Katyn Massacre (1940): The Soviet Killing of Polish Officers

The Katyn massacre was the mass execution of about 22,000 Polish prisoners of war and civilians by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in April and May 1940. The victims, many of them reserve officers drawn from Poland’s professional classes, were shot in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk and at other sites in the western Soviet Union. For almost fifty years the Soviet Union blamed Nazi Germany, and the struggle to establish the truth became a defining issue in Polish history.

Background

Under the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland between them. After the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, the Red Army invaded from the east on 17 September, as described in the article on the Soviet invasion of Poland.

The Soviets took prisoner hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers. Most ordinary soldiers were released or sent to labour camps, but officers, police officers, border guards, prison officials and others seen as potential leaders of resistance were held in special NKVD camps. Officers were concentrated mainly at Kozelsk and Starobelsk, and police and gendarmes at Ostashkov.

The decision

Over the winter of 1939–1940 NKVD officers interrogated the prisoners, recording their backgrounds and views. Very few were judged willing to cooperate with Soviet power.

On 5 March 1940 Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD, sent Stalin a proposal to shoot 14,700 prisoners in the camps and 11,000 people held in prisons in the occupied eastern regions of Poland, without trial. The Politburo approved it the same day. The document bears the signatures of Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan, with Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich recorded as voting in favour.

The killings

From early April to mid-May 1940 the camps were emptied in groups. Prisoners from Kozelsk were taken by train to Gnezdovo station near Smolensk and then to the Katyn Forest, where they were shot and buried in mass graves. Prisoners from Ostashkov were shot in the cellar of the NKVD building in Kalinin (now Tver) and buried at Mednoye. Those from Starobelsk were killed at the NKVD headquarters in Kharkiv and buried on the city’s outskirts at Piatykhatky.

Most victims were killed by a single shot to the back of the head. At Kalinin, the NKVD executioner Vasily Blokhin led the shootings, which were carried out night after night. Several thousand more Polish prisoners were killed in prisons in western Ukraine and western Belarus; many of their burial places are still uncertain.

According to a 1959 note by KGB chairman Alexander Shelepin, 21,857 people were shot in total. They included army officers of all ranks, among them several generals, as well as police officers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, priests, landowners and civil servants. One woman, the pilot Janina Lewandowska, was among those killed at Katyn.

The killings were accompanied by reprisals against the victims’ families. In April 1940 the NKVD deported tens of thousands of their relatives, mostly women, children and the elderly, from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland to Kazakhstan. Only a few hundred prisoners from the three camps were spared, among them the future general Zygmunt Berling, and their testimony later helped show when the other prisoners had disappeared.

Key people

• Joseph Stalin: Soviet leader who signed the order approving the executions.
• Lavrentiy Beria: head of the NKVD, who proposed the killings in his memorandum of 5 March 1940.
• Vasily Blokhin: NKVD chief executioner, who led the shootings at Kalinin.
• Nikolai Burdenko: surgeon who headed the 1944 Soviet commission that blamed Germany.
• Mikhail Gorbachev: Soviet leader under whom the USSR admitted responsibility in 1990.

Discovery and cover-up

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the Smolensk area came under German occupation. Poland and the Soviet Union became allies, and a Polish army was formed in the USSR from released prisoners. Its officers, including the painter Józef Czapski, searched in vain for thousands of missing colleagues, and Soviet officials gave evasive answers, at one point suggesting they had escaped to Manchuria. On 13 April 1943 German radio announced the discovery of mass graves of Polish officers at Katyn. The Nazi regime used the discovery for propaganda aimed at dividing the Allies.

When the Polish government in exile in London asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate, Stalin used the request as a pretext to break off relations with it on 25 April 1943. After the Red Army retook Smolensk, a Soviet commission led by Nikolai Burdenko reported in January 1944 that the Germans had carried out the killings in 1941.

The Soviet prosecutors raised Katyn as a German crime at the Nuremberg trials, but the tribunal did not include it in its judgment. In 1951–1952 a United States congressional committee, known as the Madden Committee, concluded that the NKVD was responsible. Britain and the United States nevertheless avoided pressing the issue during and after the war, wishing to keep the Soviet alliance and later avoiding confrontation.

In communist Poland the truth was taboo. Families could not openly mourn, and the official version blamed the Germans. Katyn became a powerful symbol of suppressed memory for the Polish opposition.

Admission and investigation

On 13 April 1990, under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet news agency TASS acknowledged that the NKVD had carried out the killings. In October 1992 Russian President Boris Yeltsin gave Polish President Lech Wałęsa copies of the secret file, including Beria’s proposal and the Politburo decision.

Polish war cemeteries were opened at Katyn and Mednoye in 2000 and at Kharkiv in the same year. A Russian criminal investigation, opened in 1990, was closed in 2004 without charges, and most of its files remained classified. In 2013 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, in Janowiec and Others v. Russia, ruled that it lacked jurisdiction to examine the Russian investigation, but found that Russia had failed to cooperate with the court by withholding documents.

In November 2010 the Russian State Duma passed a statement acknowledging that the crime had been carried out on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders.

Legacy

Katyn remains central to Polish national memory and to Polish-Russian relations. The director Andrzej Wajda, whose father was among the victims, made the film Katyń (2007). On 10 April 2010 a Polish government aircraft carrying President Lech Kaczyński and 95 other passengers and crew to a Katyn commemoration crashed near Smolensk, killing all on board, a tragedy that deeply affected Poland.

Memorials to the victims stand in Warsaw, London, Toronto, Baltimore and many other cities, and 13 April is observed in Poland as a day of remembrance for the victims.

Timeline

• 1939, 23 August: the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is signed.
• 1939, 17 September: the Soviet Union invades eastern Poland.
• 1940, 5 March: the Politburo approves Beria’s proposal to shoot the prisoners.
• 1940, April–May: the executions at Katyn, Kalinin, Kharkiv and other sites.
• 1943, 13 April: Germany announces the discovery of the graves at Katyn.
• 1943, 25 April: Stalin breaks relations with the Polish government in exile.
• 1944, January: the Burdenko commission blames Germany.
• 1990, 13 April: the Soviet Union admits NKVD responsibility.
• 1992, October: Russia hands Poland the key documents.
• 2010, 10 April: the Smolensk air disaster.

Why it matters

The Katyn massacre deliberately targeted a nation’s leaders and educated class, and the decades of lies that followed made it a symbol of Soviet repression. The long fight for acknowledgement showed how historical truth can become central to national identity and international relations.