Katyn massacre

Invasion of Poland . Behind him: Ribbentrop and Stalin. On 1 September 1939, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany began. Consequently, Britain and France, fulfilling the Anglo-Polish and Franco-Polish treaties of alliance, declared war on Germany. Despite these declarations of war, the two nations undertook minimal military activity during what became known as the Phoney War. The Soviet invasion of Poland began on 17 September, in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army advanced quickly and met little resistance, as Polish forces facing them were under orders not to engage the Soviets. About 250,000 to 454,700 Polish soldiers and policemen were captured and interned by the Soviet authorities. Most were freed or escaped quickly, but 125,000 were imprisoned in camps run by the NKVD. 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. 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. Polish prisoners of war Soviet repressions of Polish citizens occurred as well over this period. 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. 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 other historians, who hold to older estimates of about 700,000–1,000,000). 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). 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. According to Tadeusz Piotrowski, "during the war and after 1944, 570,387 Polish citizens had been subjected to some form of Soviet political repression". As early as 19 September 1939, the head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria, ordered the secret police to create the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees to manage Polish prisoners. The NKVD took custody of Polish prisoners from the Red Army, and proceeded to organise a network of reception centres and transit camps, and to arrange rail transport to prisoner-of-war camps in the western USSR. The largest camps were at Kozelsk (Optina Monastery), Ostashkov (Stolobny Island on Lake Seliger near Ostashkov), and Starobilsk. Other camps were at Jukhnovo (rail station Babynino), Yuzhe (Talitsy), rail station Tyotkino ( from Putyvl), Kozelshchyna, Oranki, Vologda (rail station Zaonikeevo), and Gryazovets. during the Soviet invasion of Poland Kozelsk and Starobelsk were used mainly for military officers, while Ostashkov was used mainly for Polish Scouting, gendarmes, police officers, and prison officers. Some prisoners were members of other groups of Polish intelligentsia, such as priests, landowners, and law personnel. The approximate distribution of men throughout the camps was as follows: Kozelsk, 5,000; Ostashkov, 6,570; and Starobelsk, 4,000. They totalled 15,570 men. According to a report from 19 November 1939, the NKVD had about 40,000 Polish POWs: 8,000–8,500 officers and warrant officers, 6,000–6,500 officers of police, and 25,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were still being held as POWs. In December, a wave of arrests resulted in the imprisonment of additional Polish officers. Ivan Serov reported to Lavrentiy Beria on 3 December that "in all, 1,057 former officers of the Polish Army had been arrested". The 25,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers were assigned to forced labor (road construction, heavy metallurgy). Preparations Once at the camps, from October 1939 to February 1940, the Poles were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political pressure by NKVD officers, such as Vasily Zarubin. The prisoners assumed they would be released soon, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to determine who would live and who would die. According to NKVD reports, if a prisoner could not be induced to adopt a pro-Soviet attitude, he was declared a "hardened and uncompromising enemy of Soviet authority". On 5 March 1940, pursuant to a note to Stalin from Beria, six members of the Soviet Politburo Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mikhail Kalinin signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. The reason for the massacre, according to the historian Gerhard Weinberg, was that Stalin wanted to deprive a potential future Polish military of a large portion of its talent. The Soviet leadership, and Stalin in particular, viewed the Polish prisoners as a "problem" as they might resist being under Soviet rule. Therefore, they decided the prisoners inside the "special camps" were to be shot as "avowed enemies of Soviet authority". == Executions ==

to Stalin which proposed the execution of Polish officers, policemen, etc. The number of victims is estimated at 22,000, with a lower limit of confirmed dead of 21,768. Detailed information on the executions in the Kalinin NKVD prison was provided during a hearing by Dmitry Tokarev, former head of the Board of the District NKVD in Kalinin. According to Tokarev, the shooting started in the evening and ended at dawn. The first transport, on 4 April 1940, carried 390 people, and the executioners had difficulty killing so many people in one night. The following transports held no more than 250 people. The executions were usually performed with German-made .25 ACP Walther Model 2 pistols supplied by Moscow, This procedure went on every night, except for the public May Day holiday. about 50 women including two sisters, Klara Auerbach-Margules and Stella Menkes, among them. Lieutenant Janina Lewandowska, daughter of Gen. Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, was the only woman POW executed during the massacre at Katyn. == Discovery ==

and others in Katyn at the graves of Mieczysław Smorawiński and Bronisław Bohaterewicz, April 1943 The question about the fate of the Polish prisoners was raised soon after Operation Barbarossa began in June 1941. The Polish government-in-exile and the Soviet government signed the Sikorski–Mayski agreement, which announced the willingness of both to fight together against Nazi Germany and for a Polish army to be formed on Soviet territory. The Polish general Władysław Anders began organizing this army, and soon he requested information about the missing Polish officers. During a personal meeting, Stalin assured him and Władysław Sikorski, the Polish Prime Minister, all the Poles were freed, and not all could be accounted because the Soviets "lost track" of them in Manchuria. In 1942, with the territory around Smolensk under German occupation, captive Polish railroad workers heard from the locals about a mass grave of Polish soldiers at Kozelsk near Katyn; finding one of the graves, they reported it to the Polish Underground State. After the war, Goetel escaped with a fake passport due to an arrest warrant issued against him. Jan Emil Skiwski was a collaborator. Józef Mackiewicz has published several texts about the crime. Two of the 12, the Bulgarian Marko Markov and the Czech , with their countries becoming satellite states of the Soviet Union, were forced to recant their evidence, defending the Soviets and blaming the Germans. The Katyn massacre was beneficial to Nazi Germany, which used it to discredit the Soviet Union. On 14 April 1943, Goebbels wrote in his diary: When Goebbels was informed in September 1943 that the German Army had to withdraw from the Katyn area, he wrote a prediction in his diary. His entry for 29 September 1943 reads: Polish reaction The Polish government-in-exile led by Sikorski insisted on bringing the matter to the negotiation table with the Soviets and on opening an investigation by the International Red Cross. On 17 April 1943 the Polish government issued a statement on this issue, asking for a Red Cross investigation, which was rejected by Stalin, who used the fact that Germans also requested such an investigation as a "proof" of Polish-German conspiracy, and which led to a deterioration of Polish-Soviet relations. According to the Polish diplomat Edward Bernard Raczyński, Raczyński and General Sikorski met privately with Churchill and Alexander Cadogan on 15 April 1943, and told them the Poles had proof the Soviets were responsible for the massacre. Churchill reportedly stated, "The Bolsheviks can be very cruel." According to Raczyński, "Churchill... without committing himself, showed by his manner that he had no doubt of it." Soviet response The Soviet government immediately denied the German charges. They claimed the Polish prisoners of war had been engaged in construction work west of Smolensk, and consequently were captured and executed by invading German units in August 1941. The Soviet response on 15 April to the initial German broadcast of 13 April, prepared by the Soviet Information Bureau, stated, "Polish prisoners-of-war who in 1941 were engaged in construction work west of Smolensk and who...fell into the hands of the German-Fascist hangmen". Western reaction The growing Polish-Soviet tension was beginning to strain Western-Soviet relations at a time when the Poles' importance to the Allies, significant in the first years of the war, was beginning to fade. In retrospective review of records, both British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt were increasingly torn between their commitments to their Polish ally and the demands by Stalin and his diplomats. During the 1951–52 Congressional investigation into Katyn, Bissell defended his action before the United States Congress, arguing it was not in the U.S. interest to antagonize an ally (the USSR) whose assistance the nation needed against the Empire of Japan. In 2014, a copy of a report Van Vliet made in France during 1945 was discovered. == Post-war trials ==

From 28 December 1945 to 4 January 1946, a Soviet military court in Leningrad tried seven Wehrmacht servicemen. One of them, Arno Dürre, who was charged with murdering numerous civilians using machine-guns in Soviet villages, confessed to having taken part in the burial (though not the execution) of 15,000 to 20,000 Polish POWs in Katyn. For this he was spared execution and was given 15 years of hard labor. His confession was full of absurdities, and thus he was not used as a Soviet prosecution witness during the Nuremberg trials. He later recanted his confession, claiming the investigators forced him to confess through torture. At the London conference that drew up the indictments of German war crimes before the Nuremberg trials, the Soviet negotiators put forward the allegation, "In September 1941, 925 Polish officers who were prisoners of war were killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk". The US negotiators agreed to include it but were "embarrassed" by the inclusion (noting the allegation had been debated extensively in the press) and concluded it would be up to the Soviets to sustain it. At the trials in 1946, Soviet General Roman Rudenko raised the indictment, stating "one of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible was the mass execution of Polish prisoners of war shot in the Katyn forest near Smolensk by the German fascist invaders", the Tribunal "should take judicial notice of official government documents" requiring no "proof of facts", including reports produced by various investigative commissions, which in case of Soviets was the Burdenko commission. Only 70 years later did it become known that former OSS chief William Donovan had succeeded in getting the American delegation in Nuremberg to block the Katyn indictment. A German officer, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was stationed in Smolensk during the war, had convinced Donovan that not the Germans but the Soviets were the perpetrators. It was not the purpose of the court to determine whether Germany or the Soviet Union was responsible for the crime, but rather to attribute the crime to at least one of the defendants, which the court was unable to do. == 1950s ==

In 1951 and 1952, during the Korean War, a US congressional investigation chaired by representative Ray Madden and known as the Madden Committee investigated the Katyn massacre. According to the Committee conclusion: "the Katyn massacre involved some 4,243 of the 15,400 Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders who were captured by the Soviets when Russia invaded Poland in September 1939." The committee concluded that these 4,243 Poles had been killed by the NKVD and that a case should be brought to the International Court of Justice. However, the question of responsibility remained controversial in the West as well as behind the Iron Curtain. In the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, plans for a memorial to the victims bearing the date 1940 (rather than 1941) were condemned as provocative in the political climate of the Cold War. It has also been alleged that the choice made in 1969 for the location of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic war memorial at the former Belarusian village named Khatyn, the site of the 1943 Khatyn massacre, was made to cause confusion with Katyn. The two names are similar or identical in many languages, and were often confused. In Poland, the pro-Soviet authorities following the Soviet occupation after the war covered up the matter in accordance with the official Soviet propaganda line, deliberately censoring any sources that might provide information about the crime. Katyn was a forbidden topic in post-war Poland. Censorship in the Polish People's Republic was a massive undertaking and Katyn was specifically mentioned in the "Black Book of Censorship" used by the authorities to control the media and academia. Not only did government censorship suppress all references to it, but even mentioning the atrocity was dangerous. In the late 1970s, democracy groups like the Workers' Defence Committee and the Flying University defied the censorship and discussed the massacre, in the face of arrests, beatings, detentions, and ostracism. In 1981, Polish trade union Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription "Katyn, 1940". It was confiscated by the police and replaced with an official monument with the inscription: "To the Polish soldiersvictims of Hitlerite fascismreposing in the soil of Katyn". Nevertheless, every year on the day of Zaduszki, similar memorial crosses were erected at Powązki Cemetery and numerous other places in Poland, only to be dismantled by the police. Katyn remained a political taboo in the Polish People's Republic until the fall of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. In the Soviet Union during the 1950s, the head of KGB, Alexander Shelepin, proposed and carried out the destruction of many documents related to the Katyn massacre to minimize the chance the truth would be revealed. His 3 March 1959 note to Nikita Khrushchev, with information about the execution of 21,857 Poles and with the proposal to destroy their personal files, became one of the documents that was preserved and eventually made public. == Revelations ==

, Poland, memorializing "Katyn, Kharkiv, Mednoye and other places of killing in the former USSR in 1940" During the 1980s, there was increasing pressure on both the Polish and Soviet governments to release documents related to the massacre. Polish academics tried to include Katyn in the agenda of the 1987 joint Polish-Soviet commission to investigate censored episodes of Polish-Russian history. In 1989, Soviet scholars revealed Stalin had indeed ordered the massacre , and in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the NKVD had executed the Poles and confirmed two other burial sites similar to the site at Katyn: Mednoye and Piatykhatky. On 30 October 1989, Gorbachev allowed a delegation of several hundred Poles, organized by the Polish association Families of Katyń Victims, to visit the Katyn memorial. This group included former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. A mass was held and banners hailing the Solidarity movement were laid. One mourner affixed a sign reading "NKVD" on the memorial, covering the word "Nazis" in the inscription such that it read "In memory of Polish officers killed by the NKVD in 1941." Several visitors scaled the fence of a nearby KGB compound and left burning candles on the grounds. Brzezinski commented: It isn't a personal pain which has brought me here, as is the case in the majority of these people, but rather recognition of the symbolic nature of Katyń. Russians and Poles, tortured to death, lie here together. It seems very important to me that the truth should be spoken about what took place, for only with the truth can the new Soviet leadership distance itself from the crimes of Stalin and the NKVD. Only the truth can serve as the basis of true friendship between the Soviet and the Polish peoples. The truth will make a path for itself. I am convinced of this by the very fact that I was able to travel here. His remarks were given extensive coverage on Soviet television. On 13 April 1990, the forty-seventh anniversary of the discovery of the mass graves, the USSR formally expressed "profound regret" and admitted Soviet secret police responsibility. The day was declared a worldwide Katyn Memorial Day (). == Post-communist investigations ==

In 1990, future Russian president Boris Yeltsin released the top-secret documents from the sealed "Package №1." and transferred them to the new Polish president Lech Wałęsa. However, he eventually declined to prosecute because Soprunenko, who died a year later, was 83, almost blind, and recovering from a cancer operation. During his 29 April 1991 interrogation, Soprunenko defended himself by denying his own signature. Further testimonies were publicized in October 1991 via a report made by Nicholas Bethell, a British historian and Conservative member of the European Parliament, who obtained videotaped copies of the interrogations to surviving participants, statements, and met with military prosecutors in Moscow. His report mentioned Soprunenko and Tokarev (1902–1993), named "Vladimir Tokaryev" in Bethell's and other sources. Tokarev, the head of the Kalinin NKVD branch, was 89 but still recalled how 250 Poles were murdered every night in Kalinin. Earlier in August 1991, Tokarev, who still lived in Miednoje, had reportedly told Colonel Aleksander Tretetsky of the Soviet Prosecutor's Office, the exact location where the Polish remains were. Bethell's report, which was published in The Observer, also quoted Tokarev as saying that he learned of the massacre's plan in March 1940; he was called to a meeting in Moscow with Bogdan Kobulov, Beria's deputy, and claimed that Soprunenko was present in said meeting, in which the latter explained details of the operation. Moreover, Bethell's spoke of Soprunenko telling that he received an order from the Politburo to carry out the executions, signed by Stalin. Kupiets further declared that ″The system of NKVD special commissions was completely outside the Soviet constitution. They had no basis in law, even in those days. An execution carried out under their authority was, quite simply, a murder. ″ And while Bethell said that Soviet prosecutors expected to recommend pressing charges against Tokaryev and Soprunenko, Russian law further prevented this due to Soviet doctrine considering that crimes against humanity, which were not universally subject to statute of limitations, were only committed in the name of Nazi Germany. In this line, Bethell suggested back then that “retroactive legislation could be passed, making mass murder of this sort a limitless crime.″ In a ruling on 16 April 2012, the court found Russia had violated the rights of victims' relatives by not providing them with sufficient information about the investigation and described the massacre as a "war crime". But it also refused to judge the effectiveness of the Soviet Russian investigation because the related events took place before Russia ratified the Human Rights Convention in 1998. The plaintiffs filed an appeal but a 21 October 2013 ruling essentially reaffirmed the prior one, claiming that the matter is outside the court's competence, and only rebuking the Russian side for its failure to substantiate adequately why some critical information remained classified. In late 2007 and early 2008, several Russian newspapers, including Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Komsomolskaya Pravda, and Nezavisimaya Gazeta, printed stories that implicated the Nazis in the crime, spurring concern, this was done with the tacit approval of the Kremlin. In the following years, many volumes of the case were declassified and transferred to the Polish government, but others remained classified. In June 2008, Russian courts consented to hear a case about the declassification of documents about Katyn and the judicial rehabilitation of the victims. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev handed one of the volumes to the acting Polish president, Bronislaw Komorowski. Medvedev and Komorowski agreed the two states should continue to try to reveal the truth about the tragedy. The Russian president reiterated Russia would continue to declassify documents on the Katyn massacre and ordered to release the documents proving the guilt of Stalin and Beria. In November 2010, the Russian State Duma issued an official declaration that condemned Stalin for the Katyn massacre. Nevertheless, 35 out of 183 files about the Katyn massacre remain classified in Russia. According to Belarus state archives known as "Belarusian Katyn List", some courts in the Belarusian SSR also issued death sentences to Poles, and there was a list with names of 3,870 officers whose identities and exact place of execution (presumably Bykivnia and Kuropaty) still remain to be established. ==Legacy==

Polish–Russian relations and Polish president Bronislaw Komorowski laying wreaths at the Katyn massacre memorial complex, 11 April 2011 Russia and Poland remained divided on the legal description of the Katyn crime. The Poles considered it a case of genocide and demanded further investigations, as well as complete disclosure of Soviet documents. In June 1998, Boris Yeltsin and Aleksander Kwaśniewski agreed to construct memorial complexes at Katyn and Mednoye, the two NKVD execution sites on Russian soil. In September of that year, the Russians also raised the issue of Soviet prisoner of war deaths in the camps for Russian prisoners and internees in Poland (1919–24). About 16,000 to 20,000 POWs died in those camps due to communicable diseases. Before the visit, the 2007 film Katyń was shown on Russian state television for the first time. The Moscow Times commented that the film's premiere in Russia was likely a result of Putin's intervention. On 10 April 2010, an aircraft carrying Polish president Lech Kaczyński with his wife and 87 other politicians and high-ranking army officers crashed in Smolensk, killing all 96 aboard the aircraft. The catastrophe has also had major echoes in the international and particularly the Russian press, prompting a rebroadcast of Katyń on Russian television. and a translation has also been made available in English. In November 2010, the State Duma (lower house of the Russian parliament) passed a resolution declaring long-classified documents "showed that the Katyn crime was carried out on direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet officials". The declaration also called for the massacre to be investigated further to confirm the list of victims. Members of the Duma from the Communist Party denied the Soviet Union had been to blame for the Katyn massacre and voted against the declaration. Those adopting pre-1990 views The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and a number of other pro-Soviet Russian politicians and commentators claim that the story of Soviet guilt is a conspiracy and that the documents released in 1990 were forgeries. They insist that the original version of events, assigning guilt to the Nazis, is the correct version, and they call on the Russian government to start a new investigation that would revise the findings of 2004. These alternative versions were refuted by a number of Russian historians and organizations such as Memorial. They pointed to inconsistencies in this alternative version, namely the details of another contemporary mass execution site at Mednoye in the Tver Region. That part of Central Russia, they stress, was never under German occupation and yet it contained the remains of victims originating from the same camps as those killed in Katyn; the victims at Mednoye were also killed in April–May 1940. Mednoye was only examined in the 1990s and was found to contain well-preserved Polish uniforms, documents, souvenirs, and Soviet newspapers dating back to 1940. In September 2009, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin's grandson, sued Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta after it published an article claiming his grandfather personally signed execution orders against civilians. Dzhugashvili centered his case on the veracity of a document showing Stalin ordered the Katyn massacre. On 13 October 2009, the Russian court rejected the suit. In 2021, the Russian Ministry of Culture downgraded the memorial complex at Katyn on its Register of Sites of Cultural Heritage from a place of federal to one of only regional importance. A number of Russian politicians advocated demolishing the Polish part of the memorial complex. Among them were State Duma deputies Anatoly Wasserman and Alexey Chepa. On 28 June 2022 the Leningradsky Court of Kaliningrad forbade distribution of the book "Katyn. On the trail of a crime". According to the court the book "rehabilitated Nazism" and "violated the law on glorifying Soviet Victory in the Great Patriotic War". In June 2022, Russia removed the Polish flag from the memorial complex, amidst a rise in Russia–Poland political tension due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In April 2023 Russia ordered all Polish flags to be removed from the site before the commemoration on 20 April. On 11 April 2023, RIA Novosti, Russian state-owned domestic news agency, reported that FSB Department for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region handed over "unique archival documents" on Katyn to the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg - including testimony of a German soldier, claiming that he took part in Katyn Massacre burials in early September 1941. RIA article further reported how according to "a number of Russian historians, the executions in Katyn were carried out by the Nazis", that there are "inconsistencies in the evidence base on which Warsaw relies" and that the Russian Federation finds the "current approach to covering the "Katyn case" does not meet the principles of objectivity and historicism" and that it is just a part of "information and propaganda campaign" to blame the "USSR for unleashing World War II." == See also ==