Poland marks Soviet killings of hundreds of Polish underground fighters
Polish Culture Minister Hanna Wroblewska has called the 1945 Soviet operation, the so-called Augustow Roundup, in which more than 600 Polish underground fighters were killed, "the biggest crime against civilians after WWII."
On Saturday, Wroblewska attended official ceremonies marking the tragic events in the north-eastern city of Augustow and opened the Augustow Roundup Memorial House.
"What started here around July 12 was not accidental," she said. "It was the biggest mass crime against civilians in Europe after World War Two."
She said the newly-opened House will serve as "a guardian of memory."
Polish President Andrzej Duda said on X that the Augustow Roundup was "a planned extermination of those, who refused to lay down their arms, because they did not recognise enslavement as liberation."
After World War Two, the Soviets installed a puppet communist government in Poland and started eliminating potential resistance against Moscow's rule.
In the Augustow Roundup, carried out in July 1945, just months after the end of the Second World War, the Soviets and Polish collaborationist units apprehended some 2,000 members of resistance who often previously fought Nazi Germans. Six hundred of them disappeared without trace and are supposed to have been killed by the Soviets. (PAP)jd/mmr
