On this day in 1943, the Nazi regime released news of the discovery of mass graves in the West Russian forest of Katyn. The victims were Polish soldiers, and each one had been shot in the back of the head.
It quickly became apparent that the murdered soldiers were Polish reserve officers, and after exhumations in the surrounding region, the death toll soon rose into the thousands.
Historians estimates today number the casualties at over 20,000, but in reality this was only the tip of the ice-berg of crimes against the Polish intelligentsia during the Second World War.
The Poles had little doubt that the Russians were the culprits (even though Germans conducted their own campaign to liquidate Poland's elite). Thousands of Polish officers had fallen into Russian hands at the beginning of the war, and when pressed as to where they had got to, Stalin made the outlandish suggestion that they had all escaped to China.
When the Polish government in exile called for a full investigation by the International Red Cross, Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the Poles and blamed the crime on the Nazis.
Following the Second World War, the Soviets ushered in a totalitarian communist regime in Poland and Katyn was quickly made a forbidden theme in the Polish press.
It was not until 1990 that President Gorbachev finally admitted that the Soviets were responsible for the crime. The Polish government are still petitioning the Russians to release all the files relating to the case. So far the Russian State has agreed to release 67 of 183 files relating to Katyn. The reason that State Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov gave for not releasing the remaining files was that the documents contained 'state secrets.'
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