For a brief moment yesterday Cracow’s ancient Royal cathedral, resting place of Polish kings, queens, saints and heroes, came to resemble a crime scene investigation.

Gloved and masked forensic scientists lifted the fragile skeleton of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland’s wartime leader, out of his marble tomb, wrapped him in foil and subjected the body to the latest tests available to modern science – tomography scans, DNA samples, a search for trace elements of poisons.

The aim was to shed light on one of the enduring secrets of the Second World War. Was General Sikorski, whose body was recovered after an air crash in the Straits of Gibraltar in July 1943, murdered by the Russians? Or even by the British?

The coffin, draped in the red-and-white Polish flag, was carried out of St Leonard’s crypt on the Wawel Hill, out of a cathedral door inscribed with the Latin motto Corpora dormiunt vigilant animae – the bodies are asleep, the souls are awake – and into a dark-windowed hearse for the short journey to the Cracow Institute of Radiology. Overhead, a helicopter hovered as if to shield the dead general from yet another assault. It was an extraordinary episode, a token of how deeply disturbed the relationship between Poland and Russia has become. The day before the exhumation of Sikorski, Lech Kaczynski, the Polish President, was attacked in Georgia while in a convoy with Mikheil Saa-kashvili, his Georgian counterpart, who promptly blamed the Russians for trying to shoot him.

Archive, 1943: General Sikorski killed

The bodies of General Sikorski and Major-Genral Klimecki have been recovered from the sea

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The investigation into Sikorski’s death was supposed to put an end to more than half a century of conspiracy theories. “The exhumation may bring a breakthrough in the investigation,” said Andrzej Drogon, of the National Remembrance Institute, which formally opened the case after a book presented fresh information suggesting that Moscow was behind the death.

In April 1943 the general, who was head of the Polish government-in-exile, had demanded an explanation for thousands of Polish officers found murdered in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk in western Russia. All the indications were that this was a crime committed not by the Nazis, but by the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, was making moves towards creating a communist-sponsored Polish government for the postwar period. Sikorski had become a serious problem for Moscow. On July 4, 1943, Sikorski, his daughter Zofia and a group of officers took off from Gibraltar. Within 16 seconds they had crashed into the rocks below.

A computer simulation carried out by Warsaw University of Technology in 1992 found that the Liberator aircraft could not have crashed into the sea for technical reasons, given the speed and height that it had reached as testified by the Czech pilot at the original British investigation in 1943.

As a result, one theory was that the pilot, the only survivor, had brought down the aircraft deliberately. Sikorski was found in a lifejacket, even though he was famed for not wearing one for superstitious reasons. Even more mysteriously, the body of his daughter was not found – but reliable Polish witnesses said that they saw her in the Soviet Gulag in 1945.

Fingers were pointed at the British in a 1980s film by Bogdan Poreba, a Polish director, because the general had spent the previous evening at the governor’s residence in Gibraltar. Was he disposed of for being an embarrassment to the British Government at a time when Winston Churchill was having to align himself more and more with Stalin?

A further complicating factor was that the head of the Iberian Peninsula section of MI6 at the time was Kim Philby, who was already working for the Russians. Could he have had a hand in it? “There really is no evidence at all that Philby was in Gibraltar at the time, more likely he was in St Albans,” said Jacek Tebinka, of Gdansk University. “He was not some kind of James Bond figure, assassinating people or tampering with engines.”

Researchers yesterday were trying to determine whether there was any trace of poison left in the skeleton, whether there was any sign of a bullet wound and, indeed, whether the body really was that of the general.

DNA swabs have been taken from the grandchildren of the general’s sister. When the body was recovered from the sea, no forensic scientific examination was carried out. First results are expected by the end of the year.

Many historians believe that even the elaborate exhumation will not give a decisive verdict on the cause of death. At the very least it will pile up pressure on the British Government to declassify secret documents on the affair.

A general in wartime exile

— Wladyslaw Sikorski was born in 1881 to a parish organ player in the Austrian zone of partitioned Poland

— He fought with distinction during the First World War, and played a prominent role in the later Battle of Warsaw against Russian forces

— His political career began in 1921 when he became chief of general staff in the new Polish state. He was appointed prime minister in 1922, but his government soon collapsed

— He fell out of favour after a coup in 1926 but, at the outbreak of the Second World War, took command of the Polish Army in France and then became leader of the Polish government-in-exile

Source: www.poland.gov.pl

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