Nazi officers stand over mass graves, 1943March 5 marks the 70th anniversary of Stalin signing the order to kill 22,000 Polish prisoners of war, detained in camps in the Soviet Union.
The decision of 5 March 1940 taken by Joseph Stalin initiated the Katyn massacre, the mass murder of Polish prisoners by the NKVD secret services.
After Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939 and Germany invaded Poland from the west, Soviet forces occupied the eastern half of the country. Tens of thousands of Polish military personnel fell into Red Army hands and were interned in prison camps inside the Soviet Union.
Historian, Professor Wojciech Materski underlines that the order for mass killings is unprecedented in the history of Soviet Union.
“There were no official court verdicts, no prosecution, no defence. Polish officers were listed on so called ‘death lists’. The killings started on April 4 and by April 15 over 20,000 Polish prisoners were killed, mostly with a bullet in the back of the head. They were buried in common, mass graves,” he told Polskie Radio.
“The aim was clear, Stalin and the Soviets wanted to eliminate Poland’s intellectual class – to decapitate Polish society. They wanted to destroy the Polish nation in the eastern part of Poland after the so called Ribbentrop Molotov Pact.”
The fact that Stalin wanted to take out a whole class of Pole has been used by Polish historians to call the massacre “genocide”, a definition Moscow resisted.
Despite the 70 years that have passed there are still many questions unanswered. Mass graves were discovered in Katyn in 1943 by Nazi Germans, who had invaded the Soviet Union in July 1941. However graves in the territory of Belarus still remain undiscovered, while many documents are buried deep in the Russian archives.
For years, the crime had been attributed to Nazi Germany, and it was only in 1990 that the authorities of the Soviet Union admitted the killing being committed by the NKVD.
In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin decided to reveal certain documents about the Katyn massacre, but this did not entail Russia admitting to the crime of genocide. Moscow has released only 67 volumes of documents relating to the Katyn Massacre, over 110 still remain in Russian archives. Revealing the documents could end the differences between the perception of the crime in Poland and Russia.
A Polish investigation into the massacre has been launched by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) after Russians decided to discontinue a 14 year long investigation.
In an irony of history, March 5 is also the anniversary of the death of Stalin in 1953. (ab/pg)