1001 Heroes takes a deep dive into one of the most tragic stories in history- The incredible true story of Russia's murder of tens of thousands of Polish surrendered officers, town leaders, intelligentsia, men, women, and children- and their attempt to cover it up and when that became impossible- to blame it on Germany.(Not that Germany wasn't committing other war crimes as well).. The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD, at Joseph Stalin's order in April and May 1940.

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Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by Nazi German forces in 1943.[2]

The massacre is qualified as a crime against humanity,[3] crime against peace,[3] war crime[3][4] and (within the Polish Penal Code) a Communist crime.[5] According to a 2009 resolution of the Polish parliament's Sejm, it bears the hallmarks of a genocide.[6][7]

The order to execute captive members of the Polish officer corps was secretly issued by the Soviet Politburo led by Stalin.[8] Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials".[9] The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state; the murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and 700–900 Polish Jews.[10]

The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in April 1943.[11] Stalin severed diplomatic relations with the London-based Polish government-in-exile when it asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross.[12] After the Vistula–Oder offensive where the mass graves fell into Soviet control, the Soviet Union claimed the Nazis had killed the victims, and it continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.

An investigation conducted by the office of the prosecutors general of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres, but refused to classify this action as a war crime or as an act of mass murder. The investigation was closed on the grounds that the perpetrators were dead, and since the Russian government would not classify the dead as victims of the Great Purge, formal posthumous rehabilitation was deemed inapplicable. In November 2010, hoping to improve relations with Poland, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration condemning Stalin and other Soviet officials for ordering the massacre. In 2021, the Russian Ministry of Culture downgraded the memorial complex at Katyn on its Register of Sites of Cultural Heritage from a place of federal to one of only regional importance.[13]

 

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