God's Eye: Aerial Photography and the Katyn Forest Massacre

A reprint of the classic study of the Katyn Forest Massacre where captured Polish officers were murdered by the Soviet Police as part of a campaign that killed over 25,000 prisoners

First published in 1999, Frank Fox’s God’s Eye , as one reviewer explained 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 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.

 

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.

 

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. Maliszewski, who was born in Scotland in 1948, developed an interest in Katyn early in life when he learned that a relative had been among the victims. Interest turned into obsession, however, when he discovered that the solution to the crime might lie in aerial reconnaissance photographs that the Germans themselves had taken of Smolensk and the surrounding area. While doing research at the US National Archives, Maliszewski came across an intriguing article from the CIA’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence. The author, a respected CIA photo interpreter, had used the German film footage to analyze the physical characteristics of Katyn, identify burial sites, and draw inferences regarding German versus Soviet culpability.