An American President once said of a Central American dictator, “He may be an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.”. It appears this sentiment very much describes the way Joseph Stalin was also perceived in allied countries around the time of World War II.
In a recent Associated Press piece, it is revealed that two American POWs gave Washington a coded message about the Soviet slaughter of Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest in 1940. And yet, it was suppressed.
22,000 Poles were slaughtered, an enduring loss for the Polish nation, including their best officers, lawyers, doctors, etc. It is supposed that this message was suppressed within the highest levels of American government, even all the way up to FDR. In fact, a U.S. congressional committee in 1952 found FDR’s administration to have suppressed public knowledge of the slaughter. It also said that this slaughter was ”one of the most barbarous international crimes in world history”. However, the White House continued silence on the issue.
The article also says that “The declassified documents also show the United States maintaining that it couldn’t conclusively determine guilt until a Russian admission in 1990 — a statement that looks improbable given the huge body of evidence of Soviet guilt that had already emerged decades earlier”
Even as late as the administration of George H. W. Bush, Franciszek Herzog, who lost his father and uncle in the massacre, was still still trying to obtain an apology for this cover-up, he even tried unsuccessfully three times with George H. W. Bush.