The Media's Initial Frame for the 1943 Katyn Forest Massacre: Even if it's True, it's Fake
Journalist William Shirer set the Story for WW2, and He's a Soviet Apologist
It’s amazing to me that the media, throughout history, so often gets a story wrong.
And often the media is not just a little wrong about minor, inconsequential details, but flat-out wrong on the big issues. The media is usually wrong with a purpose. Their goal is misdirection. They are wrong with an impure motive.
This is a fact many of us can easily agree with, but the implications and consequence of that fact is hard to appreciate.
The list of media problems as they relate to wars and major media stories is long and often memory-holed. Few dwell on the media’s made-up Syrian atrocities in 2011, the George Zimmerman trial in 2013 and the media trial of Nick Sandmann in 2019. The media that got those stories all wrong, was also hugely wrong about January 6th in 2021, COVID from 2020-Present, the Ukraine War in 2023.
The same media that’s chronically wrong about events in Iraq (2003-2011) and Afghanistan (2001-2023), was similarly wrong about what was actually happening in Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1954-1975), not to mention Iraq (2003-2011) and Afghanistan (2001-2021). If it’s a major story, the media is going to get it substantially incorrect, but it rarely corrects its bad reporting or retracts the factual harm it infects the record with.
Because of the hard-left media is combined with a hard-left academia, both the news and the history are enormously corrupted with left-wing prejudice and bias. Our very understanding of our reality is controlled, shaped, and sculpted by left-wing authors.
Some of those authors did not just have a bias, however, they had a clearly subversive agenda.
It’s a convenient contrivance to call them Communists. It’s a word that works, but not one that fits altogether well.
But when you spot the bias, and with the benefit of history when you can backwards-trace their agenda, it becomes a little more obvious. It then reveals other historical events that were subject to the same bias and prejudice.
The true potential of modern technology for history has been untapped for this purpose: to lay out large amounts of data, facts, and information so as to spot these patterns, trends, and incongruities. Most academic history are secondary sources overly influenced by prior secondary sources. Said another way: it’s hard to overcome flawed original dominant narratives.
The media coverage related to anything connected to Communism and the Soviet Union in the 20th century was almost wrong by default. Those flawed original dominant narratives were the rule, not the exception. The coverage and ‘narrative frames’ brought to the story by major media figures is often wrong on all the critical details.
I don’t think this is because they were elites from ivy league schools. I don’t think this was because many were closet homosexuals. I don’t think this was because they ‘sought a better world’ and had default progressive beliefs.
There was an agenda. There is an agenda. Sometimes we can have clear flashpoints as to what that agenda was, and how it has so greatly affected and corrupted our historical record.
One such person with impure motives was William Shirer.
Shirer is considered one of the foremost journalists and ‘war correspondents’ of the second World War.
Shirer’s famous books include “Berlin Diary” from 1941, and “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” from 1960.
Shirer started with the Chicago Tribune, and then wrote for news services, before ending up at CBS News along with famed journalist Edward R. Murrow.
Shirer is considered one of the godfathers of journalism because he was part of the group of what was called “Murrow’s Boys” who were elites in journalism during their time, and are still revered as such today.
Many of them cut their teeth on the Axis-Allied war of 1941-1945.
Even among latchkey kids from the past few generations in divorced single-mom homes plaintively yearning and searching for proto-masculinity amongst veteran grandfathers and dusty history books always ending up obsessed with the Second World War, journalist William Shirer is a bit of an obscure name. Journalists aren’t typically the recipients of long-lasting fame after all.
But Shirer helped define a major global conflict from the start, and in that comes great power and responsibility.
Shirer left Berlin in December 1940, and returned for the Nuremberg trials in 1946.
During that period of time he was still reporting, and a prominent war correspondent.
To this day, Shirer’s works are still assigned in classrooms as a history of the Nazis and the Second World War.
In college, I took a class on “Nazi Germany” and it was scheduled to be taught by Richard Breitman, who is a well-known holocaust scholar. As it happened, Breitman took a last-minute sabbatical and was replaced by another professor, whose day job was in the “Office of Special Investigations” at the Department of Justice. The Department’s mandate was to hunt down Nazi ‘war criminals’ even in their old age, which was the early 2000’s. In practice it seems as though most of their time was hunting down and harassing octogenarians like John Demjanjuk. Neither of these men were disposed to give any charity to conspiracy theories or any arguments from the political right.
And yet I distinctly remember, even now two decades later, a paper I submitted where I referenced William Shirer’s works. The replacement professor took me into his office and upbraided me for citing to his work, saying I should have known that he was widely discredited and unreliable.
The comment stuck with me because, in the rest of my undergraduate experience, I never found academics of the left willing to criticize or scrutinize the academic quality of their ideological allies and, instead, preferred to simply fight straw man arguments from their perceived right-wing enemies. I wish I had inquired more about the reasons why Shirer was discredited, and the only small issue I recall was that this professor noted that the fabled Reichstag fire in 1933 was blamed, by Shirer, on the Nazis when, instead, the consensus today was that it had, in fact, been burned by a Communist whose criminal actions were then used to pass the Enabling Acts of 1933.
Shirer’s reliability and credibility, or what academic wags might call his ‘historiocity’ seems limited to a critique on this one point: that he assigned blame for the Reichstag fire to the wrong party, absolving any blame from the obvious: that the Communists had burned the German legislature in a similar way to how the Communists had revolted against the German government at the end of the first World War.
Shirer was later in conflict with his friend Edward R. Murrow and CBS over his opposition to the Truman Doctrine in 1947, which opposed Soviet expansionism.
But the Reichstag fire wasn’t the only thing Shirer got notably wrong. I think the left kind of contains the liabilities for people they favor by hyping the one mistake, and ignoring many other ones.
Specifically I’m focused on the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at the Katyn Forest in April & May of 1940. On that story, Shirer not only got it wrong, but with the benefit of hindsight, you can see that Shirer was an ideologue and a Soviet sympathizer.
This is probably the right moment to explain the basic context around the 1940 massacre.
The German government of 1933 was largely a reaction to Communist revolutionary movements within Germany, and the experience of other European nations after their own Communist revolutions. The military purges, the mass executions, spread a great deal of fear that when it happened again, those indelible ideological marks would follow. The Soviet government of 1917 was the product of the Russian Civil War that resulted in the imposition of brutal Communism across the remnants of the Russian Empire.
These two were always destined to fight, it was simply a matter of when.
So imagine the world’s shock when, in 1939, they signed a public non-aggression pact often referred to as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. This agreement guaranteed a quiet border, and divided up Eastern Europe into zones of influence. The Soviets were granted a free hand in the Baltic nations, and the Germans were given land expanding slightly east.
Here’s a better map of the way in which the Germans and the Russians split up Poland and other Slavic lands:
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed on August 23, 1939.
The Germans invaded Poland a week later on September 1, 1939.
They attacked with 1.5 million troops, 2,000 tanks, and 1,300 aircraft.
The Soviets then invaded Poland a little over two weeks later, on September 17, 1939.
They attacked with 450,000 troops, 4,736 tanks, and 3,300 aircraft.
The Polish surrender was on September 27, 1939.
The Germans took 694,000 Polish prisoners of war.
The Russians took 300,000 Polish prisoners of war.
The Polish had 66,000 KIA from defending their homeland.
From the date they surrendered, none of the men who ended up in the Katyn Forest would survive more than 250 days.
Some of the at least 14 prominent Polish Generals murdered were:
Gen. Leonard Skierski
Gen. Orlik Lukowski
Gen. Franciszek Sikorski
Gen. Leon Billewicz
Gen. Konstanty Plisowski
Gen. Piotr Skuratowicz
Gen. Rudolf Prich
It’s important to understand the relevant timelines so that it can be better understood why the Poles immediately knew that it was the Soviets and not the Germans, who had committed this crime.
RELEVANT TIMELINE:
The Polish surrender was on September 27, 1939.
Polish authorities lose contact with the POWs around April 1940.
Polish authorities receive a report from spies that says their men are all missing in mid-1941.
Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the start of “Operation Barbarossa,” on June 22, 1941.
The battle of Smolensk between the Germans and Soviets, resulting in a German victory was from July 8-31, 1941.
Polish Ambassador Stanislaw Kot meets with Stalin, asking for the return of the Polish POWs, where Stalin acts surprised and tells him he’ll make sure it happens, in November 1941.
Polish Generals Sikorski and Anders meet with Stalin and ask him to release the Polish POWs, on December 4, 1941.
Polish Colonel Friedrich Ahrens starts hearing rumors of executed Polish POW’s in March 1942.
The Germans announced finding the mass grave on April 11, 1943.
The Soviets initially dismiss the finding by calling it “archeological remains” on April 16, 1943.
The Polish government-in-exile asks for the International Red Cross to inspect the site on April 17, 1943.
Pravda attacks the Poles for invoking the International Red Cross and for collaborating with the Germans on April 19, 1943.
The Soviet Union breaks off relations with the Polish government-in-exile over this matter on April 26, 1943.
The Poles drop their request to the International Red Cross to come investigate the Katyn Massacre. The New York Times says the “…Poles are criticized here for falling for Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda...” on May 1, 1943.
Churchill cables Stalin apologies that the British let the Poles talk to the press without censorship, and that they would be disciplined in the future, on May 10, 1943.
American Col. Henry I. Szymanski, liason to the Polish troops in Italy, sends a letter to the American head of Intelligence George V. Strong that the Soviets committed the Katyn Forest massacre based on Polish reports, on May 25, 1943.
The second Battle of Smolensk, that ended in Soviet control, ended on September 25, 1943.
An American expedition to the mass grave is coordinated by the Soviets, including Ambassador Harriman’s daughter Kathleen, to debunk the German’s 1943 investigation into the mass grave, on January 22, 1944.
SS General Walter Schellenberg (1910-1952), who would testify at the Nuremberg trials against his former comrades, confesses that the Nazis fabricated the Katyn Forest massacre story to set up the Soviets on June 28, 1945.
The International War Crimes Tribunal indicts the German defendants for having killed 11,000 Polish POW’s at the Katyn Forest, on October 18, 1945.
The Soviet prosecutor attempts to lay the blame for Katyn onto Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials, where Goering was indicted on November 20, 1945
Experts from the Soviet Union agree, the massacre was a completely German design, says the New York Times on July 3, 1946
The party line shifts at the New York Times and they admit to the Col. John Van Vliet memo, and cite to it to say the Soviets were likely responsible for the massacre, on September 19, 1950.
The U.S. House of Representatives publishes the results of a Committee investigation into the Katyn Forest massacre, the “Madden Report,” on December 22, 1952.
The Soviet government admitted that it was solely responsible for the massacre all along on April 12, 1990
The Polish government-in-exile knew right away in 1943 that its men were killed by Soviets and not the Germans because:
Timing. not only because they had been missing for years by this point having gone missing in Soviet custody in April 1940 when the Germans found the mass grave in April 1943, where families who had previously received letters from the POWs suddenly stopped receiving them in March 1940, but also because
Gossip. they had heard from Soviet policymakers that they had ‘made a huge mistake’ about the Polish POW’s while they were still missing, and
Soviet Inconsistencies. the Soviets had previously told the Poles they either couldn’t find the missing Polish POW’s or that they had been released from their camps, even though no one had heard from them,
Identification In Transit. several of the bodies had been specifically identified by their clothing and rank. Some of these men had been seen in transport en route to the execution site by other Polish POW’s,
Search Parties. their search parties within the Soviet Union had come up with nothing,
Eyewitness Statements. one of the intended Polish officers being sent to his death was Jewish, and ran across a Soviet officer who was also Jewish, who freed him so that he could escape the impending murder, the Polish officer was able to later escape,
Wrong Weather Clothes. the bodies as found were wearing heavy coats suitable for the cold spring, but not weather-appropriate for the Soviet’s claim that they were killed by the Germans in August 1941,
Wear-and-Tear on Clothes. the basic wear-and-tear on the clothing and boots did not look like they had been imprisoned for two years, it looked more like less than a year or less,
No Bugs on the Bodies. When exhumed, the bodies did not have insect larvae or other indications of flies or gnats getting into the rotting flesh. This is an indication that the executions were performed at a very cold part of the year, not in August,
Identification of the Bodies. Some of the bodies were able to be identified in April 1943, or had enough personal notes and letters on them so that their bodies could be identified, and were the names of the missing Polish officers. There would be no way for the Germans to have known this in advance,
Communist Doctrine/“Red Terror.” part of well-known Communist doctrine was to execute entire classes of people who were problems, such as how Stalin executed Kulaks, and how Bela Kun executed POWs, doctors, and lawyers in Crimea and previously, Hungary,
Suspicious Soviet Reaction. the Soviet reaction in Pravda was to blame the Poles for seeking an impartial investigation and review of the mass grave from the Red Cross, and
Incoherent Soviet Story. part of the Soviet initial response was that these were POW’s working at a work camp that was captured by the Germans, after which the Germans executed them in August 1941. If that were true, their search parties and their inquiries would not have been as fruitless as before. It’s also bizarre to think the Germans would murder these men and then dig them up later claiming that the Soviets were the real perpetrators.
Strung Along. The Polish authorities had been in the Soviet Union trying to get access to their men, or at least a firm answer on where they were at. They were constantly gaslit by Stalin, Beria, and many others. The Soviets now wanted Polish help in forming an army to oppose the Germans, but they had blood on their own hands at the same time. So the Soviet authorities spent 1941-1942 stringing along the Polish authorities making them constantly meet with mid-level bureaucrats and shuffling them around different administrative centers.
Evidence of Elaborate Cover-Up Efforts. trees were found over some of the graves. The Soviets had taken young conifers and tried to place them over the mass graves. If the Germans had done this, they were going to great lengths to cover their own crimes and then expose their own crimes.
So there was zero doubt among the Poles as to what had happened here: their men were killed by the Soviets.
Now, these things were known to the Americans, British, and Polish, because the Poles had been tracking the fate of their officer corps since the Russian invasion in September 1939.
Here’s a relevant excerpt from files with the U.S. government, showing that the Polish government-in-exile in Britain had been tracking which three camps their men were at: Starobielski, Kozielski I, and Ostaszkow.
It also shows at the end of the provided excerpt, that the Poles realized that in October 1940 those three camps had suddenly been “liquidated.”
The report also shows that the Poles then sent expeditions to try and find their men, including to some of the most remote regions of the Soviet Union.
To give some kind of context to the places where the three missions were sent, I made the following map, below. Apparently the team sent to Kolyma returned, though the other two did not.
Here’s a map of the GULAG system.
There were an estimated 30,000 GULAG camps, the slave labor camps of the Soviets.
In the excerpt, they mention that the Poles took notice that the murderous head of the secret police, Beria, said to one of their emissaries: “My z nimi zdielali bolszuju oszybku” which is probably meant to be “Мы с ними сделали большую ошибку” which translates to “We made a big mistake with them.”
In other US government reports, it is Beria’s deputy Vsevolod Merkulow (1895-1953) who utters the line to General Berling. Here is that version:
The Beria-Berling conversation involved General Zygmunt Berling (1892-1980).
This second referenced quote was a conversation involving General Władysław Anders (1892-1970) from Poland, who had long been searching for his men throughout the Soviet Union, but also caught up in the war, and then was ultimately betrayed by the Allies in 1944 at Yalta.
After protesting the Allies about the fate of his men who had been killed by the Soviets, having been continuously put on the front lines of the conflict, Churchill told him that he was ‘no longer needed’ in 1944, after the Yalta deal selling out Poland had been completed, and after the end of the war was well in sight. Anders fought the German invasion, he fought the Soviet invasion, he fought with the Allies against the Germans, only to be sold out in the end by the Allies to the Soviets. The fate of Poland was sealed: the war that started for Polish independence from Germany would see Poland’s 46 year enslavement to the Soviet Union.
So these Polish military officers, representing the Polish government-in-exile, knew 1) that their men had been taken by the Soviets, 2) they were put into camps, 3) those camps were suddenly liquidated, 4) the men within those camps disappeared, 5) the Soviets offered odd excuses, 6) search parties sent to find the men found nothing or were, themselves, missing, 7) Soviet leaders in a position to know were making cryptic comments sounding like something bad had happened.
The executions had happened in April & May of 1940.
Now it’s true that the reliability of the crime could be considered war propaganda. The Germans indeed used the crime as a propaganda tool in exposing Soviet crimes.
Here were some German propaganda posters related to the Katyn massacre:
But of course the most powerful facts are going to be used as propaganda. Not all propaganda is lies, in fact the most effective propaganda is the skillful use of the truth.
Anyway, the point is that in April 1943, there was no reasonable dispute as to who was responsible for this field of bodies. The essential truth of the matter has not changed since it was first reported.
The only thing that has changed is that the claimed fatalities has gone up as more bodies were found.
This war atrocity was originally claimed by the Germans to involve 3,000 bodies, then quickly thereafter 11,000. Later excavations, realizing this site was a dumping ground for Polish officers killed elsewhere but buried there, in addition to being a common dumping ground for bodies of other civilian victims of Soviet crimes, ultimately estimates 22,000 Polish POW bodies now.
Allied leaders knew the truth, but preferred to lie to the public anyway.
In a private letter with Polish Prime Minister in Exile Władysław Sikorski (1883-1943) in response to his request for help investigating this crime, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said: “Unfortunately, the German accusations are probably true. The Bolsheviks are capable of the worst atrocities.”
But in an official meeting with the Polish Prime Minister, Churchill’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, asked the Polish Prime Minister to issue a statement confirming that the Katyn massacre was a Nazi fabrication, to which he refused. He died three months later in a plane crash on July 4, 1943 while departing Gibraltar after inspecting his troops.
In private, the U.S. military head of Intelligence George Strong (1880-1946) said he was only interested in information about Katyn if it showed that the Germans were responsible.
To his credit, American Col. Henry I. Szymanski sent the information a day later anyway.
In 1944 FDR sent former Ambassador George Earle III on a fact-finding mission to debunk the Katyn Forest massacre narrative. To his credit, Earle came back and said that the Soviets were responsible. FDR didn’t like that answer, so he suppressed his report. When Earle asked to publish his report anyway, FDR said he could not under no circumstances, and sent him to sit out the rest of the war in American Samoa.
The George Howard Earle papers are in Philadelphia.
In 1945, the Soviets tried indicting the German defendants for the Katyn crime. The defense scored so many points, that they caused the Soviet prosecutors to drop the accusation, coupled with pressure behind the scenes from American intelligence who knew that this charge could easily blow up in their faces.
By 1946, with the Nuremberg trials still ongoing, the quality of the Soviet argument for German guilt about the Katyn Forest Massacres was pretty weak, here were their remaining 6 pro-Soviet arguments:
Internally, the Americans documenting Nuremberg made clear that no thinking person thought by this point that the Germans had committed this crime.
In response to the Goering indictment falling apart, and the clear and obvious guilt of the Soviets being established, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg simply decided to never make Goering’s statements public.
In 1946, a Soviet investigator is killed in Krakow, Roman Martini. Some claim he was killed because, having led the Katyn Massacre investigation for the Soviets, he realized that the Soviets were responsible and was about to publicly say so. Others claim he was killed by a 16 year old lover and her fiancee. Supposedly Martini named six people as having a major role in the massacre and were previously not known.
By 1950, even Churchill was admitting in his “war memoirs” that he didn’t believe the Soviet version of events about Katyn.
Here’s the key passage of Churchill’s personal logic about why Katyn was a Soviet crime and not a German one, and it doesn’t make much sense.
In 1952, Congress investigated the Katyn Massacres. The Committee was known as the “Madden Committee” for the name of the Chair, Rep. Ray J. Madden (D-IN)(1892-1987). In their final report, they identified that the FDR administration knew about the atrocities before they were made public, and stayed silent. Once the atrocities were public, they did not offend the Soviets, and officials took repeated actions to instill doubt into the public’s mind about who was responsible.
Congress made clear that the Soviet motive was to ensure that an entire class of Polish military, social, and cultural professional was dead rather than able to organize against Soviet imperialism. The death of these men made the Yalta betrayal possible, because there was no possible organized Polish resistance to Soviet plans.
Congress also noted that military files were stamped secret when they tried to relate the truth of this issue, and then disappeared altogether from the government’s files.
At the Congressional hearings, Congress brought in the legal champion from Nuremberg: Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, to testify. Jackson defended the work of Nuremberg, and even attempted to justify including Katyn in the indictments:
The missing Col. Van Vliet document from 1945 reappeared in government files in 2014.
In 1952, Julius Epstein, who later publishes the main work on Operation Keelhaul, publicly asks Churchill what he believes about Katyn, and Churchill remains silent.
In 1960, Shirer published his classic text, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
In it, there’s no mention of the Katyn Forest massacres.
In 1961, William Shirer gave a speech at Chapman College in Orange, California according to this letter to the editor and was preaching peaceful co-existence with Communism, called the United Nations the “great hope for mankind” and condemned the anti-Communist John Birch Society.
This 2011 biography of William Shirer, “The Long Night” by Steve Wick, has no mention of the Katyn Massacre within it either.
This 2015 biography of William Shirer, “A Complex Fate” by Ken Cuthbertson, nowhere in its 1700+ pages does he bother mentioning Shirer’s coverage of Katyn:
There’s really no one who challenges the basic the-Soviets-did-Katyn-Forest narrative anymore. There are no revisionists or those challenging its historicity.
But the man who used his credibility and position to help set the false narrative on the topic, that lasted for years, never corrected his reporting.
Shirer considered himself an expert on Nazi propaganda, but after 1945, he never published another word about Katyn that I can find anywhere. He helped set the official narrative, and then absolved himself of his guardianship and Soviet protection racket.
By the 1990s, not only had the Soviet government begrudgingly admitted its responsibility for this massacre, but the orders from Lavrentiy Beria to the Politburo authorizing the massacre were found and published in the Soviet archives.
This document below is the first page of the order to execute the Polish officers. It was signed on March 5, 1940, proposed by Lavrentiy Beria (1899-1953) and presented to the Soviet Politburo. The signers of this document included:
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953),
Mikhail Kalinin (1875-1946),
Lazar Kaganovich (1893-1991),
Kliment Voroshilov (1881-1961),
Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986),
Anastas Mikoyan (1895-1978).
The consequences of this document would cost 22,000 Polish men under Soviet control their lives, it would set the stage for the Yalta agreement, and it would largely condemn the Polish government for two generations of Soviet oppression.
I was able to get Google Translate to translate the document:
An English translation of the entire document is available here.
One brief excerpt dispatches of the Polish POW problem with blunt Soviet amorality:
(1) To instruct the USSR NKVD that it should try them before special tribunals:
(a) the cases of the 14,700 former Polish officers, government officials, land owners, police officers, intelligence officers, gendarmes, settlers in the border regions and prison guards being held in prisoner-of-war camps;
(b) together with the cases of 11,000 members of various counter-revolutionary organizations of spies and saboteurs, former land owners, factory owners, former Polish officers, government officials, and escapees who have been arrested and are being held in the western provinces of the Ukraine and Belarus and apply to them the supreme penalty: shooting.
This document was held in the Stalin Secret Archive in Moscow. It was an archive within an archive, and its very existence was kept secret for many years. Only when the Soviet Union had collapsed and Russia was starving in the 1990s, were historians able to buy their way in and get access to the materials.
Even in the 1990s, settling the many lies about Katyn was still not possible until this archive opened up. The many Soviet lies and deflections, empowered and enabled by journalists like Shirer, persisted past his death and the death of the Soviet regime.
Shirer’s reporting and repetition of Soviet lies helped confuse the historical record for nearly two generations. Here’s a news report from 1956 showing that the matter was still not closed in the public mind:
It took until the 1990s until the matter was firmly settled with archival documents.
Jonathan Brent describes this archival treasure hunt in 2008’s “Inside the Stalin Archive.”
So today, there’s no doubt that this crime happened and who authorized it, but we also even know who performed it.
But then again the Poles knew this the day the Germans announced the gruesome find, on April 11, 1943. They had enough evidence to convince anyone of Soviet guilt who honestly asked them what they thought. Clearly Shirer didn’t bother.
None of the men involved faced any prosecution for this crime, and suffered no consequence.
The closest to any consequence came for the NKVD chief Beria, who was deposed in a 1953 coup that had more to do with power politics, than in any sense of justice.
An estimated 7,000 of the Katyn men were killed by one executioner alone, Vasily Blokhin (1895-1955). For 28 days straight, he worked 10 hour days killing Polish soldiers. They brought them in one by one, 300 per truck per night, and Blokhin shot them in the back of the head as they walked into an office specially-designed for that purpose. It was later estimated that he shot one man every three minutes.
The details seem insane, but the two things the Soviets were legitimately good at was propaganda and executions.
This is an actual picture of Blokhin, below. This picture is a reflection of what allegedly happened 7,000 times over the course of two months.
The industrial process used to kill this many people over this period of time was dramatized in 2007’s little-seen movie “Katyn”
So with that backdrop, with all that context, with all those details, how did William Shirer report the news of the Soviet atrocity?
He blamed the Germans.
He helped to steep the crime in the cloud of war and ambiguity so as to help guard the Soviets against the political problem of fighting a war on the same side as troops whom you had executed in cold blood for purely ideological reasons.
Here is Shirer’s original article from April 24, 1943, which is a mere 13 days after the Germans had first announced finding the mass graves:
In it, you can tell the basic narrative frame from the headline: “Polish Government’s Biting at Baited Nazi Propaganda Hook Threatens to Impair Future Relations with Russia.”
Notice the first two paragraphs to know how this story is being framed by Shirer:
Don’t overlook Shirer’s loaded narrative frames in just the first two paragraphs:
Poles are ‘deliberately playing into the hands of Nazi propaganda’
The claims will ‘surprise’ many friends of Poland, because the important part is Poland’s reaction, not the discovery of a mass grave
“Before matters get out of control” means the political consequence of this find should be deliberately contained and minimized for its potential impact.
“It might be well to look into the facts” implies that the facts are reasonably in dispute, assuming the Soviets have a valid defense.
“threatens to upset the Allied applecart” shows that the real concern was not the truth of the matter,
“…give Dr. Goebbels his greatest propaganda victory of the war” reduces the importance of the story to how it affects the German war effort, not the truth of the matter therein. The framing on this presumes that, even if the story is true, it should be suppressed because of its possible effect on the war effort.
Then in a later paragraph, you can read between the lines and notice that Shirer admits that the Soviets might be responsible.
But he blames the Germans for… waiting so long to find the mass grave.
Shirer then reduces the entire incident to just mere propaganda. You can see how the tone shift here makes it seem as though the entire incident is just propaganda, whether it’s true or not.
Look at the last line, “It thus official gave credence to the Nazi reports.” Meaning that, of course, the entire incident is just mere propaganda. This line reveals Shirer’s intent to reduce this entire news story, to guard against the possible truth of 10,000+ victims of mass execution, to just mere propaganda.
Whether it’s true or not, it’s false.
But here’s where Shirer again reveals his deceitfulness, when he later titles a section “Question Remains” and impugns the motives of the Polish government-in-exile as to why they aren’t challenging other atrocity stories.
Shirer also admits he’s in tough with the Polish government, who were all of the mind to say that the Soviets were the only ones responsible for the crime.
The end of the article also shows Shirer’s bias against whether or not this incident is true, indicating he knew that on some level it was true. Shirer reduces the entire incident down to his it affects international politics, not whether the incident was true or not. The only consequence that matters is how it affects the Allied ability to win the war.
“One need have no illusions about Soviet gentleness” read against the rest of the story offers quite a contrast. If the Soviets are not gentle, if they did this evil thing, even though it plays into German propaganda, it should be ignored because it might help lose a war. That’s the explicit ending of the Shirer piece.
And it wasn’t just the ‘fog of war’ causing confusion. In April 1945, Shirer was referring to Katyn in a list of ‘fakes’ put out by Nazi propaganda that duped the West.
It’s the journalism of total moral bankruptcy. It’s also notably the kind of immoral pragmatism that only inures in favor of the Soviets.
By 1960, when Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” is coming out, reviews such as this one by Hugh Trevor-Roper list out a few mild criticisms. Covering for the Soviets, of course, is not one of them. Trevor-Roper’s credibility would be permanently undermined after authenticating the “Hitler Diaries” in 1983. Here’s Trevor-Roper commenting on William Shirer’s flaws in 1960:
Just to be blunt and plain-spoken: Shirer’s problems was that he was constantly shilling for the Soviets. He was always guarding their position so as to empower them to evade any responsibility on the world stage. Shirer protected the Soviet regime from scrutiny and any kind of international pressure to stop their many atrocities.
I’ve posted the entire William Shirer articles on Katyn below for your review and to provide maximum context.
Look at this dishonest Letter to the Editor that he wrote in 1973, saying that Nixon was worse than Hitler, and complaining about the bombings at Guernica.
The 1937 bombing of Guernica was a Soviet propaganda atrocity tale, it’s also the subject of Pablo Picasso’s most famous painting. The Soviets claim 800-1,600 died in the bombing, when the real number is probably more like 126.
Was Shirer a spy? A fellow traveler? A useful idiot? Just an insufferable progressive? We may never know. But he wasn’t a journalist.
When I was in Russia for a few weeks over a decade ago, I was able to meet with a representative from the Duma who handled historical issues. I asked about the Katyn Forest massacre and the challenge in remembering it when it is also an acknowledgement of a failure, an embarrassment.
The Russian upbraided me a bit, and pointed out that many worse things had happened to their own citizens, he made the correct point that the Soviet state was most brutal to its own people, a perversion of the highest order. His subtle point was that the Polish government continues to fight for these dead Poles, but who mourns the millions of Russians who died under the rule of the gangster Soviets? No one sent expeditions into Russia looking for Russians being shot in the back of the head.
That’s what Shirer was guarding: the ability of the Soviets to continue victimizing Poles, Slavs, and their own native populations.
Shirer never wrote about Katyn again after setting the dominant narrative: that it was all a fake. When the mainstream view changed in 1950 due to the Congressional hearings and the Madden Report, Shirer just ignored the topic for the rest of his life.
We’re 84 years away from events in the Katyn Forest. Even the grandchildren of the men who died there are elders now.
Yet culturally, it comes up in interesting ways. It still arises in political discourse, not to mention shaping the backdrop of modern conflicts such as the Ukraine War where Poland continues to seethe in hatred for the Russians over this incident.
But among journalists, there was no reckoning for the decades of shilling for the Soviets.
People like Shirer are revered and lauded, rather than re-examined or ‘cancelled’ in modern parlance. The most minor of party line deviations can get you cancelled in 2024, but shilling and covering-up for the most murderous regime in the 20th century isn’t one of them.
This lack of self-awareness can be seen by 2014, where far-left public figure Ta-Nehisi Coates can write a book review in the Atlantic about “Grappling with History’s Greatest Gangsters” (Archive Link) about Beria’s crimes in relation to the Katyn Forest massacre with no sense, recognition, or accountability that left-wing public figures from years past covered for, guarded, and protected those crimes.
The only reason we even know about these issues is because of persistent right wing ‘conspiracy theorists’ whose contributions are continuously suppressed and ignored.
Coates even focuses on the issue of culpability for these crimes, and exactly which vantage point the reader should access the material. I am quoting Coates in the first paragraph of what’s next, and Coates is then quoting author Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands” in the second paragraph.
Still I think Snyder frames the questions correctly--How can men commit such acts? The question is not answered by empty invocations of "evil" or vague invocations of "sociopathy." The question is not answered by memorializing victims (though this has its place) or the construction of national oaths (though that too might have its place.) On the contrary the question might best be answered, not by identifying with history greatest victims, but by identifying with its killers. This is in fact, as Snyder argues, the moral position:
It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.
The basic left-wing position as argued by Coates is to assess the Katyn crime by putting yourself in the empathetic shoes of Katyn mass murderer Vasily Blokhin.
Today’s reminder that liberalism is truly a mind virus.
Instead of moralizing about murderers, why can’t we come to a consensus on how it all happened and who is to blame? Surely there’s a little bit of blame to go on the multitude of Soviet apologists.
Liberalism is a mind virus that has infected all of our historical scholarship for over a century.
With the benefit of history you can see how the left committed the massacre, and then used its agents in the media to cover it up, and then continue molesting the public’s mind about the topic for generations.
If one were inclined to research the topic some more, the William Shirer papers are at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The FDR papers are at his Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York. The National Archives II in College Park, Maryland always have relevant files related to the federal government and here would definitely have things relevant to the State Department’s investigation of this issue and how it affected Polish relations. A good starting point are the ~1500+ pages of the Katyn Massacre available from the primary document service BACM.
So, this is all a long way of saying: William Shirer covered up the Katyn Forest Massacre and never paid any price for it. He was a Soviet apologist who set the WW2 narrative to help cover up for Soviet atrocities, and yet he’s still prominent and well-respected today.
But of course that’s also all true of Churchill as well.
ARTICLES by WILLIAM SHIRER—————————————————————
“Polish Government’s Biting at Baited Nazi Propaganda Hook Threatens to Impair Future Relations with Russia” by William Shirer
The Richmond News Leader - Sat, Apr 24, 1943 ·Page 9
“Nazi Triumph in Splitting Poles and Russians Proves Words are Still a Deadly Weapon” by William Shirer
Detroit Free Press - Detroit, Michigan • Sun, May 2, 1943 - Page 60
“Clever Ruses Stir Dissension” by William Shirer
The Austin American - Sun, Apr 15, 1945 ·Page 24
The Soviet crimes at Katyn were chronicled in 2010 by the walking saint of "F*ck the Media", Patrick J. Buchanan (PBUH): https://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2010/04/12/katyn-and-the-good-war/
Buchanan wrote this just after a plane crash had killed the top tier of the Polish government, coincidentally, as they were on their way to commemorate the victims of the Katyn Massacre.
> On Sept. 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany to restore the integrity and
> independence of Poland. For this great goal they converted a German-Polish clash that lasted three
> weeks into a world war lasting six years.
>
> And was Poland saved? No. Poland was crucified.
You really should read the whole thing. He covers Operation Keelhaul and the mass murder and rape committed by the Red Army at the end of WWII. Things no one, present company excluded, even touches today.
Best piece yet on this Substack. Kudos, sir. I hope I don't hog your comment section here with too may remarks, because I have a lot to add to this discussion.
First-- Re: Jonathan Brent, like Stalin, has an archive of historically relevant material that he doesn't want people to see.
https://archive.is/Fig5M
> Crammed with papers and books, Mr. Brent's office at Yale looks like just what it is: home to a busy > and energetic editor, a man with a bulging Rolodex and a filing cabinet full of press clippings.
>
> But there in the corner, under the window is a squat Sentry safe with a combination lock.
>
> "I have some documents I don't want anybody to see," he explains."Yes, related to the 'Annals'
> series." What about? "I don't want to be coy, but they have to do with World War II." He will say no
> more.