THIS COMMITTEE HEARD several witnesses whose testimony will be grouped under a special heading. Among these was a Pole who testified as an eyewitness to the massacre. His identity had to be concealed with a mask to prevent reprisals against his relatives still living in Poland. However, all the committee members are familiar with his identity.
Testifying as “John Doe” at the committee’s second hearing in Washington, this witness maintained that he and two of his compatriots personally viewed the execution of 200 Poles by Russian soldiers in what he believed to be the Katyn Forest. These observations were made by the witness and his friends at the beginning of November after the trio escaped from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp at Pavilschchev Bor.
After relating how the trio observed the Poles being led into the forest, the witness continued: “Two of them [Russian soldiers] seized their hands and held them in back and one of the Russian soldiers lifted his chin up [the victim’s] took him by the head, opened his mouth and shoved a handful of sawdust into his mouth.”
“John Doe” said most of the victims were executed with a shot through the back of their heads. Some, however, according to his testimony, were thrown into the graves alive and left to suffocate. “John Doe” further stated he saw the Poles’ hands being bound in the back with wire prior to the execution.
This witness introduced new factors hitherto unknown to the committee: he said the executions he witnessed were in the early part of November; he said the victims’ hands were bound with wire; he said their mouths were stuffed with sawdust; and he said some of the victims were left to suffocate rather than shot in the head.
These observations, up to the time that John Doe testified, had never been published in any of the material prepared by the Polish Government during its lengthy research on the Katyn massacre. Subsequently, however, they were substantiated by witnesses appearing before this committee.
Colonel Grobicki, testifying in Washington, said groups of Polish officers were evacuated from Kozielsk as early as November. In London, Mr. Rowinski, an observer at the graves taken there as a German prisoner of war in 1943, testified he observed several victims with their mouths stuffed with sawdust. In Frankfurt, Dr. Tramsen, a member of the German International Medical Commission, testified several victims had their hands bound with wire. During the same hearing, Dr. Naville, of Switzerland, and also on the same Commission, said he believed some of the victims died of suffocation instead of gunshot wounds. Several German witnesses likewise observed the victims’ mouths stuffed with sawdust and hands tied with wire.
[Again, in the generally accepted historical record of the Katyn massacres, there is no credible evidence that any took place before April 1940, nor that any of the victims were suffocated.]
This committee heard testimony of many witnesses whose revelations were of a circumstantial nature.
But in order to get the atmosphere surrounding all the facts of the Katyn massacre, their testimony was accepted and placed in the record. Among these was Jerzy Lewszecki who testified in London. He said he was a German prisoner of war interned at the prison camp near Lubeck. In 1943 he had occasion to discuss the Katyn massacre with Stalin’s oldest son by a prior marriage who likewise was a German prisoner of war interned in the same camp.
Lewszecki said he discussed the disappearance of the Polish officers with Stalin’s son, who frankly admitted that the Poles were executed by the Soviets. “Why those were the intelligentsia, the most dangerous elements to us, and they had to be eliminated,” Lewszecki quoted Stalin’s son as saying.
During our latest hearing here in Washington, this committee heard testimony from Boris Olshansky of New York, a former Soviet army officer who escaped to this country in 1946. Olshansky related conversations he had in Moscow with N. N. Burdenko, director of the Special Soviet Commission which made an investigation for the Russians in January 1944. Burdenko supervised the exhumation of 925 bodies for the Soviet investigation and in the official report stated all of the Poles were executed in the autumn of 1941.
[By January 1944, the Red Army had driven the Axis forces back to the 1939 Polish frontier, restoring Russian control of the Katyn Forest and other massacre sites.]
Olshansky testified Burdenko told him the Soviet report was false. He quoted Burdenko as saying:
“I was appointed by Stalin personally to go to the Katyn place. All the corpses were 4 years old. For me, as a medical man, this problem was quite clear. Our NKVD friends made a mistake.” Olshansky further stated he was told by Burdenko that there are more Katyns in Russia.
“Katyns existed and are existing and will be existing,” Olshansky quoted Burdenko as stating in Moscow in April of 1946. “Anyone who will go and dig up things in our country, Russia, would find a lot of things that we had to straighten out the protocol given by the Germans on the Katyn massacre,” the aging Burdenko further told Olshansky.