Poles exhume remains of wartime leader

Polish prosecutors on Tuesday exhumed the body of wartime leader-in-exile Wladyslaw Sikorski from a vault in Krakow cathedral to try to determine whether he died in a 1943 air crash or was assassinated.

General Sikorski, his country's exiled prime minister and commander in chief while Poland was occupied by the Nazis, was killed on July 4, 1943 after the Liberator bomber in which he was flying crashed into the sea seconds after taking off from the British colony of Gibraltar. A British investigation into the death found that he probably died in the crash – which a 1969 probe concluded was most probably caused by baggage blocking the flight controls.

However, this conclusion is questioned by a lively Polish conspiracy industry that is the equivalent of the US "grassy knoll" theorists who endlessly query the assassination of president John F Kennedy.

Janusz Kurtyka, the head of the Institute of National Remembrance, a government body which investigates Nazi and communist crimes against the Polish nation, said that his investigators would be looking for "the hand of Moscow" when they opened the general's casket.

One theory holds that Sikorski was killed at the behest of Josef Stalin to get rid of a foe who was causing trouble for the Soviet Union. Three months before his death, Sikorski demanded an International Red Cross investigation into the massacre of thousands of Polish officers captured by Soviet forces at the start of the war. Their mass graves were found by the Nazis in their march on Moscow in April 1943.

That theory sees Sikorski as someone who could have saved Poland from its post-war fate as a Soviet satellite, preserving a democratic Poland within its pre-war borders. However, by mid-1943 Sikorski had already been marginalised by the British, who did not want to upset their Soviet allies.

Other theories see the hand of the Nazis behind Sikorski's death, or even Polish officers who found him too acquiescent towards Moscow. One leading conspiracy theorist, Tadeusz Kisielewski, sees the killers as Britons and Poles allied with Moscow.

The investigators will be examining the general's remains, which were transferred from Britain to Poland in 1993, to see whether he was alive when the plane crashed. One theory holds that he had been suffocated before his body was put on the airplane, while another has assassins killing everyone on board shortly before takeoff, sparing only the Czech pilot who was the only survivor of the crash.

Jacek Trebina, an historian from the University of Gdansk, calls the various theories "absurd", and doubts that investigators will find anything.

The general will be reburied on Wednesday, his remains dressed in a newly-sewn uniform, but the results of the exhumation will be known only in several months' time.

© The Financial Times Limited 2008. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation