Word: katyn
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...since the discredited story of Germans cutting off the hands of Belgian children in World War I, U.S. citizens have viewed atrocity stories with a skepticism which does them credit. Last week the reports of the Communist atrocities in Korea were a reminder of an almost-forgotten atrocity, the Katyn Forest massacre, which is now under investigation by a committee of the U.S. Congress...
...Date of the Crime. The Katyn (rhymes with sateen) massacre was first reported by the Nazis in April 1943. On a spruce-covered hill overlooking the Dnieper, near Smolensk, Russia, they had found, stacked in mass graves, the bodies of some 4,000 Polish officers. Each was bound with hands behind his back; each had been shot through the base of the skull. The Nazis charged that the Russians had done it. The Polish officers, they said, were those captured by the Russians when they invaded Poland in September 1939. The Russians had shipped them from various prison camps...
...time when anything the Nazis said was deeply and properly distrusted. The Russians promptly countercharged that the Nazis had done it. The Russian story: when the Red armies retreated from Smolensk, they had to leave behind the captive Polish officers. The Nazis had shot the Poles, rigged the Katyn story as a propaganda plant...
During the postwar period of Soviet-Western cordiality, the Russian version became accepted as true. The Katyn Forest tragedy was all but forgotten-except by the Poles. But a number of U.S. Congressmen, urged on by their Polish-American constituents and a committee headed by former...
...Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane, persistently urged a reinvestigation of Katyn. This fall, the Rules Committee appointed a special investigating committee with Democrat Raymond Madden of Indiana as chairman, got the House to authorize $20,000 for expenses...