On March 5, 1940 - Members of the Soviet Politburo of the CPSU issued an order for the execution of 25,000 Polish intellectuals, including 17,500 prisoners of war.
On March 2, 1940, Lavrenty Beria - head of the NKVD, sent Joseph Stalin a secret memorandum No. 794/B, in which he defined Polish prisoners of war / 14,736 people / and prisoners from prisons in Western Belarus and Ukraine / 18,632 people / as enemies of the Soviet government who are not subject to re-education. He proposes to shoot 14,700 prisoners of war and 11,000 prisoners, without charge or indictment.
The note bears four signatures approving it: Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan,
as well as the consent of secretaries Kalinin and Kaganovich. Based on this note, the Politburo of the CPSU issued the secret resolution No. P13/144 on March 5 with the content recommended by Beria.
The mass graves of the Katyn massacre were discovered by accident. On February 17, 1943, local residents indicated to the Germans the exact location of the mass graves. On April 13, Radio Berlin reported on the crime, and on April 15, Germany invited the International Red Cross to conduct an on-site investigation. The answer is that they must receive an invitation from all interested parties. The Soviet Union did not send an invitation.
Then Germany formed an International Medical Commission, which included 12 experts from 12 European countries. The commission worked in Katyn from April 28 to 30. It published its observations and research in the fall of 1943. By the beginning of June 1943, 4,243 bodies had been removed and 2,730 of them identified.
Letters from their relatives with the latest dates from the spring of 1940 were found with the bodies. The time of the murders was also established by analyzing the roots of trees planted by NKVD functionaries on the mass graves in order to erase traces. The research documentation is stored at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Krakow.
After the war, it disappeared, but copies were discovered in the spring of 1991 in a secret hiding place at the Institute of Forensic Expertise in Krakow. Among the experts who signed the protocols was the Bulgarian doctor Prof. Marko Markov, who was forced by the communist authorities to renounce his signature after the war.
Moscow reacted two days after the announcement on Radio “Berlin“.
This is recalled in his blog by our former ambassador to Poland Alexander Yordanov.
In a statement by the Sovinformburo broadcast on the radio and published in the newspaper “Pravda“, the “German invaders“ were blamed for the massacre. After the retreat of the German army, a team of the NKVD and the military counterintelligence Smersh arrived in Katyn. The pits into which the bodies had been thrown were dug up and false documents were placed. False witnesses were prepared, and the inconvenient ones were liquidated or exiled. After the terrain was "processed", on January 13, 1944, the Politburo created a special Commission for "establishing and conducting investigative actions into the causes and circumstances surrounding the shooting in the Katyn Forest of Polish prisoners of war by the German-fascist invaders". The commission was headed by academician Nikolai Burdenko and pointed to the perpetrators of the crime as "fascists".
In 1969, a huge monument was erected in the village of Khatyn in Belarus in memory of the victims of Nazism.
The goal was to hide the name Katyn.
In the "Great Soviet Encyclopedia" it is about Khatyn, not Katyn. In 1978, a concrete shelf was placed at the site of the Katyn massacre with the inscription: "To the victims of fascism - Polish officers shot by the Nazis in 1941". At the entrance to the Katyn Forest, a monument dedicated to the non-existent 500 Russian prisoners of war "also shot" by the Germans was installed. In 1990 the Soviet authorities themselves removed the forgery. In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal refused to indict Germany due to lack of evidence. On December 22, 1952, a congressional commission was established in the United States to conduct its own investigation and issue a final report calling for the organization of an international tribunal to convict the Soviet authorities responsible for this crime against humanity.
In April 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev handed over archival documents to Poland and admitted that the Katyn massacre was committed by the NKVD.
On the same day, TASS reported that the direct responsibility lay with “Beria, Merkulov and their associates and that this was one of the greatest crimes of Stalinism“ . On April 14, 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev admitted that the Polish officers were shot on the orders of Joseph Stalin himself. On November 26, 2010, the Russian parliament adopted a declaration condemning the Katyn massacre.