Madden Commission

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The Madden Commission, the official US House Committee to conduct an investigation and study of the facts, evidence, and circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre (United States House Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances on the Katyn Forest Massacre), was unofficially by its chairman, Ray J. Madden named investigative committee of the house of representatives in Washington, DC , which was to enlighten 1951/52 if the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the years 1943 to 1945 documents about the Suppressed the Katyn massacre . The committee came to the conclusion that the allegations against the Roosevelt administration were justified and found that the mass murder of the Polish officers prisoner of war was not committed by the Germans in 1941, as previously represented by the White House , but by the Soviet secret police NKVD in 1940 has been.

prehistory

In February 1943, Wehrmacht soldiers discovered mass graves in a forest not far from the Russian village of Katyn near Smolensk containing the bodies of several thousand Polish officers who had been shot . The German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels then ordered a political campaign in which the Soviet secret police were accused of perpetration. It was intended to drive a wedge between the Western Allies and their Soviet allies. But the Kremlin accused the Germans of mass murder.

The White House in Washington adopted the Soviet version from the German perpetrators. This line was enforced by Roosevelt's special envoy Joseph E. Davies , who, according to his own admission , was fascinated by Stalin and did not want to endanger the alliance of the USA with the Soviet Union. The US government received several expertises during the war, the authors of which saw clear indications of the Soviet and not the German perpetrators. The authors included experts from the CIC secret service , Roosevelt's advisor John Franklin Carter , who had interviewed Hitler's former confidante Ernst Hanfstaengl , Lieutenant Colonel Henry Szymanski , liaison officer of the US Army with the Polish Anders Army , US diplomats who worked in London for the Polish government in exile were responsible, the emissary for the Balkans George H. Earle , the British ambassador to the government in exile Owen O'Malley . The former US ambassador to Moscow, Admiral William H. Standley , as well as the diplomat George F. Kennan , an expert on Russia, also tended to share the Soviet version. But Roosevelt ignored all of this expertise, if it got to him at all.

The public did not find out about this expertise either. The coverage of the American press was determined by the reports of the pro-Soviet Moscow correspondents Jerome Davis , Richard Lauterbach and Edmund Stevens ; they confirmed the results of the Burdenko Commission , a panel of experts appointed by the Kremlin that accused the Germans of perpetration. The publicist William Lindsay White , who, on the other hand, questioned the Soviet version in his book Report on the Russians published in 1945 , saw himself exposed to numerous attacks from pro-Soviet circles in the USA and also in Great Britain, including by the BBC correspondent Alexander Werth , and was considered to be Representative of an absurd minority opinion .

In the summer of 1945, a press campaign directed by Moscow and launched via Scandinavian newspapers and broadcasters about the German perpetrators in Katyn was reflected in the American newspapers. The New York Times also propagated the Soviet version of the German perpetrators in Katyn. At the opening of the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals in autumn 1945, the Soviet main prosecutor Roman Rudenko put Katyn on the list of German war crimes . Rudenko's advance, however, was blocked by the American delegation, as they had come to the conclusion that the perpetrators were to be looked for on the Soviet side. The charge was tacitly dropped without explanation in order not to break the trial. The public did not learn anything about these backgrounds either.

In 1949, however, the journalist Julius Epstein brought the subject back into the press. Epstein had worked for the Office of War Information during the war and had first heard of it there. After the war he learned that the US Army Lieutenant Colonel John H. Van Vliet and other American and British prisoners of war had been taken by the Germans to the mass graves in Katyn in the spring of 1943 and had written a report about the alleged Soviet perpetrators. However, Van Vliet's report was not recorded in any official register. In an article for the New York Herald Tribune and the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit , Epstein accused the US authorities of a "conspiracy of silence" on Katyn.

Together with the former US ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane , who reprimanded the silence of the White House on Katyn in his book I saw the betrayal of Poland , Epstein founded the American Committee for the Investigation of the Katyn Massacre the Katyn Massacre). The committee also joined the journalist Dorothy Thompson , the writer Max Eastman , the CIA director Allen W. Dulles and the former chief of military intelligence OSS , William J. Donovan ; Lane took the chair. However, the authorities ignored the requests of the private committee to inspect the files on the Katyn case.

The committee managed not only to interest part of the press, but also to find an echo in politics. The Indiana Democratic Congressman Ray J. Madden , whose constituency was home to large numbers of Polish immigrants, passed a resolution to set up a Katyn Committee of Inquiry in September 1949, but failed to find a majority. But the following year, Katyn in Chicago, with its large community of Polish immigrants, was the topic of the pre-election campaign for the 82nd United States Congress . The Republican Party candidate, Timothy P. Sheehan , promised voters to support a Katyn committee of inquiry in the US Congress . His advance in the House of Representatives initially failed, but was repeated a few months later by Madden, this time the majority approved. In the meantime the political climate had also changed, and the Korean War determined the debate. In public opinion, the Soviet Union had gone from being an ally to being an enemy. The Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin led the movement that wanted to protect the country from the supposed Soviet threat.

Members

The committee, henceforth known by the press as the " Madden Committee ", had seven members:

Thus, the members of the Democratic Party, of which Roosevelt was a member, had a majority of four MPs over three of the Republicans.

Madden wrote a letter asking the UK government to assist in questioning British citizens and to provide documents. But London refused this request. As emerges from the memorandum on the attitude of the British government to the Katyn Cause ( Butler Memorandum ) written by historian Rohan D'Olier Butler , the rejection was justified internally by the fact that even the State Department in Washington did not take the Madden Commission “very seriously “( Very seriously ) take.

Madden also sent a questionnaire on Katyn to the Soviet government in Moscow. There, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko , previously ambassador to Washington, recommended that the Politburo leave the State Department's letters unanswered, asking for the Madden Commission to take heed. But in the end the Soviet embassy in Washington sent the Burdenko Commission's report to the commission without further explanation .

The commission included 181 pieces of evidence in its documentation, mostly copies of documents and photographs as well as some sketches of the terrain. It also evaluated a total of around 100 written reports from people who were not available to question witnesses or whose detailed questioning was not considered necessary.

Interviews with witnesses

Between October 11, 1951 and November 14, 1952, the special committee questioned a total of 81 witnesses, and its members traveled from Washington to Chicago , London , Frankfurt and Naples .

The prelude was on October 11, 1951 in Washington with the questioning of Lieutenant Colonel Donald Stewart from the group of American and British prisoners of war who the Germans had brought to Katyn in May 1943. His questioning lasted from 9:30 a.m. to 12:05 p.m. However, besides Madden, only three of the six other members of the commission could attend the meeting. However, three MPs of Polish descent who did not belong to it turned up: John C. Kluczynski , Antoni Sadlak and Alfred D. Sieminski . Stewart reported that, like Van Vliet, he was convinced of the Soviet guilt from the start.

The second hearing was held in Washington from February 4 to 7, 1952. Those interviewed included the former Polish ambassador to Moscow, Tadeusz Romer , to whom the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had given a note in April 1943 about the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the USSR and the Polish government-in-exile because of the Katyn controversy. In addition, a lawyer from the US Department of Defense was accompanied by Colonel John H. Van Vliet, whose missing report on his visit to Katyn as a German prisoner of war had initiated the committee.

On March 13 and 14, the American-Croatian medical professor Eduard Miloslavich , who was with the International Medical Commission in Katyn at the invitation of the Germans , the former Secretary General of the Polish Red Cross Kazimierz Skarżyński and Lieutenant Colonel Henry Szymanski , appeared in Chicago during the war Liaison officer of the US Army to the Polish and Czechoslovak associations in the Middle East , which were subordinate to their respective governments in exile . A Pole who appeared in a mask and appeared under the code name John Doe received particular media attention , but experts from the Polish government-in-exile considered his portrayal to be untrustworthy.

The committee met in the Kensington Palace Hotel in London from April 16 to 19, 1952. Above all, Polish emigrants were interviewed, including Generals Władysław Anders , commander of the Polish units ( Anders Army ) established in the Soviet Union in 1941/42 , Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski , leader of the Warsaw uprising of August 1944, and Marian Kukiel , Defense Minister of the government-in-exile . Also on the list of witnesses were the former ambassador to Moscow Stanisław Kot , to whom Stalin and Molotov had claimed during a conversation in the Kremlin that they knew nothing about the Polish officers, and the former foreign minister of the government in exile, Edward Raczyński , and the two writers Ferdynand Goetel and Józef Mackiewicz , who had been brought to Katyn by the Germans. Out of consideration for his relatives who remained in Poland, economics professor Stanisław Swianiewicz , an eyewitness to the evacuation of Polish officers to the Katyn forest, testified anonymously and camouflaged by a mask.

After a break of only one day, the commission continued its work in Frankfurt from April 21 to 26, 1952. The witnesses included: Józef Czapski , painter, writer and head of the Anders Army search office, which was looking for the missing officers in the Soviet Union; the Swedish journalist Christer Jäderlund , who was in Katyn at the invitation of the Germans; the lawyers Robert Kempner , deputy chief prosecutor of the USA at the Nuremberg trials, and Otto Stahmer , who, as defense attorney for Hermann Göring, had carried out a witness questioning on Katyn in Nuremberg ; three members of the International Medical Commission, namely the Swiss François Naville , the Hungarian Ferenc Orsós and the Dane Helge Tramsen ; the two former Wehrmacht officers Reinhart von Eichborn , head of the Wehrmacht switchboard in Smolensk, and Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff , who oversaw the exhumation work in the Katyn forest.

On April 27, 1952, the commission traveled to Naples to question the medicine professor Vincenzo Palmieri , also a member of the International Medical Commission.

The next round took place in Washington on June 3 and 4, 1952, and General Clayton Bissell and other senior officers in the US Army had to answer questions about the disappearance of the Van Vliet Report. They were accompanied by a lawyer from the Department of Defense. On July 2, 1952, the committee sent an interim report to the President of Parliament, in which it was said that the testimony so far had clearly pointed to the Soviet perpetrators.

At the final round in Washington from November 11-14, 1952, the following testimony: former special envoy George H. Earle , whom Roosevelt had transferred to American Samoa in the dispute over the evaluation of the information on Katyn ; the journalist John Franklin Carter , who was an adviser to Roosevelt; Julius Epstein, who initiated the committee; former US ambassadors to Moscow William H. Standley and W. Averell Harriman and the latter's daughter, Kathleen Harriman Mortimer , who had seen the presentation of the Burdenko Commission in Katyn; the American chief prosecutor in Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson ; Former US Ambassador to Warsaw Arthur Bliss Lane , Chairman of the Katyn Private Committee, which was dissolved when the Special Committee was constituted; the former Polish premier in exile Stanisław Mikołajczyk ; former US Secretary of State Sumner Welles , a close adviser to Roosevelt, who denied that the White House had suppressed information about Katyn.

Final report

The final report comprised seven volumes with a total of 2363 pages. All committee members came to the conclusion that the Polish officers had been murdered by the NKVD in the spring of 1940 and not by the Germans in the summer of 1941. They saw the deeper reason for the mass murder in the teachings of Karl Marx and the revolutionary leader Lenin , both of whom justified violence against opponents as a legitimate means of politics. They criticized Roosevelt and the State Department under him for ignoring important documents that clearly indicated the Soviet perpetrators.

However, according to its report, the committee saw no reason to accuse Roosevelt's cabinet of deliberately suppressing news with the aim of protecting the Soviet allies. Rather, the reasons for Roosevelt's information policy are primarily to be found in the lack of coordination between the individual US authorities. But “people from the second row” deliberately withheld negative reports about the Soviet Union. The two Republicans O'Konski and Sheenan issued an additional statement, however, in which they criticized Roosevelt's "misjudgments" of the Soviet Union.

The Madden Commission recommended that the House of Representatives pass a resolution calling on the government to submit its final report to the United Nations . The government should apply to the UN that the Soviet Union be brought to justice by the International Court of Justice over Katyn .

Counteroffensive in the Eastern Bloc

Faced with the international response the Madden Commission found, the Soviet State Department set up a working group to work out a counter-campaign. It included the head of the Forensic Medicine Research Institute in Moscow, Viktor Prosorowski , who had already been a member of the Burdenko Commission and had witnessed the Soviet prosecution in Nuremberg. In the Soviet sphere of influence, the state-controlled media launched a counter-offensive designed to discredit the Madden Commission. The Soviet party organ Pravda appealed to “all scientists in the world” to protest against the “slander”. The Czech František Hájek , who was a member of the International Medical Commission, was one of the signatories of the appeal . The name of the Prague writer František Kožík , who had been brought to Katyn by the Germans with a delegation of writers, was among the articles that attacked the Americans.

In the People's Republic of Poland, the communist leadership under Bolesław Bierut feared that the Madden Commission's report could be forwarded to the International Court of Justice in The Hague . Justice Minister Henryk Świątkowski ordered a propaganda campaign aimed at his own compatriots. The Polish-born members of the Madden Commission, Machrowicz and O'Konski, as well as the government-in-exile in London, were discredited as "Hitler's allies". Several members of the Polish delegations who were brought to Katyn by the Germans in the spring of 1943 were arrested until they declared in writing that they were convinced of the German perpetrators.

In the party organ Trybuna Ludu , the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Nikolai , who was a member of the Burdenko Commission, had a say; he accused the Madden Commission of wanting to rehabilitate “Nazi criminals”. The entire press was involved in the campaign against the Madden Commission and the United States in general. Corresponding pressure was also exerted on the church press, which was only allowed to appear in small editions, but the editorial offices successfully opposed the party line.

The book The Truth About Katyn from the pen of the journalist Bolesław Wójcicki was published in two editions . According to his account, the documents found during the exhumations in Katyn were produced on behalf of the Gestapo in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Among the dead there were also murdered concentration camp prisoners who were brought to Katyn. Madden was referred to in the book as a " fascist ", the journalist Julius Epstein as a " Trotskyist ". The appendix includes articles from Prawda , a speech by the Polish Stalinist Wanda Wasilewska and a Katyn report by BBC correspondent Alexander Werth .

Meanwhile, an internal analysis by the Polish secret police UB concluded that the campaign had aroused a pro-American mood in parts of the population and had reinforced anti-Soviet sentiments. In the GDR , the party organ Neues Deutschland put Katyn in line with the Nazi crimes of Auschwitz , Majdanek and Treblinka and the “American imperialists” in line with Joseph Goebbels and Hitler .

Political Consequences

The House of Representatives approved a resolution by a large majority calling on the US government to bring the Katyn mass murder to the UN General Assembly . Although the US Mission to the UN submitted the Madden Commission's report to the UN Secretary-General in 1953, it was never on the agenda for the deliberations. After Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, the new US President Dwight D. Eisenhower started negotiations with the new Soviet leadership to end the Korean War .

literature

  • Anna M. Ciencala / Wojciech Materski / Natalia S. Lebedeva: Katyn. Crime without punishment. New Haven 2007 ISBN 978-0-300-10851-4 , pp. 235-239.
  • Thomas Urban : Katyn 1940. History of a crime. Beck, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-67366-5 , pp. 168–180.
  • Witold Wasilewski, Propaganda kłamstwa versus “Komisja katyńska” Izby Reprezentantów USA, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie , 23 (2008) ISBN 8-391778-05-3 , pp. 102-131.
  • Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-86854-286-8 , pp. 374–388.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 15.
  2. ^ John P. Fox, The Katyn Case and the Nazi Propaganda, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 3 (1982), p. 464 ( PDF ).
  3. ↑ Dennis Dunn: Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin. America's Ambassadors to Moscow. Lexington 1998, p. 184.
  4. ^ William H. Standley / Arthur A. Ageton: Admiral Ambassador to Russia. Chicago 1955, pp. 401-411.
  5. ↑ George F. Kennan: Memoirs 1925-1959. Vol. I. Boston 1967, p. 200.
  6. ↑ Anna M. Ciencala / Wojciech Materski / Natalia S. Lebedeva: Katyn. Crime without punishment. New Haven 2007, p. 239.
  7. ^ George Sanford: Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory. London 2005, pp. 161-162.
  8. ^ Jean Folkerts: Report on the Russians: The Controversy Surrounding William Lindsay White's 1945 Account of Russia . In: American Journalism, 3 July 2015, Vol. 32 (3), pp. 307-328.
  9. ^ Timothy Roy Gleason: Decade of Deceit: English-Language Press Coverage of the Katyn Massacre in the 1940s. Minneapolis 2016, p. 20.
  10. ↑ Desinformacija o Katyni v zapadnoj presse katynfiles.com , May 9, 2011.
  11. ↑ Anna M. Ciencala / Wojciech Materski / Natalia S. Lebedeva: Katyn. Crime without punishment. New Haven 2007, p. 232.
  12. ^ How the Katyn massacre disappeared from the prosecution , sueddeutsche.de , May 14, 2015.
  13. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 368.
  14. ↑ Murder on 10,000 Polish POWs, in: New York Herald Tribune , July 3 and 4, 1949.
  15. ^ The secret of the Polish mass graves near Katyn, in: Die Zeit , June 9, 1949, p. 3.
  16. ^ Arthur Bliss Lane: I saw Poland betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People. Belmont Ma. 1948, p. 255.
  17. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 372.
  18. ↑ Andrzej Przewoźnik , Amerykanie a Katyń, in: Rzeczpospolita , April 9, 2010, p. 14.
  19. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 366.
  20. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, p. 376.
  21. ↑ Anna M. Ciencala / Wojciech Materski / Natalia S. Lebedeva: Katyn. Crime without punishment. New Haven 2007, p. 232.
  22. ↑ Witold Wasilewski, propaganda kłamstwa counterproductive "Komisja katyńska" Izby Reprezentantów USA, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie, 23 (2008), S. 104th
  23. ^ George Sanford: Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice and Memory. London 2005, pp. 178-179.
  24. ^ The Butler Memorandum, p. 35.
  25. ↑ Witold Wasilewski: Ludobójstwo. Kłamstwo i walka o prawdę. Sprawa Katynia 1940-2014. Łomianki 2014, pp. 152–153.
  26. ↑ Anna M. Ciencala / Wojciech Materski / Natalia S. Lebedeva: Katyn. Crime without punishment. New Haven 2007, pp. 238-239.
  27. ↑ Witold Wasilewski, propaganda kłamstwa counterproductive "Komisja katyńska" Izby Reprezentantów USA, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie , 23 (2008), S. 106th
  28. ↑ Protocols of the witness interviews in: The Katyn Forest Massacre , US Government Printing Office. Washington 1952, Vol. 1-5, 7.
  29. ↑ Witold Wasilewski, propaganda kłamstwa counterproductive "Komisja katyńska" Izby Reprezentantów USA, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie , 23 (2008), S. 105th
  30. ↑ The Katyn Forest Massacre , Vol. 1, pp. 2-29.
  31. ↑ Krystyna Piórkowska: English-speaking Witnesses to Katyn / Angielskojęzyczni świadkowie Katynia. Warsaw 2012, p. 115.
  32. ↑ Andrzej Przewoźnik / Jolanta Adamska: Katyń. Zbrodnia prawda pamieć. Warsaw 2010, p. 398.
  33. ^ Andrzej Przewoźnik, Posłowie, in: Stanisław Swianiewicz, W cieniu Katynia . Paris 1976, pp. 375-376.
  34. ↑ Anna M. Ciencala / Wojciech Materski / Natalia S. Lebedeva: Katyn. Crime without punishment. New Haven 2007, p. 238.
  35. ↑ Anna M. Ciencala / Wojciech Materski / Natalia S. Lebedeva: Katyn. Crime without punishment. New Haven 2007, p. 238.
  36. ^ The Katyn Forest Massacre , Vol. VI, p. 1800.
  37. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings . Hamburg 2015, pp. 383, 385.
  38. ↑ Claudia Weber: War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburg 2015, pp. 386–387.
  39. ↑ Andrzej Przewoźnik / Jolanta Adamska: Katyń. Zbrodnia prawda pamięć. Warszawa 2010, p. 395.
  40. ↑ Zajavlenii čechoslovackogo professora sudebnoj mediciny F. Gaeka po povodu tak nazyvaemogo "katnyskogo dela", in: Pravda , March 12, 1952, p. 3.
  41. ↑ Mecislav Borák, Zlocin v Katyni a jeho ceské a slovenské souvislosti, in: Evropa mezi Nemeckem a Ruskem. Sborník prací k sedmdesátinám Jaroslava Valenty. Eds. M. Šesták and E. Vorácek. Prague 2000, p. 518.
  42. ↑ Tomasz Wolsza: "To co wiedziałem przekracza swją grozą najśmielsze fantazje". Wojenne i powojenne losy Polaków wizytujących Katyń w 1943 roku. Warsaw 2015, pp. 138–143.
  43. ↑ Glos świadka in: Trybuna Ludu , March 7, 1952, p. 2
  44. ↑ Witold Wasilewski, propaganda kłamstwa counterproductive "Komisja katyńska" Izby Reprezentantów USA, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie, 23 (2008), pp 113-120.
  45. ^ Bolesław Wójcicki: Prawda o Katyniu. Warsaw 1952.
  46. ↑ George Sandford: Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940. Truth, Justice and Memory. London / New York 2005, p. 208.
  47. ^ WS, Backgrounds of an American Provocation, in: Neues Deutschland , March 9, 1952, p. 5.
  48. ↑ Anna M. Ciencala / Wojciech Materski / Natalia S. Lebedeva: Katyn. Crime without punishment. New Haven 2007, p. 239.