Marian Wodziński

Marian Wodziński

Marian Wodziński (born May 8, 1911 in Tarnów , † July 21, 1986 in Liverpool ) was a Polish coroner . In the spring of 1943, on behalf of the German occupation authorities, in consultation with the Polish Red Cross (PCK), he led a group of Polish doctors who exhumed the victims of the Katyn massacre .

Life

Wodziński came from a noble family ( Szlachta ). His father ran a treasury in Krakow . He studied at the Jagiellonian University Medicine, in 1936 he received after the state exam the approbation as a doctor. He found his first job at the Institute for Forensic Medicine , where he also wrote his dissertation .

During the German occupation, he joined a resistance group that was absorbed into the Home Army (AK). After the liberation of Krakow by the Red Army in January 1945, as a member of the anti-communist resistance, he was exposed to increasing pressure from the UB secret police and the Soviet secret service NKVD . In December 1945 he was able to secretly leave the country.

Like thousands of members of the Polish armed forces who had fought in the war against the Wehrmacht under British command and did not want to return to their Soviet-occupied homeland, he settled in Great Britain. He married a Polish woman who had also emigrated and practiced as a doctor in Liverpool. He never returned to Poland. His relatives had his urn buried in a cemetery in his hometown Tarnów.

Role in the Katyn case

In April 1943, under pressure from the German occupation authorities, the Polish Red Cross dispatched a delegation of coroners to examine the dead from the mass graves in the Katyn forest . PCK General Secretary Kazimierz Skarżyński won over the 32-year-old university assistant Wodziński for the so-called “Technical Commission”. He suggested the medical professor Jan Olbrycht , who was imprisoned in the Auschwitz I concentration camp , for leadership , but the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Berlin, which coordinated the Katyn campaign of the Nazi regime, decidedly refused.

Wodziński worked on the Katyn mass graves from April 27 to June 8, 1943, longer than any other member of the Technical Commission, and took over their leadership. The Polish doctors identified a total of 2800 of the 4400 corpses in the mass graves. Among the dead he found a relative of his brother-in-law, who had been the personal physician of the late head of state Józef Piłsudski . Wodziński drew up a precise list of the exact location and order of the autopsied and identified victims.

After the work was stopped due to the infernal stench in the summer temperatures on June 7, 1943, Wodziński expressly thanked the German side around Professor Gerhard Buhtz for their help in identifying the victims. After his return to occupied Poland, he wrote a report that the AK radioed to the Polish government-in-exile in London . The report did not address the question of the perpetrator, but noted that the most recent of the documents found on the dead, such as newspapers and letters, were from the spring of 1940. The daily newspaper “Goniec Krakowski” published under German control published an interview with Wodziński in which he accused the Soviets of crime; but he immediately reported to the AK that he had not given such an interview, it was a fake on behalf of the Germans.

After the German occupiers withdrew in January 1945, the NKVD searched for Wodziński and arrested him in March. But thanks to an intervention by the rectorate of the Jagiellonian University, he was released. However, Wodziński feared he would be arrested again and went into hiding. In fact, the communist-controlled public prosecutor's office had him wanted on a wanted list in July 1945 . The NKVD also made great efforts to get hold of him; it saw him as a key figure in the Moscow Katyn campaign, according to which the Germans were the perpetrators. According to a Polish contemporary witness, a Soviet general said: "This man can spoil international politics for us for ten years with a stupid article or book."

In December 1945 he fled to Austria via Czechoslovakia , from where he traveled on to London via Italy and France. There he wrote another detailed report on the activities of the Technical Commission in Katyn. The report was incorporated into the Polish White Paper on Mass Murder published by General Władysław Anders in 1948 , which was also translated into English. The Foreign Office in London analyzed his Katyn report , but it did not come to a clear assessment, as emerges from the memorandum on the British government's position on the Katyn cause ( Butler Memorandum ) written by historian Rohan D'Olier Butler .

The list of the situation of the individual victims compiled by Wodziński in 1943 became the most important clue in the reconstruction of the events by the Russian historian Natalja Lebedewa in 1990 , who came across the documents about the transport of Polish prisoners of war from the Koselsk camp to Katyn: their order at the transports corresponded exactly to the order in the graves.

literature

• Claudia Weber : War of the perpetrators. The Katyn mass shootings. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2015, pp. 238–241, ISBN 978-3-86854-286-8 .
• Zbrodnia katyńska w świetle dokumentów. Z przedmową Władysława Andersa. London 1948, pp. 199-245.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Information on the curriculum vitae, unless otherwise stated, according to Zapomniany bohater , "Dziennik Polski" (Tarnów), April 23, 2010.
2. ↑ IPN szuka skrzyni z Katynia , rp.pl , January 13, 2016.
3. ↑ Zbrodnia Katyńska. Materiały dla ucznia ( Memento of the original from April 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Edited by IPN , Warsaw / Krakau 2014, p. 22. 
4. ↑ Tomasz Wolsza: "To co wiedziałem przekracza swją grozą najśmielsze fantazje". Wojenne i powojenne losy Polaków wizytujących Katyń w 1943 roku. Warsaw 2015, p. 148.
5. ↑ Kazimierz Skarżyński : Report Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyża. Warsaw 1989, p. 29.
6. ↑ Janusz Zawodny: Pamiętniki Znalezione w Katyniu. Paris 1989, pp. 194-195.
7. ↑ reproduced in: Andrzej Przewoźnik / Jolanta Adamska: Katyń. Zbrodnia prawda pamięć. Warsaw 2010, pp. 611–627.
8. ^ Wojciech Materski: Murder Katyński. Siedemdziesiąt lat drogi do prawdy. Warsaw 2010, p. 31.
9. ↑ The Katyn Forest Massacre. US Government Printing Office. Washington 1952, vol. III, p. 409.
10. ↑ Kazimierz Skarżyński: Report Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyża. Warsaw 1989, pp. 15-17.
11. ^ German translation of the report in: Gerd Kaiser: Katyn. The state crime - the state secret. Berlin 2002, pp. 177-181.
12. ↑ Tomasz Wolsza: "To co wiedziałem przekracza swją grozą najśmielsze fantazje". Wojenne i powojenne losy Polaków wizytujących Katyń w 1943 roku. Warsaw 2015, p. 41.
13. ↑ Zaproszenie do Katynia " Gazeta Wyborcza ", supplement "Ale Historia", March 29, 2013.
14. ↑ Facsimile of the profile: Tomasz Wolsza: "To co wiedziałem przekracza swją grozą najśmielsze fantazje". Wojenne i powojenne losy Polaków wizytujących Katyń w 1943 roku. Warsaw 2015, p. 57.
15. ↑ "Ten człowiek może nam i za 10 lat zepsuć politykę międzynarodową jakimś głupim artykułem czy książką na ten temat." , Quoted from: Stanisław M. Jankowski / Ryszard Kotarba: Literaci a sprawa katyńska. Krakow 2003, p. 99.
16. ↑ Zbrodnia katyńska w świetle dokumentów. Z przedmową Władysława Andersa. London 1948, pp. 199-245.
17. ^ The Butler Memorandum pp. 6, 14.
18. ↑ Natal'ja Lebedeva: Katyn - čelovečestva Prestuplenie protiv. Moscow 1994, pp. 4-6.