That the Katyn murders are not yet a part of the common knowledge of every educated person in the Western World is a sad commentary on the ease with which it is possible for the truth to be obscured or lost. In early 1940, after the simultaneous assault upon Poland by the Russians and the Germans, all but a few hundred of the 15,000 Polish officers taken prisoner by the USSR disappeared. When, two years later, the Smolensk region was overrun by invading German troops, the bodies of some 4,300 of these Polish officers were found buried in Katyn Wood. Each man had been shot in the back of the head. All these officers (most of whose corpses were identified) came from one of the three camps in the USSR in which the Polish officer prisoners-of-war were confined. The precise fate of the other 10,000 has never been definitively established. Virtually the entire flower of a generation of Poles had been murdered in cold blood, and in secrecy. The monstrous crime of Katyn was at once used by the Germans as a propaganda weapon against their Soviet enemy. The Russians immediately counter-charged the Germans with the same crime. The Western leaders (apart from the Poles themselves), alive to the discord that a full exposure of the murders could sow in the middle of a desperate war against the Nazis, kept quiet and even suppressed evidence. This is by far the fullest account so far published of the available evidence- evidence which points unmistakably to the culprits. These culprits have never been exposed, never made to answer for their crimes: indeed many actual participants in the murders may be alive today. -- From the book jacket.

First published by Tom Stacey, Ltd. London. -- From the reverse of the title page.

The crime -- The international situation 1920-1939 -- The three special camps 1939-1940 -- The winding-up of the camps -- The search and the German attack on Russia 1940-1943 -- Katyn -- Official German documentary evidence -- Report of the International Medical Commission -- Professor Naville's testimony -- The Russian investigation -- Dr. Markov's revocation -- Summing up.