Duda pays tribute to victims of Katyn massacre
Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, on Friday marked the anniversary of the massacre of Polish POWs by the Soviets during World War Two at Warsaw's Katyn Museum.
On April 13 Poland marks the anniversary of the so-called Katyn massacre, a series of executions of Polish officers and war prisoners by the Soviet secret police NKVD that took place between April and May 1940.
On Friday, the Polish president visited the Katyn Museum in the Warsaw Citadel, where he laid flowers in front of the Katyn Epitaph.
"We speak of the Katyn massacre in the symbolic sense, but we know full well that there were a lot of those instances," Duda said. "Over 22,000 people in total - the Polish intelligentsia, not only officers, but also social activists, people from different organisations, not only soldiers, but police officers too, officers of the Polish state, were brutally murdered, mostly by a shot in the back of the head."
"The number of Polish victims in the East, then and later, was enormous," Duda added.
The killings of Polish POWs took place at several locations but the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest where some of the mass graves of the victims were first discovered.
The victim count is estimated at about 22,000. Apart from Katyn, the executions took place in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and other locations. About 8,000 of the victims were officers imprisoned following the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, the rest were Polish intellectuals, deemed by the Soviets to be intelligence agents and saboteurs.
The Soviets denied responsibility for the killings claiming they had been carried out by the Germans until 1990, when it officially acknowledged that the NKVD had carried them out.
Soviet responsibility for the Katyn killings was confirmed by an investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004), however, Russia refused to classify them as a war crime or genocide. (PAP)
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