KATYN FOREST

With only three Polish divisions covering the 800-mile-long eastern border, it came as a complete surprise when at dawn on 17 September [1939] the USSR invaded Poland, in accordance with secret clauses of the Nazi–Soviet Pact that had been agreed on 24 August. The Russians wanted revenge for their defeats at Poland’s hands in 1920, access to the Baltic States and a buffer zone against Germany, and they opportunistically grasped all three, without any significant resistance. Their total losses amounted to only 734 killed. Stalin used Polish ‘colonialism’ in the Ukraine and Belorussia as his (gossamer-thin) casus belli, arguing that the Red Army had invaded Poland ‘in order to restore peace and order.’ The Poles were thus doubly martyred, smashed between the Nazi hammer and the Soviet anvil, and were not to regain their independence and freedom until November 1989, half a century later.

In one of the most despicable acts of naked viciousness of the war, in the spring of 1940 the Red Army transported 4,100 Polish officers, who had surrendered to them under the terms of the Geneva Convention, to a forest near Smolensk called Katyń, where they were each shot in the back of the head. Vasily Blokhin, chief executioner of the Russian secret service, the NKVD, led the squad responsible, wearing leather overalls and an apron and long leather gloves to protect his uniform from the blood and brains, and using a German Walther pistol because it did not jam when it got hot from repeated use. (Nonetheless he complained he got blisters on his trigger finger by the end of the third day of continuous executions.) 

In all, 21,857 Polish soldiers were executed by the Soviets at Katyń and elsewhere—an operation which, after the Germans had invaded Russia, Stalin’s police chief Lavrenti Beria admitted had been ‘a mistake’. When the Germans uncovered the mass graves on 17 April 1943, Goebbels broadcast the Katyń Massacre to the world, but Soviet propaganda made out that it had been undertaken by the Nazis themselves, a lie that was knowingly colluded in by the British Foreign Office until as late as 1972, even though charges against the Germans over Katyń were dropped at the Nuremberg Trials.

Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.