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By Root 1637 0

spring of 1940 the Red Army transported 4,100 Polish officers, who had surrendered to them under the terms of the Geneva Convention, to a forest near Smolensk called Katyń, where they were each shot in the back of the head. Vasily Blokhin, chief executioner of the Russian secret service, the NKVD, led the squad responsible, wearing leather overalls and an apron and long leather gloves to protect his uniform from the blood and brains, and using a German Walther pistol because it did not jam when it got hot from repeated use.14 (Nonetheless he complained he got blisters on his trigger finger by the end of the third day of continuous executions.) In all, 21,857 Polish soldiers were executed by the Soviets at Katyń and elsewhere – an operation which, after the Germans had invaded Russia, Stalin’s police chief Lavrenti Beria admitted had been ‘a mistake’. When the Germans uncovered the mass graves on 17 April 1943, Goebbels broadcast the Katyń Massacre to the world, but Soviet propaganda made out that it had been undertaken by the Nazis themselves, a lie that was knowingly colluded in by the British Foreign Office until as late as 1972, even though charges against the Germans over Katyń were dropped at the Nuremberg Trials.

Because by mid-September the Germans had already moved into several areas behind Warsaw, and had indeed taken Brest-Litovsk and Lvov, some fighting inadvertently broke out between Russians and Germans, with two Cossacks killed in one incident and fifteen Germans in another. Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, flew to Moscow in order to agree the lines of demarcation, and after an evening at the Bolshoi watching Swan Lake, and tough negotiations with his Russian counterpart, Molotov, lasting until 5 o’clock the next morning, it was agreed that the Germans would get Warsaw and Lublin, and the Russians the rest of eastern Poland and a free hand in the Baltic. The Germans withdrew from towns such as Brest-Litovsk and Białystok in the new Russian sector, and the fourth partition in Poland’s history was effectively complete. Molotov would have done well, however, to take note of Hitler’s statement made many years before in Mein Kampf: ‘Let no one argue that in concluding an alliance with Russia we need not immediately think of war, or, if we did, that we could thoroughly prepare for it. An alliance whose aim does not embrace a plan for war is senseless and worthless. Alliances are concluded only for struggle.’15

After a full day of bombing on 25 September, with no prospect of meaningful help from the Western Allies, a full-scale assault from the Russians in the east, communications cut between Śmigły-Rydz and much of his Army, and with food and medical supplies running dangerously low, Warsaw capitulated on the 27th. It was then three days before the Germans agreed to help the wounded in the city, by which time for many it was too late. Field kitchens were set up only for as long as the newsreel cameras were there. By 5 October all resistance had ended; 217,000 Polish soldiers passed into Russian captivity and 693,000 into German. Fortunately between 90,000 and 100,000 managed to escape the country via Lithuania, Hungary and Romania, to make their way westwards and join the Free Polish forces under General Władysław Sikorski, the Prime Minister in exile, who was in Paris when the war broke out and who set up a government in exile in Angers in France. About 100,000 Poles in the Russian sector – aristocrats, intellectuals, trade unionists, churchmen, politicians, veterans of the 1920–21 Russo-Polish War, indeed anyone who might form the nucleus of a new national leadership – were arrested by the NKVD, and sent to concentration camps from which virtually none emerged.

In the four-week campaign the Germans had lost 8,082 killed and 27,278 wounded, whereas 70,000 Polish soldiers and 25,000 civilians had been killed, and 130,000 soldiers wounded. ‘The operations were of considerable value in “blooding” our troops,’ concluded Mellenthin, ‘and teaching them the difference between real war with live ammunition and