Katyn: erased but not forgotten

By Beata Bruggeman-Sekowska

On April 13, 1943, the whole world heard about the crime committed by the Soviets. On that day, the Germans announced the discovery of the graves of Polish officers in the forest near Katyn. Three years earlier, in the spring of 1940, nearly 22,000 prisoners of war captured after the Red Army’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 were murdered by order of the highest authorities of the Soviet Union. Among them were soldiers of the Polish Army, professors, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. In 2007, the Polish Parliament established April 13 as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Katyn Massacre.

For over five decades after World War II, any attempt to reveal the truth about Soviet crimes in occupied Poland was met with strict censorship under the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL). The official state narrative portrayed the USSR as a brotherly nation, a liberator, and a steadfast ally in the struggle against fascist Germany. Any alternative narrative was suppressed — particularly the truth about Katyn.

The Katyn Massacre a mass execution of over 20,000 Polish military officers, police officers, and intellectuals, carried out by the Soviet NKVD in 1940. This atrocity occurred after both Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939: Germany attacked from the west on September 1, while the Soviets invaded from the east on September 17. In a stunning betrayal, the Nazis and Soviets had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, a non-aggression treaty that made them allies, coordinating their efforts to divide and conquer Poland.

The brutal reality of both regimes was evident long before the Soviets shifted their allegiance. The Soviets, quick to proclaim themselves as “liberators”, could not escape their true nature. For all their boasts, their “liberation” was a bloody occupation, as they silenced, tortured, and murdered countless Poles. Far from rescuing the Polish people from oppression, the Soviet regime — like the Nazis — was built on a foundation of brutality and cruelty. Their “liberation” was no different than their prior role in Poland’s devastation.

On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party, led by Joseph Stalin, issued a secret order: the immediate execution of thousands of Polish citizens held in special NKVD camps — Kozelsk, Starobilsk, and Ostashkov — and various prisons across occupied territories in what is now Ukraine and Belarus. These included Polish Army officers, police, border guards, teachers, doctors, lawyers, landowners, and other members of the intelligentsia — those deemed most dangerous to Soviet control. Among them were reservists who had answered the call to defend their homeland in 1939, and civilians arrested after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland.

Polish internees and prisoners were executed after 3 April 1940. Victims were systematically shot in the back of the head and buried in mass graves. Although executions were carried out at various sites, including Kalinin (Tver) and Kharkiv, the massacre was named after the Katyn Forest, where Nazi forces discovered mass graves in 1943 and publicized the crime.

While Katyn is often remembered as a massacre of men, historical records also confirm that women and even minors were among the victims. More than 50 women are now known to have been murdered in the same purge. Among them was Janina Lewandowska, the only woman identified among the officers executed in Katyn, and one of the first female POWs of WWII. Others included policewomen, prison officials, military intelligence collaborators, underground activists, teachers, aristocrats, and social workers accused of anti-Soviet activity.

The youngest of these women was 17-year-old Aniela Krotochwil, while others, like Helena Lewczanowska and Nadezhda Stepanova, were nearly 60. They were arrested between September 1939 and April 1940, interrogated in local prisons — Lviv, Lutsk, Stanisławów — and later transferred to Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson. Many had children. Entire families were destroyed: mothers and daughters executed, siblings arrested, relatives deported to Siberian gulags — where many perished.

At the time, Stalin’s regime responded with a campaign of disinformation, manipulation of history. Soviet authorities not only denied their involvement but accused the Nazis of the atrocity. This lie was upheld for decades, reinforced by state-controlled media and echoed in international diplomacy. When the Polish government-in-exile requested an investigation by the Red Cross, Stalin severed relations. The truth remained buried — not just in the soil of Katyn, but in the silence enforced by fear.

For decades, the Katyn crime was erased from official memory. In communist Poland, the topic was taboo, incompatible with the “state truth” of the USSR as a liberator. Historical research was forbidden. Documents disappeared. The victims were denied names.

The massacre, by all modern legal standards, qualifies as a crime against humanity, a war crime, and an act of genocide under the Polish Penal Code. Despite mounting evidence, post-war Soviet and later Russian authorities refused to classify it as such, arguing procedural limitations and the “natural deaths” of the perpetrators. A Russian investigation was eventually closed without prosecuting anyone.

But the truth refused to die. In 1990, the Russian government officially admitted Soviet responsibility. And yet, in 2021, the Russian Ministry of Culture downgraded the Katyn memorial from federal to regional importance — a quiet attempt to diminish its significance once again.

Image: By: German official photographer. The Katyn Massacre, 1940. Rows of exhumed bodies of Polish officers placed on the ground by the mass graves, awaiting examination. Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Katyn_Massacre,_1940_HU106212.jpg