Kazimierz Skarżyński

Stefan Norblin: Portrait of Kazimierz Skarżyński (1935)

Kazimierz Skarżyński (born December 15, 1887 in Kroczewo , Powiat Płoński , Russian Empire ; died June 10, 1962 in Calgary , Canada ) was Secretary General of the Polish Red Cross during the German occupation of Poland and a witness to the exhumations in the forest near Katyn in 1943 .

Life

Kazimierz Skarżyński came from a noble family. He attended the Jesuit high school in Vienna and studied political science in Paris and business administration in Antwerp . From 1913 to 1919 he worked for a French company in the Caucasus . After the First World War he lived in re-established Poland. In 1935 he married Zofia Zamoyska, a daughter of the Polish politician Maurycy Zamoyski , they had two children, Marek (1937-1957) and Maria.

After the German invasion of Poland , Skarżyński joined the Polish Red Cross (PCK) in January 1940, where he became Secretary General. In addition to social welfare and the Catholic Church, the PCK was tolerated by the German occupying power as a Polish organization. On April 9, 1943, the president of the PCK Wacław Lachert was summoned to the administration of the Generalgouvernement in the Palais Brühl , where the Germans published the first information about the mass grave discovered near Smolensk with Polish officers and suggested that the Poles should join forces against the Soviet Union. The church and the PCK were asked by the German occupation authorities to take part in an official delegation to Katyn, which they refused. Some municipal officials from Warsaw and some intellectuals took part, the writer Ferdynand Goetel then reported unofficially to the PCK on July 12th. Despite concerns about being taken over by propaganda, the PCK, under Skarżyński's leadership, sent a “technical group of doctors and forensic doctors without an official delegation character” to Katyn. Skarżyński wrote a first secret report on the exhumations and the apparent circumstances of the mass murder for the ICRC in Geneva and one for the government- in- exile in London, an official report and a statement on what the Germans expected for propaganda purposes, the PCK refused. Back in Warsaw, on April 17, 1943, Skarżyński organized the deployment of employees of the PCK technical commission to identify the victims until this work had to be stopped after three quarters of the cases due to the risk of epidemics on June 7th. The Krakow medical examiner Marian Wodziński wrote the final report for the secretariat of the PCK, which, with Skarżyński at its head, continued to refuse to set up an anti-Soviet Katyn committee in Poland. The occupiers had handouts distributed millions of times via the German administration of the Generalgouvernement and launched an illustrated brochure by the pseudonymous author Andrzej Ciesielski in millions of copies .

After the end of the war, the Polish communists expected Skarżyński to personally declare that he agreed with the Soviet thesis about the German authorship of the massacre. He withdrew from this request, went into hiding and earned his living as a carriage driver on the Ober Weichsel . As a result, he and his family had to flee Poland in the spring of 1946. Through Czechoslovakia and Bavaria he came to London, where he wrote a bilingual report for the Foreign Office , which however remained under lock and key.

Skarżyński emigrated to Canada and never returned to Poland. Skarżyński testified in 1952 as a witness before the Committee of Inquiry of the American Congress on Katyn ( Madden Commission ).

His Katyn reports analyzed the Foreign Office in London, but there was no clear assessment of how out of the historian Rohan D'Olier Butler written memorandum about the attitude of the British government to Causa Katyn ( Butler memorandum stating). His London report from 1946 was only discovered in 1989 by the Polish historian Włodzimierz Kowalski under "top secret" in the archives of the British Foreign Office. This was one of the events that led Russia to loosen its blockade of the investigation of the crime.

In 2015 Skarżyński was posthumously honored with the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta .

Writings (posthumous)

• Katyn . International Polish Book Club, Editions Dembinski, Paris 1990.
• Katyn. Report Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyża . Polish samizdat publication. Oficyna Wydawnicza "Pokolenie", Warszawa 1989.
• Wacław Lachert (Ed.): Sprawozdanie poufne Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyża. Report to Katynia . Zarząd Główny Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyża, Warsaw 1995.

literature

• Thomas Urban : Katyn 1940. History of a crime . CHBeck, Munich 2015.
• Jolanta Adamska, Andrzej Przewoźnik: Kazimierz Skarżyński (1887–1962). W imię prawdy o zbrodni katyńskiej . Archiwum Państwowe w Warszawie i Naczelna Dyrekcja Archiwów Państwowych, Warsaw 2015, ISBN 978-83-64806-48-3
• Eugenia Maresch: Katyn 1940: The Documentary Evidence of the West's Betrayal . History, Stroud 2010 (Contains Skarżyński's report from p. 94 in the English translation; online ).

Web links

Commons : Kazimierz Skarżyński  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Kazimierz Skarżyński in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ↑ United States. Congress. House. Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances on the Katyn Forest Massacre, The Katyn Forest Massacre: Hearings before the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, Eighty -Second Congress, first [-Second] session, on investigation of the murder of Thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk the, Russia .. . Washington: US Govt. Print. Off., 1952
2. ^ The Butler Memorandum pp. 6, 14.
3. ^ Esther B. Fein: Terrible Mystery of Katyn: Edging Toward the Truth , in: NYT, July 17, 1989
4. ↑ ^{a b} Meeting devoted to the book on the author of the first “Katyń Report” - Kazimierz Skarżyńki , at rzad.gov.pl, October 2, 2015