Topics of coins
70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre
As a result of the Soviet Union's invasion of Poland on 17 September
1939, around 250 thousand soldiers of the Polish Army were taken
prisoners. Some of them were considered particularly dangerous and
were placed in special NKVD camps. Regular and reserve officers
were taken to Kozelsk near Smolensk and Starobilsk near Kharkiv,
whereas policemen, prison guards, gendarmes, and intelligence and
counter-intelligence officers were placed in Ostashkov near Kalinin.
The conditions in the camps were harsh: prisoners were crowded in
cramped buildings and were badly nourished. Moreover, they were
overcome by depression because of the defeat they suffered. However,
the shock caused by the disaster in their country passed quickly.
The prisoners integrated, patriotic moods intensified and the belief
in the victory of Poland returned.
At the same time, NKVD officers conducted a propaganda campaign
among the captured. They tried to make them loathe the Polish State and
convince them it had disappeared from the map of Europe forever. They
tried to win the prisoners over to the communist ideology, presenting the
Soviet Union as a prosperous and socially just country. The officers and
policemen, except for a handful of dissenters, turned out to be absolutely
unaffected by the attempt to re-educate them.
At the end of 1939, the policemen from the Ostashkov camp, as the
ones guilty of anticommunist activity because of their service before
the war, were sentenced and sent to labour camps on the Kamchatka
Peninsula. The plan was to cleanse out the officers' camps from 'counter
revolutionary' element, meaning for example, intelligence officers
or members of political parties deemed anti-Soviet.
By the end of February 1940, the first 600 sentences were passed
on the prisoners of Ostashkov. At that time, however, the sentencing
procedure was stopped by the head of the NKVD himself ? Lavrentiy
Beria, who decided to present a radically different way of treating all the
prisoners of special camps to the members of the Central Committee
Political Bureau of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks). The plan
was to execute them in extrajudicial procedure ? basing on the decisions
taken by three high-ranking NKVD officials, specifically appointed for
the purpose.
What triggered such a sudden change and the use of methods from
the time of the Great Purge, when thousands of people had been shot on
the basis of similar decisions taken by three-person groups? Regrettably,
we do not know. In his proposal, Beria wrote that the prisoners were
inveterate enemies of the Soviet rule, holding no promise for changing;
just waiting for the moment they were released from the camps to take
up arms against it.
It is hardly possible that it was not until the end of February that
the head of the NKVD had reached such conclusions. The prisoners
could have been rendered harmless if they had been transported
to the Kamchatka Peninsula. There is a convincing hypothesis that
the Soviets feared riots that could break out in connection with
the planned Polish and Allied troops aid to Finland that was fighting
against the Soviets. Such a presumption would explain why the head of
the NKVD ? alarmed by the course of war with the Finns ? presented
his proposal so suddenly and at that very moment.
On 5 March 1940, the Political Bureau approved the proposal to kill
the prisoners put in the camps of Kozelsk, Starobilsk and Ostashkov,
and to shoot 11 thousand Polish citizens, kept in NKVD prisons in the
Eastern borderlands occupied by the Soviet Union.
The extermination campaign began on 3 April 1940, when a rail
transport left the camp in Kozelsk, taking the first group of prisoners to
the Gnezdovo station near Smolensk. In the nearby Katyn forest, graves
had already been dug. The executioners ? NKVD officers armed with
guns ? were waiting. The prisoners were killed by shots in the back
of the head; the corpses were piled in stacks. In this manner,
4410 prisoners of Kozelsk were killed. In the NKVD facility in Kharkiv,
3739 prisoners of Starobilsk were shot, and a further 6314 policemen
of Ostashkov were murdered in the NKVD complex in Kalinin.
In the prisons of Kiev, Kharkiv, Kherson and Minsk the number
of prisoners shot amounted to 7305 and not 11 thousand, as stipulated
by the March decision of the Politburo.
Almost 22 thousand people fell victim to the Katyn massacre. The
murdered were the cream of the Polish intelligentsia ? not only welleducated
but also exhibiting patriotic attitude.
Sławomir Kalbarczyk, PhD