re: #165 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

I remember what a big blowup there was over Katyn: my hometown of Gary, Indiana, with a large Polish immigrant community, was home of a major conference on that topic in the 1950.

Although I fully understand the political ramifications of determining who was responsible for this particular massacre, when you look at the bigger picture it is like two crackheads who break into a house and murder the whole family then arguing about which one of them strangled grandma…

Churchill and FDR intentionally suppressed the story because there was a danger that it would further damage the alliance. I must say I support that decision. Realpolitik. Katyn then came up during the Nuremberg trial. The Soviets wanted to pin it on the Germans through a pure technicality. Art. 21 of the Nuremberg charter said that the court shall take judicial notice of all official Allied acts. The Soviet judge and the main Soviet prosecutor both (absurdly) argued that it means that the case is automatically proven by the Soviet report and cannot be refuted by the defendants even in principle. The Western judges thankfully disagreed, each side could present their own witnesses (3 each), and Katyn was not mentioned in the judgment.

After the Cold War started Katyn became a useful anti-Communist tool, hence the Congressional hearings about it in 1952 (the Madden committee), probably leading to the conference that you have mentioned.