From a May 24, 1943, memo to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, from Owen O’Malley, the British ambassador to the Polish government in exile, in the collection of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. This September, the National Archives released more than a thousand pages of previously classified documents concerning the U.S. and British governments’ roles in covering up the Red Army’s 1940 Katyn Forest massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners. The bodies were found by Nazi forces in the spring of 1943.
Sir,
The men who were taken to Katyn are dead, and their death is a…