Soviet officers vanish into a forest, and Moscow blames Germany for 50 years
What happened
In April 1940 the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, shot nearly 22,000 Polish prisoners, army officers, policemen, and members of the educated class seized when the USSR occupied eastern Poland the previous autumn. The killing was ordered at the very top: a memorandum dated 5 March 1940 and signed by Stalin condemned the prisoners to the supreme measure of punishment, shooting. A 1959 internal KGB memorandum later itemized where they died, 4,421 in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk alone, 21,857 in all. When German troops occupying the area discovered the mass graves at Katyn in 1943, Moscow immediately declared the discovery a Nazi crime, and after retaking the region staged its own inquiry blaming German units instead.
Why it matters
The fabricated Soviet version held as official truth across the Eastern Bloc for the entire length of the Cold War, and Western governments largely declined to press the point while the wartime alliance, and later peaceful coexistence, made the question inconvenient to raise. Not until 13 April 1990, as the Soviet Union itself was collapsing, did Moscow finally admit the NKVD had done the killing. Katyn became the clearest case in the whole war of a state manufacturing its own history, and of archives eventually unmaking the manufacture.
How we know
The killing order itself, a memorandum dated 5 March 1940 and signed by Stalin, and the 1959 KGB memorandum tallying 21,857 dead, both became accessible to researchers only after the Soviet admission of 13 April 1990; the Hoover Institution holds millions of pages of the underlying Soviet Communist Party records, known as Fond 89, that document the case in full.
Sources
- Hoover Institution. Remembering Katyn · Reputable sourcehoover.org · The domain "hoover.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineWorld War II59 events · From a staged skirmish at a bridge outside Beijing to a charter signed in San Francisco, the deadliest conflict in history, every event sourced.View all →