Katyn

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Katyn , village, W central European Russia, 12 mi (19 km) W of Smolensk. During World War II, when it was part of the USSR, it was occupied by the Germans in Aug., 1941. In 1943 the German government announced that the mass grave of some 4,250 Polish officers had been found in a forest near Katyn and accused the Soviets of having massacred them. The officers had been captured during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. The Soviet government denied the German charges and asserted that the Poles, war prisoners, had been captured and executed by invading German units in 1941. The Soviets refused to permit an investigation by the International Red Cross. In 1944, a Soviet investigating commission alleged that the Germans killed the officers. In 1951–52, a U.S. Congressional investigation charged that the Soviets had executed the Poles. In 1989 Soviet scholars revealed that Stalin had indeed ordered the massacre and the following year Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev apologized to the Polish people for the killings. In 1992 Russian officials released secret documents that proved Stalin's direct involvement in the Katyn massacre.

Bibliography: See V. Abarinov, The Murderers of Katyn (1992); W. Materski, ed., Katyn: Documents of Genocide (tr. 1993); A. Paul Katyn (upd. ed. 2010).

Katyn Massacre During their occupation of the eastern half of Poland in accordance with the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, the Soviet army imprisoned around 14,000 officers of the Polish armed forces, among them many conscripts including intellectuals and artists. These were secretly, but systematically, shot by officers of the Soviet NKVD/KGB, on Stalin's orders. Traces of this act were only discovered in April 1943, when the mass grave of around 4,500 of them was discovered in the Katyn Forest (near Smolensk). The Red Cross subsequently verified that they had been shot by Soviet soldiers, and the Polish government-in-exile demanded an explanation from the USSR. Stalin denied any involvement, and used the accusations to break off relations with the Polish government-in-exile. Even though the Soviet version of events was the official doctrine adopted by the Polish Communist government, the event soured relations between the two countries for decades. Only in 1991 did the new Russian government under Yeltsin admit that Stalin had, indeed, ordered the execution.

Katyn massacre A massacre in Katyn forest in the western USSR. In 1943 the German army claimed to have discovered a mass grave of some 4500 Polish officers, part of a group of 15,000 Poles who had disappeared from Soviet captivity in 1940 and whose fate remained unknown. Each victim had a bullet in the base of his skull. The Soviet Union denied involvement in the massacre until April 1990, when it was confirmed that the officers had been killed in the early days of close Nazi-Soviet collaboration, by order of Stalin.