Gestapo-NKVD Conferences

The Gestapo-NKVD Conferences were a series of meetings between the two secret police, organized in late 1939 and early 1940 by German officials and Soviet, after the German-Soviet joint invasion ofPoland , according to the Nazi-Soviet alliance . ^{1 2} The purpose of the meetings was to enable the German and Soviet security forces, including the Gestapo and the NKVD respectively, to share information about their parallel terrorist operations in occupied Poland. In spite of their differences in other subjects, both Heinrich Himmler and Lavrenti Beria had common objectives as regards the fate of Poland. ³ The well-known conferences were devoted to the coordination of plans for the destruction of bases that articulated Polish nationality, as well as to discuss ways of dealing with Polish resistance in the early days of World War II . ^{4 5}

There were four lectures. [4] The third and best known took place in the famous resort of Zakopane , in the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland. ⁴ Several senior secret police officers (NKVD) participated in the meetings, while the German hosts sent a group of experts from the Gestapo. ¹

Prelude

After the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact , on August 23, 1939, Germany invaded Poland on September 1 [6] [7] and the Soviet Union did on September 17, [6] [8] resulting The Occupation of Poland (1939-1945) . ^{6 7 6 8}

First Conference

The first meeting between the Gestapo and the NKVD was reportedly held on 27 September 1939 in Brześć nad Bugiem , while some units of the Polish army were still fighting (see Invasion of Poland ) and resulted in mass internment Of soldiers and extrajudicial executions along the Curzon Line . Both the Gestapo and the NKVD were awaiting the emergence of a resistance in Poland and discussed ways to confront the clandestine activities of the Poles. Immediately after the meeting, the Soviet NKVD began collecting data that led to the Katyn massacre , committed in the spring of 1940. ^{5 2} The agreements of the conference were set out in the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation Signed on September 28, 1939 by the USSR and Nazi Germany .

Second Conference

This meeting took place sometime at the end of November of 1939, probably in Przemysl , [2] city that remained divided in zones of German and Soviet occupation between September of 1939 and June of 1941.. ² In addition to talks about fighting the Polish resistance, the Soviets and the Germans discussed the exchange of prisoners of war Poles. In addition, the first discussions on the occupation of Poland began. Some historians claim that this meeting took place in Lwów . ^{1 3} It is also stated that a meeting was held in December. ^{5 9}

Third Conference

This is the best known and took place in Zakopane [10] from 20 February 1940 [5] in the village “Pan Tadeusz”, located on the street Droga do Białego, near the valley of Dolina Białego. ^{October 5} The German side was represented by Adolf Eichmann and an official name Zimmermann, who later became the head of the District of Radom in the territory of the General Government . The Soviet delegation was headed by Grigoriy Litvinov and among others Rita Zimmerman (director of a gold mine in Kolymá ) and a man named Eichmann, creator of an efficient way to kill by shooting in the back of the head. ²

According to various sources, one of the results of this conference was the Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion German (see extraordinary peacekeeping operation ), [11] the elimination intellectuality Krakow ( Sonderaktion Krakau ) and the Soviet slaughter in Katyn . ^{5 November} In his book of 1,991 Stalin: Breaker of Nations , the British historian Robert Conquest stated, “the last horror suffered by so many millions of innocent Jews, Slavs and other European peoples, as a result of this meeting of evil minds, is a stain Indelible in the history and integrity of Western civilization, with all its humanitarian pretensions. ” ¹² Meanwhile Professor George Watson of the University of Cambridge , writes in his commentary ” Rehearsal for the Holocaust? “, June 1981, that the fate of the Polish officers prisoners may have decided at this conference. ^{13 14} However, this is disputed by other historians, who point out that there is no documentary evidence to confirm any kind of cooperation on this issue, that existing Soviet documentation makes such collaboration in fact unlikely, and that it is reasonable to say that Germany knew nothing of The Katyn massacre until the corpses were found. ^fifteen

Fourth Conference

The fourth and last meeting took place in March 1940, in Krakow ¹⁶ (according to some historians was part of the conference of Zakopane). This event was described by General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski , commander of Armia Krajowa , in his book ” Armia Podziemna ” ( ” Secret Army “). It describes how a special delegation of the NKVD arrived in Krakow, in order to discuss with the Gestapo how to act against the Polish resistance. The talks lasted several weeks. ^{17 18}

Bor-Komorowski’s account is discussed by the Russian historian Oleg Vishlyov, who states, based on the original and highly suspect documents of the Soviets, that the conference was not between the NKVD and the Gestapo, but between Soviet and German commissions Dealt with the question of refugees in the two occupied territories and that the topic of discussion was supposedly the “refugee exchange”. According to Vishlyov the conference had nothing to do with repression against the Poles or with the Katyn massacre. ¹⁹ Meanwhile some historians (including Wojciech Materski) point out that there is clear evidence of the operations of clandestine assassinations carried out by both Soviet and German forces in 1939-1940 throughout occupied Poland; however there is no evidence of direct connection between the massacres of prisoners of the NKVD and extraordinary peacekeeping operation in Poland carried out by the Germans, which led to the slaughter of thousands of prominent Poles in the same period . ^twenty

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