Katyn: execution of Polish officers. The history of the tragedy in Katyn

During the Second World War, both sides of the conflict committed many crimes against humanity. Millions of civilians and servicemen were killed. One of the conflicting pages of that history is the shooting of Polish officers under Katyn. The truth, which has been hidden for a long time, accusing others of this crime, we will try to find out.

More than half a century, the real events in Katyn hid from the world community. Today information on the case is not secret, although the opinion on this issue is ambiguous both among historians and politicians, and among ordinary citizens who participated in the conflict of countries.

Katyn massacre

For many, the symbol of brutal killings was Katyn. The execution of Polish officers can not be justified or understood. It was here, in the Katyn forest of the Smolensk region, in the spring of 1940, thousands of Polish officers were killed. The mass murder of Polish citizens was not limited to this place. Documents were promulgated that during April-May 1940, more than 20,000 Polish citizens were killed in different NKVD camps.

The shooting in Katyn for a long time complicated the Polish-Russian relations. Since 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the State Duma have recognized that the massacre of Polish citizens in the Katyn Forest was the activities of the Stalin regime. This was announced in a statement "On the Katyn tragedy and its victims." However, not all public and political figures in the Russian Federation agree with this statement.

The capture of Polish officers

The Second World War for Poland began on 01/09/1939, when Germany entered its territory. England and France did not enter into conflict, expecting an outcome of further events. On September 10, 1939, the Soviet troops entered Poland with the official goal of protecting the Ukrainian and Belarusian population of Poland. Modern historiography calls such actions of the aggressor countries "the fourth section of Poland". Troops of the Red Army occupied the territory of Western Ukraine, Western Belorussia. By decision of the Treaty of Versailles, these lands became part of Poland.

The Polish military, defending their lands, could not resist the two armies. They quickly defeated. On the ground, under the NKVD, eight camps were created for Polish prisoners of war. They are directly connected with the tragic event, called the "execution in Katyn."

In total, up to half a million Polish citizens fell into the hands of the Red Army, most of whom were eventually released, and there were about 130,000 people in the camps. After a while, some of the soldiers, natives of Poland, were dismissed to their homes, more than 40,000 were sent to Germany, the rest (about 40,000) were distributed to five camps:

• Starobelsky (Lugansk) - officers in the number of 4 thousand.
• Kozelsky (Kaluga) - officers in the number of 5 thousand.
• Ostashkovsky (Tver) - gendarmes and police in the number of 4,700 people.
• Directed to the construction of roads - the rank and file of 18 thousand.
• Directed to work in the Krivoy Rog basin - private in the amount of 10 thousand.

By the spring of 1940, prisoners from the three camps stopped receiving letters from their relatives, who had been regularly transmitted through the Red Cross before. The reason for the silence of the prisoners of war was Katyn, the history of the tragedy which linked the fate of tens of thousands of Poles.

The shooting of prisoners

In 1992, a document-proposal was issued from 03.08.1940 by L. Beria to the Politburo, which dealt with the question of the shooting of Polish prisoners of war. The decision on capital punishment was taken on March 5, 1940.

At the end of March, the NKVD completed the plan. Prisoners from the Starobelsky and Kozelsky camps were taken to Kiev, Kherson, Kharkov, Minsk. Former gendarmes and policemen from Ostashkovsky camp were taken to Kalinin prison, from which ordinary prisoners were removed in advance. Not far from the prison, huge pits were dug (Mednoye settlement).

In April, 350-400 people were taken prisoners to be shot. Those sentenced to death assumed that they were being released. Many of them left in the carriages in high spirits, not even knowing about the imminent death.

How was the shooting under Katyn:

• Captured prisoners;
• They threw a greatcoat over their heads (not always, only on especially strong and young);
• Led to the ditch;
• Shot in the back of the head from Walter or Browning.

It was the last fact that for a long time testified that German troops are guilty of a crime against Polish citizens.

Prisoners from Kalinin prison were killed right in the cells.

From April to May 1940 was shot:

• In Katyn - 4421 prisoners;
• In the Starobelsky and Ostashkov camps - 10131;
• In other camps - 7305.

Who was shot in Katyn? Executed were not only career officers, but also lawyers, teachers, engineers, doctors, professors and other intellectuals mobilized during the war.

"Missing" officers

When Germany attacked the USSR, negotiations began between the Polish and Soviet governments on combining forces against the enemy. Then they began to search for the officers who had been taken to the Soviet camps. But the truth about Katyn was still unknown.

None of the missing officers could be found, and the assumption that they escaped from the camps was groundless. None of the news or references to those who got into the above-mentioned camps were not.

To find officers, or rather, their bodies, could only in 1943. Mass graves of the shot Polish citizens were found in Katyn.

Investigation of the German side

The first mass graves in the Katyn forest were found by German troops. They performed the exhumation of the excavated bodies and conducted their investigation.

Exhumation of the bodies was conducted by Gerhard Butz. To work in the village of Katyn, international commissions were involved, which included physicians from German-controlled countries of Europe, as well as representatives of Switzerland and Poles from the Red Cross (Polish). Representatives of the International Red Cross were not present at the same time because of a ban on the part of the government of the USSR.

The German report contained the following information about Katyn (execution of Polish officers):

• As a result of the excavation, eight mass graves were found , 4143 of them were taken out and re-buried. Most of the victims were identified. In the graves # 1-7 people were buried in winter clothes (fur jackets, overcoats, sweaters, scarves), and in the grave number 8 - in the summer. Also, in scraps No. 1-7 scraps of newspapers were found, dated April-March 1940, and there were no traces of insects on the corpses. This indicated that the execution of Poles in Katyn occurred during the cool season, that is, in the spring.
• The dead found many personal belongings, they testified that the victims were in the Kozelsk camp. For example, letters from the house, addressed to Kozelsk. Also, many had snuffboxes and other items with the inscriptions "Kozelsk".
• Sections of trees showed that they were planted on the graves about three years ago from the time of detection. This testified to the fact that the pits fell asleep in 1940. At that time the territory was under the control of the Soviet troops.
• All the Polish officers in Katyn were killed by a shot in the back of the head with German-made bullets. However, they were issued in the 20-30s of the XX century and exported in large batches to the Baltic countries and the Soviet Union.
• The hands of the executed were tied with a cord in such a way that, when they tried to separate them, the loop was tightened even more. Victims from the grave number 5 were shaken heads so that when trying to make any movement the loop choked the future victim. In other graves, the heads were also connected, but only with those who stood out with sufficient physical strength. On the bodies of some of the dead, traces of a tetrahedral bayonet were found, as in Soviet weapons. The Germans used flat bayonets.
• The commission interviewed local residents and found that in the spring of 1940 a large number of Polish prisoners of war arrived at Gnezdovo station, which they reloaded into trucks and took to the side of the forest. More local people these people have not seen.

The Polish commission, which was in the process of exhuming and conducting the investigation, confirmed all German conclusions in this case, without revealing obvious signs of fraudulent documents. The only thing the Germans tried to conceal about Katyn (the execution of Polish officers) is the origin of the bullets with which the murders were conducted. However, the Poles understood that such weapons could have been from representatives of the NKVD.

The Soviet version

Since the fall of 1943, representatives of the NKVD have taken up the investigation of the Katyn tragedy. According to their version, Polish prisoners of war were engaged in road works, and with the advent of the summer of 1941 in the Smolensk region, the Germans did not have time to evacuate them.

According to the NKVD's assumption, in August-September of the same year the remaining prisoners were shot by the Germans. To hide the traces of their crimes, the Wehrmacht representatives opened the graves in 1943 and extracted from there all the documents dated after 1940.

The Soviet authorities prepared a large number of witnesses for their version of events, but in 1990 the surviving witnesses abandoned their testimony for 1943.

The Soviet commission, which conducted repeated excavations, falsified certain documents, and completely destroyed part of the graves. But Katyn, whose history of tragedy did not give rest to the Polish citizens, nevertheless revealed its secrets.

Katyn case at the Nuremberg Trials

After the war from 1945 to 1946. Was the so-called Nuremberg trial, the purpose of which was to punish war criminals. The Katyn question was also raised at the trial. In the execution of Polish prisoners of war, the Soviet side accused the German troops.

Many witnesses in this case changed their testimony, they refused to support the conclusions of the German commission, although they themselves took part in it. Despite all attempts by the USSR, the Tribunal did not support the accusation on the Katyn issue, which in fact gave rise to the idea that the Soviet troops were guilty of the Katyn massacre.

Official recognition of responsibility for Katyn

Katyn (execution of Polish officers) and what happened there, was considered by different countries many times. The United States conducted its investigation in 1951-1952. At the end of the 20th century, the Soviet-Polish commission worked on this matter, since 1991 the Institute of National Memory was opened in Poland.

After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Federation also re-occupied this issue. Since 1990, the investigation of the criminal case by the military prosecutor's office began. It received No. 159. In 2004, the criminal case was terminated due to the death of the accused in it.

The Polish side put forward a version of the genocide of the Polish people, but the Russian side did not confirm it. The criminal case on genocide was terminated.

To date, the process of declassification of many volumes of the Katyn case is continuing. Copies of these volumes are transmitted to the Polish side. The first important documents on prisoners of war of the Soviet camps were handed over in 1990 to Mikhail Gorbachev. The Russian side admitted that the Soviet power in the person of Beria, Merkulov and others was behind the crime in Katyn.

In 1992, documents on the Katyn massacre were published, which were kept in the so-called Presidential Archive. Modern scientific literature recognizes their authenticity.

Polish-Russian relations

The Katyn massacre issue appears from time to time in Polish and Russian media. For the Poles, it has a weighty significance in the national historical memory.

In 2008, the Moscow court rejected a complaint about the shot Polish officers from their relatives. As a result of the refusal, they filed a complaint with the European Court against the Russian Federation. Russia was accused of ineffectiveness of investigations, as well as of neglect of close relatives of the victims. In April 2012, the European Court of Human Rights qualified the shooting of prisoners as a war crime, and ordered Russia to pay 10 of 15 plaintiffs (relatives of 12 officers killed in Katyn) for 5 thousand euros each. This was compensation for the plaintiffs' legal costs. Have achieved their Poles, Katyn for whom it became a symbol of family and national tragedy, is difficult to say.

The official position of the Russian government

Modern leaders of the Russian Federation, V. V. Putin and D. A. Medvedev, adhere to one point of view on the Katyn massacre. They made statements several times in which they condemned the crimes of the Stalin regime. Vladimir Putin even expressed his assumption, which explained the role of Stalin in the murder of Polish officers. In his opinion, the Russian dictator thus avenged the defeat in 1920 in the Soviet-Polish war.

In 2010, DA Medvedev initiated the publication of classified documents in the Soviet era from the "package number 1" on the website of Rosarkhiv. The execution in Katyn, whose official documents are available for discussion, is still not fully disclosed. Some volumes of this case still remain classified, but the Polish media DA Medvedev said that he condemns those who doubt the authenticity of the documents submitted.

11/26/2010 The State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted the document "On the Katyn tragedy ...". This was countered by representatives of the Communist Party faction. According to the adopted statement, the Katyn massacre was recognized as a crime that was committed on the direct order of Stalin. The document also expressed sympathy for the Polish people.

In 2011, Russian officials began to declare their readiness to consider the issue of the rehabilitation of the victims of the Katyn massacre.

Memory of Katyn

Among the Polish population, the memory of the Katyn massacre has always remained part of history. In 1972, a committee was established in London by the Poles in exile, which began collecting funds for the construction of a monument to the victims of the massacre of Polish officers in 1940. These efforts did not support the British government, as it feared the reaction of the Soviet authorities.

By September 1976, a monument was erected at the Gunnersberg Cemetery, which is located west of London. The monument is a low obelisk with inscriptions on the pedestal. The inscriptions are made in two languages - Polish and English. They say that the monument was built in memory of more than 10 thousand Polish prisoners in Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov. They disappeared in 1940, and their part (4,500 people) were exhumed in 1943 under Katyn.

Similar monuments to the victims of Katyn were erected in other countries of the world:

• In Toronto, Canada;
• In Johannesburg (South Africa);
• In New Britain (USA);
• At the Military Cemetery in Warsaw (Poland).

The fate of the monument in 1981 at the Military Cemetery was tragic. After installation at night it was taken out by unknown people, using a construction crane and cars. The monument was in the form of a cross with the date "1940" and the inscription "Katyn". To the cross adjoined two pillars with the inscriptions "Starobelsk", "Ostashkov". At the foot of the monument were the letters "V. P. ", meaning" Eternal Memory ", as well as the coat of arms of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the form of an eagle with a crown.

Memory of the tragedy of the Polish people was well covered in his film "Katyn" by Andrzej Wajda (2007). The director himself is the son of Yakub Vaide, a career officer who was shot in 1940.

The film was shown in various countries, including Russia, and in 2008 he was in the top five of the international award "Oscar" in the nomination of the best foreign film.

The plot of the picture is based on the story of Andrzej Mulyarchik. The period from September 1939 to autumn 1945 is described. The film tells about the fate of four officers who were in the Soviet camp, as well as their close relatives who do not know the truth about them, although they know the worst. Through the fate of several people, the author told everyone what the real story was.

"Katyn" can not leave the viewer indifferent, regardless of nationality.