Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Bogdan Kobulov held a conference in Moscow of a dozen NKVD officials, where it took a week to plan the killings. All victims’ families had to be deported at dawn on one day, April 15, to Kazakhstan for ten years. Inquiries had to be made of Hitler’s authorities to ensure that Poles from central Poland were returned to the Germans. Kobulov, Merkulov, and Bashtakov drew up identity slips with the death sentences for each of 22,000 victims. About 600 men were reprieved, some at the request of Pavel Sudoplatov of the NKVD’s foreign directorate, because their military experience would be crucial in a future war with Germany or because they were candidate puppets to rule a future communist Poland; their families were also exempted from deportation. Three future generals, Władysław Anders, Zygmunt Berling, and Jerzy Wołkowicki, thus lived to form new Polish armies a year later.

Fifty Poles of international renown, including the impressionist painter Józef Czapski, were rescued by Mussolini and other influential Westerners. Hitler’s government begged the life of Wacław Komarnicki, who would ironically become minister of justice in the exiled London government. Polish fascists, even if virulently anti-Bolshevik, were handed over unharmed to the Germans. A few were saved so late that they witnessed NKVD atrocities: Professor Stanisław Swianiewicz, on a death train, was identified as an expert on the German economy and removed.

To transport all the prisoners to the execution sites in the forest around Katyn, Beria’s railways boss Solomon Milshtein timetabled trains and laid on trucks. The executioners of the Lubianka and Sukhanovka under Vasili Blokhin had in March 1940 finished the elimination of Ezhov’s men and the intellectuals implicated by Mikhail Koltsov, so a contingent was assembled and equipped with German weapons and ammunition.⁴⁴ Soprunenko went off to exchange prisoners with the Finns and the work of compiling lists fell on Arkadi Gertsovsky, one of the main managers of the massacres.

Eleven generals, an admiral, 77 colonels, 197 lieutenant colonels, 541 majors, 1,441 captains, 6,061 lieutenants and other ranks, 18 chaplains, and the Polish army’s chief rabbi were all to be shot in April, together with the remnants of the Polish civil service and bourgeoisie. The condemned were joined by other Poles who had attracted adverse attention, such as Ludwig Helbardt, dying of stomach cancer in a Ukrainian hospital, who had written to Molotov asking to be reunited with his destitute family. Few suspected what was awaiting them. Many were distressed, some to the point of suicide, by being deprived of all mail from March, but when the trains were marshaled in mid-April some wrote in their diaries that they were going home, although they feared being returned to German-controlled Poland.

Some executions were carried out more humanely than usual by Blokhin and his men. In Kalinin (Tver), where the Ostashkov prisoners were killed one by one, each Pole was taken into the prison club room and his identity carefully checked, before being handcuffed and led into a neighboring soundproofed chamber and shot in the back of the neck. The bodies were then dragged through a back door, thrown into covered trucks and taken to the countryside at Mednoe, to the grounds used for the NKVD men’s dachas, a site chosen by Blokhin. A total of fifty executioners was used, Blokhin in his leather apron, helmet, and gauntlets taking a leading part. Each evening a body count was telegraphed to Merkulov in Moscow.

The same procedure was used in Kharkov, the bodies disposed of in the grounds of an NKVD sanatorium next to the secret-police dachas, where a large number of Soviet victims had already been buried.

The victims buried in Katyn forest—4,143 bodies were exhumed by the Germans in 1943—left graphic memorials: one victim had carved in a piece of wood a diary of his last days; another diary ends, “they have taken away my rubles, my belt, my penknife.” These men suffered: they were stood in groups by open pits, many of them had their hands bound with barbed wire and some had nooses around their necks. Others, notably some Catholic priests, buried at Katyn had been shot in Smolensk prison in an underground execution chamber and their bodies stacked in the pits.

As the shootings ended, in mid-April, the unsuspecting families were deported east. Many died of starvation and cold. Surviving Polish men were assigned to a group of 135,000 prisoners sent to the Arctic to build a railway to the coal mines of Vorkuta. One NKVD man, Daniil Chekholsky, showed a spark of kindness. Sacked for letting Poles post letters as they went off to execution, he admitted sending telegrams to relatives: “Your husbands have left. We don’t know the address. . . .” Other NKVD men took to drink. In October Beria rewarded the executioners with an extra month’s salary, while the organizers all received medals and awards.