Stalin DID order the execution of 3,500 Polish soldiers according to newly discovered testimony of U.S. officer who watched Nazis exhume the bodies

U.S. researcher Krystyna Piorkowska found testimony from U.S. Lt Col John H Val Vliet from May 1945

In the statement he says he witnessed Nazis exhuming the bodies of 3,500 Polish soldiers killed under Stalin

Vliet's testimony fuels speculation that the U.S. tried to cover up the genocide to keep the Soviets on their side for the end of the war

A researcher says she has uncovered vital testimony from a U.S. officer who in 1943 was forced by the Nazis to watch as they exhumed thousands of Polish officers killed on Soviet leader Josef Stalin's orders.

At a news conference Wednesday in Warsaw, U.S. researcher Krystyna Piorkowska said she found the Paris-dated May 10, 1945, testimony of former American prisoner of war Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet Jr. in the U.S. National Archives near Washington last November. It was filed among other unrelated World War II documents from the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

The sworn deposition provides evidence of Soviet responsibility for the 1940 massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest and other places in what was then the Soviet Union. The Soviet Red Army had taken the Polish officers prisoner after invading eastern Poland in September 1939.

Warning: Graphic content



New testimony: U.S. researcher Krystyna Piorkowska found U.S. John H Van Vliet's testimony from 1945 (above). In the statement he says he watched the Nazis exhume the bodies of some 3,500 Polish soldiers who were killed under the orders of Stalin while he was living as a German prisoner of war.



Another report that Van Vliet made a few days later in Washington is considered missing. This has fueled speculation that the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet responsibility for the massacre out of fear that saying the truth would anger Stalin, whom the Allies were counting on to help them defeat Germany and Japan in World War II.

For decades, Moscow had blamed the Nazis for the massacre, but then in 1990 admitted that Stalin had ordered it. The massacre further embittered Poland's relations with Moscow, which has refused to consider the massacre a genocide and has been reluctant to prosecute any living henchmen.

Van Vliet was a POW in Germany when he was taken to Katyn to see the evidence.

Gruesome: Officials exhume the bodies buried in a mass grave in Katyn forest Thousands of soldiers: According to Van Vliet's testimony, the bodies were all wearing Polish uniforms



In the document that Piorkowska found, Van Vliet tells an interrogating U.S. officer that he saw the exhumation of some 3,500 corpses in tailor-made, little-worn Polish uniforms. They were all killed with a shot to the back of the head.

Responsibility: For years' Moscow denied part in the Katyn massacre, but eventually pinned the order on Stalin in 1990

He said the 'decomposition of the corpses and the nature of the undergrowth undisturbed' on the graves indicated they must have remained there 'over a year - possibly three or four.'

'The belongings removed from the corpses all indicated death in the months of February, March or April, 1940,' Van Vliet said.

The area was under Soviet control then. Germany's Nazi regime discovered the graves in early 1943 after invading parts of the Soviet Union.

The report by Van Vliet named other Allied POWs who witnessed the exhumation with him. Some of the names were not known previously to Polish historians.

Piorkowska told The Associated Press that the deposition was a signal to 'go on searching, that there are still more documents to be found.'

'This offers new names and suggestions of where to seek new evidence,' she said, adding that she was seeking to get in touch with the other POWs' families.