This month marks 80 years since the government of Nazi Germany announced the shocking discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest in the occupied USSR. Thus began one of the most tangled and disturbing of WW2 stories. Just what had happened?

In this episode from our archive, the writer Jane Rogoyska, author of Surviving Katyń, takes us back to the year 1940 to find out.

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In April 1943 the discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union ignited one of the most explosive rows of the Second World War.

The identity of the victims was clear enough. They were the Polish military elite and significant figures – academics, writers, industrials, doctors - from wider Polish society.

But who was responsible? The Germans instantly blamed the Soviets. The Soviets retaliated that the accusation was a ‘vile slander’, intended to mask yet another instance of Nazi wickedness.

In this episode the writer Jane Rogoyska takes us back to the scene of a sinister and bitterly contested crime: the Katyń Massacre.

Jane Rogoyska is the author of Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth  

As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com.

Show notes

Scene One: March 1940, Starobelsk camp, Soviet Ukraine. Bronisław Młynarski and his friends find a mysterious message tied to the collar of a stray dog.

Scene Two: April 1940, Starobelsk camp. NKVD Commissar Kirshin stands on the steps of the ruined church watching the transports of men depart: ‘You are leaving,’ he says, ‘for a place where I would like to go myself.’

Scene Three: July 1940, Griazovets camp near Vologda in the far north of Russia. The artist Józef Czapski gives an informal lecture about Marcel Proust, delivered entirely from memory, to a group of friends lying on the grass in the sun.

Memento: One of the Christmas decorations created by graphic artist Edward Manteuffel while he was a prisoner in Starobelsk camp.

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Jane Rogoyska

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Colorgraph

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