In the Forest of Katyn

Im Wald von Katyn

Overview

It depicts a crime scene — the exhumation of bodies and personal belongings found with the remains of Polish officers in a mass grave in the Katyn Forest, murdered in 1940 by the Soviet NKVD political police. The film also shows members of the International Medical Commission established by the German authorities, journalists, former Polish Prime Minister Leon Kozłowski (1934–1935), and Russian peasant Parfien Kiselev, one of the witnesses to the Katyn massacre. The Germans sought to exploit these crimes for maximum political gain, and the film’s narrator, in the spirit of Nazi propaganda, argues that in the face of “Bolshevik barbarism,” people would fare much better under German than under Soviet rule.