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Introducing Katyn Forest
In 1990 the Soviet authorities finally admitted that the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) had shot more than 6000 Polish officers in the back of the head in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1940. The bodies of the officers, who had been imprisoned by the Soviet occupying troops in Poland in 1939, were left in four mass graves.
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Until 1990, Soviet authorities had blamed it on the Nazis. Victims were trucked from Gnezdovo, a country station, to Kozyi Gory, site of the graves. The graves have not been disturbed and are now marked by memorials. About 11, 000 other Polish officers almost certainly suffered similar fates elsewhere in the USSR.
Less well known is the fact that, according to a 1989 Moscow News report, the Katyn Forest was also the site of massacres of 135, 000 Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis (out of an estimated one million Soviet POWs shot by the Germans in WWII) and of thousands of Soviet 'enemies of the state' exterminated by the NKVD in the 1930s.
Last updated: Feb 17, 2009
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