Kathleen Harriman Mortimer

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Kathleen Harriman Mortimer (born December 7, 1917 in Arden , New York ; † February 17, 2011 ibid) was an American multimillionaire who was the subject of press coverage as the daughter of the entrepreneur, diplomat and politician W. Averell Harriman and later as a socialite. Your report of a trip to Katyn in January 1944 reinforced US President Franklin D. Roosevelt's conviction that the Katyn massacre was committed by the German occupiers.

Life

Childhood and youth

Kathleen Harriman was the second daughter of W. Averell Harrimans, one of the heirs to the Union Pacific Railroad , and his first wife, Kitty Lanier Lawrance. She grew up in privileged circumstances on the family's country estate in Arden.

As a teenager, she took part in horse riding and skiing competitions. When she was 17 years old, her parents divorced. After her mother's untimely death, she moved in with her father in 1936. She attended private Bennington College in the state of Vermont .

Second World War

In 1941 she accompanied her father to London as a special envoy directly reporting to Roosevelt. She became a subtenant with Pamela Digby Churchill , the future daughter-in-law Winston Churchill and later lover and third wife of her father. In London, she began writing reports on London society for American magazines including Newsweek . In 1943 she moved to Moscow with her father when he took over the management of the US embassy. There she occasionally took over work for the Office of War Information (OWI). In November 1943 she was part of the US delegation to the Tehran Conference .

She was her father's official companion at diplomatic receptions in the Kremlin and invitations from prominent Soviet citizens. The Soviet newspapers published reports about her regularly, so she became known throughout the country. The US press also reported on them. The everyday life of the Soviet citizens remained unknown to her, however, in a private letter she took the view that life in the Soviet Union was “close to paradise”.

Accompanied by the US diplomat John Melby , who headed the Moscow representation of the OWI, at the invitation of the Soviet Foreign Ministry from January 28 to 30, 1944, she took part in a trip of Western correspondents to a press conference of the Burdenko Commission , which on the orders of Stalin was for evidence the German perpetrators in the Katyn massacre, took part in the Katyn forest and a presentation of the exhumation work by the commission's chief medical examiner , Viktor Prosorowski . In her report she described the Soviet version of the incident as credible. She also convinced her father of it. He sent his daughter's Katyn report, supplemented by a personal cover letter, to Roosevelt, and the State Department passed it on to the other departments dealing with foreign policy.

In January 1945 she was accompanied by the American first wife Eleanor Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference . When father and daughter Harriman left the Soviet Union in 1946, they received two precious show horses as a farewell present from Stalin.

Society lady

In 1947, at the age of 30, she married the multimillionaire Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., one of the heirs of the Standard Oil concern . She largely withdrew from the public eye and, like many other women from the rich East Coast society , was involved in charities.

In 1952 she had to admit to the Madden Commission , the US Congress' special committee on the Katyn massacre, that she lacked the competence to evaluate the Burdenko Commission's presentation.

The American press only dealt with her in detail again in reporting on the dispute over the inheritance of her father, who died in 1986. His third marriage was to her former fellow student Pamela Digby Churchill, who was later sent to Paris by President Bill Clinton as US ambassador under her name Pamela Harriman . Daughter and widow Harriman fell out over this dispute, which was settled in 1995.

literature

  • 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. 102-108.
  • Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg edition. Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-86854-286-8 , pp. 273–284.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical data, unless otherwise stated, according to Kathleen Mortimer, Rich and Adventurous, Dies at 93 , in: New York Times , February 20, 2011, p. 26A.
  2. ^ Richard E. Lauterbach : These are the Russians. New York 1945, pp. 95-96.
  3. ↑ Averell Harriman / Elie Abel: Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941-1946. New York 1975, p. 300.
  4. ↑ Geoffrey Roberts, "Do the Crows Still Roost in the Spasopeskovskaya Trees?" - The Wartime Correspondence of Kathleen Harriman, in: The Harriman Magazine , March 2015, p. 16.
  5. ^ William H. Lawrence , Soviet Blames Foe in Killing of Poles, in: New York Times , January 27, 1944, p. 3.
  6. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 283.
  7. ↑ Averell Harriman / Elie Abel: Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941-1946. New York 1975, pp. 301-302.
  8. ↑ Krystyna Piórkowska: English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn. Recent Research / Anglojęzyczne świadkowie Katynia. Najnowsze badania. Warsaw 2012, pp. 37, 140.
  9. ↑ Geoffrey Roberts, “Do the Crows Still Roost in the Spasopeskovskaya Trees?” - The Wartime Correspondence of Kathleen Harriman, in: The Harriman Magazine, March 2015, p. 15.
  10. ↑ The Katyn Forest Massacre. US Government Printing Office. Washington 1952, vol. VII, p. 2142.
  11. ↑ Harriman Heirs Ask for Assets To Be Frozen New York Times , September 20, 1994.
personal data
SURNAME Harriman Mortimer, Kathleen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Harriman, Kathleen (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American multimillionaire
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Arden , New York
DATE OF DEATH February 17, 2011
Place of death Arden