kremlin plot

Published on 12/09/2012 01:31

The Katyn massacre was inspired by Soviet secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, who proposed executing all members of the Polish Officer Corps in a memo dated 5 March, 1940, approved and signed by Stalin.

The 22,000 victims were murdered in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, with the rest being Polish intelligentsia.