John H. Van Vliet

John Huff Van Vliet Jr. (* 9. November 1914 in Texas City , † 2. February 2000 in Atlanta ) was an American army officer who in April 1943 as a prisoner of war by the Wehrmacht as a witness to that uncovered mass graves of Katyn been brought was. The controversy over his Katyn report ("Van Vliet Report") led in 1951 to the establishment of an investigative committee of the US Congress ( Madden Commission ).

Life

Van Vliet came from a family of officers: both his great-grandfather, who had been promoted to General of the Union Forces during the American Civil War , and his grandfather and father had successfully graduated from the West Point Officers Academy. In 1937 he was the fourth generation to be officially certified . For the next three years he served in an infantry regiment .

In September 1941 he was transferred to Great Britain as a military observer . There his unit met the German Reich's declaration of war on the USA on December 11, 1941. As a battalion commander with the rank of lieutenant colonel , he took part in the Anglo-American operations in Tunisia against the German Africa Corps under General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at the end of 1942 . On February 17, 1943, he was taken prisoner by Germany near Tunis . With other officers of the Western Allies he was brought to the Oflag IX A / Z in Rotenburg an der Fulda .

In June 1943 Van Vliet was relocated to Oflag 64 in Altburgund, not far from the city ​​of Bromberg , which was then part of the German Empire . Using a previously agreed code procedure, he used a makeshift radio set secretly built in the camp to contact Department X of the MIS Military Intelligence Service, which coordinated actions to free prisoners of war from Great Britain. He informed MIS-X of the preparations for the attempt to escape, that the US Air Force should send an airplane to pick up the refugees. The Polish AK underground army was supposed to secure the landing site . According to Van Vliet, the prisoners were to flee through a secretly dug tunnel. But the plan was not implemented. His camp was liberated by the Red Army on May 6, 1945 .

After the war he did service in various locations in the USA. In the late summer of 1950 he served as the deputy commander of an infantry regiment in the Korean War . In 1951 he was ordered back to the USA, he took over command post in the supply chain . He ended his military career with the rank of colonel . He spent his twilight years in Clearwater , Florida .

Role in the Katyn case

After the discovery of the mass graves in the forest of Katyn in March 1943, the Wehrmacht was commissioned to bring three British and one American general who had fallen into the hands of the Germans there as witnesses. German and Polish experts were supposed to explain to them that the Polish officers had been murdered in the mass graves by the Soviet secret service NKVD . But the four generals refused, citing the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention.

Ultimately, a British colonel named Frank Stevenson and Van Vliet was chosen among the prisoners-of-war officers from the Western Allied forces. Then there were the American captain Donald B. Stewart and the British military doctor Stanley Gilder. The eight-man group also included three soldiers and an English civilian arrested by the Germans on the Channel Island of Guernsey . The Channel Islands were the only British territory that came under German control. Van Vliet reported to his German camp commandant that he would only take part in the trip under protest and only as a private person. According to his own account, he also refused to give his word of honor that he would not attempt to escape.

In Smolensk , the Americans and the British visited the partially destroyed city center. As they later unanimously reported, they were all convinced before arriving in Katyn that it was an attempt by the Germans to cover up their own perpetrators. But then they made an observation that made them change their minds: the uniforms and boots of the murdered Poles were all in good condition. They concluded that the Poles “could not have been prisoners long before they died. ... The boots were hardly worn, they showed hardly any signs of wear. ”They saw in this an important indication of the correctness of the German version, according to which the Poles were murdered by the Soviets in 1940.

Van Vliet briefly informed the military intelligence service MIS about the trip to Katyn via radio messages that he secretly sent from the Oflag, including the conclusion that the Soviets were obviously the perpetrators. The information about this was not passed on to the Ministry of Defense. References to this were only discovered in 2012 after the US Army had released its files. In September 1943, the US mission in Bern learned from the Swiss authorities that the prisoners-of-war Allied officers were traveling to Katyn. Switzerland was the protective power of the USA against the German Reich , Swiss diplomats visited officer camps set up by the Wehrmacht with American prisoners of war. However, the US authorities did not learn at the time how Van Vliet assessed the Katyn case.

A few days after his release at the end of the war, Van Vliet reached an American troop command in Leipzig . There he briefly reported on his trip to Katyn with the conclusion that, in his opinion, the Soviets, and thus the allies of the USA, were the perpetrators. He was then taken to the headquarters of the US troops in Europe in Reims, France, where he wrote the first brief report on his Katyn trip on May 10, 1945.

From Paris he was flown to the Pentagon in Washington for further questioning . There he wrote his official service report for the US Department of Defense on May 22, 1945 about his observations in Katyn. Major General Clayton L. Bissell , intelligence officer of the Chief of Staff George C. Marshall , classified the report as secret. Bissell gave Van Vliet official orders to keep it quiet. The American public should not know that US officers were convinced of Soviet perpetration after inspecting the mass graves of Katyn.

Not even the US military intelligence service , the CIC, was informed of the Van Vliets report . In 1948, CIC officers reported from Nuremberg that a former Wehrmacht interpreter had told them about the American and British officers' trip to Katyn. This was such sensational news for the CIC in Nuremberg that it was immediately reported to Washington.

In 1948 the journalist Julius Epstein found out about Van Vliet's and the other prisoners of war's trip to Katyn. When he asked the US authorities about the report, he was told that such a document was not recorded in any government register. Epstein came to the conclusion that the information about Katyn should be systematically withheld from the American public. On his research in the Van Vliet case, he wrote reports for the “New York Herald Tribune” (June 3rd / 4th, 1949) and the Hamburg weekly newspaper “ Die Zeit ”. This was followed two years later by a 15-page brochure entitled “The Secret of the Van Vliet Report”, published by the Polish American Congress , the umbrella organization for Polish emigrants in Chicago .

The leadership of the association managed to interest the Democratic Congressman Ray J. Madden , in whose constituency many Polish emigrants lived, in the case. Madden got a majority in the US House of Representatives to set up a committee to investigate how the US administration and the US Army were handling the news about Katyn.

By the time the Madden Commission began its work on October 11, 1951, Van Vliet was serving in the Korean War. When he received the summons to the commission, he was immediately recalled from the war zone: no one wanted to take the risk that he would be taken prisoner by the Communists as an important witness. Van Vliet stated when questioned by the Commission in Washington that on May 11, 1950, he had written another report on his observations at the mass graves, but that this was also classified as secret. On September 18, 1950, the Pentagon published this second official Van Vliet report.

The Madden Commission also interviewed the U.S. Army officers to whom Van Vliet gave his first missing report, including General Bissell. According to him, Van Vliet's statements could have endangered the American-Soviet alliance. Bissell said he referred it to the State Department . However, the investigations revealed that he was not registered there either. The Madden Commission was unable to determine the whereabouts of the Van Vliet Report of May 22, 1945.

Afterlife

It was not until six decades after the Madden Commission, in 2013 and 2014, that the National Declassification Center in Washington released large collections of files. Some of the documents are devoted to the search for Van Vliet's missing service report. His very first report, written in France on May 10, 1945, the forerunner of the much more detailed report for the Pentagon, which was written almost two weeks later at the Pentagon, was found by chance; it was in the files of the American embassy in Paris .

In 2015, the Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski awarded Van Vliet the Officer's Cross posthumously for services to the Republic of Poland . Van Vliet's relatives accepted the award.

literature

• Julius Epstein: The Mysteries of the Van Vliet Report. A case history. Chicago 1951.
• Krystyna Piórkowska: English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn. Recent Research / Anglojęzyczne świadkowie Katynia. Najnowsze badania. Muzeum Wojska Polskiego. Warsaw 2012, ISBN 978-83-904932-3-7 , pp. 45–55, 70–92, 116–122.
• Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg edition. Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-86854-286-8 , pp. 222–226.

Web links

• Julius Epstein's report for "Die Zeit" (June 9, 1949)
• Lt. Colonel John H. Van Vliet Jr. Krystyna Piorkowska: The English-speaking Witnesses to Katyn
• Official File Regarding Alleged Loss of Top Secret Document Concerning the Katyn Massacre The National Archives Catalog

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Data according to: Krystyna Piórkowska: English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn. Recent Research. Warsaw 2012, pp. 49–52.
2. ↑ K. Piórkowska: English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn. 2012, pp. 51-52.
3. ↑ K. Piórkowska: English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn. 2012, pp. 64–68.
4. ↑ K. Piórkowska: English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn. 2012, p. 35.
5. ↑ The Katyn Forest Massacre. US Government Printing Office. Washington 1952, vol. I, pp. 13-15, 22.
6. ^ AP Exclusive: Memos show US hushed up Soviet crime Associated Press , September 10, 2012.
7. ↑ Bern Despatch No. 8064 with Enclosures Regarding the Visit of Two American Officers Named JH Van Vliet and DB Stewart to Katyn
8. ↑ K. Piórkowska: English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn. 2012, pp. 87-88.
9. ↑ Newly-discovered US witness report describes evidence of 1939 Katyn massacre foxnews.com, January 9, 2014.
10. ^ George Sandford: Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940. Truth, justice and memory. London / New York 2005, p. 163.
11. ^ Dossier on Katyn Forest Murders, 1948 images 184/185.
12. ↑ Julius Epstein: The secret of the Polish mass graves at Katyn. In: The time. June 9, 1949, p. 3.
13. ^ Julius Epstein: The Mysteries of the Van Vliet Report. A case history. Chicago 1951.
14. ↑ Jacek Kalabiński: Czego Amerykanie never powiedzieli o Katyniu. In: Gazeta Wyborcza . September 17, 1991, p. 11.
15. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2015, p. 224.
16. ↑ C. Weber: War of the perpetrators .. 2015, pp. 382–383.
17. ↑ The Katyn Forest Massacre. vol. VII, 1952, p. 1874.
18. ↑ Official File Regarding Alleged Loss of Top Secret Document Concerning the Katyn Massacre, 1949–1954 , Images 171–178.
19. ↑ Odnaleziono nieznany dokument katyński z 1945 roku , polskieradio.pl, January 8, 2014.
20. ↑ Prezydent Komorowski odznaczył zasłużonych w upowszechnianiu prawdy o zbrodni w Katyniu  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. wiadomosci.wp.pl, April 8, 2015.