On Friday, at Warsaw’s Katyn Museum, Polish President Andrzej Duda honored those murdered. In his speech, he stressed that “all crimes committed against humanity, against the innocent, against those who cannot defend themselves, must be explained and punished.”
The Katyn massacre
In 1940, during World War II, the NKVD - the Soviet secret police,
executed over 22,000 Polish prisoners of war: officers, policemen, and intellectuals who had been captured by the Soviet Union after their invasion of Poland in 1939. The massacre was named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German Nazi forces.
Katyn was part of a larger effort by the Soviet government to weaken and control Poland by eliminating those who could potentially resist or challenge their rule in Poland.
By killing off the country’s intelligentsia and leadership,
the Soviet Union hoped to create a power vacuum that would make it easier for them to assert control over Poland and its people. This tragic and devastating event continues to impact Polish history today.
The Soviet Union initially blamed the massacre on the Nazis, and generations of Russian propagandists repeated the “Katyn Lie” until 1990 when the country’s government officially admitted that the NKVD had been responsible for the killings.
