U.S. cover-up of Katyn massacre revealed in released files - interview with Patrick Kenney
It's been more than seventy years since a brutal massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners by Soviet secret police during WWII in the Katyn forest on the western edge of Russia. A large swath of American intelligence related to this has been just released today and reveals disturbing details as well as evidence of the US cover-up.
Patrick Kenney is here to talk more about the event, he is a Professor of History at Indiana University as well as the director of the School of Russian and Eastern European Institute and the Polish Studies Centre. Professor Kenney, welcome.
Thank you
So, first, tell us about what happened in Katyn, in the forest and what were the events that led up to the massacre?
Well, in the fall of 1939 the Soviet Union invaded Eastern Poland and rather quickly found that it had thousands of officers, many of them from the reserve, as well as other people that the Soviet authorities decided were problematic or potential enemies, adversers, saboteurs and so on, and they put thousands of them in prison. And began rounding up at thousands more. And in spring of 1940 Lavrentiy Beria, one of Stalin`s henchmen, proposed to Stalin that these people should be shot, he actually named a number of about 25,000 who should be executed. And Stalin agreed, there is actually a signature on a document from Stalin, saying ‘yes, go ahead and do this’. And over the course of a few weeks, in the spring of 1940, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, executed somewhere around 22,000 men and one woman from Poland, most of them again officers, some in the army, some in the police, and some intellectuals and other local elite from the area that the Soviets had taken....