Eyewitness to Massacre

In Washington last week, a special House committee resumed the investigation it began last fall into the wartime massacre of more than 4,000 Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia (TIME, Nov. 26). The issue: Was Katyn just another Nazi atrocity, or did the Russians do it and then dupe the Western world into blaming the common enemy?

U.S. Army Colonel John H. Van Vliet Jr., who made a forced visit to Katyn as a German prisoner in 1943, testified that, despite his hatred for the Nazis, he formed an immediate "unshakeable opinion" that the Russians were guilty. Henry Cassidy, former Associated Press correspondent in Moscow, testified that he suspected the Russians of rigging the evidence when they took him to view the mass graves at Katyn in 1944. An exPolish diplomat said that his exile government in London asked Moscow fruitlessly more than 50 times about the fate of the missing officers. Two former Polish soldiers testified that officers were winnowed systematically from Soviet prison camps in 1939 and 1940, never to be heard of again.

A third Polish army veteran offered even graver evidence. He testified that he watched from hiding in a nearby tree in October 1939, when 200 Polish officers were slaughtered by Red army soldiers at Katyn. It was night time, he said, and the victims were led two by two to the edge of a huge ditch illuminated by floodlights. "First," he continued, "they tied the [victim's] hands together and then tilted the head back, and they packed sawdust into the victim's mouth. If he showed signs of collapsing while in their hands, they just kicked him into the ditch. And those who showed signs of resistance, or resisted this procedure--then the guard would put a gun to his head . . . and he shot him. Then he would spin him around and throw him in the ditch."

This witness appeared with his head covered by a grotesque white hood and was identified only as "John Doe." The committee explained that it wanted to protect his relatives in Poland against Communist reprisals, though the witness himself had not requested anonymity. In an unhappy try for circus effect, the committee produced a genuine Russian pistol and got "Doe" to aim it at a volunteer victim while the flashbulbs popped.

The committee's evidence against the Russians was impressive enough not to need artificial bolstering by such ballyhoo tricks as a masked witness.

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