Owen O'Malley

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Sir Owen St. Clair O'Malley (born May 4, 1887 in Eastbourne , † April 16, 1974 in Oxford ) was a British diplomat . Contrary to the line of his government , he became involved in investigating the Katyn massacre .

Life

Owen O'Malley was born the fifth child of lawyer Edward Loughlin O'Malley, who at the time was Attorney General of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong . The family was from Ireland . The son grew up near Oxford , raised by his mother . He attended various schools in Middle English rugby before at Magdalen College in Oxford Historical Sciences studied. In 1909 he passed the exam in "Modern History".

At the age of 24 he entered the Foreign Office , to which he remained loyal until his retirement. His mentor there was Germany expert Eyre Crowe . In 1913 he married Mary Ann Dolling Sanders (1889–1974), who was a successful novelist and travel writer under the pseudonym Ann Bridge . The marriage resulted in two daughters and a son. The family was close friends with the alpinist George Mallory .

On the eve of World War II, O'Malley was sent to Budapest as ambassador for two years . From 1943 until the end of the war he was ambassador to the Polish government in exile in London , after which he represented the British crown for two years in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon .

At the end of his ambassadorial career, O'Malley was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Saints Michael and George . He spent his retirement years on the family estate in County Mayo in western Ireland.

Role in the Katyn case

Shortly after taking up his post as ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile in early 1943, O'Malley received numerous materials on the terror of the Soviet NKVD in eastern Poland , which had been annexed by the Soviet Union in November 1939 after a manipulated vote . He informed his government about the mass deportations from Poland to the depths of the Soviet Union.

After the discovery of the mass graves in the forest of Katyn by soldiers of the Wehrmacht , in the spring of 1943 O'Malley evaluated the reports from both the German side and the search office of the Anders Army headed by Józef Czapski , which after several thousand had remained in Soviet captivity advised Polish officers searched. In his report of May 24, 1943, he came to the conclusion that the analyzes describing Soviet perpetrators were plausible. He presented the report to Secretary of State Anthony Eden .

The report was classified as secret, only members of the cabinet and King George VI. received one copy each. In public, however, Eden gave the impression that he believed the Soviet version, according to which the perpetrators of Katyn had been the Germans, to be correct. In a speech to the House of Commons , he condemned the “cynical hypocrisy” of the Germans in the Katyn case.

Churchill had O'Malley's report sent to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt . Churchill's cover letter said it was "a horrific, very well-written story, perhaps too well-written." ( A grim, well-written story, but perhaps, a little too well written. ) He asked Roosevelt to write the report Keep O'Malley strictly confidential. The request was granted: the White House officially ignored him.

After the publication of the report of the Soviet investigative commission headed by the medical professor Nikolai Burdenko in January 1944, in which a unit of the Wehrmacht was accused of the Katyn massacre, O'Malley again made a detailed statement. His analysis of February 11, 1944 refuted the report of the Burdenko commission in the central passages. But Eden had it classified again as secret and put on file. O'Malley's petitions were received with great reluctance at the level of the Foreign Office. As can be seen from the memorandum on the attitude of the British government to the Katyn Cause ( Butler Memorandum ) written by the historian Rohan D'Olier Butler , he was accused of having accepted the view of the government-in-exile uncritically.

In the early 1970s, the Catholic publicist Louis FitzGibbon, whose family also came from Ireland, came into possession of copies of O'Maley's classified cables from 1943 and 1944. FitzGibbon researched Katyn, the reports O ' He devoted a lot of space to Malleys in his 1971 book "Katyn - A Crime without Parallel". The following year, FitzGibbon published O'Maley's diplomatic cables as a separate publication. In the late 1970s they appeared in a Polish underground magazine .

O'Malley wrote in the preface to the pamphlet with his Katyn reports on the policy of London to stifle a public debate about Soviet perpetrators in consideration of the ally Stalin : “We have been compelled to the normal and healthy functioning of our intellectual and moral judgment to interrupt. ... So we - inevitably - used the good reputation of England to cover up a bloodbath. "( We have been obliged to appear to distort the normal and healthy operation of intellectual and moral judgments. ... We have in fact perforce used the good name of England to cover up a massacre. )

O'Malley asked his former boss Eden to comment publicly. But Eden only stated that he did not want to "open old wounds".

literature

  • Katyn - Despatches of Sir Owen O'Malley to the British Government. Introduction by Louis FitzGibbon, London 1972.
  • 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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information, unless otherwise stated, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  2. ↑ Katyn. Despatches of Sir Owen O'Malley to the British Government. Introd. L. FitzGibbon. London 1972, p. 8.
  3. ↑ Katyn. Despatches of Sir Owen O'Malley to the British Government. Introd. L. FitzGibbon. London 1972, pp. 22-29.
  4. ↑ George Sandford: Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940. Truth, Justice and Memory. London / New York 2005, ISBN 0-415-33873-5 , pp. 172-173, 180.
  5. ↑ George Sandford: Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940. Truth, Justice and Memory. London / New York 2005, ISBN 0-415-33873-5 , p. 169.
  6. ^ Message to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from Winston Churchill, 08/13/1943, ID 6851129
  7. ↑ Joseph E. Persico: Roosevelt's Secret War. FDR and World War II Espionage. New York 2002, p. 264.
  8. ↑ George Sandford: Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940. Truth, Justice and Memory. London / New York 2005, ISBN 0-415-33873-5 , p. 190.
  9. ^ The Butler Memorandum, p. 7.
  10. ↑ German-language edition: The horror of Katyn - crime without example. Historical Review Press, London 1980, ISBN 0-906879-10-8 .
  11. ↑ Bożena Łojek, Komitety, stowarzyszenia i organizacje społecznie działające na rzecz ujawnienia i upowszechnienia prawdy o zbrodni katyńskiej, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie , 1.1990, p. 127.
  12. ↑ Katyn. Despatches of Sir Owen O'Malley to the British Government. Introd. L. FitzGibbon. London 1972, p. 10.
  13. ^ Eugenia Maresch: Katyń 1940th Dowody zdrady Zachodu. Documentation brytyjskich archiwów. Warszawa 2014, p. 347.
personal data
SURNAME O'Malley, Owen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Malley, Sir Owen St. Clair (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH May 4, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Eastbourne
DATE OF DEATH April 16, 1974
Place of death Oxford