#katyn

The Katyń Massacre

The Katyń massacre (“zbrodnia katyńska” in Polish) was the mass murder of approximately 22000 Polish nationals carried out by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in April and May 1940. The massacre was prompted by a proposal (dated 5th March 1940) from Lavrentiy Beria, Minister of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps who had been captured and imprisoned by the USSR during the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. This official document was approved and signed by the Soviet Politburo, including its leader Joseph Stalin.

As well as approximately 8000 officers of the Polish army, the victims of the Katyń massacre included 6000 police officers and thousands of civic leaders, government officials, politicians, university lecturers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, priests and other members of the “bourgeoisie” who had been targeted for arrest following the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland.

In February and April 1940, many of the families of the Katyń massacre victims were also arrested by the Soviet authorities and deported from occupied eastern Poland to camps, collective farms, exile villages and various outposts of the gulag deep in the USSR - for use as slave labour.

By physically eliminating Poland’s military and civilian elites, Stalin wanted to decapitate the Polish nation and ensure it was less able to resist the enforced Sovietisation of the occupied Polish territories.

The victims were all citizens of Poland, but not all were ethnically Polish - for example, the murdered army officers included Ukrainians, Belarusians and several hundred Jews, among them Baruch Steinberg, the Chief Rabbi of the Polish army. The majority were interned at three Soviet camps (Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków) before being taken to NKVD mass murder sites, where they were executed and buried in mass graves.

Although the killings took place at several different locations in Soviet Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, the massacre is named after the Katyń forest in the Smolensk oblast of western Russia where the graves of the Kozielsk prisoners were discovered in 1943. The exact fate of the other victims and the location of their graves was not confirmed until five decades later. After the discovery of the Katyń burial site, the USSR denied responsibility for the massacre and tried to blame it on the Germans, and then continued to lie about the killings for 50 years until finally admitting Soviet guilt in 1990 and revealing where the remaining victims were buried.

In the 1990s it finally became possible to exhume and identify the bodies from the mass murder sites at Charków (Kharkiv), where the NKVD murdered the prisoners who were interned at Starobielsk, and Miednoje (Mednoye), where the NKVD murdered the prisoners who were interned at Ostaszków - as well as other locations such as Bykownia (Bykivnia).

Most of the Ostaszków prisoners were killed by Beria’s chief executioner Vasily Blokhin, who was awarded the Order of the Red Banner by Stalin at the end of April 1940 for demonstrating “skill and organisation in the effective carrying out of special tasks”.

Although several other ex-members of the NKVD eventually confessed to participating in the Katyń massacre, none of the perpetrators were ever brought to justice, and neither the Soviet government nor successive governments of Russia have ever permitted a full investigation of this war crime.

There are also plenty of vatniks, tankies and other useful idiots out there who are still in denial about it, even though claims that the murders were carried out by the Germans have zero credibility and have been comprehensively debunked (it’s actually impossible for the Polish prisoners interned at Ostaszków - who disappeared without trace in 1940 and whose bodies were found in Miednoje in 1991 - to have been captured, killed and buried by the Germans, who never reached either of these locations in Russia at any time during World War 2)…. The Katyń Massacre Timeline

23rd August 1939 - Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which included a secret protocol allocating "spheres of influence" in Europe to the two powers.

17th September 1939 - the Soviet Union invaded Poland and interned thousands of Polish army officers, police officers and others as prisoners of war.

February 1940 - the first mass deportation of Polish citizens to the gulags.

5th March 1940 - pursuant to a note to Joseph Stalin from Lavrentiy Beria, six members of the Soviet Politburo - Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Kalinin - signed an order to execute Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" interned in Soviet camps and prisons.

April-May 1940 - the Soviet NKVD carried out mass executions of Polish prisoners in Katyń, Kharkiv, Mednoye and other execution sites in the Soviet Union.

April 1940 - the second mass deportation of Polish citizens to the gulags.

June-July 1940 - the third mass deportation of Polish citizens to the gulags.

May-June 1941 - the fourth mass deportation of Polish citizens to the gulags.

22nd June 1941 – Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union.

June-November 1941 - further mass murders were carried out by the NKVD in Soviet prisons.

13th April 1943 - Radio Berlin announced the discovery of mass graves of Polish officers murdered by the NKVD in the Katyń Forest.

15th April 1943 - the Soviet Information Bureau issued a statement prepared by Andrei Vyshinsky, corrected by Vyacheslav Molotov and approved by Joseph Stalin, denying responsibility for the massacre. This was the beginning of the Katyń lie.

17th April 1943 - the Polish government-in-exile in London requested the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to investigate the mass graves of Polish officers discovered by the Germans.

25th April 1943 - the Soviet Union suspended diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile, accusing Poland of cooperating with Germany.

13th January 1944 - the Soviet Union established the so-called Burdenko Commission, aimed at placing the blame for the massacre on the Germans. The commission also falsely claimed that all the victims were murdered in the Katyń Forest (the Soviets covered up the existence of the other mass graves until 1990).

1945-1946 - representatives of the Soviet Union tried to include the Katyń massacre in the indictment at the Nuremberg Trials in an effort to shift responsibility for the crime onto Germany.

1944-1989 - in communist-ruled Poland and the rest of the Soviet bloc, the official stance was that Germany committed the Katyń massacre, and anyone trying to reveal the truth about Soviet guilt faced repression.

22nd December 1952 - the US Congress commission chaired by Ray John Madden published its report on the Katyń massacre. It was the first official document in the West confirming Soviet responsibility for the crime.

August 1980 - the emergence of Solidarity made it possible for limited public debate in Poland about the crimes of communism, including the Katyń massacre.

13th April 1990 - the Soviet authorities finally admitted responsibility for the Katyń massacre, describing it as "one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism". During a visit to Moscow, Wojciech Jaruzelski received copies of NKVD documents confirming Soviet responsibility from Mikhail Gorbachev. The location of the mass graves in Mednoye, Kharkiv and Bykivnia was also revealed for the first time.

14th October 1992 - the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, handed over to Poland copies of key documents concerning the Katyń massacre, including Beria's March 1940 proposal to carry out the murders, and a 1959 note from KGB head Alexander Shelepin to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in which he proposed to destroy many documents related to the Katyń massacre to minimise the chance that the truth would ever be revealed.

2000 - following major exhumation work throughout the 1990s, Poland opened the Polish War Cemeteries in Katyń, Mednoye, Kharkiv and Bykivnia.

2004 - the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation discontinued its investigation into the Katyń massacre. In response, the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland opened its own investigation.

2005 - the Russian authorities suspended cooperation with Poland in the investigation of the Katyń massacre, refusing legal assistance and full access to the files of the Russian investigation.

10th April 2010 - a Polish government aircraft which was taking a delegation of senior Polish state officials to the 70th anniversary commemorations of the Katyń massacre, crashed near Smolensk. Ninety six people were killed in the catastrophe.

2014 onwards - Russia attacked Ukraine, returned to an imperial policy and revived the false narrative that the Katyń massacre was committed by the Germans, moving further away from any legal or historical reckoning with the crime.

May 2020 - authorities in the Russian city of Tver removed memorial plaques commemorating victims of the Katyń massacre from the former Soviet secret police building.

28th June 2022 - a Russian court banned the distribution of the book "Katyn: On the trail of a crime", claiming that it "rehabilitated Nazism" and "violated the law on glorifying Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War".

April 2023 - all Polish flags were removed from the Katyń Memorial Complex. Busts of Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky and Yakov Sverdlov were installed at Mednoye.

2025 - the Russian prosecutor’s office ordered the removal of Polish symbols from the cemeteries in Katyń and Mednoye. These included the Cross of the September Campaign of 1939, commemorating the German and Soviet invasions of that year, and the Virtuti Militari, Poland's highest Polish military decoration.

Desde nuestra adolescencia, leí mucho sobre la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Uno de los episodios de aquella contienda arrasadora que más me sorprendió fue la matanza de Katyn. Esa sorpresa, mezclada con el horror y el espanto, continúa hasta hoy. En 1940, en el bosque de Katyn, ahora en Rusia, fueron arrojados a una fosa común varios miles de soldados polacos. Cada uno de ellos fue expulsado de este…

On 5th March 1940, Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the Soviet NKVD, sent a note (No 794/B) to Joseph Stalin, in which he stated that the Polish officers being held as prisoners of war in the camps at Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków, as well as thousands of Polish university lecturers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, civic leaders, politicians, government officials, priests and other members of the “bourgeoisie” who were interned in Soviet prisons, were all enemies of the Soviet Union, and recommended their execution.

These people had all been captured and imprisoned by the USSR during and after the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.

Funerals in Poland Lech Kaczyński, the fourth President of the Republic of Poland, died on 10 April 2010, after a Polish Air Force Tu-154 crashed outside of Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 aboard. His wife, economist and First Lady Maria Kaczyńska, was also among those killed. After the death of Kaczyński was announced, a week of mourning was declared by the acting President of…