Despite Goebbels allegations that the Wehrmacht
would not take appropriate propaganda advantage of the situation, the Wehrmacht officers in Smolensk had
made a significant decision prior to any announcement or actions by Goebbels – they
had decided on the name the crime site should be known by - without which the propaganda effort would have had even less of a chance.
This is why it is referred to as Katyn – and not
Gniezdowo which would have been the more accurate name, as this was not only
the railroad station at which the officers disembarked, but it was also
significantly closer to Kozie Gory, where the murders took place, than the
hamlet of Katyn, and thus would have been the appropriate name for the massacre
site.
As becomes clear from the1952
testimony to the Madden Committee by General Rudolf von
Gersdorff, the
wartime Chief of Intelligence of Army Group Mitte located in the Smolensk
region, as well
as his materials prepared for the Headquarters United States Army,
Europe, for which the general consulted in the postwar period, it is due to the decisions
of the Wehrmacht that the NKVD crime passed into history under the
name of the Katyn Massacre.
von Gersdorff: In the vicinity of Gniezdowo there were
prehistoric Russian cairns, old prehistoric tombs in caves. They were overgrown
with shrubs and heavily so. They were actually in the area, so that was the
reason why, when the graves of the Polish officers were discovered, we did not
call it the murders of Gniezdowo, but to distinguish it from these old
prehistoric tombs, we called it the murders of Katyn, so as not to get these
two things mixed up.
Flood: Then these graves were actually closer to
Gniezdowo than they were to the village of Katyn.
von
Gersdorff: Yes; that is correct.
Flood: Who finally conferred the title of the Katyn
Massacre on this thing? Did you do that?
von
Gersdorff: This was done by my unit with the chief of our Staff agreeing to
it
The name of General von Gersdorff, as a member of
anti-Hitler conspiracies which included Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr,
is known – but his role in the naming of Katyn is of equally great importance,
since the choice of name did carry a great significance, as became clear in the
initial Soviet response to the matter.
It also due to General von Gersdorff that we
learned who was responsible for discovering the truth about the conifer
saplings planted on the graves. The
seemingly inconsequential remarks in his and various other testimonies allow us
to create a clearer image not only of what occurred on site, but also of how
German propaganda rapidly created a “marketing plan” meant to disrupt the
British-USA-Soviet Alliance and how that plan essentially collapsed within
days.
This is in contrast to the Soviet disinformation plan
concerning Katyn, which began, it would appear over 15 months before the
Soviet exhumations and propaganda campaign of January 1944, went into full
gear.
