Soviets' decision to murder Polish POWs 77 years ago today
On March 5, 1940 Soviet communist party top authorities passed a resolution sanctioning the execution of ap. 22,000 Polish prisoners of war.
The Central Committee of the Political Bureau of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) passed a resolution on the execution of Polish POWs, including officers and members of Polish intelligentsia, detained at Soviet camps in Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszkow and Polish prisoners held by the NKVD within the pre-war boundaries of Poland's eastern provinces.
The decision to murder Polish POWs was passed by top Soviet state and party bodies on grounds of a March 1940 top secret letter addressed by Lavrentiy Beria (the then people's commissioner for internal affairs), to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. In it he informed his superior on the numbers of imprisoned Polish citizens and on their firm anti-Soviet stance.
The executions started on April 3, 1940. 4,404 prisoners from Kozielsk were transported to the Katyn forest and murdered with gun shots in the back of the head (so-called Katyn method). 3,896 prisoners from Starobielsk were killed in NKVD's buildings in Kharkiv and dumped into mass graves in the nearby Piatykhatky. 6,287 persons from Ostaszkow were executed in Kalinin, now Tver, and buried in Mednoye. Some 7,300 remaining prisoners held in various Soviet prisons were murdered by NKVD forces, among others in Bikivnia and Kurapaty near Minsk.
During the days of the executions, families of the murdered were deported deep into the Soviet Union, mainly to Kazakhstan. The March 12/13 mass scale deportation actions embraced some 61,000 Polish people.
It was on the way to Katyn massacre observances that a delegation of 96 top Polish state and military officials with President Lech Kaczynski and the First Lady perished in a plane crash near Smolensk on April 10, 2010. (PAP)
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