THE KATYN FOREST MASSACRE

Ever since the discredited story of Germans cutting off the hands of Belgian children in World War I, U.S. citizens have viewed atrocity stories with a skepticism which does them credit. Last week the reports of the Communist atrocities in Korea were a reminder of an almost-forgotten atrocity, the Katyn Forest massacre, which is now under investigation by a committee of the U.S. Congress.

The Date of the Crime. The Katyn (rhymes with sateen) massacre was first reported by the Nazis in April 1943. On a spruce-covered hill overlooking the Dnieper, near Smolensk, Russia, they had found, stacked in mass graves, the bodies of some 4,000 Polish officers. Each was bound with hands behind his back; each had been shot through the base of the skull. The Nazis charged that the Russians had done it. The Polish officers, they said, were those captured by the Russians when they invaded Poland in September 1939. The Russians had shipped them from various prison camps to Smolensk, carried out the executions in March, April and May 1940.

The Nazis made the most of the charge in an effort to sour relations between the Russians and the other Allies. The Polish government-in-exile in London promptly asked both Germany and Russia to allow investigation by the International Red Cross. Germany agreed; Russia did not. The Nazis sent teams of medical experts, comprised of non-German doctors, to corroborate their findings, and even brought several Allied prisoners to view the bodies. The Nazis claimed that no clippings or letters were found on the bodies dated later than May 1940--more than a year before Hitler invaded Russia.

The charge was made at a time when anything the Nazis said was deeply and properly distrusted. The Russians promptly countercharged that the Nazis had done it. The Russian story: when the Red armies retreated from Smolensk, they had to leave behind the captive Polish officers. The Nazis had shot the Poles, rigged the Katyn story as a propaganda plant.

After the Russians recaptured Smolensk in 1943, they put on a show of their own with their own medical experts and investigators, and brought down a group of U.S. correspondents to watch. By autopsy and other evidence, the Russians had their own date for the massacre: August 1941.

During the postwar period of Soviet-Western cordiality, the Russian version became accepted as true. The Katyn Forest tragedy was all but forgotten--except by the Poles. But a number of U.S. Congressmen, urged on by their Polish-American constituents and a committee headed by former

U.S. Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane, persistently urged a reinvestigation of Katyn. This fall, the Rules Committee appointed a special investigating committee with Democrat Raymond Madden of Indiana as chairman, got the House to authorize $20,000 for expenses.

The Missing Report. One of the first things they investigated was a report made by Lieut. Colonel John H. Van Vliet Jr. As a wartime prisoner in Germany, West Pointer Van Vliet had been one of four Allied officers forced by the Germans to go under guard to Katyn. When he was liberated in 1945, Van Vliet promptly made a report to Major General Clayton Bissell, chief of War Department Intelligence in Washington. Bissell had him dictate a full account of the trip, marked it "Top Secret," and swore him to silence. Then, somehow, the Top Secret report disappeared. Bissell said he sent it to the State Department; State says it never received it and the Army had no receipt to show that it did.

When this was discovered, five years later, the Army asked Van Vliet to reconstruct his report from memory. His conclusions: "I believe the Russians did it. I hated the Germans, I didn't want to believe them. I realized the Germans would do their best to convince me that Russia was guilty ... It was only with great reluctance that I decided finally that it must be true."

Van Vliet admitted that no single piece of evidence provided absolute proof, but particularly, Van Vliet noticed the condition of the uniforms and boots. If the officers had been killed after two years in prison camp, these would have shown much more wear, Van Vliet thought. Lieut. Colonel Donald B. Stewart, another U.S. prisoner of the Germans, told the committee that he agreed with Van Vliet. Other investigators have pointed out that many officers were dressed in fur coats and woolen scarves--dress suitable for Smolensk's cold spring but unlikely for August when the Russians claim the Poles were shot by the Germans.

If the Russians were indeed responsible for the Katyn massacre as such preliminary findings indicated it would be clear evidence that the Kremlin had planned the extirpation of Polish army leadership far in advance (some 11,000 other Polish officers had simply disappeared without trace in Russia). The Kremlin's rule in Poland today is maintained through the Communist party and through Red Army Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, who is Poland's Defense Minister. Russian control is greatly facilitated by the fact that the major part of Poland's officer corps is either dead or in exile.

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