The thing that has always confused me about Katyn is that it completely contradicts the behaviour demonstrated in the well known interaction between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. And that incident is in Churchill's own memoirs:
“teasing of me, which I did not at all resent until the Marshal [Stalin] entered in a genial manner upon a serious and even deadly aspect of the punishment to be inflicted upon the Germans. The German General Staff, he said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President [Roosevelt] quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.
Roosevelt and Stalin both teasing Churchill that all 50,000 or 49,000 nazi officers and technicians should be shot as a joke.
That didn't happen, obviously. And given that this is such an obvious joke it seriously makes me question whether it was a direct reference to the Katyn incident being attributed to the USSR falsely. Surely if they executed all the Polish officers then they would in fact have seriously wanted to see all the Nazi officers executed who were much worse than the Polish officers.
Something has never quite added up fully about it. The joke between the three of them has always struck me as an esoteric joke about war propaganda that Roosevelt and Stalin understood but Churchill did not get.
The thing that has always confused me about Katyn is that it completely contradicts the behaviour demonstrated in the well known interaction between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. And that incident is in Churchill's own memoirs:
Roosevelt and Stalin both teasing Churchill that all 50,000 or 49,000 nazi officers and technicians should be shot as a joke.
That didn't happen, obviously. And given that this is such an obvious joke it seriously makes me question whether it was a direct reference to the Katyn incident being attributed to the USSR falsely. Surely if they executed all the Polish officers then they would in fact have seriously wanted to see all the Nazi officers executed who were much worse than the Polish officers.
Something has never quite added up fully about it. The joke between the three of them has always struck me as an esoteric joke about war propaganda that Roosevelt and Stalin understood but Churchill did not get.