YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW (Signed by Jan & Isie Smuts, Deneys Reitz, and Montgomery of Alamein)

87pp.

Blue leather over card wrappers, gilt titles to spine and front wrap which also bears a Protea flower device in blind. Heavy, textured gilt-coloured endpapers.

Near Fine, a touch of foxing to top and lower edges.

Signed by the author and by: Deneys Reitz, Montgomery of Alamein, J.C. Smuts and his wife Issie Smuts to the title page. Foreword by Isie Smuts.

Most likely a presentation copy – another edition with brown paper wrappers is known.

Frank Stevenson was among a contingent of Allied POWs taken by the German Army in 1943 to the site of the Katyn massacre near Smolensk, Russia. There, over the course of April and May 1940, the NKVD on Stalin’s orders executed about 22 000 Polish officers, professors and other members of the Polish intelligentsia. This discovery had clear propaganda value for the Nazis, who saw it as a means to fracture Soviet relations among the Allies by revealing Russian war crimes. Russia officially denied responsibility until 1990.

Stevenson wrote a detailed report of his experiences at Katyn, the existence of which was kept secret by English authorities until as recently as 2010 (Cisek, 2012). 

During the Madden Committee hearings on the massacre in the United States, Stevenson’s fellow POW John H. Van Vliet Jr – an American soldier who went with Stevenson to Katyn - presented a report on events written to Major General F. L. Parks, then US Army Chief of Information in 1950. In it, he wrote of the author:

“Lt. Col. Stevenson did a lot of talking with the Germans. Told them that he had once published a book and that as soon as he returned home he was going to get permission from his superiors to write a book about this experience. We couldn’t get him to shut up about any subject at any time except the big question of “Whodunnit?” He was a windbag. He claimed to be a member of a group of amateur investigators of the supernatural. He even carried a feather in his wallet which he said was from the headdress of the American Indian Chief (spirit) whom he had contacted through a medium in S. Africa.”

Janusz Cisek, Post-1991 Katyn Investigations in Poland, 44 Case W. Res. J. Int'l L. 591 (2012) Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/jil/vol44/iss3/23