A reprint of the classic study of the Katyn Forest Massacre where
captured Polish officers were murdered by the Soviet Police as part of a
campaign that killed over 25,000 prisoners
First published in 1999, Frank Fox's God's Eye, as one reviewer
explained is part history and part biography. The historical part tells
the story of Katyn and other killing fields where more than 20,000
Polish officers, soldiers, border guards, police, and other officials,
as well as ordinary citizens, were executed during World War II. The
narrative stretches from 1940 to the present, tracking successive
investigations that uncovered the truth bit by bit. The hero of Fox's
book is a self-taught photo-interpreter of professional caliber named
Waclaw Godziemba-Maliszewski. The data collected at the time of the
crime were aerial reconnaissance photographs taken by the German
Luftwaffe, which were seized, classified, and stored in the "evidence
room" of the US National Archives until they were declassified in 1979.
The methods used to finally solve the crime were modern photo
interpretation and photogrammetry. German occupation forces stumbled
onto mass graves at Katyn in April 1943. Nazi propaganda minister Josef
Goebbels charged the Soviets with mass murder, hoping to exploit the
grisly discovery to shatter the Anglo-American-Soviet wartime alliance.
The Germans exhumed many of the corpses and brought in an international
team of forensic experts and other observers to substantiate the Soviet
atrocity.
Stalin blamed the Germans for the massacres, and London and Washington
accepted his version of the story as the truth. As time went on, most
historians in the West concluded that the Soviets were to blame, since
what little evidence there was suggested that the Poles were killed
while in Soviet, not German, captivity. Nevertheless, doubts persisted
for decades.
The biographical part of Fox's book focuses on Maliszewski's
indefatigable efforts to identify execution and burial sites, establish
Soviet culpability, and pressure Warsaw and Moscow to complete a full
official investigation. Maliszewski, who was born in Scotland in 1948,
developed an interest in Katyn early in life when he learned that a
relative had been among the victims. Interest turned into obsession,
however, when he discovered that the solution to the crime might lie in
aerial reconnaissance photographs that the Germans themselves had taken
of Smolensk and the surrounding area. While doing research at the US
National Archives, Maliszewski came across an intriguing article from
the CIA's in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence. The author, a
respected CIA photo interpreter, had used the German film footage to
analyze the physical characteristics of Katyn, identify burial sites,
and draw inferences regarding German versus Soviet culpability.
