Journal of Eurasian Studies - EPA

July‐September 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 3.
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The news of these executions was first presented to the world by Germany in the spring of 1943, but
the Red Cross was not willing to examine the situation, so the Germans set up an international
commission for the clarification of the events. The famous Hungarian pathologist professor, dr. Ferenc
Orsós was a member of this commission, and he was declared later a war criminal. Moscow put the guilt
of the executions in Katyn on the Germans, but the event was not part of the trial in Nürnberg. The Soviet
official statements tried to falsify the events that happened in Katyn during the war. After 1945, in Poland
it was prohibited to talk about the executions that happened in Katyn. Only in 1956, at the time of the
so‐called meltdown, seemed possible that the Polish community can find out something about the stories
of the victims, but Wladyslaw Gomulka, the leader of the party, was afraid of Moscow’s revenge, and
backed down. The silence was broken finally by Mihail Gorbachev in 1990. He made an announcement in
which he said that the Soviet Union was responsible for the executions that happened in the woods of
Katyn. Two years later Boris Yeltsin gave to Lech Walensa copies of many important documents about
Katyn, one of them of the decision of the party dated March 5, 1940 in which Stalin agreed to the
executions of the Polish officers.
Things are not in their right place even in our days. 1 Vladimir Putin, in spite of the documents and
evidence that were presented, is doubtful that the Soviets killed Polish prisoners in Katyn in the spring of
1940. Hearing about the Wajda movie, some papers in Moscow say the same thing. The Russian military
prosecutor’s office started an investigation of this matter at the beginning of the 1990’s, and this
investigation was closed only in 2004. The documents of the prosecutor’s office – in spite of Putin’s
opinion – do not question the fact that the Soviets executed the Polish officers and the civilians in Katyn,
but they claim that that was not a crime of war and against humanity, but an ordinary crime. The exact
number of the victims will be never known, and there is strong evidence that Moscow destroyed many
documents related to this event in 1959. According to the research up until now 14,736 Polish officers and
more than 10,600 Polish civilians were executed by the NKVD in Katyn.
This execution had two Hungarian victims as well. One of them was born in Poland in 1897, he was
Hungarian‐born, Oskar Rudolf Kuehnel. He fought against the Nazis as senior captain of the Polish
army. He was imprisoned by the Soviets and sent to a camp in Koselski by the NKVD. He was murdered
in April 1940 in the woods of Katyn. His body was exhumed in 1943. In his uniform they found his
personal belongings and his journal, and the last date registered was April 7, 1940. The other Hungarian
victim was Emánuel Aladár Korompay, born in Budapest in 1890, captain of the Polish army, who fought
in Galicia during World War I. After the war he did not return to Hungary, but he joined Jozef Pilsudski’s
legion and defended the Polish homeland from the Red Army in 1920. He graduated from the Reformed
School; got a degree in philosophy from the University of Budapest; then he settled in Warsaw. He is
considered as a pioneer of Hungarology in Poland and he was the editor of the first Hungarian‐Polish
dictionary. He worked at the University of Warsaw as a lecturer and in the same time he was the cultural
attaché of the Hungarian Embassy. He was mobilized in September 1939. He could have asked for his
acquittal for having double citizenship and being an employee of the embassy. However, he did not do
such thing. He was imprisoned and taken by the NKVD to a camp in Starobelski. Although the body of
1 Very recently, on November 26, 2010 the Russian Duma, Russiaʹs lower house of parliament has condemned Joseph Stalin by
name for the mass execution of Polish officers and civilians at Katyn during World War II. The Duma declared that the Soviet
dictator and other Soviet officials had ordered the ʺKatyn crimeʺ in 1940. — Ed. Journal of Eurasian Studies.
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