THE TABLET, April 28th, 1956. VOL. 207, No. 6049

Published as a Newspaper

THE TA B LET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

APRIL28th,1956

NINEPENCE

South African Dilemma : The Shadow over the European Future

The Police and Professor I V l a r r O U : Conscience in Algeria. By John Dingle

A Polish Procession in Whitehall: Last Sunday's Demonstration

The Church and Our Lady : A Protestant Study. By the Abbot o f Downside

Review of Reviews : Asia and the Universal Church. By Lancelot C. Sheppard

Baroque Denmark : Mr. Sitwell’s Descriptions. By Sir Alec Randall

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

CHANGE IN POLAND

A T a time when the Russian visitors to Britain have chosen to emphasize that they have no control of their Communist satellites, news comes from Poland for which they might otherwise have much of the credit. It is good news, with promises not only of amnesty, but even of compensation; of the release of thirty thousand people and remissions for seventy thousand others ; acts of leniency and belated justice which have followed numerous dismissals of officials concerned with the severities there is now the professed intention to correct.

that permission must therefore be withdrawn. It was then shown at the Sikorski Institute.

In his introductory remarks General Anders demanded the setting up of an international tribunal under the United Nations, since an investigation by the Kremlin would, as he said, be nothing more than a travesty of justice. “A new tribunal to try the murders at Katyn cannot be composed of those suspected of the crime.” It must be an international tribunal such as was recommended also by the Select Committee of the American Congress in 1952, after an exhaustive enquiry into the Katyn Wood murders.

The change seems to have come about by steady pressure from below, for it has always been the great weakness of Communist rule in Poland that the Party has not had enough genuine and capable Communists to man a police State properly. It is a political commonplace that when Governments of this kind find it necessary to relax their grip, it ceases to rest with them how much grip they retain. As people talk more freely, they embolden each other, until there comes to be one vast open secret, that nobody believes in the things they have to say or do officially. Then the few fanatics in a Committee of Public Safety have the very difficult choice, whether to try to re-assert their authority by a reversion to drastic terrorism, or whether to drift further, being pushed in an increasingly liberal direction which ends in the loss of authority. The Truth about Katyn Wood

According to a report from Warsaw which appeared recently in The Times, the Soviet Government has now appointed a commission to investigate the Katyn murders, and it was in order to protest against such an investigation at the time of the Soviet leaders’ visit to Britain that General Anders invited representatives of the Press on Monday to see a film about the Katyn Wood murders which has been composed from German and Soviet documentaries and furnished with an English commentary. The film was to have been shown at the British Council’s cinema in Hanover Square, but at the last moment the Polish organizers were informed that the British Council had been unaware of its “political” character, and

The film shown on Monday was a grim document which revealed the attempts of both the Germans and the Russians to use the horrible discoveries at Katyn Wood for their own propagandist purposes. Twice the bodies were exhumed, first by the Germans in 1943 and then by the Russians, and twice they were shown to the international Press as evidence of the bestial conduct of the other side. But for once, as the commentator said, German propaganda was using the truth. The Russians claimed that the bullets with which the unfortunate Polish officers had been shot were made in Germany, which was true enough, but they were part of supplies exported from Germany to Russia before 1941. That the method of shooting prisoners in the neck had been practised in other camps of the Soviet Union cannot be denied ; nor that there must have been similar mass murders, as yet uncovered, because in other camps also there were similar sudden stops in the mail sent to relatives and friends.

General Anders corrected the widespread impression that ten to twelve thousand corpses were found in Katyn Wood when the graves were opened. This computation was put out by the Germans. The Soviets later put the figure more precisely at 11,000 and this was adopted in the indictment at the Nuremberg Trials, which, as will be remembered, left the blame unallocated. In actual fact, the Katyn Wood mass graves contained just over four thousand bodies. However, during and after the Spring of 1940, over 10,000 other Polish prisoners-of-war held in Soviet captivity, mostly officers,