The Katyn Massacre: Soviets Murder Polish Leaders

Until June 1941, the USSR was an enthusiastic ally of Hitler’s Germany. Stalin eagerly invaded Poland from the east, while Hitler’s troops attacked from the west.

After the Nazis and the Soviets divided the occupied Polish territory, Stalin’s socialists were eager to neutralize any potential leaders. Thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, and priests were rounded up.

The prisoners were taken eastward into Russia, into the Katyn Forest. In an infamous war crime, the Soviets murdered them. An estimated 22,000 victims were brutally killed.

The communists worked to keep the atrocity secret, but in 1943, when the German army entered the area, soldiers discovered the mass graves. The Germans informed the world.

By this time, the Soviets had changed their allegiance, and were now fighting against the Germans. The Germans had no motive to protect the USSR’s reputation by hiding the massacre. The USSR was eager to deny the event.

The Polish government-in-exile asked the Red Cross to conduct an official investigation. They documented the war crimes extensively.

The Western Allies - Britain, France, and the United States - were allied with the both Poland and the USSR. The Western Allies needed the USSR in the war effort against Hitler.

To avoid angering Stalin, and thereby to keep the USSR engaged against Hitler, the Western Allies downplayed the Katyn atrocities. The media in the Western Allies did almost no reporting on the topic. Diplomats from the Western Allies did not confront their Soviet counterparts with the murders.

During the remainder of WW2, and for several decades afterward, the USSR continued to deny that the incident ever happened. In some cases, they were joined by governments, media, and academics from the Western Allies. Historians Stan Evan and Herbert Romerstein write:

At the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, to take an example earlier noted, the Soviets captured a million-plus Poles and shipped them off to Russia, some to become slave labor in the Gulag, a few recruited as agents, others who disappeared entirely. One vexing question was the fate of fifteen thousand Polish officers who couldn’t be found when efforts were made to form an army-in-exile to fight the Nazis. Nobody could get the facts about these captives, who had in fact been murdered by the Soviets and buried in mass graves in Russia’s Katyn Forest. The truth about the murders would be denied and covered up for years, not only by the Soviets but by Western leaders who knew the facts but kept discreetly silent.

When communism inside the USSR began to crumble in 1989, evidence surfaced, giving shocking details of how the Soviets carried out the massacre. With the communist government gone, the Russians were free to tell the truth about Katyn.

Scholars and researchers from both Poland and Russia have now extensively documented the executions. The priests, policemen, and military officers murdered in the Katyn Forest are officially recognized as victims of communism.

Greece Expands: Causes of the Colonization

“We sit around our sea like frogs around a pond,” said Socrates, and thereby described the settlement activity of the Greeks, which lasted for more than three hundred years. It began in the archaic era, in the eighth century B.C., and ended as the sixth century B.C. drew to a close.

Greek cities spread out around almost the entire Mediterranean area, and all around the Black Sea, colonies of Corinth, Phokaia, Rhodos, or Miletus. These daughter-cities, in turn, again founded colonies, so-called grandchild-cities. Their names partly live on today, in modified forms: e.g., Nizza (Nikaia), Marseille (Massilia).

Which causes led to this emigration movement, which the Greeks called “the relocation of home”? In the case of the Samier - people from the Island of Samos - it was political disputes, and a lack of any prospects for success and wealth.

Other reasons were the search for new places to do business, the desire for adventure, and the desire for knowledge. In most cases, however, failed harvests, starvation, poverty, and dense population allowed no other choice than to move on.

Because, according to Greek inheritance laws, property was divided among all sons, the farmer’s fields could, with time, become so small that they could not sustain their owners. Because, in addition, the population grew, the homeland did not offer enough land and chances.

When reports about other lands became known through traders, individual cities began to think about getting some help: they organized the founding of colonies, and these were often so successful, that they, like e.g. Miletus, could themselves send out colonists several times within a generation of their founding.

Communist Brainwashing

The word ‘brainwashing’ became widely used in the 1950s. It was used first to describe how Chinese citizens were subject to ‘thought reform’ inside their government’s ‘re-education camps’ and prisons.

Individuals who had previously been skeptical of communism emerged from these sessions, proclaiming their firm belief in communism and confessing their previous ‘errors’ and even ‘crimes’ in opposing communism.

Robert Lifton described the psychological techniques of such mind control in his book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China.

The Chinese used these techniques to help North Korea during the Korean War (1950 to 1953). Captured American soldiers were made to confess to crimes which they had not committed. Edgar Schein documented these instances of ‘thought control’ in his book, Coercive Persuasion: A socio-psychological analysis of the “brainwashing” of American civilian prisoners by the Chinese Communists.

Louis West also analyzed China’s use of undue influence in an article, “Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread).”

The term ‘brainwashing’ became a permanent part of the popular vocabulary, although specialists prefer phrases like ‘thought control,’ ‘mind control,’ ‘thought reform,’ ‘unethical influence,’ and ‘undue influence.’

Spy novels and movies about secret agents began to regularly feature the ideas of brainwashing.

In The New York Times, Tim Weiner writes that, during the 1950s, China was “a strange enemy driven by an alien ideology, killing Americans abroad, threatening Americans at home.” Bit by bit, the public learned “that China’s Communists had learned how to penetrate and control the minds of American prisoners of war.”

There are at least two variants of brainwashing: the first changes a person’s beliefs and values; the second induces him to make false confessions of crimes he never committed.

The type of brainwashing which changes beliefs and values has wide-ranging implications. The person will view his own past differently: what was good is now bad, and what was bad is now good. The person will act differently: actions are based on values. The person will speak differently: he’ll give up military secrets, or make propaganda statements for the media.

Tim Weiner recalls that Edward Hunter popularized the word:

The Korean War had just begun in 1950 when The Miami News published his article, “‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party.” He determined that “the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels,” experts in the use of “drugs and hypnotism.”

Although forms of mind control had been featured in fiction, like Brave New World and 1984, Weiner notes that

It took Mao’s China — and the forced “confessions” of some American prisoners of war during the Korean conflict — to make brainwashing a centerpiece of 1950s culture.

In the context of the Cold War, China seemed better than the Soviet Union at thought control techniques, and used them more often. Weiner cites “A Dutch psychologist, Joost A. M. Meerloo,” who wrote

in a New York Times Magazine article in 1954: “The totalitarians have misused the knowledge of how the mind works for their own purposes. They have applied the Pavlovian technique — in a far more complex and subtle way, of course — to produce the reflex of mental and political submission of the humans in their power.”

After the Cold War, the practice of mind control is more commonly found in ‘destructive cults’ like the Scientology organization or the Unification Church (known as the ‘Moonies’). Mind control, as unethical influence, can also be found in personal relationships in a family, a group of friends, or a workplace.

The Global Network of Communist Spies

In the mid-1930s, the world was filled with the major tensions which would later become known as World War II.

In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, a semi-independent region controlled by China. In 1937, Japan invaded China itself.

Up to that time, a civil war divided China between the communists and the nationalists. Both sides declared a truce and agreed to work together to stop the invading Japanese.

The Soviet Union wanted Manchuria for itself, and was afraid that the Japanese would invade the USSR. The Soviets, who’d already been supporting the communist party in China, helped the Chinese against the Japanese.

The truce in China was an uneasy one. The communists and the nationalists knew that, as soon as the Japanese were gone, they’d fight each other again. Each side was seeking to undermine the other, even before the Japanese were defeated.

In addition to military conflict, all the involved parties employed substantial espionage networks, as historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:

To deal with this complex of issues and protect their flank in Asia, the Soviets had on the ground in China a formidable group of undercover agents. Foremost among these was the German Communist Richard Sorge, perhaps the most effective secret agent in Soviet history (enshrined in the Moscow pantheon of intelligence heroes).

The GRU is a Soviet intelligence agency. It is older than the KGB. The GRU was founded in 1918, and still exists today. The KGB didn’t start until 1954, and was disbanded in 1991.

The breadth of the international communist conspiracy can be seen in the GRU, which was active all over the world, and employed people from many different nations. Richard Sorge was a German, employed by the Soviets, working in China against the Japanese, and working with communists from the United States and Britain.

As of the latter 1930s, Sorge was a ten-year veteran of the GRU (military intelligence) and head of an extensive pro-Red network based in Shanghai. His group was a veritable microcosm of the Soviet global project, including as it did the Red Chinese apparatchik Chen Han Seng, the American pro-Soviet writer Agnes Smedley, the German-born naturalized Briton Guenther Stein, and influential Japanese Communists Hotsumi Ozaki and Kinkazu Saionji.

Born in 1895 in Azerbaijan to a German family, Richard Sorge grew up in Berlin, and studied political science and economics at the universities of Berlin, Hamburg, and Kiel, earning a Ph.D.

Like many people of his era, WW1 caused an internal crisis of belief for Sorge. He developed a belief in communism.

Sorge was a battle-wounded German veteran of World War I, disillusioned by the carnage inflicted by that struggle and accompanying economic chaos, who became convinced that capitalism was the source of these social evils. In 1929 he joined the German Communist Party and would later be sent to Moscow for training as an agent of the Comintern, dealing in “political intelligence.” He was subsequently transferred to Soviet military intelligence, specializing in Far Eastern matters.

Because Stalin’s Soviet Socialist government was allied with Hitler at the time, Richard Sorge joined the Nazi party in 1933. The USSR and the Nazis were allied until June 1941, when the Nazis attacked the Soviet Socialist homeland.

Sorge travelled frequently and during the 1930s was in China, Germany, Japan, and the USSR. In 1941, he was discovered in Japan and arrested by the Japanese government. He died in 1944.