>For it was Polish defiance of Adolf Hitler's demand to negotiate the return of Danzig, a German town put under Polish control after World War I, that gave birth to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which led to Katyn.
>After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, ignited the war, Joseph Stalin attacked Poland from the east on Sept. 17, capturing much of the Polish officer corps.
>In April 1940, on Stalin's order, the Soviet Secret Police, the NKVD, murdered virtually the entire leadership of the nation, including 8,000 officers and near twice that number of intellectuals and civilian leaders. Some 4,000 were shot with their hands tied behind their backs in Katyn Forest.
>The Germans unearthed the bodies in 1943 and invited the Red Cross in to examine the site. Through newspapers found on the corpses, the date of the atrocity was fixed as more than a year before the German Army invaded the Soviet Union.
>When Polish patriots, whose sons had flown with the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, went to Winston Churchill to demand that he get answers from Stalin about the atrocity, he brushed them off.
>"There is no sense prowling around the three-year-old graves of Smolensk," said the Great Man.
>At Stalin's request, Churchill bullied the Poles into acceding to Soviet annexation of all the Polish land Stalin had been awarded for signing his pact with Hitler.
>At the Nuremberg trials, the Russian delegation, led by Andrei Vishinsky, the prosecutor who did Stalin's dirty work in the purge trials, charged the Germans with the massacre.
>This presented a problem for the Americans and British who knew the truth. They finessed the issue by leaving the charge unresolved.
>Katyn and 'The Good War' by Pat Buchanan
m.townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2010/04/13/katyn_and_the_good_war
