Soviet massacre 'hushed up'
Date September 12, 2012
Flowers laid near the portrait of a Polish officer at the memorial wall near the mass graves in Katyn. Photo: AFP
NEWLY released World War II documents bolster a long-held belief the United States covered up Soviet responsibility for the infamous 1940 massacre of Polish soldiers in the Katyn Forest.
The papers lend weight to the belief the mass executions of about 22,000 Polish soldiers and other prisoners were hushed up because then US president Franklin Roosevelt did not want to anger Russia's Joseph Stalin, whose forces were essential to defeating Adolf Hitler.
The documents, about 1000 pages of declassified files, put online by the US National Archives, included coded messages from American soldiers captured by the Germans.
They reported in 1943 seeing rows of partially mummified corpses in Polish officer uniforms in Katyn, near Smolensk, proving they could not have been killed by the Nazis, who seized the western Russian region in 1941.
The national archives said the documents were declassified at the request of two US politicians acting for a research body, the Katyn Council.
The National Archives says a US congressional panel called the Madden Committee concluded in 1951 that the Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, was responsible.
The archives said on its website the question of the US staging a cover-up so as not to antagonise ally Stalin ''was less clear cut''.
The Madden committee concluded that US officials failed to assess properly and act on ''clear danger signals in Russian behaviour evident as early as 1942'', the archives said.
