Thomas Urban (3)

The Katyn Massacre 1940: History of a Crime - A Warning from History for Now

On 17th September 1939 the Russian Army crossed the border into Poland in aid of their Nazi allies and took the Eastern Borderlands. The Russians attacked Poland with the excuse they were saving people from the Polish ‘fascists’ while bombing towns and villages of no military value. Today it sounds vaguely familiar to some of the excuses being used for the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Katyn Massacre 1940: History of a Crime, from Thomas Urban, a German historian is an up-to-date investigation into the war crime. A war crime that nobody has ever been prosecuted for, though the Russians did try to have the Germans tried for it at Nuremberg. Coming from a Polish family who was affected by Katyn and the exile of families, I was told these stories as a child. Russia continued to deny they had any thing to do with the crime and it was down to the Germans. They only admitted their guilt in 1990.

Spring 1940, Stalin's NKVD, the forerunners of the KGB executed 22,000 Polish officers, ensigns and state officials near the Russian village of Katyn. When Wehrmacht soldiers discovered some of the graves three years later, the Russians succeeded in convincing US President Roosevelt of the German perpetration. Winston Churchill had no clear picture of the crime and made no comment.

Urban has used recently released US documents; this book refutes the popular thesis that the Western Allies deliberately lied about the Katyn case in order not to endanger the alliance with Stalin. As well as consulting Polish and Russian documentation on this war crime, for the first time, the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, who wrote about Katyn, have been examined. This is the first rounded investigation of all the facts.

He also names some of those ‘guilty’ British journalists who were supportive of the regime in Moscow, amazingly all middle or posh upper-class elitists who thought they knew better. Who also attacked the Polish Government-in-exile for its stance on Katyn, such as the BBC’s and Sunday Times Alexander Werth, who accused the Government of not showing enough gratitude to the Russians. Or Ralph Parker of The Times who was an enthusiastic support of Stalin, with friends like these no wonder it took 50 years for the Russians to admit their guilt.

This is an excellent book and if reading during 2022, will look like the playbook of the Russian leadership, the Army and the Secret Police.… (mehr)

Very poor book! Unclear why it was translated and published in Russian, unless it was a vanity project. Intended for readers who know nothing about VN, it contains a lot of very basic history, biography and literary history, paraphrases of books and stories that take place or concern Germany or Germans, but no analysis. The most interesting chapter is a complete anticlimax - VN was not the author of the "Roman c kakainom" - but it contains interesting info about the life of the real author, Mark Levi. But none of this info is based on work done by Urban! All secondary sources. Contains useful appendices, all of VN's Berlin addresses and chronology.… (mehr)