Katyňský masakr

Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre


Every nation has a historical trauma that has stirred emotions for decades, fueled by its public neglect or even denial. The tragedy in Katyn is just such a trauma for Poland.


In mid-April 1943, several mass graves were discovered in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, and in them were the bodies of four and a half thousand executed Polish officers. The truth about one of the greatest war crimes in modern history has thus come to light. Most of those murdered had their hands tied behind their backs and were killed by a shot in the back of the head. Among the victims were not only active soldiers, policemen and gendarmes, but also doctors, university professors, scientists, artists and writers who were mobilized in September 1939. Germany, of course, did not keep its discovery to itself and made propaganda use of it. The entire world public, including the Polish government-in-exile in London, learned in this shocking way where thousands of officers captured by the Red Army, missing since 1940, had gone.


Unfortunately, the general awareness of the Katyn issue in Czech society is still much lower than the importance of this topic deserves. The fact that Poles from the Czech lands were also victims of Katyn comes as a huge surprise to most. According to the research of Professor Mečislav Borák, there are now over 500 registered victims from the territory of Těšín Silesia (called Zaolzie, Záolzí by the Poles, basically the former political districts of Karviná and Český Těšín), who were evacuated as soldiers and officers of the Polish army, members of the police and state services before the onslaught of the German occupiers to the East. There, they were captured by the Soviet Army in late September 1939, and then in the spring of 1940, along with more than 20,000 captured Polish officers and policemen, they were mass murdered by the Soviet NKVD security forces in Katyn,Smolensk, Tver, Kharkov and other places in the then Soviet Union.


The Katyn crime, one of the most horrific mass murders ever perpetrated on prisoners of war, was for many years silent not only in Poland, which was so tragically affected by the whole case, but also in the world, where the facts were distorted according to their own power-political interests. Until 1990, the Soviet and Russian leadership cowardly avoided admitting to this mass murder... It was only 47 years after this crime that the Soviet Union admitted that these murders were committed by its secret service NKVD.


Here is a brief chronology of the Katyn crime, a dark chapter of not only European history, focusing only on the war and post-war period. It is deliberately free of the earlier Polish-Russian wars, the triple partition of Poland involving Russia, the subsequent uprisings, and other factors in the long history of complicated Polish-Russian relations that may have had more or less influence on the course of events leading up to the Katyn massacre.


The year 1939


August 23, 1939
The Treaty of Non-Aggression between Nazi Germany and the Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, known as the "Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact", was signed in Moscow. In an additional secret protocol, it was agreed that in the Baltic region the border of influence between Germany and the USSR would be identical to the northern border of Lithuania, meaning that Latvia, Estonia and Finland would join the Soviet Union. Furthermore, that the border in Poland would be formed by the lines of the Narev, Vistula and San rivers, while the existence of an independent Polish state was still to be negotiated according to the development of the situation. The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact thus anticipated Soviet operations in the eastern regions of Poland in its secret protocol.


25. 08. 1939
Britain provides Poland with written security guarantees in case of an attack by Germany.


[September 01-16, 1939
The Nazi invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 begins World War II. The Polish army, facing German superior numbers, retreats towards the south-eastern border. Its aim is to continue the fight in the south-eastern territory of Poland, or to save as many soldiers as possible for further combat by evacuating across the border.


17. 09. 1939
On that day, Red Army troops enter Poland. This insidious and, for the Poles, completely surprising entry of the Soviet army was the final blow to the Polish resistance.


28 September 1939
Germany and the Soviet Union, two of the worst totalitarian regimes in Europe, implement the formal partition of Poland.


September 17 - September 30, 1939
Approximately 250,000 Poles are taken prisoner by the Red Army. These thousands can hardly be described as prisoners of war, as Poland was not in a state of war with the Soviet Union. The Soviets showed no interest in ordinary soldiers and non-commissioned officers and in most cases released them. Half of the prisoners were soon set free and thus managed to escape further persecution.


September-November 1939
The remaining detainees were taken over by the NKVD secret service. Through subsequent interrogations and selections, 15,500 Polish army officers, policemen and civil servants were selected and imprisoned in prison camps and transported by transports to labour camps in eastern Ukraine and Siberia.


The largest camps for officers and policemen were set up in former monasteries, which at that time belonged to the Soviet security forces. These were monasteries in Starobelsk in eastern Ukraine, in Kozelsk, about 250 kilometres southeast of Smolensk. These camps housed mainly officers of higher rank. The third was the camp at Ostashkov on Lake Seliger, about 200 kilometres north-west of Moscow, where police officers were interned.


Most of these officers were not on active duty, having been drafted into the army during the general mobilization in August and September 1939. They were mostly teachers, doctors, journalists, lawyers - the flower of the Polish intelligentsia.


October 1939
The NKVD starts interrogating detainees. During the interrogation they wanted to find out the degree of willingness to agree with the Soviet regime. If a few such individuals were found, they tried to recruit them as collaborators, and then saved them from a drastic end.
The Soviets emphasized their social origin; intelligence simply posed a threat to the Soviet regime. They also focused on their political orientation and their possible participation in the Polish-Bolshevik war in 1920. They were interested in links to citizens living in territories occupied by the Soviet Union, so that they could widen the circle of suspects. They investigated whether their occupation might be related to espionage against the Soviet Union. However, practically every case was stamped "Enemy of the People" at the end of the interrogation. These words were tantamount to a death sentence.


Year 1940


February 1940
Red Army Headquarters asks Stalin for further orders and instructions regarding the next course of action against Polish officers stationed in camps in Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov .


In the territory of Poland occupied by the Red Army, mass deportations of Poles to the interior of the USSR begin. According to various sources, during the four waves of deportations, around 1.2 million Poles were transported to the East.


March 1940
The NKVD establishes a transit camp in Pavlischevo Bor, which houses 448 prisoners from the camps in Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov. They are later transferred to the camp in Gryazovets. From there they are released in 1941 and give their testimonies about the liquidation of the camps. To this day, it is not clear why the Grjazovec camp was established, but the testimonies of its prisoners have made it easier to clarify the fate of the remaining prisoners.


05. 03. 1940
The People's Commissar of the Interior of the USSR Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beriya handed Stalin File No. 794/B, in which he defined the Polish prisoners as hardened opponents of the Soviet system, with no possibility of redress. It states that the NKVD considers it undesirable that these prominent prisoners of war, hostile to the USSR and communism in general, should return home. It proposes a special solution, the application of the highest possible punishment against the above - execution by shooting.


The same day, a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union signed by Stalin and all senior members of the leadership (Beria, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Molotov, Voroshilov) decided that some 26,000 Polish enemies should be subjected to the ultimate punishment. This resolution decided the fate of 15,000 Polish officers, border guards, members of the intelligence and counter-intelligence services, gendarmes, policemen and prison service personnel held in the camps mentioned above. However, the other 11 000 Poles who were in prisons and camps throughout the western belt of the Soviet Union were no longer just soldiers. They were settlers, landowners, various businessmen, priests and members of the intelligentsia.


The morbid plan to exterminate thousands of innocent people was approved. The NKVD could begin what it called its "wet work"... Or cruel murder. According to their plans, everything would be finished in five weeks - no survivors, no eyewitnesses.


This coldly calculated and ruthlessly executed mass murder was intended not only to liquidate the officer corps of the Polish army, but also to deal a heavy blow to the Polish intelligentsia. It was the liquidation of these components of the nation - its elite - that removed a large part of the people who could have been at the forefront of the future struggle for the freedom and independence of their homeland.


April-May 1940
Gradual liquidation of prison camps. From early April to mid-May 1940, prisoners were taken out of the camps and executed. For the purpose of executions, a very simple but elaborate method was devised: the prisoners, kept in the hope of repatriation, were transported in groups of several hundred persons by closely guarded transports from the individual camps to the places of secret executions - to the nearest prisons in the headquarters of the NKVD regional administrations. In the cellars of the prisons, the executioners had already rehearsed mechanised methods of murder from the years of the Great Terror.


03. 04. 1940
The liquidation of the Kozelsk camp begins, the first group of 62 officers from Kozelsk is deported to Katyn, two days later the liquidation of the camps in Starobelsk and Ostashkov begins.


Kozelsk
4,410 prisoners from the Kozelsk camp are murdered in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. Highly guarded transports were dispatched between 3 April and 12 May. From the station, the officers were transported by bus to the murder site, where their hands were tied behind their backs above the prepared mines and they were executed by a shot in the neck or the back of the neck with a round from German Walther pistols of 7.65 mm calibre. Some of the victims were loaded with four-edged Russian bayonets. When someone wanted to resist, the executioner threw his coat over his head, tied it under his neck and led him, thus hooded, to the pit. It must have been a horrible sight to the others. In the wide, deep pits lay their colleagues. The bodies were trampled over by firing squads, and they were squeezing them and wading through the blood like butchers in a slaughterhouse... It is very likely, however, that some of the prisoners were murdered in the cellars of the prison of the NKVD district headquarters in Smolensk. This is evidenced by the fact that in some mass graves the victims were placed differently than in others. They were systematically stacked face down next to each other, which indicates the posthumous placement of the victims.

Starobelsk
3,739 prisoners from the Starobelsk camp are killed in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Transports were dispatched between 5 April and 12 May. From Kharkiv railway station, prisoners were transported by trucks to the NKVD prison. After identification, the prisoners' hands were tied behind their backs and they were executed by a blow to the neck or the back of the neck. The dead bodies were taken out of the city at night and buried in mass graves near Kharkov, in a forest park about 1.5 km from the village of Piatichatka.


Ostashkov
6,314 prisoners from the Ostashkov camp are shot in Tver. Transports were dispatched between 4 April and 16 May. In the cellars of the Tver NKVD headquarters, officers were systematically murdered. However, the tried and tested methods of murder were not sufficient for such large numbers of prisoners. During the first transport of 390 officers, the executioners were unable to carry out their work, so the next transports had to be reduced to 250 people... The bodies of the slaughtered were taken by trucks to the NKVD recreation centre in the village of Miednoye, 32 km away. The remains were dumped in one of the 20 prepared pits and bulldozed.
A further 7 300 Poles were slaughtered in camps in western Belarus and Ukraine. Their graves have not yet been found.


May 1940
Before they were shot, the officers were allowed to maintain contact with their families in German-occupied territory. After the completion of this horrific crime, protected by state secrecy, there was a time of silence for the families of the slain, waiting for any news from their loved ones. Correspondence ceased, letters sent were returned undelivered, and attempts to obtain information about their fate and whereabouts went unanswered.
At the same time, this gave rise to various speculations about their removal to camps in northern Russia and the subsequent sinking of prison ships in the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean.


Year 1941


June 22, 1941
The German attack on the Soviet Union is launched.


16. 07. 1941
The area around Smolensk is occupied by German troops.


30. 07. 1941
General Sikorski signs an agreement with Ambassador Majsky between the exiled Polish government and the USSR. The agreement included an "amnesty" for Polish citizens imprisoned on USSR territory.


04. 08. 1941
General Anders, released from Lubyanka prison, is appointed by the Polish government in London as commander of the newly formed Polish Army in the USSR. The Soviet side accepts the nomination.


12 August 1941
The Soviet government announced a decree of amnesty for Polish citizens, after which a commission was established to search for Polish citizens.


[14. 08. 1941
Poland and the USSR sign a special military agreement, specifying the conditions for the establishment of the Polish Army in the USSR.


[22 August 1941
General Anders goes to the camp in Grjazovec, where he finds 1,600 men and among them a group of rescued officers from the camps in Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov.


4. 09. 1941
The new Polish ambassador Stanislaw Kot arrives in Moscow and immediately begins searching for the missing officers.


[August-November 1941
Thousands of volunteers arrive in Buzuluk, a small town at the southern end of the Urals. The influx of people exceeded all expectations, with 46,000 soldiers signing up by the end of November. The Soviet Union is unable to provide food rations for such a large number of people and recommends that further recruitment be stopped. Anders, however, looks in vain for officers from the camps in Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov. Many generals, colonels and various specialists, so needed by the newly formed army, have disappeared without a trace.


03. - 04. 12. 1941
General Sikorski visits Moscow again. When asked where the thousands of missing officers are, he receives only a vague reply that it is possible that they are in camps beyond the Arctic Circle, where telegrams ordering their release have not yet arrived. Stalin even replied that they might have fled to Mongolia or Manchuria. Sikorski and Anders stressed that it was impossible for such a large number of people to move several thousand kilometres without being noticed. The Soviets were further presented with the theory that they had been handed over to the Germans and were on German territory. Thanks to the domestic resistance in Poland, these theories were verified and refuted. Thus, Sikorski never received a direct answer from the Soviet Union as to the whereabouts of these officers.
Due to the difficulties of supplying the Polish Army in Buzuluk and its overwhelming physical condition, Sikorski offered to move the entire army to Iran. Stalin categorically rejected this proposal.


Year 1942


March 18, 1942
During a meeting in the Kremlin, General Anders reopens the issue of missing prisoners from the camps in Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov. He gives Stalin the lists of names of the missing. Even this attempt, however, did not contribute to clarifying the mystery.


April-August 1942
Thanks to the support of the Western powers, the Soviet Union allowed the evacuation of part of the Polish army and thousands of civilians to the Middle East .


Year 1943


The mass graves at Katyn were discovered in the summer of 1942. On the basis of information from local residents, Polish workers who were there on forced labour started digging at the indicated sites. They found two remains in Polish uniforms and reported the discovery to the German authorities, who ignored the incident.


The Germans returned to the Katyn discovery in the late winter of 1943. After the defeat at Stalingrad, it was necessary to distract the world's attention from this fatal defeat for the Germans and to draw attention to the atrocities of the state of the anti-Hitler coalition, thus bringing division into the Allied camp. The German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels decided to make good use of this opportunity.


February 18, 1943
After the ground thawed, exhumation work began and by April 13, 400 bodies had been recovered. A total of eleven mass graves were discovered and in seven of them the remains of Polish officers were found. Everything was ready for the next massive propaganda campaign. Field laboratories and autopsy rooms were prepared for detailed documentation to identify and label bodies, clothing remnants and other evidence.


During the examination of the first hundred bodies, it was confirmed that they were officers only. Among them, two generals (Mieczysław Bohatyrewicz and Bronisław Smorawiński ), two colonels and a number of other senior officers of the Polish Army were identified.
After the bodies were dug up, the remains were subjected to a thorough examination. The victims' high boots were cut open and the pockets of their uniforms were searched. Thousands of items found, such as rings, identification marks, medals, coins, banknotes, documents, letters, newspaper clippings and others were placed in bags with the corresponding markings and body number. All the evidence was subjected to expert examination in the Smolensk laboratories. The authenticity of this evidence, which proved the time of the murder to be the spring of 1940, was later confirmed by neutral and often German-hostile experts.
Autopsies of the bodies were carried out at random - only when traces of more than one bullet were found, when bayonet wounds were evident, or when the victim was tied up and his mouth gagged.
At the same time, the field police conducted interrogations of the local population.


10. 04. 1943
A delegation of prominent figures of Polish social life from Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin arrived in Smolensk. With this move, the Germans wanted to make their investigation more credible before the world public. The Polish Red Cross refused this invitation, correctly assuming that the Germans would use this invitation for their propaganda.


13 April 1943
Radio Berlin reports on the discovery of mass graves with the remains of Polish soldiers in the Katyn Forest. A carefully prepared campaign informed the world that "several thousand officers of the former Polish army who were interned in the USSR in 1939 were bestially murdered by the Bolsheviks."


15. 04. 1943
The Soviet Information Bureau strongly objected to the "fascist lies" and identified the Germans as the authors of the Katyn crime. It announced that Polish prisoners of war had been in the vicinity of Smolensk on construction work, had fallen into German captivity there, and had been slaughtered.
For the Polish authorities, this declaration came as a great surprise - after all, for more than twenty months the Soviets had been presenting them with new and new stories about the fate of the missing officers... The grim fears were beginning to turn into the harsh truth.


17. 04. 1943
On that day, Germany, but also Poland, appealed to the International Red Cross to have the Katyn affair reviewed by an international commission.


19 April 1943
The Soviet daily Pravda printed an article entitled "Polish minions of Hitler".


26 April 1943
The Soviet Union announced the severing of diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile. Before that, Stalin, in secret dispatches to the Allies, accused the Sikorski government of colluding with Hitler and violating the Allied treaties with the USSR.


These were really just pretexts for the termination of relations, because from late 1942 onwards Stalin increasingly prepared for the arrival of pro-Soviet Poles, who were organized in the Union of Polish Patriots. The latter, together with a newly organized Polish unit under Colonel Berling, was politically completely subordinate to Stalin. These moves were politically directed against the Sikorski government and were to become the basis for the creation of a power centre in post-war Poland, subordinate to Moscow.


28-30 April 1943
Examination of the remains by twelve European medical capacities produced the unequivocal conclusion that the crime was committed in March and April 1940, at a time when the area was under the control of the Red Army.


The members of the international commission who signed this detailed investigation document of more than three hundred pages were Dr. Speelers from Belgium, Dr. Markov from Bulgaria, Dr. Tramsen from Denmark, Dr. Saxen from Finland, Dr. Palmieri from Italy, Dr. de Burlet from Holland, Dr. Hajek from Bohemia, Dr. Birkle from Romania, Dr. Šubik from Slovakia, Dr. Orsós from Hungary and Dr. Miloslavitz from Croatia.
During the war, the documentation of this commission was placed in the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Cracow. The records of the 4,243 exhumed remains were lost in the vicinity of Dresden in the last days of the war.


07. 06. 1943
With the burial of the exhumed bodies, the work in Katyn was completed. Between April and the end of June, the commission managed to identify 4,243 bodies.


04. 07. 1943
General Sikorski was killed in an air crash in Gibraltar. The general was returning from an inspection tour of Polish troops in the Middle East. The "timing" of Sikorski's death, during a severe crisis between the Polish government-in-exile, the Allies and the USSR following the revelations of the Katyn massacre, lends credence to various conspiracy theories. While the event was closed as an accident, there are still doubts as to whether Sikorski was deliberately removed as an obstacle to the British-Soviet alliance. After Sikorski's death, Stanislaw Mikołajczyk took over the government.


26 September 1943
The area of Smolensk is liberated by the Red Army. Immediately a "Special Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Execution of Prisoners of War - Polish Officers by Nazi Raiders" is established. The chairman of the commission was academician N. Burdenko and only citizens of the USSR could become members. Not even any Poles from the Union of Polish Patriots or from the Berling Army were called to it. The Commission immediately started questioning "witnesses" and collecting evidence.


Year 1944


04. 01. 1944
The Red Army crossed the pre-war borders of Poland. The liberation of Poland began, accompanied by many incidents aimed at discrediting the government-in-exile in London and the pro-London Land Army (AK). According to a familiar scenario, AK officers are rounded up and many are executed. The rank and file AK soldiers have the choice of joining Berling's army or deportation.


16 - 23 January 1944
More than 900 bodies were reportedly exhumed during this week. Probably several dozen remains were prepared during this period and later presented to the press.


24. 01. 1944
Publication of the results of the special commission's search. The Soviet report of the investigation was written in only 38 pages. Its conclusions were in sharp contrast to those of the Germans. The medical analysis, which was supposed to prove a time of death sometime between September and December 1941, contained only a few paragraphs. The largest part of the report contained testimony from local residents who allegedly saw Polish officers during construction work in the Katyn area in 1941.


Seventeen foreign journalists were invited to Katyn and were shown a sample autopsy, and at a press conference they were briefed on the commission's findings and the evidence it had collected. The autopsies were not performed on bodies pulled at random from graves, but on remains prepared in front of tents. Everything was carried out under strict control and under the supervision of film cameras. During the press conference, all nine (!) pieces of evidence found in the graves were shown to the journalists. In glass cases there were newspaper scraps, one letter, two postcards, a receipt from the dry cleaners... However, none of this evidence was recovered from the mass graves in the presence of neutral observers.
The whole well-prepared event was intended to convince the world of Soviet innocence and to brand the Wehrmacht as murderers.


January 30, 1944
A ceremonial military parade of Polish troops in the USSR under the leadership of the Red Army took place in Katyn. On that occasion, vows were made of an indissoluble alliance in arms and revenge against the German murderers of Katyn...


June 22, 1944
The Red Army liberates the first major city in Poland - Lublin. On the same day, the pro-Soviet Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) is established in Lublin - a puppet, provisional government, later also called the Lublin Committee, which declared itself the provisional executive power over the liberated territory and refused to recognize the government-in-exile. Four days later this committee is recognized by Moscow as the sole and legal government in Poland.


Autumn 1944
A decision is made to destroy German evidence stored at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Kraków before the approaching Red Army. The Polish underground movement and the AK tried unsuccessfully to take over this archive. The head of the Institute, Dr. Beck, refused the order to destroy the archive and took 14 boxes of material to the then safe city of Wrocław.


Year 1945


After the entry of the Red Army into Kraków, the race against time for NKVD officers in their search for the Katyn archives began. The Institute of Forensic Medicine was unsuccessfully searched, and interrogations of those arrested led investigators to the Wroclaw trail.


The same situation repeated itself after the occupation of Wroclaw at the Anatomical Institute, where the archive was temporarily stored. By that time, Dr. Beck had already taken the archive to Dresden, where it was burned at the suburban railway station just before the troops entered from the east. Ironically, the first soldiers to enter Dresden were members of the 2nd Polish Army...


The post-war search for the truth about the Katyn massacre.


The Katyn affair was reopened during the Nuremberg Trials. The Soviet Union, through the mouth of its prosecutor Rudenko, tried to blame the massacre of thousands of officers on the defeated Germany, accusing it of genocide. However, the charges were dropped for lack of conclusive evidence. It should be added, however, that the evidence against the Soviet Union offered by the Polish government-in-exile was also rejected by the tribunal.
The Soviet Union continued to insist on maintaining outright lies and the West chose silence. This state of affairs settled down for half a century. Thus, at Nuremberg, with the approval of the Western powers, a chance was missed for a just punishment for all war criminals ...


Stalin succeeded in conquering Poland not only with the help of the army, but also by deceiving his allies at Yalta. Poland was the most discussed topic at the meeting. The Yalta Agreement of 4-11 February 1945 regarding Poland stated:"The provisional government now operating in Poland should be reorganized on a broader democratic basis, with the addition of democratic leaders from within Poland and from foreign Poles. This new government should be called the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity." In fact, Stalin had already installed the Lublin Committee without consulting his Western allies, who recognized the Polish government in exile.


In June 1945, the chairman of the government-in-exile, Stanislaw Mikołajczyk, returned to Poland and took up the post of deputy chairman in the provisional Polish government. His protests that the government was not sufficiently democratic were to no avail. Its communist majority falsified the results of the plebiscite of 30 June 1945 and persecuted members of democratic parties. The general elections of 19 January 1947 were held in an atmosphere of fear and delivered the Polish parliament into the hands of a Communist minority backed by Moscow. In August and September the first major political trial was held against 19 accused opponents of communism, nine of whom were sentenced to death. In October 1947, Mikołajczyk was publicly branded an "ally of foreign imperialists" and therefore fled Poland for the United States with the help of the British ambassador.


Poland thus effectively became a Soviet satellite and the subject of the Katyn massacre became taboo for many years. During the war, the truth about Katyn was deliberately concealed by both the British and American governments in order to maintain good relations with the Soviet Union. The Western Allies were well aware of the necessity of this alliance and the strength of the Red Army in the fight against Germany. Polish troublesome issues that could have undermined this alliance were sacrificed for these goals. Some reversal came only during the Cold War, when in 1951-52 a special U.S. Congressional commission to investigate the Katyn massacre clearly identified the Soviet Union as the culprit. However, its call for an international tribunal to try the crime was never heeded. Apart from the moral victory, the greatest positive result of the commission's work was the collection and publication of extensive documentation from the interrogation of witnesses.


Stalin's version was thus passed off as the truth for many years, thanks to propaganda in the USSR but also in the PLR. The Katyn lie thus became one of the cornerstones of communist rule in People's Poland. There were only a few brave individuals who dared to point the finger at the true culprits of the massacre. But their reward for this act was only persecution and imprisonment. Forty years of silence were enforced by the totalitarian authorities through harsh repression. On 11 November 1976, the exiled President of the Republic of Poland in London, Professor Stanisław Ostrowski, awarded the Virtuti Militari cross to all Polish soldiers murdered in Katyn and other execution sites.


It was only during the period of perestroika, in 1987, that a joint Polish-Russian commission was set up to investigate the crime. Yet the Soviet Union denied its guilt until 1990, when it admitted that the crime was Stalinism. In 1992, copies of key documents were handed over to Poland, including the decision to liquidate the prisoners signed by the USSR leadership. Although Russia confessed, it has not punished the murderers to this day. Instead, all we hear today from the Russian side are general platitudes about a 'mistake'. This is what the contemporary Russian leadership calls the murder of fifteen thousand people, reducing the act to a mere administrative error - a common criminal offence. Today, we do not hear words from Russia about genocide, as the Soviet prosecutors claimed when they blamed the Nazis during the Nuremberg trials. A 60-year-old lie is now being turned against Russia...


It is a sad fact that the horrific act of Katyn continues to be questioned even today, when it has been mapped out in dozens of scholarly works. Unfortunately, this is also happening in our country. Phantasmagorical evidence pointing to the guilt of the Nazis is endlessly produced by groups of left-wing glorifiers of the Communist era, who still do not accept Katyn as part of history. This not only confirms the spinelessness of these people, but it proves the fact that the ways of totalitarianism, red or brown, are very similar indeed. Instead of humility and apology, which neither the Polish state nor the survivors of the victims have ever received, they are not shy of spitting on the memory and honour of the slaughtered officers...


Finally, a quote from Wajda's film Katyn - a tribute to the thousands murdered: "Hitler promises a thousand-year empire, communism is for eternity, it will come out the same". And I add - thank goodness both fortunately did not live to be a hundred years old.




sources:
Allen Paul, Katyn. Stalin's Massacre and the Triumph of Truth, Świat Książki, Warsaw 2006, ISBN 83-247-0240-7
Stanisław Swianiewicz, W cieniu Katynia, Warsaw 1990. ISBN 83-07-02093-X
Józef Czapski, Na nieludzkiej ziemi, Warsaw 1990,ISBN 83-07-02092-1
Józef Mackiewicz, Jacek Trznadel, Katyń--zbrodnia bez sądu i punishment, Polish Katyn Foundation, 1997, ISBN 838648232X
Natalia Sergeevna Lebedeva. Katyn: a crime against humanity, Dom Wydawniczy Bellona, 1998, ISBN 8311087415
Jacek Trznadel. Powrót rozstrzelanej armii: Katyn-facts, revisions, views, ANTYK, 1994, ISBN 838648201X
Mečislav Borák, The Symbol of Katyn : Transylvanian victims of camps and prisons in the USSR. Český Cieszyn : ZG PZKO Polish Cultural and Educational Association, Board of Directors, 1991.


http://laskatynski.webpark.pl/
pl.wikipedia.org
http://www.katyn.rawelin.com/
http://www.pamietamkatyn1940.pl/
URL : https://www.valka.cz/Katynsky-masakr-t76113#280887 Version : 0
Photographs from German exhumations - February 1943.

Sources listed in the first paragraph.
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upload.wikimedia.org
Katyňský masakr - Zástupce Vichistické Francie Fernand de Brinon a ostatní v Katyni před hroby generálů Smorawińskiho a Bohatyrewicze, duben 1943

Zástupce Vichistické Francie Fernand de Brinon a ostatní v Katyni před hroby generálů Smorawińskiho a Bohatyrewicze, duben 1943
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In 2000, the Polish war cemeteries in Kharkiv (17.6.2000), Katyn (28.7.2000) and Mednoye (2.9.2000) were inaugurated. The photos show the Polish war cemetery in Katyn.


Sources listed in the first post.
Katyňský masakr - Vchod na hřbitov.

Vchod na hřbitov.
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This post has not been translated to English yet. Please use the TRANSLATE button above to see machine translation of this post.

Ve známém německém časopisu Signál číslo 12 ročník 1943 jsem našel zajímavý článek a unikátni fotky o masakru polských válečných zajatců v sovětském svazu.
Na fotkách jsou exhumované ostatky polských vojáků a důstojníků zajatých po sovětské agresi do Polska v září 1939 a popravených jednotkami NKVD 1940. Crying or Very sad
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Professor patológie Mudr. František Šubík, ktorý bol member of medzinárodnej commission súdneho lekárstva for Slovakia, is the known aj under the poetic menom Andrej Žarnov. In 1952 he emigrated zo Slovakia and in 1953 sa get to the USA.

Source:
http://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrej_%C5%BDarnov.
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Diskuse

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U nás máme něco podobného rozsahem, o čem se stále ještě vůbec nemluví. Od podzimu 1939 do jara 1941 uprchlo z bývalé Podkarpatské Rusi do Sovětského svazu více než 15 000 Rusínů, až do března 1939 československých občanů.
Téměř všichni byli zadrženi a odsouzeni minimálně k pěti letům nucených prací.
Stejně jako v případě polské exilové vlády, také československá exilová vláda dosáhla se Sověty v létě 1941 dohody, že všichni bývalí českoslovenští občané, kteří se nacházejí v sovětských koncentrácích, budou amnestováni. Během roku 1942 však do Buzuluku dorazila méně než třetina z předpokládaného počtu Rusínů. O oněch více než 10 000 uprchlících, kteří do Buzuluku nedorazili, nevíme dodnes vůbec nic.
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Bohužel nic nevíme ani o dalších našich občanech ať už z "polského legionu" nebo o lidech zavlečených do SSSR po osvobození například východního Slovenska. Bohužel žádná vláda se nikdy vážně nezajímala o tyto oběti (že by přežili je více než pochybné). Proto se nejspíš nikdy nedovíme ani přesnější počty obětí, ani jejich osudy, že by se nástupce režimu snad nejzrůdnějšího v dějinách, omluvil nehrozí.
Mimochodem obávám se že Lublin nebyl prvním polským významným městem, podobně jako náš "košický program" byl vyhlášen v prvním slovenském nikoli tedy československém městě (to by bylo na Zakarpatské Ukrajině) i zde došlo k vyhlášení na území které "neosvobodil" SSSR ve svém tažení kdy si ve spolupráci s nacisty dělil Polsko. Myslím že mnohá města na "Západní Ukrajině" byla osvobozena dřív a válka začala právě kvůli Polsku a jeho osvobození, pokud mne tedy nezmátla nějaká propaganda.
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Vážení kolegové,
z hlediska ruského vedou obdobnou diskusi na stránkách Bronarm forum, pod názvem Katyń.


Jak je to od nás na východ běžné, narazíte zde na zcela protichůdné názory a dogmata.
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Podle dnesniho vyjadreni pana Zacka, byvaleho reditele USTR, jsou mezi obetmi v Katyni i Cechoslovaci. Bohuzel bez dalsich detailu.


Zdroj:
CT24, monitoring udalosti kolem tragicke havarie letounu Tu-154 polske vladni letky.
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Vážení,
na této internetové adrese jsem nalezl "výkřik" o tři sta zabitých Čechoslovácích bez dalšího upřesnění.


Poznámka
Jediný diskutující - nám známý Miroslav Chýlek - tvrdil, že tento čin Sovětů byl odplatou za smrt zajatců po Tuchačevského ofensivě.


Odkaz
88.86.114.244
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