Roman Świątkiewicz , pen name Roman Świątek , or Romuald Świątek-Horyń ( born May 20 , 1928 ) , is a Polish writer , war veteran and World War II amateur historian . He published two controversial books about his personal experiences , '' Przed czerwonym trybunałem '' in 1987 in London ( re-issued in Poland in 1990 ) and '' The Katyn Forest '' in 1988 in London under the pseudonym of " Romuald Swiatek " . In the books he blamed the Germans for the Katyn massacre . In his second book he also claimed that Gerhard Buhtz , the leader of the German Katyn Commission in 1943 was killed by the Germans in 1944 . Świątkiewicz spent seven years in Soviet labor camps in 1950-1956 , where he met several hundred of German POWs , who told him that they had seen Polish POW camps in Nazi occupied territories . In the preface to his book '' The Katyn Forest '' he wrote : '' I hope that following will clarify my reasons for writing this book . When , in 1950 , I found myself in Soviet labour camps , amongst German prisoners of war , Polish underground army members , some of Vlasov 's men and Bandera 's men , where the crime of Katyn was frequently and hotly discussed . I developed , quite when I know not , a deeper interest in the subject and , with the passage of time and influenced by material I had gathered , I began to see that the version of the Katyn crime given in 1943 by Polish exile groups in London had no real foundation . '' '' During my seven-year stay in the camps , I met many German officers who , in 1941 , were occupying the territories of Smolensk and saw , with their own eyes camps with Polish officers . I also met in the camps several residents of Smolensk whose statements finally confirmed my conviction that some Polish exile groups in London , / Sanacja / took advantage of the discovery by Germans of the mass graves of Polish officers in order to use it as a political weapon against General Sikorski , whose policy towards the Soviet Union , as , indeed , his very person , was to them , total anathema . '' After meeting a Polish POW - an officer from Kraków named Władysław Zak - who told him that he was transferred from a NKVD camp near Smolensk to a jail in Moscow just two weeks before the German attack on Soviet Union , Świątkiewicz became completely convinced that the Germans had committed the massacre in Katyn
Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre
Roman Świątkiewicz