Posted on 04/13/2025 11:26:23 AM PDT by marcusmaximus
Speaking in Kraków on the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of the Katyn Massacre, Duda laid a wreath at the Katyn Cross and paid tribute to over 22,000 Polish officers executed by the Soviet NKVD in 1940.
"It was genocide – a premeditated extermination of a vital part of Poland’s elite," Duda said.
"They [Soviet Russia ed.] managed to kill them, but never managed to erase the memory of their heroic stance from our nation’s consciousness."
The president condemned both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for attempting to destroy the Polish state, quoting Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s reference to Poland as a "bastard of the Treaty of Versailles."
Duda also recalled the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk that killed President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others en route to a Katyn commemoration, calling it a further sacrifice that reinforced Poland’s duty to remember.
"Glory to the heroes, eternal memory to the fallen, and eternal shame to the perpetrators," he concluded.
Ceremonies were held across the country, with central events in Warsaw attended by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Officials from the Institute of National Remembrance emphasised that the victims included teachers, doctors and scholars – the backbone of the Second Polish Republic.
Dr Filip Musiał of the Kraków branch of the institute noted that the massacre deprived Poland of a generation of leaders, calling the victims "representatives of a lost Republic."
The Katyn massacre was ordered on 5 March 1940 by the Soviet Politburo, resulting in the execution of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals by the NKVD secret police.
Officials have said that the root cause of that decision was a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
(Excerpt) Read more at polskieradio.pl ...
The treachery of the Soviets to the Poles, from the ‘39 partition, to the Katyn massacre, to holding its armies in check while the Nazis wiped out the Warsaw Uprising, to the seizure of eastern Polish territories after the war, are an indelible stain on the communist regime and its post-communist imperialist successor, Russia.
The Germans have had long, if imperfect, reckoning of the barbarity of their nation in the war. The Russians have not.
Poland should go nuclear.
“ Poland should go nuclear.”
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Right… nothing catastrophic could ever result from that. /sarc
...
“Poland should go nuclear.”
Agreed. With half pointed at Moscow and the other half at Berlin.
L
Gown can Russia be blamed for the actions of another Nation? The USSRvdid the atrocity.
Well put.
Probably the ONLY THING good the nazis did when they made this find public.
I have a copy of THE UNKNOWN WAR on DVD in which Brut Lancaster narrating blames Katyn on the nazis.
But Lancaster was huge lib I’ve been told.
It was just recent the Russians admitted it.
Red Cross Aid Given in Probe of ‘Massacre’
Will Help Obtain Neutral Experts to Investigate Nazi Charges
By PAUL GHALI
SPECIAL RADIO To The Binghamton Press and the Chicago Daily News, Inc.
Berne, April 23. 1943—The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, after deliberating for nearly a week in the closest secrecy the requests of the Polish and German Governments to participate in identification of bodies exhumed in Katyn Forest, has just issued an official communique declaring its readiness “in principle to assist in the appointment of neutral experts” to investigate the affair.
The committee’s decision, however, is made subject to the expressed condition that “all parties concerned” request its intervention in accordance with the memorandum of Sept. 12, 1929, in which the committee informed belligerents of the principles by which it would be guided in making inquiries.
The result of today’s decision is, naturally, that the committee will not intervene unless requested to do so by Russia.
Geneva circles believe that the committee is extremely reluctant to be dragged into the affair but simultaneously does not wish to incur the displeasure of any government on whose good will it must rely for success in its work.
The communique just issued represents a compromise between the conflicting issues at stake.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Poland’s government in exile seeks an investigation into Germany’s charge that 10,000 Polish officers had been massacred in 1940 by the Russians and buried near Smolensk. Moscow argues that its Polish ally should be loyal enough not to swallow Nazi allegations.
NATO exists so many countries don’t need to go nuclear they are protected by the USA nuclear shield
Vasily Blokhin was Stalin's chief excecutioner. He personally murdered most of the officers in the Katyn Massacre.
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