THIS COMMITTEE UNANIMOUSLY agrees that evidence dealing with the first phase of its investigation proves conclusively and irrevocably the Soviet NKVD (Peoples’ Commissariat of Internal Affairs) committed the massacre of Polish Army officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, not later than the spring of 1940.
This committee further concludes that the Soviets had plotted this criminal extermination of Poland’s Intellectual leadership as early as the fall of 1939 – shortly after Russia’s treacherous invasion of the Polish nation’s borders. There can be no doubt this massacre was a calculated plot to eliminate all Polish leaders who subsequently would have opposed the Soviet’s plans for communizing Poland.
In the course of its investigation, this committee has observed a striking similarity between what happened to the Polish officers in Katyn and the events now taking place in Korea. We unanimously agree that this committee would be remiss in its duty to the American people and the free people of the world if it failed to point out that the identical evasions by the Soviets to the Polish Government while the Poles were searching for their 15,000 missing officers in 1941, appear again in the delaying tactics now being used by the Communists in Korea.
[The Korean War would end with the signing of an armistice on July 27, 1953, though without a peace treaty between South Korea and the United Nations forces on the one hand and North Korea on the other. The Committee’s estimate of the Katyn massacres overlooks the considerable number of retired and reserve officers arrested in the winter of 1939-1940 and later murdered in Ukraine and probably in Belarus, though the latter graves have never been found.]
This committee feels that Katyn may well have been a blueprint for Korea. Just as the Soviets failed for almost 2 years to account for the missing Polish officers, so to this day the Communists in Korea have failed to account for many thousands of captured United Nations soldiers. Among these are 8,000 Americans whom General Ridgway described as atrocity victims in his report to the United Nations last July, and the estimated 60,000 South Koreans still unaccounted for.
The Communists’ delaying tactics in the Korean peace talks today may be from the same cloth as the nebulous replies received from the Soviets by the Poles in 1941-42 while they searched for their missing officers.