More evidence recently came out that FDR and the US government knew Stalin and the Soviets had murdered 22,000 Polish officers at the Katyn Massacre.
The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.
The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.
This helps prompt a recurring question in my mind: why exactly did we ally ourselves with the Soviets during WWII, when they were as – or more – monstrous than the Nazis?
I’ll cover potential motives in a future blog. For now, let’s stick to the basic facts.
- Prior to the war:
- 20 million murdered; FDR and the US government overlooked Stalin’s mass murder of almost 20 million innocents.
- Less than a decade prior to becoming allies, Stalin gave the order for almost 7 million Ukranians to be intentionally starved to death. This all happened over a single winter, and was Stalin’s penalty for the Ukranian resistance to the Soviet collectivist ideals
- And as more extensively noted in this article
Stalin had shown his true colors long before Roosevelt and Churchill took on as their ally the brave, bluff “Uncle Joe.” Had they never heard of the forced famine of Ukraine, the NKVD mass arrests, the Gulag camps, the purges and show trials, the murder of Trotsky, the invasions of Poland (with the Katyn Forest massacre of 15,000 Polish officers), Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? All these things, and more, revealed not only the brutality of Stalin but the logic of Communism itself, which had begun its reign in Russia with the mass murder of Orthodox priests under Lenin. Communism was in essence a reversion to the principles of primitive warfare, directed not only against external enemies but against its own subjects if they resisted (or were even suspected of a disposition to resist) its tyranny
- Stalin and Hitler sitting in a tree…; FDR and the US government overlooked the significant and recent partnership between Stalin/Soviets and Hitler/Nazis. The Soviets provided the Nazis material support, supplies, military training, and training/expertise in how to run concentration camps with lethal effectiveness.
- During the war:
- Overlooked and help conceal the Katyn Massacre; FDR and the US government helped conceal the Soviet army murder of 22K Polish officers which the Soviets then blamed on the Nazi army
- After the war:
- No freedom for thee; FDR and the US government provided direct assistance to the Soviets by forcefully helping return millions of refugees who had only tried to escape tyranny. Upon returning to Soviet control, these refugees were systematically punished, imprisoned or executed. Operation Keelhaul was only a small portion of this “repatriation program” agreed by FDR, Stalin, Churchill.