On13 April 1943, the German Government announced the discovery of over4,400 graves in the forest of Katyn, near Smolensk, attributing thecrime to the Soviet Union.

This was swiftly followed bycounter claims from Moscow that the Germans themselves were responsiblefor the massacre in 1941. For the next 50years public controversy as toresponsibility tended to dominate and overshadowthe human tragedy ofthe wartime atrocity. Amidst the crossfire of claim andcounter-claimthe British line - like the rest of the Western Alliance -remainedsubstantially the same from 1943 until 1990, namely that, in theabsenceof conclusive documentary proof of responsibility for the massacres, noofficial public statement imputing guilt could be made. Thoughsuccessive Ministers and officials, more latterly with greaterfrequency and candour,expressed their view that the circumstantialevidence pointed towards Sovietculpability, this did not go far enoughfor the campaigners who comprised the'Katyn lobby', including theémigré Polish community, as they sought theunequivocal labelling of theSoviet Union as the guilty party. Britain’s official response to theKatyn massacre remained the focus of public interest,speculation andsuspicion.

The transfer to the Public Record Office of theBritish Government's wartimerecords in 1972 did not end thecontroversy, and it took more than 50 years -the span of the Cold War -before the truth about Katyn could be documentedwith certainty.President Mikhail Gorbachev's admission of Soviet guilt inApril 1990was outlined in a communiqué issued by the Soviet news agencyTASSlaying blame for the crime at the door of the NKVD, forerunner ofthe KGB.Finally, in 1992, documents handed over to the Polish Presidentby PresidentYeltsin of the Russian Federation established beyond doubtthat the crime hadbeen committed on the express orders of Josef Stalin,Chairman of the Councilof People's Commissars of the Soviet Union,despite contemporary Soviet denialsand counter-accusations of Germanguilt. In the aftermath of these revelations in Moscow, the FCOconfirmed in 1994 that all FCO files over 30 years old concerning Katynwere now in the public domain. During the following year therecords ofthe Special Operations Executive (SOE) concerning Katyn werealsotransferred to the Public Record Office and a History Note waspublished to explain their significance ¹ . Thepresent history, andother selected documents here re-produced, takethis openness a step further by tracing British reactions to Katyn as acontribution to the research andunderstanding of a tragic event in theSecond World War.