Katyn Aerial Photography Fox

God’s Eye: Aerial Photography and the Katyn Forest Massacre, by Frank Fox. 1999

Aerial Photography Alone Debunks the Soviet Blame-Shifting to Germans. Jewish Victims of Katyn

This work honors the work of Polish-American photo-interpreter Waclaw Godziemba-Maliszewski, whose painstaking work was exploited by others without proper attribution or credit. Aerial photography, originally done for military-intelligence purposes, was put to a very different use. Patches of aerially-recognizable disturbed ground take around 140 years to disappear. (p. 43).

THE SOVIETS DID NOT WANT THE GERMANS TO KNOW

Boxes of declassified captured Luftwaffe photos happen to include the Katyn area, which is located only 13 km west of militarily-significant Smolensk. The pioneering work of Robert G. Poirier, an outstanding CIA photo-interpreter, showed that the Katyn area showed no changes in 1941 until just before the Soviet retreat, consistent with Soviet attempts to hide something before the German invaders took possession of the area. (p. 1).

THE SECOND ATTEMPTED SOVIET COVERUP

Luftwaffe photos after the 1943 German retreat, continuing up to June 1944, progressively show the disappearance of the memorials, and the Soviets using bulldozers to re-exhume the bodies and destroy other evidences of their crime with great urgency. (pp. 2-3).

MORE SITES OF THE MURDER OF POLISH OFFICERS AND INTELLECTUALS ARE DISCOVERED

Maliszewski subsequently built upon Poirier’s work, deducing the existence of previously-overlooked Katyn burial sites (p. 52), as well as the sites probably used by the Burdenko commission. (pp. 135-136). Later, the unheralded Maliszewski helped pinpoint the Katyn burial sites for the early-1990’s exhumations (pp. 50-52), despite the half-century of local changes and Soviets’ deliberate relocation of many local markers in order to misdirect those looking for the burial sites.

MANY KATYN POLES, ABOUT TO BE MURDERED, FOUGHT BACK

Fox provides many seldom-told tidbits of information in his narrative. For instance, in one of the Katyn burial pits, 200 victims had been comprehensively tied up–for apparently resisting. (p. 77). Surviving Russian perpetrators provided other details–such as the NKVD’s use of German revolvers because the Russian ones tended to quickly overheat with prolonged use. (p. 95).

JEWISH VICTIMS AT KATYN

Fox clarifies the extent of Jewish victims who, at 276 identified and 700-800 possible total, represent up to 15% of Katyn victims: “The fact that many of the officers were members of professions such as medicine (fifty percent of Poland’s prewar physicians were Jews) accounted for the disproportionate amount of Jewish officers compared to their numbers in the general population.” [10%]. (p. 22). [However, other sources dispute these high figures. In any case, it is hypocritical for Jews to complain that Poles do not specifically mention the Jewish victims of Katyn “enough”, when even Yad Vashem refuses to honor the Jewish victims of Katyn! Jewish mentions of the Jewish victims of Communism commonly serve as a deflection of the crimes of the Zydokomuna. Finally, some Jews make an absurd comparison between the Soviet denial of blame for Katyn (an open-and-shut case) with the Polish denial of blame for Jedwabne (a dubious case).]

A FEW OF THE MURDER SITES BEYOND KATYN ITSELF

Emphasis, especially among the photos shown in the back of the book, is given to the WWII-unknown murder sites near Kharkov (Starobielsk victims: e. g., pp. 43-44) and Miednoje/Kalinin/Tver (Ostaszkow/Ostashkov; e. g., pp. 48-50). The Kharkov murder location first came to general Polish attention when some Polish workers, building a hotel near Kharkov, came across a bazaar at which Polish military medals and buttons were being sold. (p. 43).

A SECOND KATYN NEAR RZESZOW

A “mini Katyn” occurred in 1944 at Trzebuska near Rzeszow, where the NKVD murdered about 150 AK officers, soon after disarming them. (pp. 60-61)[According to some accounts, the victims’ throats had been cut so as to avoid alerting the nearby Polish population by gunshots.]

Of course, there were many additional Katyns, notably during the Soviet imposition of the Communist puppet state on Poland (1944-on), notably the war against the ZOLNIERZE WYKLECI.