A story about U.S. OWI and Voice of America (VOA) pro-Soviet propaganda originally published by the Online Cold War Radio Museum Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum September 1, 2016 The Office of War Information (O.W.I.), established by Executive Order No. 9182 of June 13, 1942, was the WWII-era domestic and foreign propaganda agency of the U.S. Executive Branch reporting…
By Ted Lipien In my book, Wojtyła’s Women: How They Shaped the life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church, I describe how future Pope John Paul II, whom I had interviewed in Washington D.C. for the Voice of America (VOA) in 1976 when he was Kraków’s Archbishop, became familiar with many stories of immense suffering of…
Throughout World War II, the arrests and forced deportations of Polish families to labor camps ordered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin received practically no mainstream media coverage in the United States. After the Soviet Union became an important military ally against Nazi Germany with the sudden collapse of Stalin’s alliance with Hitler following the German attack on Russia in June…
A statement made on the floor of the U.S. Senate on February 8, 1940 by Senator John A. Danaher (R-Connecticut) may have been the first major public reference in the United States to the 1940 deportations of Poles and other nationalities to Gulag forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. Senator Danaher inserted in the Congressional Record the text of…
Following the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, which started World War II, the Soviets began the first mass deportation of Poles on February 10, 1940 from the occupied eastern part of Poland. Whole families were arrested, usually early in the morning, and sent in overcrowded cattle train wagons to forced labor…
Wojtek can you hear me? By Anne Kaczanowski Wojtek can you hear me? Wojtek do you still remember me? Wojtek czy pamietasz? Wojtek czy jeszcze pamietasz mnie? The penetrating sound of friends transcend the pages of time And the bear turns his ear as the bell of the universe chimes He remembers as though it…
A Soviet-instigated plan to kill an anti-communist woman journalist in the early years of the Cold War was linked to her attempts to tell the story of thousands of Polish children who in 1940-1941 had been deported with their families from eastern Poland to Siberia and Central Asia where many died from brutal treatment. The assassination plan was revealed in…
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo, 1943 By Ted Lipien A U.S. Government propaganda photo showing an unidentified Polish woman and other Polish women making their own clothing at a Red Cross refugee camp in Iran was taken by the Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in 1943. A few months earlier, the women were prisoners and slave laborers in the Soviet…
How the Roosevelt Administration Shipped Polish Refugee Orphans to Mexico In Locked Trains and Lied About It to Protect Stalin The Untold Story of Polish Refugee Children from Soviet Russia: “A Group Lost in History” The current crisis at the U.S. southern border and the Trump administration’s efforts to keep migrants in Mexico, some of them children, while their asylum…
This U.S. Government propaganda photo showing Polish refugee families awaiting evacuation was taken by the Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in Iran in 1943. To protect Stalin and the anti-Germany military alliance with Moscow, pro-Soviet propagandists in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration did not publish photos of Polish children who were starved, ill and near death when they were…
By Ted Lipien Lieutenant Colonel Henry I. Szymanski was a U.S. Army Liaison Officer to the Polish Army created under the command of General Władysław Anders during the Second World War II which fought the Germans alongside American and British troops in North Africa and Italy. On November 22, 1942, Lt. Col. Szymanski sent a report on Polish-Russian relations to…
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo This U.S. Government propaganda photo showing an unidentified Polish woman with two children at a refugee camp in Iran was taken by the Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in Iran in 1943. By that time, this woman was safe and both of her children looked healthy and no longer starved. For several months with thousands…