Katyn (4 Stars)

This film is about one of the forgotten incidents of World War Two: the massacre of 22,000 Polish army officers by the Russians in 1940. When the war began Germany and Russia had signed a pact that deemed they would cooperate in the event that one of them was attacked by another country. The public part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact made it sound like a non-aggression pact, but there were confidential paragraphs that agreed on more active cooperation. As a reaction to England declaring war on Germany, Russia invaded Poland. The opening scenes of the film show the absurd situation of Polish refugees fleeing westwards to escape the Russians while other refugees were fleeing eastwards to escape the Germans, and crossing one another on a bridge.

Germany and Russia worked closely in the division of Poland. Stalin requested that all captured army officers be handed over to the Russians. In return all other soldiers were handed over to the Germans. Germany imprisoned the POWs and treated them relatively humanely; Russia executed the Polish officers and buried them in mass graves in the forest near Katyn. Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, 131 refugees, 20 university professors, 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots.

The killings were methodical. After the personal information of the condemned was checked, he was handcuffed and led to a cell insulated with stacks of sandbags along the walls and a felt-lined, heavy door. The victim was told to kneel in the middle of the cell, was then approached from behind by the executioner and immediately shot in the back of the head. The body was carried out through the opposite door and laid in one of the five or six waiting trucks, whereupon the next condemned was taken inside. In addition to muffling by the rough insulation in the execution cell, the pistol gunshots were also masked by the operation of loud machines (perhaps fans) throughout the night. This procedure went on every night, except for the May Day holiday.

Evidence of the massacre was discovered by the western powers late in the war years. Russia claimed that the massacre had been committed by the Germans in 1941, after Russia had withdrawn from Poland. Anyone in Poland who denied that the Germans had been guilty for the massacre was imprisoned; in fact, it remained a criminal offence to deny German responsibility until 1989.

Note: Throughout this review I have called the country "Russia" instead of using its official name, the "Soviet Union" or the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (USSR). This is a deliberate choice on my part. Calling the country a union implies a voluntary coalition of free states. In actual fact, the 14 member states were enslaved to Russia. The country that waged war against Poland was Russia, and its 14 slave states were dragged into the conflict against their will.