Of the group of 12,000 Poles sent to Dalstroy camp (near Kolyma) in 1940–1941, mostly POWs, only 583 men survived they were released in 1942 to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East. IPN estimates the number of Polish citizens who died under Soviet rule during World War II at 150,000 (a revision of older estimates of up to 500,000). According to estimates by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), roughly 320,000 Polish citizens were deported to the Soviet Union (this figure is questioned by some other historians, who hold to older estimates of about 700,000–1,000,000). Since Poland's conscription system required every nonexempt university graduate to become a military reserve officer, the NKVD was able to round up a significant portion of the Polish educated class as prisoners of war. Soviet repressions of Polish citizens occurred as well over this period. The 43,000 soldiers born in western Poland, then under Nazi control, were transferred to the Germans in turn, the Soviets received 13,575 Polish prisoners from the Germans. Of these, 42,400 soldiers, mostly of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity serving in the Polish Army, who lived in the territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, were released in October. Some were freed or escaped quickly, but 125,000 were imprisoned in camps run by the NKVD. About 250,000 to 454,700 Polish soldiers and policemen were captured and interned by the Soviet authorities. The Red Army advanced quickly and met little resistance, as Polish forces facing them were under orders not to engage the Soviets. The Soviet invasion of Poland began on 17 September, in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Despite these declarations of war, the two nations undertook minimal military activity during what became known as the Phoney War. Consequently, Britain and France, fulfilling the Anglo-Polish and Franco-Polish treaties of alliance, declared war on Germany.
On 1 September 1939, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany began. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signs the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The falsified Soviet version of the events has become known as the "Katyn lie", a term coined in reference to the " Auschwitz lie". In November 2010, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for ordering the massacre. The investigation was closed on the grounds that the perpetrators were dead, and since the Russian government would not classify the dead as victims of the Great Purge, formal posthumous rehabilitation was deemed inapplicable. After the Vistula–Oder offensive where the mass graves fell into Soviet control, the Soviet Union claimed the Nazis had killed the victims, and it continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.Īn investigation conducted by the office of the prosecutors general of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres, but refused to classify this action as a war crime or as an act of mass murder. Stalin severed diplomatic relations with the London-based Polish government-in-exile when it asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in April 1943. The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state the murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews including the chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be " intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials".
The massacre was initiated in NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to Joseph Stalin to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps, which was secretly approved by the Soviet Politburo led by Stalin.
Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German forces.
#PIT OF 100 TRIALS THOUSAND YEAR DOOR SERIES#
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Map of the sites related to the Katyn massacre
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