After the Nazis and the Soviets divided the occupied Polish territory, Stalin’s socialists were eager to neutralize any potential leaders. Thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, and priests were rounded up.
The prisoners were taken eastward into Russia, into the Katyn Forest. In an infamous war crime, the Soviets murdered them. An estimated 22,000 victims were brutally killed.
The communists worked to keep the atrocity secret, but in 1943, when the German army entered the area, soldiers discovered the mass graves. The Germans informed the world.
By this time, the Soviets had changed their allegiance, and were now fighting against the Germans. The Germans had no motive to protect the USSR’s reputation by hiding the massacre. The USSR was eager to deny the event.
The Polish government-in-exile asked the Red Cross to conduct an official investigation. They documented the war crimes extensively.
The Western Allies - Britain, France, and the United States - were allied with the both Poland and the USSR. The Western Allies needed the USSR in the war effort against Hitler.
To avoid angering Stalin, and thereby to keep the USSR engaged against Hitler, the Western Allies downplayed the Katyn atrocities. The media in the Western Allies did almost no reporting on the topic. Diplomats from the Western Allies did not confront their Soviet counterparts with the murders.
During the remainder of WW2, and for several decades afterward, the USSR continued to deny that the incident ever happened. In some cases, they were joined by governments, media, and academics from the Western Allies. Historians Stan Evan and Herbert Romerstein write:
At the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, to take an example earlier noted, the Soviets captured a million-plus Poles and shipped them off to Russia, some to become slave labor in the Gulag, a few recruited as agents, others who disappeared entirely. One vexing question was the fate of fifteen thousand Polish officers who couldn’t be found when efforts were made to form an army-in-exile to fight the Nazis. Nobody could get the facts about these captives, who had in fact been murdered by the Soviets and buried in mass graves in Russia’s Katyn Forest. The truth about the murders would be denied and covered up for years, not only by the Soviets but by Western leaders who knew the facts but kept discreetly silent.
When communism inside the USSR began to crumble in 1989, evidence surfaced, giving shocking details of how the Soviets carried out the massacre. With the communist government gone, the Russians were free to tell the truth about Katyn.
Scholars and researchers from both Poland and Russia have now extensively documented the executions. The priests, policemen, and military officers murdered in the Katyn Forest are officially recognized as victims of communism.
