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According
to data in the possession of the Polish government-in-exile, in
early 1940 the Soviet Union held as many as 15,000 Polish prisoners
of war, of whom 8,300 were officers. Taken prisoner by the Red Army
in the second half of September 1939, they were interned in three
camps: Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostaszkow. Late that year, there
were reports that the three camps had been disbanded. In 1941 and
1942, the Polish government-in-exile repeatedly asked the Soviet
Union for information on the prisoners’ fate, but to no avail.
On April
13, 1943, the Germans announced that mass graves had been discovered
in the Katyn Forest, in their area of occupation, containing the
bodies of thousands of Polish officers who had been shot in the back
of the head. The Germans charged the Soviet authorities with the
murder and appointed a multinational medical commission to probe the
matter. In May 1943, the commission reported that the graves
contained the bodies of 4,143 officers, of whom 2,914 were
identified by documents in their uniforms. It was the commission’s
opinion that the men had been shot to death in the spring of 1940.
The Soviet authorities flatly rejected the accusations of the
German-appointed commission, arguing that the Germans themselves had
committed the deed when they had occupied the area in July 1941.
In
mid-April 1943, when the Polish government-in-exile demanded that an
investigation of the Katyn killings be made by the International Red
Cross, the Soviet Union reacted on April 25 by severing relations
with the government-in-exile. This step would have far-reaching
effects on relations between the Soviet Union and Poland. In
November of that year, several months after the Red Army had
liberated the area, the Soviet Union appointed a commission of
inquiry of its own, which blamed the Germans for the Katyn murders.
A United States congressional inquiry in the early 1950s found the
NKVD (the Soviet secret police) responsible, and most Western
historians now believe that the massacre was committed at the behest
of the Soviet authorities. On March 8, 1989, the Polish government
officially accused the NKVD of perpetrating the slaughter.
Following
Michael Gorbochov’s Glasnost policy, the Soviet Union
released documents indicating that it was responsible for the
massacre at Katyn.
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