'Ilustrowany Kurjer Polski'

German propaganda magazine

The Katyń massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22 000 Polish citizens – military and police officers and members of the intelligentsia – carried out by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) on Stalin’s orders in April and May 1940. The victims had been captured and arrested following the Soviet attack on Poland on 17 September 1939. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, the mass graves discovered in the Katyń forest became a means for Nazi Germany to discredit the Soviet Union, which denied any responsibility for the massacre. In turn, the Soviet authorities claimed that the human remains belonged to ‘Polish prisoners of war, who in 1941 were engaged in construction work west of Smolensk and who [...] fell into the hands of the German-Fascist hangmen’. After the German forces retreated in 1944, the Soviet Union conducted its own investigations in Katyń, from which foreign personnel were excluded. It was concluded that the occupying German forces were to blame. Diplomatic pressure from Poland and from Russian intellectuals to clear up the matter intensified before the collapse of the Soviet Union. On 13 April 1990, its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, handed over excerpts of secret documentation on the Katyń massacre to the Polish authorities. For the first time, the Soviet leadership admitted that it had been the Soviet secret police who had executed Polish prisoners of war. This period of Polish-Russian diplomatic relations enabled families to gather information about the fate of their relatives. Only in the 1990s were they able to visit the graves. The history of the Soviet Union’s denial of responsibility, as well as the Third Reich’s attempts to exploit the Katyń massacre for propaganda purposes, was showcased at the House of European History in its temporary exhibition ‘Fake for Real. A History of Forgery and Falsification’ (October 2020-January 2022).