1940 massacre of Poles remains potent issue

Efforts to gain justice for thousands of Polish captives executed apparently at Stalin's orders have been rebuffed by Russia's courts. The country's mood has swung away from probing the Soviet past.

Reporting from Mednoye, Russia -- There were 6,295 Polish prisoners held captive at the monastery when the order came to "unload" the camp. It took a month and a half to kill all of them.

The prisoners were mostly military officers, police, gendarmes and landlords, rounded up as a dangerous "bourgeois" elite when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in the run-up to World War II. The following year, 1940, the Communist Party decided to eliminate them.

Today, all that remains of the Polish prisoners is an incomplete trail of paper and the forest grave sites. Stalin's signature still shows on the Central Committee of the Communist Party order to execute the captives. There are also documents indicating that all the men had been transferred to the killing sites.

There is the testimony of the local NKVD chief who in the 1990s described the obliteration of the prisoners. There is a secret letter the KGB sent to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, warning that the registration cards from "former bourgeois Poland" should be destroyed lest they shed a negative light on the Soviet Union.

In October 2007, Russia's most popular newspaper published, without a dissenting view, a Soviet general's denial of the Soviet Union's hand in the death of the Poles. He termed the mass graves "a German provocation."

"The Germans destroyed them," Valentin Varennikov, who died this month, was quoted as saying. "And then at gunpoint the same Germans forced several Russians to write statements that the Poles were allegedly shot by the NKVD."

There, in the basement of intelligence headquarters, the prisoners were executed: a single bullet to the head from a German pistol, historians here say.

Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. Blokhin—outfitted in a leather butcher's apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform[9]—then pushed the prisoner against the log wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol.[10] He had brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended.[9][11] The use of a German pocket pistol, which was commonly carried by Nazi intelligence agents, also provided plausible deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later.

The use of a German pocket pistol, which was commonly carried by Nazi intelligence agents, also provided plausible deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later.

He had brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended.

the Nazi invasion of USSR or subsequent events that followed in the years after the executions which led to the discovery of the NKVD's mass graves.

and the Brit's knew it in 1941

and so did Stalin, since, he had a spy at Bletchley Park, a Polish Officer no less, Sorry to say!. :-(

I don't think so. It was discovered in 1942 by Polish railroad workers, but it was not believed at that time. Then the Germans unearthed the remains in April 1943

I hope you mean that Stalin knew

What's the spy's name and rank?

btw there was a film about how brave American sailors captured enigma

Words will never bring back the dead, though. Justice may be served but the memories will remain.

I'd recommend the relevant course of action but too little, too late.

Look at the ME issue.

A final point: Maybe Wajda got the message out on this site, but his mesage stayed in the Polish community. People who are not Polish are largely UNAWARE of the Katyn genocide.

The "ME issue?" I

how many years are you going back now to bash on about another situation where the Poles were the victims???