Allies in August of 1944. This invasion was highly influenced by decrypted Enigma messages from Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge to German high command. During the summer of 1944, Kluge sent several messages to OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), the Supreme Command of Armed Forces, and OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres), German Army High Command. These messages consisted of a careful inventory of the troops and equipment under his command. Kluge sent these messages because he had heard a rumour that Hitler, refusing to admit defeat, was commanding non-existent armies. Kluge therefore wanted to make sure that German High Command was sure of what they had available. The fact that the Allies had in their possession the locations and descriptions of all German armoured divisions under Kluge's command allowed them to plan a careful attack, and be able to predict the speed and strength of counter-attacks. (Hinsley, p. 20, also Kozaczuk, p. 182) The information from von Kluge's reports led to the Allied victory at the Battle of Falaise, the key Western battle of Overlord. Frederick W. Winterbotham calls this victory "Ultra's greatest triumph." (Winterbotham in Kozaczuk, p. 185)
Although Allies' decryption efforts affected many other events of the war, only the key battles which they influenced have been discussed. One should consult the works of Kozaczuk and Kahn for detailed descriptions of these and other battles which may or may not have been determined by Allied interception of enemy communications. Still, considering the importance of the battles discussed, it should be enough for one to conclude that the work of projects Ultra and Magic greatly influenced, and perhaps even determined, the outcome of World War II.
The extent to which code-breaking affected the Allied victory has been discussed at length by historians. Hinsley emphasizes the effect Ultra had on Operation Overlord. He goes on to claim that the ability to predict U-Boat locations saved 1.5 million tons of Allied shipping. (Hinsley, p. 19) General Dwight Eisenhower, future president of the United States, once remarked to the British Intelligence Agency, "The intelligence which has emanated from you before and during this campaign has been of priceless value to me. It has simplified my task as a commander enormously. It has saved thousands of British and American lives and, in no small way, contributed to the speed with which the enemy was routed and eventually forced to surrender." (Eisenhower in Coghlan, p. 45) Still, it would be an overstatement to claim that Allied cryptanalysts won World War II. Even though Kahn describes the decryption of German coded radio messages as "the chief hidden factor that helped the Allies win," (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. ix) he also admits that neither Ultra, nor Magic, nor the combination of the two, won the war. (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 277) He instead reports that "Enigma solutions saved between 1.5 and 2 million tons of shipping in the last half of 1941 and more than 650,000 tons in the first five months of 1943." (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 277) He also claims that "Ultra saved the world two years of war, billions of dollars, and millions of lives." (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 278) Jedd does not agree, claiming that if the Allies, by 1945, had not been close to victory, they would have ended the war by dropping a nuclear bomb over Berlin rather than Hiroshima. (Jedd, 2nd last paragraph) Even if this is true, one can still conclude that Allied code-breaking saved millions of Allied lives, and cost the enemy millions as well.
The necessity of secrecy in military intelligence operations sometimes backfires on a nation. Inadequate or modified records, spies who betray their nations, and even political leaders initiating cover-ups, are all products of this necessary secrecy. But did such things affect the Allies during World War II? Perhaps this question is best answered by evaluating several situations which have been deemed by some as 'scandals', or cover-ups. There exist credible references who claim that the truth has not been revealed about World War II, or some part of it. It is crucial to evaluate why certain things happened during the time of war, so that they do not happen again.
One such incident is the famous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which killed 2,403 Americans, and entered the United States into World War II. The 1945 Congressional Investigation into the Pearl Harbor attack investigated the claim that the Allies had prior knowledge of the attack. The official investigation concluded that they did not, but historians still argue whether or not this is true. The main problem historians and conspiracy-theorists have is this: How did the Japanese achieve complete and utter surprise on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941? How, with all the success American cryptanalysts were having, could the US not have been able to predict such a large-scale attack? The answer is not simple, and much has been published on the subject. 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner John Toland wrote a book entitled, "Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath," which is perhaps the leading source arguing the United States government had prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. (Prados, pp. 172-173) Most authors tend to argue that this is an exaggeration, and that there was no way for the Allies to predict the attack.
The main source of controversy revolves around the now famous "Winds" messages. Transmitted November 19, 1941, these signals supposedly gave an indication of war by including the keywords "East Wind, Rain." It was known to the Allies at the time that this phrase indicated that Japanese-American relations were in danger, and that Japanese embassies in the USA were to destroy all code papers and encrypting devices. The "Winds" messages also contained an "execute command," though it is not clear just what the Japanese government is ordering execution of. In the 1945 investigation, it was alleged that the "Winds execute" had been intentionally suppressed from the military records. True enough, the file containing the "Winds execute," serial number JD-1:7001, is missing, but the Navy claims that this is not uncommon, and that serial numbers were often cancelled for legitimate reasons. (Kahn, "The Intelligence Failure...," p. 149) Captain Laurence Safford, the head of the Navy code-breaking unit at the time, insists that this record was deliberately removed because knowledge of the Winds execute would prove that the military knew of the attack. Kahn disputes Safford's claim, saying that possession of the Winds execute would still not have been enough to predict the attack. (Kahn, "The Intelligence Failure...," p. 149)
Rusbridger points out that the Winds intercepts were not even decoded until January 28, almost two months after the Pearl Harbor attack. He claims that American cryptanalysts were too busy working on Purple decrypts rather than J-19, which was the device used to encrypt the Winds transmissions. (Rusbridger, "Winds of Warning," p. 11) So even if the Winds messages did contain incriminating information, they were not decrypted in time to prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor.
There are also indications that the US government may have known the location of the Japanese Navy at the time. Indeed, instructions for the Japanese Navy to sail for Hawaii were intercepted, but the military maintains that it did not decrypt these until after the war. The Dutch had provided details that the Japanese fleet were sailing in a southerly direction, but there was no specific mention of Pearl Harbor. Rusbridger concludes that the military did know that some sort of action was to take place on December 7, 1941, but did not know what or where. (Rusbridger, "Winds of Warning...," p. 12) He seems to believe that had one person been in charge of all military intelligence, navy and army combined, and had that one person been given all decoded transmissions, including the Winds execute command, then perhaps Pearl Harbor could have been predicted. However he does not believe that there was any deliberate conspiracy attempt. "Despite some exotic theories propounding the "smoking gun" thesis, all available evidence on the attack on Pearl Harbor points to it being a combination of audacity and security on the part of a calculating enemy, and administrative lethargy largely resulting from years of peacetime penny-pinching that reduced America's ability to react swiftly to what should have been an obvious threat." (Rusbridger, "Winds of Warning," p. 13)
There is also the question of why. Why would a nation's own government allow the slaughter of thousands of its citizens? Originators of the Pearl Harbor conspiracy contend that President Roosevelt suppressed knowledge of the attack in order to force his otherwise reluctant nation into the war. Indeed, if this was Roosevelt's intention, it worked. Immediately following Pearl Harbor, the United States government declared war on Japan. It is has also been contended that it was British Prime Minister Churchill that suppressed knowledge of the attack, due to his desire to have the US as an ally in the war. However, Churchill wanted the US in the war against Germany, not Japan. Kahn argues against these conspiracy-theorists, "The concocters of these theories are unable to accept that humans sometimes do things wrong or do not do them at all, that accidents happen, that in the complex system that is the world improbable events occur." (Kahn, "The Intelligence Failure...," p. 150) Is Kahn suggesting that Pearl Harbor was an 'accident'? Did the US scientists in charge of decrypting JN-25 'do things wrong'? Could Pearl Harbor have been prevented? Perhaps we'll never know for sure. Perhaps the answer has been 'encrypted' by a higher power.
The bombing of Coventry, England, by the Nazis on November 14, 1940, is another source of controversy caused by decrypts of enemy messages. William Stevenson claims that British Prime Minister Churchill knew of the Germans' plans to bomb the city of Coventry, and allowed the bombing to take place rather than allow the Germans to know that the British could read Enigma. He reports that the British had decoded the order to destroy Coventry, and that the plaintext actually had the city directly named in it, rather than the use of a codeword, which was standard Nazi practice. (Stevenson, p. 153) Lewin disputes this, saying that the decoded message had only the word "Korn," which was the German word for Coventry. He contends that the British did not know that Korn referred to Coventry, and therefore was not aware of the attack beforehand. (Lewin in Momsen, http://members.aol.com/nbrass/2enigma.htm)
It seems possible that Churchill did indeed sacrifice Coventry. If he had evacuated the city, the Germans would have been alerted to the fact that the British could read Enigma. They would have almost certainly changed the cipher, and a key source of military intelligence would have been lost. As head of British Security Coordination William Stephenson once said, "Better lose a battle than lose a source of intelligence." (Stephenson in Stevenson, p. 63) In other words, had Churchill evacuated Coventry, it would indeed have saved many lives, but would have consequently cost many more in the long run. In Churchill's defence, he did alert fire-fighting and ambulance services ahead of time. There would be many more sacrifices made to preserve the secrecy of Ultra and Magic; they were probably all worth it.
Perhaps the most controversial is the recent claim that the Allies knew of Germans conducting mass executions of Jews as early as 1941. The British government has only recently released documents decrypted at Bletchley Park which may have indicated this. Some contend that something should have been done to stop this, that the Allies should have concentrated all efforts to save the Jews from the holocaust. John Keegan's arguement is that by battling Hitler's armies, they were fighting for the Jews. "It is understandable to deplore anything that was not done to halt or check the Holocaust. But the overriding necessity throughout World War II was to defeat Hitler. Ultra was not the sole cause of Hitler's failure, but it was one of the mightiest weapons on the Allied side. Anything that compromised it would in the long run have served not the cause of freedom but that of tyranny itself." (Keegan, 2nd last paragraph) In essence, it was more important to maintain the secrecy of Ultra and Magic. Had the Allies announced publically what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, it would have comprimised one of their most powerful weapons. Without Ultra and Magic, the Allies knew it may not be long before they too were in concentration camps. By concentrating all efforts on defeating Hitler, they were fighting for the Jews' freedom as well as their own.
While we have so far only examined the role that Allied code-breaking played on the war, it is perhaps worthwhile to mention a few things about the enemy's efforts as well. The Germans had at least as much success reading the Allies' encoded messages as the British and Americans did. Especially during the earlier stages of the war, the German counterpart of Ultra, 'B-Dienst', actually read the allied ciphers quite regularly. Britain and the others did not use machine ciphering until the mid-stages of the war, which made decryption much easier for the Germans. Kahn describes the American encryption techniques as "transparent as a fish tank for any competent cryptanalyst." (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 49) In fact, so superior was the Enigma to any other cipher that once the Allies had re-built it, the British and Americans even used it to encode top-secret intelligence messages to each other!
With the strong effect that cryptography had on the Allied war effort, as has been shown, it seems reasonable to ask the question, why did not the Germans and Japanese simply use new cipher machines? The answer is a combination of two factors. Firstly, they simply did not know the extent that the Allies were reading their transmissions. Secondly, those that did know, or at least had an idea, could not convince higher authorities that it was so. Perhaps the biggest Nazi weakness was their overconfidence; the Enigma was no exception. Hitler simply could not accept the fact that the inferior British or American, let alone the Polish, nations could solve his machine. The extent to which the enemy did know has been debated among authors. Hinsley claims that throughout the war, the enemy simply did not know. (Hinsley, p. 16) Hawker argues that they did know, but were reluctant to change the system they had come to be so dependent on. (Hawker, "Breaking the Code.") Kahn agrees that overconfidence did not allow Hitler and his confidants to accept the fact that the Allies had solved their ciphering machines. (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," pp. 200-208) Indeed, Hitler's confidence in the Enigma was not unrealistic; there were 10.5 quadrillion possible keys so it is conceivable that no existing person or machine could ever try all of them. He simply did not have any faith in the Allies' abilities as code-breakers.
Another reason the enemy did not abandon their cipher machines is the extreme secrecy Ultra and Magic insisted upon. "Churchill's anxiety about the secrecy of Ultra was constant; rules in all of the armed forces forbade any action to be taken on the basis of Enigma intercepts unless some cover, such as air reconnaissance, was provided. The security implies Ultra's significance." (Kahn, "Seizing the Enigma," p. 276) Churchill sacrificed lives to keep his secret; it is quite possible that he succeed.
If it were not for mistakes made by enemy cipher clerks, the Allies may never have solved the ciphers. These mistakes were dubbed 'cillies' by the scientists at Bletchley, and included the clerk's early practice of choosing poor keys (such as 'AAA' or a girlfriend's or famous German's name), and failing to follow guidelines strictly. This is not to say that the enemy was ignorant, quite the opposite. Both the German and Japanese cipher machines were works of art, performing encryption that was years ahead of its time. The enemy did actually alter their machines quite often, which kept the Allied cryptanalysts on their toes. Sometimes changes in the enemy's machines would prohibit the Allies from reading transmissions for up to ten months. The cipher machines simply could not compete with the genius characteristic of the likes of Marion Rejewski, Frank B. Rowlett, and Max Newman.
The importance of Allied decryption efforts during World War II has not yet
been fully realized. Governments are still withholding information concerning
military intelligence during the war. However, what we do know is enough to
conclude that the Polish efforts, combined with projects Ultra and Magic,
probably shortened the war by at least two years. The men and women who
contributed to the war against the enemy's cipher machines, be they from the US
Signals Intelligence Service, Bletchley Park, or Biuro Szyfrów (BS-4) in Warsaw,
are war heroes. They played a large part in feeding Britain (by protecting
merchant ships from U-Boats), returning soldiers to their families, and
defeating a deranged madman intent on taking over the world. The cryptanalysts
were also successful in attaining victory over an enemy without physical
violence. This paper concludes that the solving of enemy cipher machines such as
Enigma and Purple was due to astute and resourceful codebreaking by intelligent
Allied men and women, whose genius and ingenuity were underestimated by an enemy
that would pay the price.
Bennet, Ralph. "Knight's Move at
Drvar: Ultra and the Attempt on Tito's Life, 25 May 1944" Journal of
Contemporary History, April, 1987.
Coghlan, Andy. "A core of special
Allied intelligence" Forum, Mar 6, 1993.
Garli ski, Józef. "The Enigma
War" (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980)
Fox, Barry and Webb,
Jeremy. "Colossal Adventures" New Scientist, May 10, 1997.
Hawker, Pat.
"Breaking the code" Electronics & Wireless World, January 1988.
Hinsley, F.H. "The Enigma of Ultra" History Today, September, 1993.
Jedd, Joseph. "Poland's Contribution in the Field of Intelligence to the
Victory in the Second World War" http://www.dnai.com/~salski/No05-06Folder/Jedd'sPoland'sContribution.htm"
(The Summit Times, 1994)
Kahn, David. "Hitler's Spies" (Toronto: Hodder
and Stoughton, 1978)
Kahn, David. "Seizing the Enigma" (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1991)
Kahn, David. "The Intelligence Failure of Pearl
Harbour" Foreign Affairs, Winter 91/92.
Keegan, John. "What the Allies
Knew" New York Times, November 25, 1996. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/allied.htm
Kozaczuk, Wladyslaw. "Enigma" (USA: University Publications of America,
1984)
Momsen, Bill. "Codebreaking and Secret Weapons in WWII" http://members.aol.com/nbrass/enigma.htm
(Nautical Brass Online, February 1997)
Payne, Michael J. "Cryptography
Timeline" http://www.ns.net/users/payne-o/timeline.html
(NSNet, June 1996)
Pinkney, David. "World War II: The Development and
Impact of Cryptology" http://glug.cs.uml.edu/~dpinkney/suff/suff.shtml
(University Of Massachusetts Lowell, 1992)
Prados, John. "Combined Fleet
Decoded" (Toronto: Random House, 1995)
Rusbridger, James. "Winds of
Warning: Mythology & Fact about Enigma and Pearl Harbour" Encounter,
January, 1986.
Rusbridger, James. "The Sinking of the Automedon, the
Capture of the Nankin" Encounter, May, 1985.
Sale, Tony. "Bletchley Park
Home Page" http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/ccc/bpark/
(Cranfield University, 1997)
Stevenson, William. "A Man Called Intrepid"
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976)
Wark, Wesley K.
"Cryptographic Innocence: The Origins of Signals Intelligence in Canada in the
Second World War" Journal of Contemporary History, October, 1987.
Zorpette, Glenn. "Breaking the enemy's code" IEEE Spectrum, September,
1987.
"The Enigma Machine" http://www.msichicago.org/exhibit/U505/ENIGMA.html
(Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, 1996)
"Secrets of War" http://www.secretsofwar.com/ (Documedia
Group, California, 1997)
"WWII Timeline" http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/ww2time.htm
(The History Place, 1998)
I had no idea how piggish these "friends" are while living in commie (thanks to Western neo-commie bast*rds in Yalta) Poland. Reading and watching their pinky media here in the US finally opened my eyes.
Thank you for your most interesting and informative post and response!
The comparison between the fall of France and Poland in WW11 is significant. The schoolchildren of this country were taught that France capitulated within days because they were surprised. Poland, we were told, was defeated because their leaders were so foolish as to use only cavalry against the invading German tanks.
My question is: Who permeated our schools with such blatant lies? Why are some groups consistently and persistently denigrated in the official propaganda in this country? Why is intolerance rewarded and encouraged by so many who claim they "care"/
History that was fed to Stavka2 and millions of others:
"As for military...Poland might have been under a military dictator (who was busy erasing all evidence of Orthodox Christians in eastern Poland) but as a modern military of the era, they were a joke. If the Soviets had not attacked, the Poles would still have fallen...it would have just taken the Germans a bit longer and cost a bit more. As for resistence...quite a few Poles were in the SS and quite a few took it as an opportunity to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and other less desirables."
History on 09/02/2001 according to Western neo-commie media:
Israel was branded a "racist apartheid" state early on Sunday by thousands of non-governmental organisations meeting in Durban, a move that shocked Jewish delegates.
The NGO Forum also accused the Jewish state of "systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing".
Would love to see my grand grandchildren history books.
The Germans faked a massacre and a raid on a German radio station at Gleiwitz. Nato faked a massacre at the village of Racak in order to start the bombing of Serbia. Things never change.
As our history books are becoming a reflection of the Hollywood state of mind, there is no chance that such politically incorrect stories as for example Westerplatte could be ever mentioned. Courageus Poles and chivalrous Germans - no go! Westerplatte
| |
That history that came to me "fed" came partially from my grandfather who was a major in the Polish horse cavalry during the war, before he became a Soviet Officer (only because he was also a surgeon, otherwise he would have been shot). Poland had precious few tanks, and while the horse cavalry was able to route the german infantry (even though they were armed with sabers, lances and pistols) they did precious little against even the light machine gun tanks. Soviet cossak formations were used likewise against the exposed Nazi rear, attacking deep to hit the supply trains where tanks were none existent. That is the history I know.
Ever wondered why Poland had precious few tanks and overall miserable equipment? Thanks to her pathetic, so called "Allies" and anti-Polish hysteria in the Western media. Thanks to this bunch of political nincompoops the world suffered almost 6 years of war, millions of dead, 45 years of communism in EU and other parts of the world, further communisation of the world media and Western Europe etc.
Israel is in quite similar situation today: the all-knowing neo-commie world spits at her, millions of enemies around. The only difference: Israel has better ally, ergo her military is in a good shape.
Andrei Piontkovsky (director of Moscow's Centre of Strategic Research) said recently, commenting on upcoming Sharon's visit to Moscow: "For obvious reasons, Israel feels itself increasingly isolated and believes that Russia will be sympathetic. And Israel needs all the sympathy it can get right now."
Now tell me, Savka: what possesed all these putzes in the Western neo-commie media to start anti-slavic ("they're all anti-semite little nazis!"), anti-catholic and overall anti-christian campaign right now, when "Israel needs all the sympathy it can get?" Who are these putzes? Why do they do it? Who wants to make big bucks on divide at impera this time?
Thank God your grandfather survived.
As for resistence...quite a few Poles were in the SS and quite a few took it as an opportunity to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and other less desirables. Lets keep history in perspective, shall we?
I have recently come across information that indicates that many Jews worked for the Gestapo in Poland. Apparently there were over 7,000 in Warsaw alone. Their job was to uncover Jews posing as Goy.
I am unaware of any evidence, other than scurrillous anti-Slav racially motivated slanders, that Poles collaborated with the SS. Could you provide a source or authority to substantiate your claim?
Thanks. I did not know any of this. Didn't even know Poland had a navy. BUMP!
The battle of Westerplatte is quite amazing. Our taxpayers backed the wrong people when FDR( and his commie assistants)gave Stalin the so-called lend lease...a lend lease for which the Brits were required to pay and Stalin was not.
Good question about the putzes....what do they really hope to accomplish?
I recall from memory that early versions of the Enigma machine were avaliable commercially in Germany until at least the mid-1930s. I could be wrong though...
VRN
So they should have backed the Nazies? So much better. Yes then only the pure blood Aryans, ruled by sexual perverts and drug addicts could have ruled the world.
How sweet it is that Poland qualified for the World Cup on September 1.
Never forget that the invasion of Poland was a joint Nazi-Soviet operation, and that in many cases the Soviet treatment of Poles was even worse than that of the Germans.
You've attacked about every group other than Russians during your stay at FR. Why is that?
Sorry that you misunderstood me. Heaven forbid that we would support Hitler. BTW, there are quite a few of us that think perverts do rule many aspects of our country.
I think you are right. The text in Post #10 seems to refer to that:
Koch found little interest in his machine, and so he sold it to a German engineer named Dr. Arthur Scherbius. Scherbius improved the machine, and began shopping it around. He renamed it the Enigma, and sold it to the German government.
You are correct and katyn massacre proves it:
Hoover Digest - 2000 No. 2
Home | About Hoover | Library & Archives | Research | Publications | Campaign
HOOVER INSTITUTION
Brian Crozier
Remembering Katyn
In Soviet documents recently obtained by the Hoover Institution, the details of one of the bloodiest crimes of Stalin's reign of terror have come to light.
For those who lived through World War II, and for many who did not, the Katyn Massacre carries a sinister resonance. The most notorious of Stalin's wartime atrocities, the massacre was falsely attributed to Hitler through a scarcely credible but widely believed piece of Soviet disinformation.
In April 1940, nearly twenty-two thousand Polish prisoners were rounded up, transported to Katyn and various other sites, and executed. They included army officers, civil servants, landowners, policemen, ordinary soldiers, and prison officers. They were lined up, made to dig their own mass graves, and shot in the back of the neck. The victims were never tried or presented with any charges. The executions were ordered personally by Stalin in a memorandum dated March 5, 1940, to Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB). Per Stalin's instructions, the prisoners were to receive the "supreme measure of punishment—shooting."
•••
The full facts became widely accessible to researchers with the acquisition of millions of sheets of Soviet secret documents by the Hoover Institution, known as Fond 89. Many of these documents were made available to me while I was at work on The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. The full story is worth telling.
The mass grave in Katyn Forest was discovered by the occupying Nazi forces in 1943. The disinterment of more than four thousand corpses was an unexpected gift to Goebbels's propaganda machine, which broadcast the story to the outside world—to the embarrassment not only of Stalin but of his wartime allies Roosevelt and Churchill. Roosevelt dismissed the Nazi claims as "German propaganda and a German plot." Churchill was less explicit: "The less said about that the better."
There the matter lay—until March 3, 1959, when Aleksandr Shelepin, then head of the KGB, gave full details in a secret memo to Krushchev of the numbers executed. The total was 21,857 killed:
- 4,421 in the Katyn Forest (Smolensk region)
- 3,820 in the Starobelsk camp (near Kharkov)
- 6,311 in the Ostashkovo camp (Kalinin region)
- 7,305 in other camps and prisons in western Ukraine and western Belorussia
•••
A curious but related episode deserves notice. In 1972, a private group in London resolved to build a monument to the victims of Katyn. The original plan was to place the monument in Kensington, one of London's best-known tourist areas. At first, the Council of the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea gave permission for the plan to go ahead. Permission was withdrawn, however, under pressure from the Foreign Office.
It is now known, through the Hoover Institution's Soviet archives, that the Foreign Office pressure was itself the outcome of pressure from Moscow. There was an exchange of telegrams on September 7, 1972, between the Soviet Politburo and the Soviet ambassador in London. The Kremlin's message started as follows:
Reactionary circles in England are again undertaking attempts for anti-Soviet purposes to stir up the so-called "Katyn Affair." To this end the campaign to collect funds for the construction of a "Memorial to the Victims of Katyn" in London is being made use of.In his reply, the Soviet ambassador stated that the attention of the British government had already been drawn to attempts to whip up an anti-Soviet campaign based on "the inventions—long ago exposed—of the Goebbels propaganda machine concerning the so-called 'Katyn affair.'"
Stalin's orders were unambiguous. The Polish prisoners were to receive the "supreme measure of punishment—shooting."On September 8 the Politburo drafted a further statement, which contained the following passage:
The above-mentioned anti-Soviet campaign cannot but arouse justified feelings of profound indignation in the Soviet Union, whose people made enormous sacrifices for the sake of saving Europe from fascist enslavement.Foreign Office pressure on the borough resulted and permission was withdrawn. Four years later—in 1976—the Katyn memorial was in fact built, in the cemetery at Gunnersbury on the outskirts of London. The project was supervised by the National Association for Freedom (later, the Freedom Association). Presumably under pressure from the Foreign Office, the British Defense Ministry forbade former members of the British armed forces to don their uniforms for the launching ceremony. This negative order was ignored by several ex-servicemen, without further consequences.
On April 13, 1990, the Soviet authorities at last admitted responsibility for the massacres at Katyn and elsewhere, although the figure cited in the relevant statement—"around 15,000"—fell short of the real total by more than 6,000. The admission came in a statement by the Tass news agency, with the personal authority of then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The statement referred to only three of the prison camps involved: Smolensk, Voroshilovgrad, and Kalinin. It claimed that the authorities had knowledge of the killings through "recently discovered documents." "Direct responsibility for the crime" was ascribed to Beria. The statement ended "The Soviet side, expressing profound regret over the Katyn tragedy, declares that this was one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism."
At a meeting in Moscow that day, Gorbachev presented Polish president General Wojciech Jaruzelski with copies of the NKVD's lists of names of Polish internees in the three camps mentioned. The Polish government issued a statement declaring that the question of responsibility for the massacre had "weighed particularly painfully" on Polish-Soviet relations and that the "long-awaited" Soviet admission made possible a relationship based on "partnership and true friendship." The statement went on: "Reconciliation can only be built on truth." It is surely fair to add that the Tass statement—although useful for relations between the ailing Soviet Union and its Polish satellite—was true but not the whole truth. Only three of the localities involved were named, and the total given fell short of the true figure.
In 1990, fifty years after the fact, the Kremlin finally admitted Soviet complicity in the killings in the Katyn Forest.The Polish statement was striking not only for its content but because it had been drafted under the authority of Jaruzelski—a communist leader installed under Soviet protection. In September of that year, he was forced to resign and in December he was replaced as president by the elected anticommunist leader Lech Walesa.
Postscript
In his 1959 memo to Krushchev, KGB head Shelepin noted that Soviet propaganda efforts to blame the Katyn massacre on the Germans had "taken firm root in international public opinion." To keep the truth from coming out, Shelepin recommended that all records pertaining to the murdered Poles be destroyed. In other words, "We did it, but the world believes the Germans did. Therefore, leave the story as its stands." Thankfully, the documents were not destroyed and we now know the truth about Katyn.
Uncovering the Past: Supplementary material from the Hoover Institution Archives.
Special to the Hoover Digest.Brian Crozier's essay "Why the Cold War?" appears in the new Hoover Press book The Collapse of Communism, edited by Lee Edwards. To order, call 800-935-2882.
Brian Crozier is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and the founder of London's Institute for the Study of Conflict.
After a search at the History Channel site I find no citation, no mention, nada about the Katyn Forrest Massacre! Considering that WW11 has been the longest running TV show in the history of television, this appears to be either a major oversight or blatant censorship. Because London caved in to the commies, I strongly suspect the latter.
letters
Start of the War War II -- Schleswig-Holstein
The reading of the events of Westerplatte has been a true joy for me who has a thirst for history. We have lived too long without being informed of the real truths of the devastations occurring in this last century.
Freedom bump!
There is a great book "Thousand Hours Day" by Wieslaw Kuniczak in reference to the Polish campaign 1939. It was a book of the month some time ago. As there are some politically incorect references in the book, you can not get that book anywhere.
Kuniczak is also the guy who translated, rather well, The Trilogy by Henryk Sienkiewicz (Nobel Prize for literature in 1905). The Trilogy, which includes "With Fire and Sword", "Deluge" and "Fire in the Steppe" is in fact the Polish bible, especially on the issues of patriotism, courage, sacrifice and faith. It is fun to read.
btt
Your recommended book, Thousand Hours Day by Kuniczak, sounds most interesting. I have done a search, found it and placed an order for it.
Frankly I do not expect to actually receive this book because the last time I ordered a non-PC book I was informed that, for some reason, the book seller couldn't find this book that they were advertising. It is funny that Dan Rather never talks about this type of censorship.
btt
Bump for more.
bump till September 15, the day of the Soviet invasion.
Bump for Poland, an ally we can count on unlike the French.
bump: meant September 17
My family will remember!
Worth to compare.
Terror in Poland, Polish Campaign 1939 subpage
Introduction
Almost the each European nation suffered from the Second
World War, but there were nations which were the victims of
exceptional barbarism. A few nations on which extermination was
concentated by Nazi Germany were: Jews, some nations from
Slavonic group: Poles, Russians and some from Yugoslavia nations
and also the Gypsies.
Poland
was the country which suffered the most from the war: not only
lost 6 million of its 35 million citizens but beeing the war
"victor" (at the end of the War Poland was the 4th
Allied force: almost 20 divisions on all fronts having a place
after Soviet Union, USA and Great Britain and before France which
was let on victory parade and Poland was not) Poland was given to
Stalin's generosity and the new occupation of Poland started and
new victims of communist (this time) terror were taken including
patriots, Home Army soldiers, Polish Army on the West soldiers.
Also "Pogroms" on Jews were provoced and made by NKVD
and the servant Polish Security Beaureau to force them to leave
the country. Poles really lost this war. Poland became the free
country in 1989 after 50 years from the war end.
I present the population losses in the countries under German occupation (losses per 1000 citizens):
| Poland | 220 |
| USSR | 124 |
| Yugoslavia | 108 |
| Greece | 35 |
| Albany | 24 |
| Holland | 22 |
| Czechoslovakia | 21 |
| Luxembourg | 16 |
| France | 13 |
| Belgium | 12 |
| Norway | 3 |
| Denmark | 0.3 |
About 6,000,000 Polish citizens died during the war. Only about 450,000 - 640,000 people lost their life because of direct war operations. 4,500,000 people died by extermination, and about 500,000 - 1,000,000 because of hunger and cold. The victims were Polish citizens but their nationality was: 3,000,000 Poles, 2,500,000 Jews, 500,000 Ukrainians and Byelarussians.
At last the truth is out! And I had to wait 50 years to hear it. The selective, very selective, rememberances of WW11 have permeated our entire society. Entire societies of peoples have been denigrated in order to praise a few. There are memorials to some and, at the same time, slander against many WW11 victims.
Where is the justice in this country which allowed its leaders to assist the Bolsheviks in crushing Christian nations? Where is justice in this country when its academia and media justified these Communist crimes?
Talking about terror: during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 about 250,000 Polish civilians were killed during 63 days of fighting. This makes almost 4,000 civilians per day.
I have long been aware of the Poles contributions and their bravery. One our great revolutionary heros was, Casimir Pulaski, known as the Father of American Cavalry.
We lived in Chicago for 5 years back in the 60's in a Polish, Ukraine neighborhood, they were friendly and great neighbors. Our family often went to Pulaski Park for the kids to play.
I think Chicago has the largest Polish population outside of Poland. It seemed every third guy I met in Chicago was nicknamed " Ski"
After a search at the History Channel site I find no citation, no mention, nada about the Katyn Forrest Massacre! Considering that WW11 has been the longest running TV show in the history of television, this appears to be either a major oversight or blatant censorship. Because London caved in to the commies, I strongly suspect the latter.
You are right, when the Germans uncovered the massacre site they brought in doctors from the occupied countries in the west to perform autopsies to prove they did not do it. Damned hypocritical of the Nazis to want to be proven innocent in this after all the murdering they did as a matter of course. It did no good, for the Allies would not even listen.
Shame on the information givers and historians who have ignored or distorted this part of history.
One major encyclopedia of today even has the audacity to print "Warsaw was LIBERATED by the Soviets in January 1945".
The way I understood it, it was a gay British guy who broke enigma...guess the Limes and the gays will be up in arms now. As for military...Poland might have been under a military dictator (who was busy erasing all evidence of Orthodox Christians in eastern Poland) but as a modern military of the era, they were a joke. If the Soviets had not attacked, the Poles would still have fallen...it would have just taken the Germans a bit longer and cost a bit more. As for resistence...quite a few Poles were in the SS and quite a few took it as an opportunity to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and other less desirables. Lets keep history in perspective, shall we?
Unkind and inaccurate. True a gay brit invented the first word processor to speed identifying he daily key change, but it was a pole who got out of Poland who got them on the right track. It was also Brits who got the first real sample of the machine off of a German Sub long before we entered the war.
Second, the Poles did mamage a resistance, The fall of France was sixty days, so the Poles 35 days is actually quite respectable for the times. When Hitler first hit Russian, his tanks put on more miles the first week than then there were miles across Poland. By any such measure, the real pushover of the war was in Russia at the beginning before the legendary Russian primitiveness, lack of modern technology in it's infrastructure and the coldest Russian winter in decades began to be more effective against a modern German army than anything else the Russians had.
Consider too, that in regard to the Polish Uprising, we are being told even today that the US couldn't supply these patriots "because Stalin refused permission"!
Who are these spewers of mal-information? Why do they still exist as agents of influence in our country today? Will they be able to manipulate our current crisis into a malefaction of untold devastation?
Well, this is how it goes when one lies all the time and then tells the truth, but no one will listen because they think it's another lie.
I may be wrong, but it seems that there was an American observer in Katyn and there was a report issued based on his/her observations.
Another interesting take from the CIA research on Katyn: The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field
One of the earliest--and certainly the most infamous--mass shootings of prisoners of war during World War II did not occur in the heat of battle but was a cold-blooded act of political murder. The victims were Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians captured by the Red Army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. Strictly speaking, even the Polish servicemen were not POWs. The USSR had not declared war, and the Polish commander in chief had ordered his troops not to engage Soviet forces. But there was little the Poles could do. On 28 September, the USSR and Nazi Germany, allied since August, partitioned and then dissolved the Polish state. They then began implementing parallel policies of suppressing all resistance and destroying the Polish elite in their respective areas. The NKVD and the Gestapo coordinated their actions on many issues, including prisoner exchanges. At Brest Litovsk, Soviet and German commanders held a joint victory parade before German forces withdrew westward behind a new demarcation line. 1
Official records, opened in 1990 when glasnost was still in vogue, show that Stalin had every intention of treating the Poles as political prisoners. Just two days after the invasion began on 17 September, the NKVD created a Directorate of Prisoners of War. 2 It took custody of Polish prisoners from the Army and began organizing a network of reception centers and transfer camps and arranging rail transport to the western USSR. Once there, the Poles were placed in "special" (concentration) camps, where, from October to February, they were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political agitation. The camps were at Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov, all three located on the grounds of former Orthodox monasteries converted into prisons. The NKVD dispatched one of its rising stars, Maj. Vassili Zarubin, to Kozelsk, where most of the officers were kept, to conduct interviews. Zarubin presented himself to the Poles as a charming, sympathetic, and cultured Soviet official, which led many prisoners into sharing confidences that would cost them their lives. 3
The considerable logistic effort required to handle the prisoners coincided with the USSR's disastrous 105-day war against Finland. The Finns inflicted 200,000 casualties on the Red Army and destroyed tons of materiel--and much of Russia's military reputation. That war, like the assault on Poland, was a direct result of Stalin's nonaggression pact with Hitler.
The Soviet dictator offered Helsinki "remarkably moderate terms," in the words of British military historian Liddell Hart, taking only territory needed to defend the land, sea, and air approaches to Leningrad. 4 The difference between Stalin's treatment of Finland and Poland underscored his imperial ambitions toward the latter. Moscow and Helsinki even exchanged prisoners once hostilities had ceased. (Stalin, however, dealt harshly with his own soldiers who had been in Finnish captivity. At least 5,000 repatriated troops simply disappeared from an NKVD prison and were presumably executed. 5)
Stalin was anxious to settle with Finland so he could turn his attention to Poland and the Baltic countries, which the Red Army would soon occupy and the NKVD would "pacify" using terror, deportations, and executions. Militarily, the war was over by late February, though a peace agreement was not signed until March. NKVD interrogations were completed about the same time. The Poles were encouraged to believe they would be released, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to determine who would live and who would die. On 5 March 1940, Stalin signed their death warrant--an NKVD order condemning 21,857 prisoners to "the supreme penalty: shooting." They had been condemned as "hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority." 6
During April-May 1940, the Polish prisoners were moved from their internment camps and taken to three execution sites. The place most identified with the Soviet atrocity is Katyn Forest, located 12 miles west of Smolensk, Russia. For years historians assumed that the grounds of an NKVD rest and recreation facility were both an execution and burial site for nearly a fifth of the unfortunate Poles who found themselves in Soviet captivity. Post-Cold War revelations, however, suggest that the victims were shot in the basement of the NKVD headquarters in Smolensk and at an abattoir in the same city, although some may have been executed at a site in the forest itself. In any event, the Katyn Forest is--and will probably long remain--the main symbol of the atrocity, even if it was not the actual killing field.
The Katyn Forest massacre was a criminal act of historic proportions and enduring political implications. When Nazi occupation forces in April 1943 announced the discovery of several mass graves, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels hoped that international revulsion over the Soviet atrocity would drive a wedge into the Big Three coalition and buy Germany a breathing space, if not a victory, in its war against Russia. (A headline in the May 1943 Newsweek read: "Poles vs. Reds: Allied Unity Put to Test Over Officer Dead.") But Goebbels miscalculated. Despite overwhelming evidence of Soviet responsibility, Moscow blamed the Germans, and for the rest of the war Washington and London officially accepted the Soviet countercharge. When the Polish government-in-exile in London demanded an international inquiry, Stalin used this as a pretext to break relations. The Western allies objected but eventually acquiesced. Soon thereafter, the Soviet dictator assembled a group of Polish Communists that returned to Poland with the Red Army in 1944 and formed the nucleus of the postwar government. Stalin's experience with the Katyn affair may have convinced him that the West, grateful for the Red Army's contribution to the Allied military effort, would find it hard to confront him over Poland after the war.
Professor Stanislaw Swianiewicz was the sole survivor of Katyn. He was waiting to board a bus to the forest area when an NKVD colonel arrived and pulled him out of line. Swianiewicz was an internationally recognized expert on forced labor in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, who had been born in Poland when it was still part of the Russian empire, and had studied in Moscow. He ended up in Siberia, and after the war emigrated to the United States, where he taught economics at the University of Notre Dame. At least one CIA analyst remembers the professor from his days in South Bend.
Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors; 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots. 7 It was their social status that landed them in front of NKVD execution squads. Most of the victims were reservists who had been mobilized when Germany invaded. In all, the NKVD eliminated almost half the Polish officer corps--part of Stalin's long-range effort to prevent the resurgence of an independent Poland.
Recent historical research shows that 700-900 of the victims were Polish Jews. 8 Ironically, the Germans knew this, and it complicated Goebbels' effort to portray the atrocity as a "Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy"--a mainstay of the Nazi regime's anti-Semitic propaganda.
Katyn created a big echo in the United States. Dozens of books have been written on the subject--the Library of Congress has catalogued 19 new ones since 1975--and several Web sites on the Internet are devoted to it. There is a Katyn memorial in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and one Web site belongs to a Baltimore group trying to raise funds to erect a monument there. Several states and many cities have issued commemorative proclamations. The most recent was signed by New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, who designated 15 September 1996 "Katyn Forest Massacre Day." The commemorative statement is available on the Internet. In 1988, Alaska chose 30 April as a "Day To Remember Katyn." A Web site maintained by the Archaeological Institute of America tracks excavations at Katyn and two other execution sites, one at Mednoye (near the former city of Kalinin, now Tver', in Russia) and the other near Kharkiv (formerly Kharkov), Ukraine.
Katyn played a convoluted role in US politics and US-Soviet relations. Two US servicemen, brought from a POW camp in Germany, were at Katyn in 1943, when Berlin held an international news conference there to publicize the atrocity. The ranking officer was Col. John H. Van Vliet, a fourth-generation West Pointer. After returning to Washington in 1945, he wrote a report concluding that the Soviets, not the Germans, were responsible. He gave the report to Maj. Gen. Clayton Bissell, Gen. George Marshall's assistant chief of staff for intelligence, who deep-sixed it. Years later, Bissell defended his action before Congress, contending that it was not in the US interest to embarrass an ally whose forces were still needed to defeat Japan.
In 1944, President Roosevelt assigned Capt. George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyn. Earle did so, using contacts in Bulgaria and Romania. He too concluded that the Soviet Union was guilty. FDR rejected Earle's conclusion, saying that he was convinced of Nazi Germany's responsibility. The report was suppressed. When Earle requested permission to publish his findings, the President gave him a written order to desist. Earle--who had been a Roosevelt family friend--spent the rest of the war in American Samoa.
As the Cold War heated up, Katyn became a shibboleth in US politics. In 1949, an American journalist assembled a committee of prominent Americans, which included former OSS chief Gen. William Donovan and future DCI Allen Dulles, to press for an official inquiry, but it went nowhere. Then came the Korean war and concern that Communist forces were executing American GIs. "Katyn may well have been a blueprint for Korea," one Congressman declared. 9 In September 1951, the House of Representatives appointed a select committee to hold hearings. It was chaired by Rep. Ray J. Madden and was popularly known as the Madden Committee. Although not without political or propaganda overtones, the hearings were the most comprehensive effort to date to gather facts and establish responsibility. 10 The committee heard 81 witnesses, examined 183 exhibits, and took more than 100 depositions. The hearings gave Democrats a chance to deflect charges of having "betrayed" Poland and "lost" China at Yalta and offered Republicans an opportunity to court voters of Polish and other East European ancestry who traditionally favored Democrats. 11
Before disbanding the select committee, Madden tried to get the UN to bring the Katyn massacre before the International Court of Justice and sought Congressional support for a joint Senate-House inquiry. 12 But the political will to do so was lacking. Stalin's death, the rise of a new leadership, and the end of the Korean war seemed to auger a thaw in US-Soviet relations.
Meanwhile, the Soviets obliterated references to Katyn on maps and in official reference works. Then, in 1969, Moscow did something strange that many believe was further calculated to confuse the issue further: it chose a small village named Khatyn as the cite for Belorussia's national war memorial. There was no apparent reason for the selection. Khatyn was one of 9,200 Belorussian villages the Germans had destroyed and one of more than a hundred where they had killed civilians in retaliation for partisan attacks. In Latin transliteration, however, Katyn and Khatyn look and sound alike, though they are spelled and pronounced quite differently in Russian and Belorussian. When President Nixon visited the USSR in July 1974, he toured the Khatyn memorial at his hosts' insistence. Sensing that the Soviets were exploiting the visit for propaganda purposes, The New York Times headlined its coverage of the tour: "Nixon Sees Khatyn, a Soviet Memorial, Not Katyn Forest." (The Times probably got it right. During the Vietnam war, the Soviets frequently took visiting US peace activists to Khatyn.)
While Katyn was taboo in the USSR and Poland, numerous books and articles appeared in the United States and the UK. The standard scholarly work was written by Dr. Janus K. Zawodny, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1988, the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored a Polish translation of his Death in the Forest for distribution in Poland. Later, the Reagan and Bush administrations both released previously classified records bearing on Katyn. These were the first official US efforts since the House hearings aimed at documenting Soviet responsibility.
Old habits die hard. In the summer of 1998, a US corporation sponsored an exhibit of World War II photographs from the Russian Army Museum at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington. Incredibly, in a souvenir program sold at the exhibit, the Russian exhibitors repeated the Soviet lie that the Nazis, not the NKVD, had murdered Polish prisoners at Katyn. 13
For 50 years, the Soviet Union concealed the truth. The coverup began in April 1943, almost immediately after the Red Army had recaptured Smolensk. The NKVD destroyed a cemetery the Germans had permitted the Polish Red Cross to build and removed other evidence. In January 1944, Moscow appointed its own investigative body, known as the Burdenko Commission after the prominent surgeon who chaired it. Predictably, it concluded that the Polish prisoners had been murdered in 1941, during the German occupation, not in 1940. To bolster its claim, the commission hosted an international press conference at Katyn on 22 January. Three American journalists and Kathleen Harriman, the 25-year-old daughter of US Ambassador Averell Harriman, attended. After viewing exhibits of planted evidence, they endorsed the Burdenko Commission's findings. (Ms. Harriman later repudiated her 1944 statement before the House select committee.) Eight days later, the Soviets held a religious and military ceremony attended by a color guard from the Polish division of the Red Army to honor the victims of "German-fascist invaders." A film was made and shown for propaganda purposes.
Katyn was a forbidden topic in postwar Poland. Censors suppressed all references to it. Even mentioning the atrocity meant risking reprisal. While Katyn was erased from Poland's official history, it could not be erased from historical memory. In 1981, Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription "Katyn, 1940." Even that was too much. The police confiscated it. Later, the Polish Government, on cue from Moscow, created another memorial. It read: "To the Polish soldiers--victims of Hitlerite fascism--reposing in the soil of Katyn."
Then came Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost. In 1987, the Soviet president signed an agreement with the head of Poland's military government, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, for a joint historical commission to investigate "blank spots," that is, censored subjects, in the two countries' troubled history. Polish historians tried unsuccessfully to include Katyn on the agenda. The commission did provide a forum, however, for Polish historians to press their Soviet counterparts for access to official records, even if to confirm the Burdenko Commission's conclusions. (There were, after all, "court historians" on both sides.) Gorbachev had a chance to address Katyn during a July 1988 state visit to Warsaw, but dodged the issue.
Pressure was building on the Soviets, however. Prominent Polish intellectuals signed an open letter asking for access to official records and sent it to Soviet colleagues. A month after Gorbachev's visit, demonstrators paraded in the streets of Warsaw demanding an official inquiry. The Kremlin had to do something; it chose to deceive. In November, the Soviet Government announced plans for a new memorial at Katyn commemorating Polish officers "[who] together with 500 Soviet prisoners . . . were shot by the fascists in 1943 as our army approached Smolensk." This was not true, and the change of dates was a further obfuscation, but more important was the subliminal message directed to the Poles: Russia and Poland were both victims of German aggression, something neither country should forget. 14
In early 1989, three top Soviet officials sent Gorbachev a memorandum warning him that the issue was becoming "more acute" and that "time is not our ally." 15 Some form of official admission, even a partial one, would have to be made. At a Kremlin ceremony on 13 October 1990, Gorbachev handed Jaruzelski a folder of documents that left no doubt about Soviet guilt. He did not, however, make a full and complete disclosure. Missing from the folder was the March 1940 NKVD execution order. Gorbachev laid all blame on Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, and his deputy. (This was a safe move, because Beria and his deputy had been branded criminals and summarily shot by Stalin's successors.) Gorbachev also failed to mention that the actual number of victims was 21,857--more than the usually cited figure of 15,000. By shaving the truth, Gorbachev had shielded the Soviet Government and the Communist Party, making Katyn look like a rogue secret police action rather than an official act of mass murder.
The next major discovery turned up in an unexpected place--the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. While conducting research on Katyn at the Archives in spring 1990, a Polish-American art and antiques expert named Waclaw Godziemba-Maliszewski was given a copy of an article entitled "The Katyn Enigma: New Evidence in a 40-Year Riddle" that had appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Studies in Intelligence. It was written by CIA officer and NPIC analyst Robert G. Poirier, who used imagery from Luftwaffe aerial photoreconnaissance during World War II to uncover evidence of the original crime and a Soviet coverup during 1943-1944. 16 The imagery, selected from 17 sorties flown between 1941 and 1944 and spanning a period before, during, and after the German occupation of the Smolensk area, was important evidence. Among other things, it showed that the area where the mass graves were located had not been altered during the German occupation and that the same area displayed physical changes that predated the Germans' arrival. It also captured the NKVD on film bulldozing some of the Polish graves and removing bodies. Poirier speculated that the corpses had been removed and reburied at another site.
At the National Archives, Godziemba-Maliszewski located the same imagery that Poirier had used. He also found additional shots of Katyn and the other two execution sites at Mednoye and near Kharkov. He discovered much additional imagery, new collateral evidence, and eyewitness testimony, resulting in important new conclusions about what actually happened at Katyn.
After completing further research, in January 1991 Godziemba-Maliszewski turned over copies of the imagery and Poirier's article to scientists at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. They in turn passed the information to the Polish Ministry of Justice. The Ministry had to be convinced that the article and photographic evidence were bona fide and that Godziemba-Maliszewski was not, as some suspected, a CIA agent! Stefan Sniezko, Poland's deputy general prosecutor, then gave an interview to the German newspaper Tagesspiegel [Daily Mirror], published on 12 May 1991. This was the first public disclosure of the Luftwaffe imagery and its utility for identifying burial sites in the USSR.
The disclosure had an immediate impact in Germany, where media interest in Katyn had been running high since the 1980s, and in the USSR as well. Armed with this "smoking gun," a Polish prosecutor assigned to investigate Soviet crimes flew to Kharkov (now Kharkiv), where the Ukrainian KGB, under watchful Russian eyes, assisted in identifying a series of sites, including Piatikhatki, where prisoners from the Starobelsk camp had been executed. Ironically, for a second time the German military had provided evidence, albeit unwittingly, of Soviet complicity in the massacre.
The new evidence put additional pressure on the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation to reveal the full truth. In 1992, Moscow suddenly "discovered" the original 1940 execution ordered signed by Stalin and five other Politburo members-- in Gorbachev's private archive. 17 Gorbachev almost certainly had read it in 1989, if not earlier. 18 In October 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin presented a copy of the order along with 41 other documents to the new Polish president, former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. In doing so, he made a point of chiding his arch enemy Gorbachev, with whom he was locked in a bitter domestic political battle. During a 1993 visit to Warsaw's military cemetery, Yeltsin knelt before a Polish priest and kissed the ribbon of a wreath he had placed at the foot of the Katyn cross. 19 In a joint statement with Walesa, he pledged to punish those still alive who had taken part in the massacre and make reparations--a promise that has not been kept. Meanwhile, Soviet and Polish teams were permitted to excavate at Katyn and the other two sites, on a selective basis, where Polish prisoners had been executed. In 1994, a Soviet historian published a book that for the first time called Katyn a "crime against humanity." 20
Katyn is a wound that refuses to heal. In May 1995, officials from Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus announced their intention to end an official probe into "NKVD crimes" committed there and at other sites. 21 But even that announcement revealed "new" information that had long been known in the West. Stalin's secret police had committed crimes against some 11,000 Poles living in western Ukraine and western Belorussia after the USSR had incororated those regions, and murdered more than 3,000 Polish prisoners in panic killings when Germany attacked in June 1941.
With the official investigation complete, Yeltsin appeared a few days later at a ceremony to lay the cornerstone for a Polish cemetery at Katyn. Those expecting an expression of contrition were disappointed. Yeltsin told his audience that "totalitarian terror affected not only Polish citizens but, in the first place, the citizens of the former Soviet Union." 22 He added that 10,000 bodies of the "most varied nationalities" had been found there. (The NKVD had used the forest as a killing ground in the 1930s.) Yeltsin's plea that the tragedy "not be allowed to divide our nations and be the subject of political games" fell on deaf ears. Less than two weeks later, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman warned Poles still insisting on an apology not to exploit the memorial service to sow "distrust between Russia and Poland." 23 He too could not resist remarking that "totalitarian rule" had "killed, among others, millions of Russians."
Some Poles undoubtedly took offense at Yeltsin's effort to commemorate Katyn as a common Russian and Polish tragedy and blame it on "totalitarianism." Moreover, the Russian president refused to apologize and did not follow up on his pledge to punish still-living culprits and pay reparations. Meantime, resentment by extreme nationalists and Communists in the Duma was increasing. In January 1996, a book with the provocative title The Katyn Crime Fiction, written in Polish under the pseudonym "Juri Micha," began circulating in the Duma and was placed on sale in the Russian parliament's bookstore. It repudiated Gorbachev's 1990 admission (without mentioning Yeltsin's elaboration two years later) and repeated the old Stalinist charge of German guilt.
The book came at a bad time for Godziemba-Maliszewski, who was completing a study based on new information, some of it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and the good offices of former national security adviser Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski. His manuscript included declassified satellite imagery and maps as well as eyewitness statements, personal photographs, stills from a documentary film, and other items. It also contained a detailed study and reinterpretation of Luftwaffe imagery. The manuscript was entitled "Katyn: An Interpretation of Aerial Photographs Considered with Facts and Documents," and it eventually appeared as a special issue of the Polish journal Photo-Interpretation in Geography: Problems of Telegeoinformation with parallel texts in Polish and English. 24
Before the manuscript went to press, the Polish editor, with an eye toward Moscow's retrenchment on the Katyn question, insisted on deleting 20 pages of text and notes and other material. The editor also dropped a tribute to analyst Poirier, presumably on the grounds that it would give the manuscript an unacceptable CIA imprimatur.
And so the story stood until fall 1998, when Moscow made a bizarre move. In September, Procurator General Yuri Chayka sent a letter to Poland's minister of justice demanding an official inquiry into the deaths of Russian soldiers captured during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921. The letter asserted that 83,500 internees had died "in Polish concentration camps as a result of cruel and inhuman conditions." Chayka added: "The information we have allows us to conclude that genocide was applied to Red Army POWs." 25 Poland officially rejected the allegation but not before offering to cooperate in a joint search of Polish and Russian archives for additional information. (The offer was not accepted.)
This was the first time Moscow had raised such an allegation at an official level, but such charges had been circulating in Russian circles for some time. A rumor heard in Warsaw in the early 1990s claimed that Gorbachev had ordered his staff to find a "counterbalance" to Katyn. The rumor has not been confirmed, but after the first Katyn disclosure in 1990 the Soviet (and later Russian) press occasionally cited alleged abuses in Polish POW camps. Headlines such as "Strzakowo--A Polish Katyn" and "Tuchola--A Death Camp" were typical but attracted little notice.
Then, in July 1998, the Moscow paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta [Independent Newspaper] ran a front-page article claiming that tens of thousands of prisoners had died as a result of shootings, starvation, and exposure. This article formed the basis of Chayka's demarche. 26 It went beyond previous assertions that Russians and Poles both were victims of Stalinism: "The present position of Warsaw resembles the former position of the USSR, which failed to confess the Katyn crime for a long time . . . . It would be good if Poland followed in Russia's footsteps and pleaded guilty to the savagery [against Red Army soldiers]." The case for moral equivalence had been replaced by a claim to moral superiority.
No one knows for certain what prompted the new charge, but it may have been a preemptive reaction to more revelations about Katyn and new evidence of Soviet crimes in Poland. In 1997, a Russian and a Polish archivist collaborated on a compendium of documents entitled Katyn: Prisoners of an Undeclared War. 27 Then, in 1998, a Russian-Polish research team issued a series of previously classified secret police reports with the title Eyes Only for J.V. Stalin: NKVD Reports from Poland, 1944-1946. The reports detailed a second wave of terror unleashed during the postwar occupation, showing that the crimes committed during 1939-1941 were not an aberration but part of a single imperial design. Soon thereafter, a group of Polish members of parliament spent 10 days in Russia, trying unsuccessfully to obtain an official acknowledgment that the Soviet Government had engaged in genocide. In the meantime, more graves filled with Polish corpses were found near Tavda and Tomsk, east of the Urals.
Russians cannot look at Katyn without seeing themselves in the mirror of their own history. Thus official Moscow resists using the "g" word (genocide) to describe the atrocity. When Gorbachev's advisers warned him in 1989 that Poland's demand for the truth contained a "subtext . . . . that the Soviet Union is no better--and perhaps even worse--than Nazi Germany" and that the Soviet Union was "no less responsible" for the outbreak of World War II and the 1939 defeat of the Polish Army, they were also thinking of undercurrents in their own country. 28 Russian intellectuals were already beginning to equate Communism with fascism and Stalin with Hitler. Reports of vandalized war memorials and looted battlefield cemeteries underscored growing popular disillusionment with the cult of triumphalism built around Stalin and the USSR's victory over Nazi Germany. 29 Now some Russian revisionists go so far as to claim that Hitler's invasion launched a preventive war aimed at forestalling Stalin's plan to strike Germany first--a view that even Western historians reject. 30
In June 1998, Yeltsin and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski agreed that memorial complexes under construction at Katyn and Mednoye, the two NKVD execution sites on Russian soil, should be completed before 2000. But that is not likely to end the controversy. Two days earlier, speaking at a ceremony in the Ukrainian village of Piatikhatki, the site of the third killing field, Kwasniewski declared that Poland has a duty to continue speaking the truth about Katyn. Until Russians and Poles reach some mutual understanding about their past, Katyn will continue to cast a shadow over their futures.
Benjamin B. Fischer is on the History Staff of CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence.
1 For photographs of the parade, see Olaf Groehler, Selbstmorderische Allianz: Deutsch-russische Militarbeziehungen, 1920-1941 [Suicidal Alliance: German-Russian Military Relations, 1920-1941] (Berlin: Vision Verlag 1993), pp. 21-22, 123-124. These photographs were intended for official use only, since German policy was still officially anti-Communist. Relations between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht were genuinely friendly, based on mutual hostility toward Poland and years of secret collaboration after World War I. In addition to Groehler's book, see Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Pariahs, Partners, Predators: German-Soviet Relations, 1922-1941 (Columbia University Press, 1997).
The parade was organized by Col. (later Gen.) Semyon Krivoschein and Gen. Heinz Guderian, both outstanding tank commanders who would go on to distinguish themselves in the Soviet-German war. Guderian's panzer group was the first German force to reach the outskirts of Moscow in 1941. Krivoschein's tank corps was the first to reach Berlin in 1945 and capture Hitler's headquarters. His 1939 encounter with Guderian almost cost Krivoschein his life in April 1945, when a SMERSH military counterintelligence detachment searching Nazi archives discovered a photograph of Krivoschein and Guderian shaking hands. The Soviet general was questioned and released, probably because he was Jewish and therefore an unlikely Nazi spy.
2 Nataliya Lebedeva, "The Tragedy of Katyn," International Affairs (Moscow), June 1990, p. 100.
3 In October 1941, Stalin sent Zarubin to Washington as his NKVD rezident (station chief) with orders to cultivate agents of influence in the US Government. He remained until 1944, and he and his wife Elizabeth, an NKVD captain, launched the Soviet effort to penetrate the Manhattan Project and steal US atomic secrets. Zarubin's daughter, Zoya Zarubina, herself a former intelligence officer and translator, may be familiar to some readers from her appearance in the first segment of the CNN series Cold War.
4 As cited in Albert Axell, Stalin's War Through the Eyes of His Commanders (London: Arms and Armour, 1997), p. 55.
5 Lebedeva, "The Tragedy of Katyn," p. 105.
6 For a translation of the order, see Allen Paul, Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Seeds of Polish Resurrection (Annapolis, MD; the Naval Institute Press, 1996), pp. 353-354. The same order identified an additional 18,632 prisoners, including 10,685 Poles, being held in NKVD jails in western Ukraine and Belorussia (formerly eastern Poland) for possible execution. A KGB memorandum of February 1959 cites 21,857 as the total number of executions during the April-May 1940 action. See Dmitri Volkogonov, Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime (New York: The Free Press, 1998), p. 220.
The killings probably continued after May 1940, and the total number of victims may have exceeded 27,000. Ongoing excavations in Ukraine and Russia are turning up more Polish corpses, so this number may increase. There were many more Polish victims of Stalin's crimes. During 1940-1941, the NKVD unleashed a reign of terror, arresting, torturing, and killing thousands of Poles and inciting national and ethnic violence among Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Belorussians in the former eastern Poland. Some 1.2 million Poles were deported to Siberia and Central Asia, where many died in transit or in exile. See Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
7 Lebedeva, "The Tragedy of Katyn," pp. 102-103. The social and professional profile of the other two groups was similar.
8 See Frank Fox, "Jewish Victims of the Katyn Massacre," East European Jewish Affairs, 23: 1 (1993), pp. 49-55.
9 The NKVD filmed executions carried out in Smolensk, either at the local prison or in the basement of its headquarters. During the Korean war, the Soviets gave North Korea a copy of the film for instructional purposes.
10 US Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on the Katyn Forest Massacre. The Katyn Forest Massacre: Hearings before the Select Committee on Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, 82d Congress, lst and 2d Session, 1951-1952, 7 parts. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1952).
11 Representative Madden's district included a substantial Polish-American population in Gary, Indiana. The hearings began in a campaign year.
12 In 1946, the chief Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal tried to indict Germany for the Katyn killings but dropped the matter after the United States and the UK refused to support it and German lawyers promised to mount an embarrassing defense.
13 See Benjamin J. Stein, "Can We Talk?" American Spectator, November 1998, p. 66.
14 During the Cold War, the Soviet Union constantly reminded Poland, which had absorbed much of Germany's former eastern regions, that it was the Poles' sole protection against German revanchism.
15 Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness--A Soviet Spymaster (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1994), pp. 278-279, n14.
16 Godziemba-Maliszewski's lifelong interest in Katyn was personal as well as scholarly. A relative of his, an uncle of his father's, was among the victims.
17 The document's survival is in itself an interesting story. In March 1959, the head of the KGB recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that all records of the execution of Polish soldiers and civilians be destroyed, arguing that they had no operational or historical value and could come back to haunt the Soviet Government. For reasons that remain unclear, Khrushchev refused. A rumor that has never been confirmed claims that Khrushchev wanted to reveal the truth about Katyn, but Polish leader Wladislaw Gomulka rejected the idea because it would discredit the Polish Communist Party, which had fabricated evidence to implicate the Germans and exculpate the Soviets. The rumor is probably not true, however; even while acknowledging some of Stalin's crimes, Khrushchev was always careful not to implicate the Communist Party. Volkogonov, Autopsy of an Empire, p. 220.
18 Ibid.
19 Yeltsin almost certainly was emulating former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who, in December 1970, fell to his knees after placing a wreath at a Warsaw memorial commemorating the Nazis' destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. A press photo of the event became one of the most poignant images of the Cold War.
20 N. Lebedeva, Katyn: prestuplenie protiv chelovechestva [Katyn: A Crime Against Humanity] (Moscow: Izdatel'skaia gruppa Progress: Kul'tura, 1994).
21 Warsaw PAP in English, 1658 GMT, 31 May 1995.
22 Warsaw PAP in Polish, 1017 GMT, 4 June 1995.
23 Moscow ITAR-TASS in English, 1523 GMT, 15 June 1995.
24 Mr. Godziemba-Maliszewski kindly sent me a copy of his study after reading a monograph I had written for the Center for the Study of Intelligence. Copies are available from the author, whose address is PO Box 343, Bethel, Connecticut 06801. The price is $60.00.
25 The letter was given to the press. See Wojciech Duda and Czary Chmyz, "Back to the Past," Zycie, 12-13 September 1998, p. 1.
26 Yuri Ivanov, "The Tragedy of the Polish Camps," Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 16 July 1998, pp. 1, 6.
27 R. G. Pikoia and Aleksander Gieysztor, eds., Katyn': plenniki neob' iavlennoi voiny (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond "Demokratiia," 1997).
28 Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead: The Rise & Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 180.
29 Ibid., p. 203. The graverobbers were looking for artifacts to sell to military collectors.
30 See, for example, B. V. Sokolov, "Did Stalin Intend to Attack Hitler?" in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 11:2 (June 1998), pp. 113-141. The author's answer is yes. In an intrductory note, the US editors expressed their disagreement with this view.
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