The Soviet Union even went so far as to include the Katyn Massacre among the list of Nazi war crimes presented at the Nuremberg trials. Wikimedia CommonsOfficials examine the exhumed remains of the Katyn massacre. 1943. In 1940, Poland was caught between the military aggression of both Germany and the Soviet Union. The conflict climaxed that spring in Russia’s Katyn Forest when the Soviets murdered 22,000 of the best and brightest Poles of their generation en masse — then tried to blame the whole thing on the Nazis. The Katyn massacre and its ensuing cover-up shaped Russo-Polish relations for the...