Quora question: “What is the Katyn massacre?”

My response to the Quora question, “What is the Katyn massacre?”

On September 28, the USSR and Nazi Germany, allied since August, partitioned and then dissolved the Polish state—a direct result of Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler. This alliance between the Soviets and the Nazis was based on mutual hostility toward Poland and years of secret collaboration after World War I, despite the fact that, officially, the Nazis were anti-communist.[1]

Under the Directorate of Prisoners of War, created by the NKVD, the Soviets took custody of Polish prisoners from the Army and began organizing a network of reception centers and transfer camps and arranging rail transport to the western USSR.[2] The camps were at Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov—all three located on the grounds of former Orthodox monasteries converted into prisons.

Stalin’s ambitions regarding Poland and the Baltic countries were that the Red Army would soon occupy and the NKVD would “pacify” using terror, deportations, and executions. A peace agreement was signed in March. Up until this time, NKVD interrogations were conducted. At their conclusion, the Polish prisoners were led to believe they would be released. But the interviews were a selection process to determine who would live and who would die. On March 5, 1940, Stalin signed their death warrant—an NKVD order condemning 21,857 prisoners to “the supreme penalty: shooting.”[3]

During April-May 1940, the Polish prisoners were moved from their internment camps and taken to three execution sites, the most notorious of which was Katyn Forest, 12 miles west of Smolensk, Russia. While Katyn was previously identified as the killing field for for Stalin’s massacre of the Polish prisoners, post-Cold War revelations, suggest that the victims were shot in the basement of the NKVD headquarters in Smolensk and at an abattoir in the same city, although some may have been executed at a site in the forest itself.[4]

The Katyn Forest massacre was to have enduring political implications. Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels hoped that international revulsion over the Soviet atrocity would drive a wedge into the Big Three coalition. But Goebbels miscalculated. Despite overwhelming evidence of Soviet responsibility, Moscow blamed the Germans, and for the rest of the war Washington and London officially accepted the Soviet countercharge.[5]

The killings probably continued after May 1940, and the total number of victims may have exceeded 27,000. Ongoing excavations in Ukraine and Russia are turning up more Polish corpses, so this number may increase.[6,7]

[1] The Katyn Controversy: Stalin’s Killing Field
[2] “The Tragedy of Katyn,” by Nataliya Lebedeva in International Affairs (Moscow), June 1990, p. 100.
[3] For a translation of Stalin’s order, see Katyn: Stalin’s Massacre and the Seeds of Polish Resurrection, by Allen Paul, Naval Institute Press, 1996, pp. 353-354.
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[6] Op. cit. “The Katyn Controversy…”
[7] Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, by Jan T. Gross, Princeton University Press, 1988.