The invasion and taking of part of a sovereign nation.

Polish military, civil authorities, teachers, technicians - including Jewish as well as Christian- in the Katyn Woods massacre and buried them like so much trash anonymously. Those Russian liberators?

Pact? Seriously?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre


<snip>
Background
Refer to Caption
Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signs the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Behind him: Ribbentrop and Stalin.

On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Meanwhile, Britain and France, obligated by the Polish-British Common Defence Pact Polish-British CDP and Franco-Polish Military Alliance to attack Germany in the case of such an invasion, demanded that Germany withdraw. On 3 September 1939, after it failed to do so, France, Britain, and most countries of the British Empire declared war on Germany but provided little military support to Poland.[6] They took minimal military action during what became known as the Phoney War.[7]

The Soviet Union began its own invasion on 17 September, in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army advanced quickly and met little resistance,[8] as Polish forces facing them were under orders not to engage the Soviets. About 250,000[1][9]–454,700[10] Polish soldiers and policemen were captured and interned by the Soviet authorities. Some were freed or escaped quickly, but 125,000 were imprisoned in camps run by the NKVD.[1] Of these, 42,400 soldiers, mostly of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity serving in the Polish army who lived in the former Polish territories now annexed by the Soviet Union, were released in October.[9][11][12] The 43,000 soldiers born in western Poland, then under German control, were transferred to the Germans; in turn the Soviets received 13,575 Polish prisoners from the Germans.[9][12]

In addition to military and government personnel, other Polish citizens suffered from repressions. Since Poland's conscription system required every nonexempt university graduate to become a military reserve officer,[13] the NKVD was able to round up a significant portion of the Polish educated class.[f] 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).[14][15] 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).[14][15] Of the group of 12,000 Poles sent to Dalstroy camp (near Kolyma) in 1940–1941, most POWs, only 583 men survived, released in 1942 to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East.[16] According to Tadeusz Piotrowski, "during the war and after 1944, 570,387 Polish citizens had been subjected to some form of Soviet political repression".[17]

As early as 19 September, head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria ordered the secret police to create the 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 centers and transit camps and arrange rail transport to prisoner-of-war camps in the western USSR. The largest camps were located at Kozelsk (Optina Monastery), Ostashkov (Stolbnyi Island on Seliger Lake near Ostashkov) and Starobelsk. Other camps were at Jukhnovo (rail station Babynino), Yuzhe (Talitsy), rail station Tyotkino 90 kilometres/56 miles from Putyvl), Kozelshchyna, Oranki, Vologda (rail station Zaonikeevo), and Gryazovets.[18]
A large group of Polish Prisoners of War
Polish POWs captured by the Red Army during Soviet invasion of Poland

Kozelsk and Starobelsk were used mainly for military officers, while Ostashkov was used mainly for Polish boy scouts, gendarmes, police and prison officers.[19] Some prisoners were members of other groups of Polish intelligentsia, such as priests, landowners, and law personnel.[19] The approximate distribution of men throughout the camps was as follows: Kozelsk, 5,000; Ostashkov, 6,570; and Starobelsk, 4,000. They totaled 15,570 men.[20]

According to a report from 19 November 1939, the NKVD had about 40,000 Polish POWs: about 8,000–8,500 officers and warrant officers, 6,000–6,500 police officers, and 25,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were still being held as POWs.[1][12][21] 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".[9] The 25,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers were assigned to forced labor (road construction, heavy metallurgy).[9]

Once at the camps, from October 1939 to February 1940, the Poles were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political agitation by NKVD officers such as Vasily Zarubin. The prisoners assumed that they would be released soon, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to determine who would live and who would die.[22][23] According to NKVD reports, if the prisoners could not be induced to adopt a pro-Soviet attitude, they were declared "hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority".[22]

On 5 March 1940, pursuant to a note to Joseph 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.[24][c] The reason for the massacre, according to historian Gerhard Weinberg, was that Stalin wanted to deprive a potential future Polish military of a large portion of its talent:

It has been suggested that the motive for this terrible step [the Katyn massacre] was to reassure the Germans as to the reality of Soviet anti-Polish policy. This explanation is completely unconvincing in view of the care with which the Soviet regime kept the massacre secret from the very German government it was supposed to impress. ... A more likely explanation is that ... [the massacre] should be seen as looking forward to a future in which there might again be a Poland on the Soviet Union's western border. Since he intended to keep the eastern portion of the country in any case, Stalin could be certain that any revived Poland would be unfriendly. Under those circumstances, depriving it of a large proportion of its military and technical elite would make it weaker.[25]

In addition, the Soviets realized that the prisoners constituted a large body of trained and motivated Poles who would not accept a Fourth Partition of Poland.[1]
Executions
Letter in Cyrillic, dated March 1940, contents per caption
Memo from Beria to Stalin, proposing the execution of Polish officers

The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000, with a lower limit of confirmed dead of 21,768.[1] According to Soviet documents declassified in 1990, 21,857 Polish internees and prisoners were executed after 3 April 1940: 14,552 prisoners of war (most or all of them from the three camps) and 7,305 prisoners in western parts of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs.[26] Of them 4,421 were from Kozelsk, 3,820 from Starobelsk, 6,311 from Ostashkov, and 7,305 from Byelorussian and Ukrainian prisons.[26] Head of the NKVD POW department, Maj. General P. K. Soprunenko, organized "selections" of Polish officers to be massacred at Katyn and elsewhere.[27]

Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 non-commissioned officers, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, 131 refugees, 20 university professors, 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots.[22] In all, the NKVD executed almost half the Polish officer corps.[22] Altogether, during the massacre the NKVD executed 14 Polish generals:[28] Leon Billewicz (ret.), Bronisław Bohatyrewicz (ret.), Xawery Czernicki (admiral), Stanisław Haller (ret.), Aleksander Kowalewski (ret.), Henryk Minkiewicz (ret.), Kazimierz Orlik-Łukoski, Konstanty Plisowski (ret.), Rudolf Prich (murdered in Lviv), Franciszek Sikorski (ret.), Leonard Skierski (ret.), Piotr Skuratowicz, Mieczysław Smorawiński and Alojzy Wir-Konas (promoted posthumously). Not all of the executed were ethnic Poles, because the Second Polish Republic was a multiethnic state, and its officer corps included Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Jews.[29] It is estimated that about 8% of Katyn massacre victims were Polish Jews.[29] 395 prisoners were spared from the slaughter,[1] among them Stanisław Swianiewicz and Józef Czapski.[22] They were taken to the Yukhnov camp and then to Gryazovets.[18]
A mass grave, with multiple corpses visible
A mass grave at Katyn, 1943

Up to 99% of the remaining prisoners were subsequently murdered. People from the Kozelsk camp were executed in the Katyn forest; people from the Starobelsk camp were murdered in the inner NKVD prison of Kharkiv and the bodies were buried near the village of Piatykhatky; and police officers from the Ostashkov camp were murdered in the internal NKVD prison of Kalinin (Tver) and buried in Mednoye.[18]

Detailed information on the executions in the Kalinin NKVD prison was provided during a hearing by Dmitrii 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 9×19mm Walther Modell 2 pistols supplied by Moscow,[30] but Soviet-made 7.62×38mmR Nagant M1895 revolvers were also used.[31] The executioners used German weapons rather than the standard Soviet revolvers, as the latter were said to offer too much recoil, which made shooting painful after the first dozen executions.[32] Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin, chief executioner for the NKVD—and quite possibly the most prolific executioner in history—is reported to have personally shot and killed 7,000 of the condemned, some as young as 18, from the Ostashkov camp at Kalinin prison over a period of 28 days in April 1940.[27][33]

The killings were methodical. After the personal information of the condemned was checked and approved, he was handcuffed and led to a cell insulated with stacks of sandbags along the walls and a heavy, felt-lined door. The victim was told to kneel in the middle of the cell, was then approached from behind by the executioner and immediately shot in the back of the head or neck.[34] The body was carried out through the opposite door and laid in one of the five or six waiting trucks, whereupon the next condemned was taken inside and subject to the same fate. In addition to muffling by the rough insulation in the execution cell, the pistol gunshots were also masked by the operation of loud machines (perhaps fans) throughout the night. Some post-1991 revelations suggest that prisoners were also executed in the same manner at the NKVD headquarters in Smolensk, though judging by the way the corpses were stacked, some captives may have been shot while standing on the edge of the mass graves.[35] This procedure went on every night, except for the public May Day holiday.[36]
1939 Polish passport issued to Dr. Zygmunt Sloninski, also a major in the army, to be used for travelling to Switzerland to attend an international medical conference. Issued 2 months before the outbreak of World War Two. A year later he would be murdered by the NKVD.

Some 3,000 to 4,000 Polish inmates of Ukrainian prisons and those from Belarus prisons were probably buried in Bykivnia and in Kurapaty respectively.[37] Lieutenant Janina Lewandowska, daughter of Gen. Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, was the only woman executed during the massacre at Katyn.[36][38]
Discovery
17 men, most in military uniform, stand in a cemetery, inspecting two graves.
Secretary of State of the Vichy regime Fernand de Brinon and others in Katyn at the graves of Mieczysław Smorawiński and Bronisław Bohatyrewicz, April 1943

The question about the fate of the Polish prisoners was raised soon after the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union 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, that all the Poles were freed, and that not all could be accounted because the Soviets "lost track" of them in Manchuria.[39][40]

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, found one of the graves, and reported it to the Polish Secret State.[41] The discovery was not seen as important, as nobody thought that the discovered grave could contain so many victims.[41] In early 1943, Rudolf von Gersdorff, a German officer serving as the intelligence liaison between the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center and Abwehr, received reports about mass graves of Polish military officers. These reports stated the graves were in the forest of Goat Hill near Katyn. He passed the reports to his superiors (sources vary on when exactly the Germans became aware of the graves — from "late 1942" to January–February 1943, and when the German top decision makers in Berlin received those reports [as early as 1 March or as late as 4 April]).[42] Joseph Goebbels saw this discovery as an excellent tool to drive a wedge between Poland, Western Allies, and the Soviet Union, and reinforce the Nazi propaganda line about the horrors of Bolshevism and American and British subservience to it.[43] After extensive preparation, on 13 April, Berlin Radio broadcast to the world that German military forces in the Katyn forest near Smolensk had uncovered a ditch that was "28 metres long and 16 metres wide [92 ft by 52 ft], in which the bodies of 3,000 Polish officers were piled up in 12 layers".[44] The broadcast went on to charge the Soviets with carrying out the massacre in 1940.[44]
Refer to caption
Polish banknotes and epaulets recovered from mass graves

The Germans brought in a European Red Cross committee called the Katyn Commission consisting of twelve forensic experts and their staff from Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, and Hungary.[45] They were so intent on proving that the Soviets were behind the massacre that they even included some Allied prisoners of war, among them writer Ferdynand Goetel, the Polish AK prisoner from Pawiak.[46] After the war, Goetel escaped with a fake passport due to an arrest warrant issued against him; two of the twelve, the Bulgarian Marko Markov and the Czech František Hájek, with their countries becoming satellite states of the Soviet Union, were forced to recant their evidence, defending the Soviets and blaming the Germans.[47] The Croatian Pathologist Eduard Miloslavić managed to escape to the USA. 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: "We are now using the discovery of 12,000 Polish officers, murdered by the GPU, for anti-Bolshevik propaganda on a grand style. We sent neutral journalists and Polish intellectuals to the spot where they were found. Their reports now reaching us from ahead are gruesome. The Führer has also given permission for us to hand out a drastic news item to the German press. I gave instructions to make the widest possible use of the propaganda material. We shall be able to live on it for a couple of weeks".[48] The Germans won a major propaganda victory, portraying communism as a danger to Western civilization.

The Soviet government immediately denied the German charges and claimed that 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 that "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".[49]
The decomposing remains of Katyn victims, found in a mass grave.
Katyn exhumation, 1943

In April 1943 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.[50] Stalin, in response, accused the Polish government of collaborating with Nazi Germany, broke off diplomatic relations with it,[51][52] and started a campaign to get the Western Allies to recognize the alternative Polish pro-Soviet government in Moscow led by Wanda Wasilewska.[53] Sikorski died in an air crash in July—an event that was convenient for the Allied leaders.[54]
Soviet actions

When, in September 1943, Goebbels was informed 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: "Unfortunately we have had to give up Katyn. The Bolsheviks undoubtedly will soon 'find' that we shot 12,000 Polish officers. That episode is one that is going to cause us quite a little trouble in the future. The Soviets are undoubtedly going to make it their business to discover as many mass graves as possible and then blame it on us".[48]

Having retaken the Katyn area almost immediately after the Red Army had recaptured Smolensk, around September–October 1943, NKVD forces began a cover-up operation.[22][55] A cemetery the Germans had permitted the Polish Red Cross to build was destroyed and other evidence removed.[22] Witnesses were "interviewed", and threatened with arrest for collaborating with the Germans if their testimonies disagreed with the official line.[55][56] As none of the documents found on the dead had dates later than April 1940 the Soviet secret police planted false evidence to push the apparent time of the massacre back to the summer of 1941, when the Germans controlled the area.[56] A preliminary report was issued by NKVD operatives Vsevolod Merkulov and Sergei Kruglov, dated 10–11 January 1944, concluding that the Polish officers were shot by the Germans.[55]

In January 1944, the Soviet Union sent another commission, the Special Commission for Determination and Investigation of the Shooting of Polish Prisoners of War by German-Fascist Invaders in Katyn Forest (Russian: Специальная Комиссия по установлению и расследованию обстоятельств расстрела немецко-фашистскими захватчиками в Катынском лесу военнопленных польских офицеров, Spetsial'naya Kommissiya po ustanovleniyu i rassledovaniyu obstoyatel'stv rasstrela nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami v Katynskom lesu voyennoplennyh polskih ofitserov), to the site; the very name of the commission implied a predestined conclusion.[22][55][56] It was headed by Nikolai Burdenko, the President of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (hence the commission is often known as the "Burdenko Commission&quot , who was appointed by Moscow to investigate the incident.[22][55] Its members included prominent Soviet figures such as the writer Alexei Tolstoy, but no foreign personnel were allowed to join the Commission.[22][55] The Burdenko Commission exhumed the bodies, rejected the 1943 German findings that the Poles were shot by the Soviets, assigned the guilt to the Germans and concluded that all the shootings were done by German occupation forces in autumn of 1941.[22] Despite lack of evidence, it also blamed the Germans for shooting Russian prisoners of war used as labor to dig the pits.[22] It is uncertain how many members of the commission were misled by the falsified reports and evidence, and how many suspected the truth; Cienciala and Materski note that the Commission had no choice but to issue findings in line with the Merkulov-Kruglov report, and that Burdenko himself likely was aware of the cover-up. He reportedly admitted something like that to friends and family shortly before his death.[55][55] The Burdenko commission's conclusions would be consistently cited by Soviet sources until the official admission of guilt by the Soviet government on 13 April 1990.[55]

In January 1944, the Soviets also invited a group of more than a dozen mostly American and British journalists, accompanied by Kathleen Harriman, the daughter of the new American ambassador W. Averell Harriman, and John Melby, third secretary at the American embassy in Moscow, to Katyn.[56] That Melby and Harriman were included was regarded by some at the time as an attempt by the Soviets to lend official weight to their propaganda.[56] Melby's report noted the deficiencies in the Soviet case: problematic witnesses; attempts to question the witnesses were discouraged; statements by witnesses were obviously given as a result of rote memorization and "the show was put on for the benefit of the correspondents". Nevertheless, Melby, at the time, felt that on balance the Russian case was convincing.[56] Harriman's report reached the same conclusion and both were asked to explain after the war why their conclusions seemed to be at odds with their findings, with the suspicion that the conclusions were those the State Department wanted to hear.[56] The journalists were less impressed, and not totally convinced by the staged Soviet demonstration.[56]

<snip>

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I thought we were talking about the initial invasion of Poland, not the whole war.

party. They invaded together from opposite sides of Poland and met at the predetermined line.

You categorically denied my assertion and asked for links. Education is a liberation. Read more.

I bet you also don't how and why Stalin starved tens of millions of Ukrainian "kulaks" to death in the years leading up to WWII and its involvement with the Axis.

Stop getting all of your information from only R/T, the Fox network of the Russian Federation

have stopped it. A few months later the German Army pushed pushed the UK off of Europe (except for Gibraltar) in the most motley "advance"to the rear in history. Only German lack of initiative kept the Luftwaffe from bombing the 300,000 men or so of the Brittish military during the nine day evacuation that used pleasure boats, cattle boats etc to get them back to UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation

You have terribly uninformed opinions.