ALLIES:

-REVIEW: of God's Eye: Aerial Photography and the Katyn Forest Massacre By Frank Fox (Benjamin B. Fischer, CIA)

A number of police departments in the United States have created `cold-case squads' to investigate unsolved crimes that are years or even decades old. To `clear' old cases, detectives often use new methods such as DNA analysis and other modern forensic techniques to analyze data that was collected but not comprehensible when the crimes were committed. Professor Fox's intriguing book is about an historical `cold case' that took more than 50 years to clear.

The crime in question was the cold-blooded murder of some 4,500 Polish officers and soldiers whose bodies were discovered in April 1943 in the Katyn Forest, located 12 miles west of the Russian city of Smolensk. 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. The plan backfired. All of the forensic experts were from Nazi-occupied countries, with the exception of one pathologist from neutral Switzerland. 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.

God's Eye 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 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.

The Katyn Massacre plays a key role in Robert Harris's fine thriller Enigma--the film is decent too. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 8, 2003 8:37 AM