In 1940, after the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Iosif Stalin's police shot 21,857 Polish prisoners of war, policemen, gendarmes, and other representatives of the fallen Polish state. In the words of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Lavrentii Beriia, these were “hardened, irremediable enemies of Soviet power.” A substantial minority of the executions took place in the forest of Katyn, Smolensk region. “Katyn” later came to stand for the entire killing operation, because from 1943 the Germans used the uncovered mass graves for a concerted propaganda campaign. The Soviets instead blamed the Germans, conceding responsibility only in 1990. From 1995, an immense amount of archival material on the affair was published in multi-volume Russian and Polish collections. An essential selection was translated as Katyn: A Crime Withouth Punishment, the standard work in English (Anna M. Cienciala, Wojciech Materski, and Natalia S. Lebedeva, eds., Yale University Press, 2007, 119 and 332 for quotations and numbers cited above). This new flood of primary sources became the basis for a fairly large literature of new secondary works in Polish, Russian, and English.

German historians were somewhat more reluctant to revisit a topic that used to be deeply enmeshed in Goebbels' propaganda and apologetics for the Wehrmacht. Claudia Weber, who teaches at the University of Frankfurt (Oder), has shown considerable bravery in tackling this politically sensitive topic in an incredibly detailed reconstruction of the history, memory, and politics of both.

Soon, Weber found herself in the historiographical line of fire in a country where history books make the newspapers. She was accused of apologetics for Stalin, because she speculated that the German refusal to take more Polish POWs as part of a population exchange explains the timing of the decision to kill them—a transfer of responsibility to the Germans and “exculpation of the Soviets” in the opinion of one reviewer (FAZ 15.6.2015). If anything, however, Weber damns Stalinism by treating it as equivalent with Nazism. In Poland, she writes, the two dictatorships ran a joint “war of extermination” (deutsch-sowjetischer Vernichtungsfeldzug, 13).

To put Katyn in the context of a shared and entangled history of violence (Gewaltgeschichte) between Nazism and Stalinism in 1939–41 does not help us understand the origins of the Katyn murders, however. The Germans also refused to take back Polish Jews who, after experiencing severe hardship on Soviet territories in the aftermath of their flight from the Wehrmacht, wanted to return to their homes on the German side of the demarcation line. The NKVD did not kill, but instead deported them. (In one of the bitter ironies of the Soviet Second World War, this deportation saved many of them from destruction in the Holocaust.) Why not choose this option for the twenty thousand representatives of the Polish state as well? Beriia's words provide the answer: the Stalinists, who only shortly before had killed hundreds of thousands of their citizens in the mass operations of the Great Terror, saw them as enemies who could not be reformed and hence had to die. That the POWs did all they could to make a nuisance of themselves, insisting on their rights as prisoners of war and arrogantly confronting their interrogators with self-confident Polish nationalism, only proved the point.

Weber's book provides little new information on the killing operations themselves, or their pre-history. Meanwhile, the chapter on Katyn at the Nuremberg trials is essential reading for any student of the early Cold War. Against the advice of the western Allies, the Soviets insisted on adding Katyn to the list of war-crimes prosecuted. Despite the continued good will of the other parties, this attempt to once and for all wash Stalinist hands of Polish blood turned into a major tactical blunder. When the defense found witnesses who disproved parts of the Soviet version, Stalin's legal team tried to prevent their appearance. This blatant attempt to turn Nuremberg into a show trial was too much for the western judges. The result was a major embarrassment for the Stalinists, and Katyn continued to linger in the polemical force field of the Cold War until the Soviets finally owed up to this past in 1990, a history Weber sketches in the final quarter of the book.

Overall, then, this is a useful book for anybody interested in the politics of political memory, the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the early Cold War. Readers who want to inform themselves about the Katyn crimes are better served with Cienciala's standard edited volume.