Stalin, the Nazis and the West

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

For many years, Russia and its many friends in the West strenuously denied the Katyn Forest Massacre –the 1940 murders of over 20,000 members of Poland’s social and military elite by order of Stalin. The denials began with Stalin, FDR’s wartime administration, and continued through the long twilight struggle of the cold war by so-called intellectuals. On May 6th, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) begins a three-part docudrama detailing the diplomatic deal making that resulted in mass murder and global war. WW II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, utilizes once secret documents from official Soviet archives to chronicle, in many cases verbatim, the secret deals reached between Stalin and his two wartime allies – Hitler, and later, Roosevelt.

The story begins with the 1939 meeting between German foreign minister von Ribbentrop, his Soviet counterpart Molotov and Dictator Joseph Stalin. In a surreal moment, von Ribbentrop, on orders from Hitler, requests a 100-year truce between the Thousand-Year Reich and the Soviet Union. Stalin rejects this as ridiculous and unrealistic and, instead, proposes to a 10-year non-aggression pact. The pact’s secret protocols agreeing to divide Poland between Hitler and Stalin are most interesting in light of the fact that Roosevelt later agreed to give his Soviet ally so much more of Eastern Europe at the Teheran and Yalta conferences.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s armies marched east into Poland. On September 17th, more than 600,000 soldiers of Stalin’s Red Army marched West. After the fall of Poland, Hans Frank, Germany’s Governor-General for the occupied Polish territories is depicted dining and drinking with his Soviet counterparts at a celebration lunch organized by the German-Soviet Boarder Committee in Warsaw, Poland. Taking a drag on his cigarette, Frank turns to a Russian friend and says, “You and I are both smoking Polish cigarettes to symbolize the fact that we have thrown Poland to the wind.” After the war, Frank was tried at Nuremberg for war crimes, condemning the tribunal for not trying the Soviets for their wartime atrocities in Poland. Frank was hanged on October 16, 1946.

Though the series paints historical events with broad strokes, it also breaks away to include personal remembrances of eyewitnesses, victims and video confessions from Stalin’s NKVD secret police killers.

 “I should tell you that on the first night they brought 300 people,” recalled Dmitry Tokarev, an NKVD colonel who was charged with organizing a portion of the Katyn murders. “I thought it was too many. The night was short and we could only work during the hours of darkness. I saw all that horror.”

“They [the prisoners] came in and a few minutes later Blokin was wearing his special clothing – brown leather apron, brown leather gloves with cuffs over his elbows. This produced a horrible impression on me. I saw an executioner.”

After the prisoners were interviewed and their names were checked against a list of those to be executed, the killing began.

According to Tokarev “The mechanics of the killing were worked out by Blokin, together with the commandant of our administrative board, Rubinoff. They covered the doors to the shooting cells that led to the corridors, so the sounds of the shootings couldn’t be heard. Then the accused, well, let’s call them that, were brought through the corridor. They were brought into the cells to be shot.”

The Soviet killers never had their day in court, but most in Tokarev’s murderous companions met certain justice. “I want to say the following; it was certainly a horrible business. Rubinoff, for instance, went mad. Pavlov, my first deputy, shot himself dead. Then Sukarov, my driver, shot himself dead, and even Blokin shot himself dead.” It’s striking that the old NKVD colonel never gave a thought to the fate of his 6, 311 Polish victims, or he most certainly would have shot himself as well.

When Stalin’s orders were fully carried out, 22,000 Poles were dead.

In 1944, President Roosevelt assigned U.S. Navy Lt. Commander George Earle the task of investigating the Katyn Massacre. Compiling evidence from contacts in Bulgaria and Romania, Earle delivered a report to FDR that concluded Stalin was behind the Katyn atrocities. Roosevelt rejected Earle’s conclusions and suppressed the report. After requesting permission to publish his findings, Roosevelt hastily reassigned the Lt. Commander Earle to a posting in American Samoa for the remainder of the war.

British journalist Kevin Myers observed: “Far from berating the Soviet leader for the massacres, the two democratic leaders [Roosevelt and Churchill] propitiated him, awarding him the Polish land he had stolen even as he seized his future murder victims . . . [the] Teheran [conference] was the true nadir of international diplomacy, morally far more ignoble and strategically far more catastrophic than either Munich five years before or Yalta a year later. And the key to Teheran was Katyn; once Stalin had got away with that, he realized he could get away with anything.”

In October of 1951, the U.S. Congress conducted an investigation of the massacre.  In Historical Dictionary of American Propaganda, Martin J. Manning and Herbert Romerstein wrote:

Allegation arose during the hearings that despite sympathy for the Polish people, the U.S. government tried to hide the truth to appease the Soviet Union. During World War II, OWI [Office of War Information] officer Alan Cranston (later U.S. Senator, California) and Soviet agent David Karr directed campaigns to pressure Polish-American groups to deny the Soviet involvement. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government released documents showing that the Polish officers were murdered under the direct orders of Stalin.

As Stalin’s post-war intensions became clear, the American left refused to believe good old “uncle Joe” was at fault. Stalin’s actions caused a divide in American politics between Russian accommodationists and vocal conservative anti-communists. With much of America still basking in the warm glow of its wartime alliance with Russia, Sen. Joseph McCarthy filled the vacuum left by timid Republicans unwilling to speak out against Stalin’s treachery. This led to the formation, at least among America’s left-leaning intellectuals, of an anti-anti-communist movement.

In a 1953 editorial, The New York Times declared:

While the United States is in no sense in a “wave of terror”…McCarthyism nevertheless has had a profound effect on all of us – on our writing, speaking and even thinking. We are all very much more careful…because we all start from the premise that whatever we do may be subject to damaging criticism from the extreme right. Our takeoff point has moved without our even realizing it. Thus, if McCarthy should drop dead today, he would still have worked a fairly profound change in the American intellectual atmosphere that will take us a long time to recover from.

It’s interesting that at a time when the Soviet Union was consolidating its power in Eastern Europe and supporting communist dictator Kim Il-Sung’s war of aggression on the Korean peninsula, The New York Times was troubled by the chilling effect Sen. McCarthy’s “damaging criticism” was having on their accommodationist drivel.

Of the 20th Century’s two totalitarian giants, Mark Halpern observed in his insightful book Language and Human Nature:

…in their overt acts and their effect on those subject to them, the two regimes were essentially indistinguishable – Stalin was even exhibiting Hitler’s rigid anti-Semitism in his last days. Both were despotisms; both killed, tortured, and imprisoned millions; but Nazism is remembered with universal loathing…while communism still enjoys a lingering tenderness on the part of millions throughout the Western world. Jugged by their acts, the two regimes are Tweedledum and Tweedledee – but judging by acts rather than words, where the two diverge, is precisely what large numbers of Western intellectuals cannot do, and therein lies the root of the problem.

No matter what was done in the Gulag, they [intellectuals] cannot help heaving a soulful sigh when they hear “From each according to his ability…” and “Workers of the world, unite!” and all the rest of it. The Gulag is merely a historical fact, receding from us at the speed of oblivion and forgetfulness; slogans live forever.

Halpern also gets to the reason for this intellectual disconnect:

We have today far better evidence for many of our beliefs than our predecessors of a hundred and more years ago had, but we are less sure of anything than they were; all we have is weighty evidence, they had the word of God. And, already uncertain of anything, we are constantly being exhorted to keep an open mind; to respect the opinions and beliefs of others; to realize that different people see things differently; and even to entertain the possibility that there is, at least in the most profound matters, no such thing as the truth.

PBS is to be commended for revealing the nearly forgoten truth of the Katyn Massacre with this insightful series, especially at this time in our nation’s history. As a new administration seeks diplomatic accommodation with any unspeakable evil willing to sit across a negotiating table, WW II Behind Closed Doors shines much needed light on past agreements that led to so such death and misery, and continue to disturb the peace in our time.