In early March, Berlin had been informed
that this grave site existed, that these were the bodies of Polish officers and
that each had been individually shot in the back of their head at close range –
something that might in contemporary language be described as a personalized
murder and not a neutral execution. The
Nazis were additionally well aware that the Polish Army under the command of
General Anders had been attempting to locate over 10,000 men who had
disappeared after the Soviet incursion onto Polish territory on September 17,
1939 – and given the estimated size of the graves it began to be thought that
all the missing men were buried there.
Information about the discovery of the mass
graves at Kozie Gory had been first submitted by Police Secretary (Polizeisekretär)
Ludwig Voss of Gruppe 570 Geheime Feldpolizei in writing to
Berlin no later than March 4, 1943, but it appeared that there was little
interest in the matter in headquarters. Yet this was not the first report
submitted by Voss – he had written earlier that
At the beginning of
February it was reported by a contact that in the vicinity of Katyn several
thousand Poles are buried, having been shot by members of the NKVD in April and
May of 1940...
and he submitted
this report to the Commander of
Group Army Mitte, as well as the Oberkommando des Heeres, and CC’d it to Dr. Gerhardt Buhtz (professor at Breslau University, then assigned to the Quartermaster of the 4th
Army as an “advisor on forensic medicine” [beratender
Gerichtsmediziner] and thus responsible for the investigation of war crimes), with a request for instructions as to how
to proceed. Having received no reply he
proceeded to resubmit his request for instructions to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.
It
was only the resubmission of this information by Voss and then direct contact
by Hans Meyer of the 689 Propanganda
Kompanie, stationed in Smolensk, who had travelled to Berlin, with Werner
Stephan, Ministerial Advisor (Ministerialrat) in the Reich Propaganda Ministry (in
addition to other posts,) that led to the presentation of this material in
person by Werner Stephan to Joseph Goebbels.
Goebbels decided to meet with Meyer – which meeting occurred on April 1
or 2, 1943. Stephan believed that Goebbels had not heard information about the
site until then – the information had not moved up the chain of command in
Berlin. That is when the propaganda
machine began preparing to publicize the discovery. The following days saw a flurry of activity
both in planning in Berlin and activity at the massacre site.
There was in fact a clear and continuing
conflict between the Wehrmacht and Goebbels, as he believed that the Wehrmacht
would not understand how to exploit this or other matters.
It took a little over a week for the German
propaganda machine to begin to ramp up their operations. At least for the first few days of April,
Goebbels was not able to meet with Hitler to discuss the matter, as he was at
his Eastern Front HQ – so planning went on without final approval until
Goebbels travelled to meet with Hitler and received it.
©Krystyna Piórkowska
