1 July 1946

During the Nuremberg trial, the Soviet prosecutors make an unsuccessful attempt, as it will later turn out, to charge the German officers Colonel Friedrich Ahrens and Lieutenant Reinhard von Eichborn from the 537th communications regiment of the former Army Group „Centre” with responsibility for the murder of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest.

 

5 July 1946.

On that day, in his account of the Nuremberg trial, ‘Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza’ revealed the dropping off of the report on the massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest to Dr. Otto Kranzbuchler (Admiral Doenitz’s defender), but also the fact that this document was not accepted by a British judge, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, President of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, as having no publisher’s name.

The London pamphlet ‘Report on the Massacre of Polish Officers on the Katyn Wood’ will go down in history as a document whose inclusion in evidence would not save the lives of the judged leaders of the Third Reich, but would certainly drive a wedge between the Allies. And perhaps it would led to the outbreak of World War III, which for two years had been precisely prepared on the orders of Winston Churchill.

30 October 1947 

Ivan Kriwoziertsev, the main witness of the Katyn Massacre, who had been interrogated several times and who did not hide the NKVD massacre, was found hung in Somerset, England.   

17 November 1949

Letter from Arthur Bliss-Lane, Chairman of the American Committee of Katyn to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union Andrei Wyszynski, in which he calls for help in establishing the truth about ‘the crime committed against over 4 thousand Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest and the disappearance of another 10 thousand Polish prisoners during the Second World War in other parts of the USSR’. The addressee did not reply.

17 September 1950

Zofia Dwornik, a student of the Łódź Film School was sentenced to one year in prison by the Provincial Court for the city of Łódź for ‘spreading false information about the Katyń crime and the liberation of eastern lands by the Red Army in September 1939’. In the justification of the verdict it was written about ‘the action [of the convicted person] to the detriment of the interests of the People’s Republic of Poland and international relations with the Soviet Union’

7 October 1950

In Skarbków near Lwówek Śląski, Security Office officers arrested the owner of a car workshop, Mikołaj Marczyk, who in 1943 was sent to Katyn with a group of Polish workers from the GG’s work establishments, and after his return he accused – depending on the listeners – Germans or Russians of committing a crime there

18 September 1951   

On the initiative of the democrat from Gary, Indiana, Ray Madden from the House of Representatives adopted a resolution recommending the establishment of a seven-member Congress committee in the United States to ‘conduct an in-depth investigation into the facts, evidence and circumstances both before and after the murder of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest and to find those responsible’

 

11 October 1951

In Washington, DC, the first day of witness hearings by the US Congress Committee known as the Madden Committee takes place. The representatives of the USSR and the People’s Republic of Poland, invited to listen to the committee’s work, did not come forward.

3 March 1952

The USSR Embassy in Washington reminds the U.S. Department of State that the Katyn Massacre case ‘was already investigated by an official commission in 1944, it was stated that the Katyn case was the work of Nazi criminals [and] the reopening of the Katyn Massacre case after eight years […] can only aim at slandering the Soviet Union…’

 

10 March 1952

In a letter, printed that day in the ‘Trybuna Ludu’, the reader introducing himself as ‘Stanisław Zdanowicz – son of a lieutenant in the Polish Army killed in Katyn [ ?! ] – Władysław Zdanowicz’ stresses that ‘for all those who lost their loved ones in Katyn it is clear that this crime was committed by the Nazis…’

 

14 March 1952

‘Dziennik Zachodni’ prints the ‘Statement of the Czechoslovak scholar Franciszek Hajek, professor of forensic medicine at Charles University in Prague’, who participated in the research in 1943, in the Katyn Forest, which was conducted by a group of international experts in forensic medicine. In the ‘Statement’, Professor Hajek informs that he went to Katyn ‘fearing arrest and sending to a concentration camp’ and ‘from the very beginning he became strongly convinced that all this terrible crime was committed by the Nazis themselves…’

 

May 1952

A book by Bolesław Wójcicki titled ‘Prawda o Katyniu’ (‘The Truth About Katyn’),  was published in Warsaw with a circulation of 10,000 copies. The book criticizes the activity of the ‘Katyn committee’ in the United States, as well as the ‘Nazi murderers of Polish prisoners of war near Katyn [ ?! ] and American murderers of Korean and Chinese prisoners of war…’. The second, extended edition of this book was published in 1953.

 

24 November 1952

The report of the Polish Embassy to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw describes the answers of General Clayton Bissel, a former army intelligence chief, who testified before the Madden Committee, who admitted that Van Vliet’s report had been kept secret, because “this was the policy of the United States of America, signed by the President and Chief Executive Officer of the United States, and this was my order

25 June 1953

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress House of Representatives rejected the Madden Committee’s motion to refer the Katyn Massacre case to the International Court of Justice.

29 October 1956  

Władysław Gomułka, at that time for several days the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Worker’s Party, during a meeting with representatives of youth, asked a question whether the disclosure of the results of the research conducted by the Katyn Committee in the USA and “recognision of Soviet responsibility is necessary for us, for our relations?” . And in the same speech he replied that “we will not take a single demonstrative step towards the Soviet Union, nor a single step that is not necessary, that would weaken our relations

 

3 November 1956.

Julius Epstein’s appeal to Władyslaw Gomułka on behalf of six million American citizens of Polish descent but also of the entire American nation ‘to present the truth about Katyn once and for all, which would provoke more sympathy for your struggle for complete independence from Moscow’s guardianship’

June 1957

Stanisław Bujnowski manages to photograph the cemetery in Katyn: a sunken area, surrounded by a wooden fence, with a wooden cross and a concrete slab without any inscription.

9 March 1959

In a note to the President of the USSR Council of Ministers, Nikita Khrushchev, the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR, Aleksandr Shelepin proposes the destruction of the files of 21,857 Poles executed on the basis of the decision of the special troika of the NKVD USSR and reminds that any indiscretion may lead to the unmasking of the operation, with all its undesirable consequences for our country…”

April 1971

Instruction from the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Soviet Ambassador to London to protest during his visit to the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs against the BBC’s plan to broadcast a film ‘about the so-called Katyn case, hostile to the Soviet Union’

5 April 1976

The decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to undertake counter-propaganda on Katyn, among others, by ‘becoming familiar with the opinions of Polish friends expressed during the consultations’ and ‘using the help of the KGB of the USSR, which ‘through unofficial channels should make it clear to people from the government circles of the relevant Western countries that the exploitation of anti-Soviet counterfeiting will be treated by the Soviet Government as an intentional special provocation aimed at worsening the international situation’

 

18 September 1976.                                    

Eight thousand people, including the mayors of six autonomous districts of London, 49 color guards  and 120 delegations with wreaths, participated in the unveiling and blessing of the Katyn Monument at the Gunnersbury Cemetery in London. Government and Armed Forces representatives did not attend.

 

8 December 1976.

The Monument Construction Presidium appealed to the Polish society in Australia to make a donation for the construction of the Katyn Monument in Adelaide.

April 1977

In the Encounter monthly magazine, Lord Nicholas Bethell reminds a standpoint of British Minister of Foreign Affairs which was astonishing for him, expressed in words: “The JKM government has not satisfactorily prove, who was responsible [for the massacre]. We have no clear evidence that we could put on the table if we were called upon to prove the responsibility of the Russians…”

 

16 September 1977

„The Daily Mail” reports that Soviet embassies and the People’s Republic of Poland protested in the Foreign Office against the erection of the Katyn monument at the Gunnersbury Cemetery in London 10 times…

 

17 September 1977

In the presence of the President of the World Federation of Polish Combatants Association Stanisław Soboniewski, one and a half thousand Poles and – in contrast to London – the Australian military orchestra on the square of the Central Polish House at Angas st. in Adelaide in Australia, a Katyn monument designed by the eminent sculptor Stanisław Ostoja-Kotkowski was unveiled.