Franklin D Roosevelt, the US president, hushed up the Katyn massacre to maintain close relations with the Soviet dictator, declassified documents show.
Franklin D Roosevelt, the US president, hushed up the Katyn massacre - Joseph Stalin's wartime slaughter of thousands of Polish officers and officials - to maintain close relations with the Soviet dictator, declassified documents show.
The files released by the US National Archive appear to confirm long-standing suspicions that the Americans knew that Stalin bore responsibility for the massacre of 22,000 Poles in and around the Katyn Forest in 1940, despite Soviet claims that German forces had killed the Poles.
The Polish prisoners were killed with a single shot to the back of the head by NKVD executioners to eliminate the leadership of a country that Stalin hoped to absorb into the Soviet empire. It was not until 1990 that Moscow gave up denying claims first made by Germany in 1941 that it was responsible for the crime.
In one case dating from 1943, the files show how American POWs managed to send a coded message reporting how they had seen corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn Forest - evidence that the victims had died long before Hitler's armies rolled across the Soviet Union during their 1941 invasion.
In a statement made in 1950, Capt Donald Stewart, one of the POWs, confirmed he had sent a message along the lines of "German claims regarding Katyn substantially correct".
Although reaching Washington, the POWs' evidence disappeared, indicating that Roosevelt wanted to ensure anger over the massacre would not upset a relationship with the Soviet Union that the Western allies put well above the interests of fellow ally Poland.
Even after the war, the Katyn evidence was kept under wraps. The reports failed to appear during a 1951-52 Congressional hearing into the massacre, as did a report by Britain's ambassador to Poland's government in exile, Owen O'Malley, which spoke of "serious doubts" over Soviet claims of innocence.
Katyn still casts a shadow over Warsaw's relations with Moscow.
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