ABSTRACT
The long drawn out search for the truth about Katyn and the 1940 massacre resembles a detective story in many respects. The issue was further complicated because, as Congressman Ray Madden said when chairing the 1952 committee, ‘the Katyn massacre is the only international crime in world history where two nations disputed the guilt’.1 The general outline of the Kozelsk-Katyn, Starobelsk-Kharkov and Ostashkov-Mednoe aspects of the 1940 massacre has been revealed in the extensive detail covered in this book by the political admissions, archival revelations, judicial investigations and exhumations of the early 1990s. The exhumations, however, were only able to resolve the commemoration issue on a largely group not individual basis. Although much progress was made it did not prove possible to identify all the Polish bodies individually in the three burial sites nor to establish fully comprehensive lists of all the Poles buried there. Beyond that, as we saw in Chapter Five, the burial sites of the victims associated with the 1940 massacre in the Ukraine and Belarus still have not been established while the names of those killed in Belarus remain even hazier. Although probably hardly anyone who had participated in carrying out the 1940 massacre was still alive by 2004 only the names of the top planners and middle-level organisers as well as the main executioners had been established while most of the lower-level incidental assistants and escort guards had vanished into oblivion. Finally, one doubts if any new documentation will emerge about the motivation behind the top leadership decision. At most some scraps of hearsay or diary evidence concerning some NKVD functionary involved or a forgotten copy of a list or order may emerge in due course. One doubts if anything new still remains to be discovered about Stalin himself. It is also unlikely if anything major concerning the Western cover-up and its convoluted consequences, despite the Hess speculation and the question marks over Allied wartime intelligence material, still remains to be exposed. The fundamental general issues, however, still remain for further discussion so the interpretation of the material will continue to be fought over.
