Free Republic

A sobering tale of the massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and Poland's intellectual elite - all of POW status - by the Red Army in 1940, and the subsequent propaganda that masked the truth for the next fifty years. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2008.

Poland on Friday marked the 75th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre — a mass murder of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners of war in Katyn forest in western Russia by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's secret police NKVD in an attempt to wipe out the country’s elite after the Soviet Union overrun part of Poland in September 1939.

It’s odd watching a group of left-wing academics buck up each other’s spirits after they’ve encountered the cold, cruel world outside academe. Such a gathering was on display at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago this month whenever the Radical Caucus of the MLA met. “The failure of communism did not result from Lenin, Stalin and Mao,” Grover C. Furr of Montclair State University told the group. “These were some of the greatest men in the world.” “Socialism preserved the contradictions of capitalism, such as differentiations in pay. We should abandon the term ‘socialism.’ Marx and Engels did...

American POWS sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area. The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to...

The most dramatic revelation so far is the evidence of the secret codes sent by the two American POWs — something historians were unaware of and which adds to evidence that the Roosevelt administration knew of the Soviet atrocity relatively early on. The declassified documents also show the United States maintaining that it couldn't conclusively determine guilt until a Russian admission in 1990 — a statement that looks improbable given the huge body of evidence of Soviet guilt that had already emerged decades earlier. Historians say the new material helps to flesh out the story of what the U.S. knew...

The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

An ally who feared U.S. indifference. Tragedy In Smolensk: Lech Kaczynski was a Polish patriot and a friend of the West who believed in the defense of freedom and democracy. We don't have many friends like him, and we treated him shabbily. Numerologists might note the number 70 figured prominently in both the life and death of Poland's president. Kaczynski, 60, his wife Maria, an economist, and 95 others who died Saturday on their way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners in the Katyn Forest in western Russia in 1940 by Stalin's secret...

WARSAW — As the body of Poland’s president was returned to this traumatized capital on Sunday, a day after he and dozens of top Polish political and military leaders died in a plane crash in western Russia, the country was in mourning but there was already a sense that its young democracy had passed a major test. The mechanisms to replace the lost officials appeared to be functioning and the political culture was responding with remarkable unity. Senior Polish officials sought to reassure the public that the government would continue to function normally despite the loss. Military leaders were immediately...

Poles pleaded with Hitler to free them from Stalin's grip New documents on attempts to Polish officers from Soviet POW camps have been found in the archives of the German Foreign Office. Russians continued negotiations concerning freeing a few hundreds Polish army officers even long after they had been shot death in the spring of 1940 - a Polish institute probing Nazi and Stalinist crimes has found out. Families of a few hundreds of Polish officers wrote letters to German Foreign Office pointing out their German origin or other kinds of connection to get their husbands, brothers and fathers back...

Poles Mark Stalin's Katyn Forest Massacre By ELA KASPRZYCKA ASSOCIATED PRESS WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Poles on Saturday attended a Mass, sang patriotic songs and lay flowers on a monument to more than 21,000 military officers and intellectuals massacred by Soviet agents in Katyn Forest, marking the day 65 years ago that dictator Josef Stalin ordered the killings. Along with the homage at Warsaw's St. Ann's Church, the Katyn Committee, an organization of relatives of those killed in Katyn Forest in western Russia and at other sites in 1940, demanded more Russian attention to the massacre. A recent Russian investigation...

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Polish war crimes prosecutors have opened an investigation into the 1940 massacre in the Katyn forest of more than 21,000 Polish officers and intellectuals by the Soviet secret police, authorities said Wednesday. Leon Kieres, the head of Poland's National Remembrance Institute, told a news conference that the investigation by 16 of his specialized prosecutors will attempt to add names to the fragmentary records of the Soviet officials and secret police agents who issued, passed on, or carried out the orders to kill the Polish prisoners. Deputy Justice Minister Andrzej Kalwas said the investigation was an act...

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) April 27, 2003, Sunday SECTION: Pg. 22 HEADLINE: Our shame still lies in the Katyn forest BYLINE: By KEVIN MYERS Today Poles all over the world will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the war crime which didn't occur. And the non-existence of this atrocity constituted democracy's most sordid exercise in realpolitik of the entire 20th century. The Soviet Union captured 180,000 Polish soldiers during its invasion of Poland in 1939. Most were herded off to slave-camps in Siberia, but 22,000 officers were not. In April 1940, on Stalin's orders, each was bound with barbed wire...