Kłamstwo katyńskie 1940–2016
The Katyn Lie 1940–2016

Genesis, Typology, History. Vol. 1 – ‘They fled to Manchuria’

Summary/Abstract: As the result of the Soviet aggression towards Poland on 17 September 1939, several thousand Polish officers were taken hostage by the Soviets. Most of them were reserve officers, representing many important civilian professions. It was a Polish elite and a cadre which could have been used to recreate the Polish army of over 100,000 people. The officers, however, were very ardent patriots and were thus murdered by the NKVD in spring 1940. This date is considered to be the beginning of the Katyn lie. After the genocide had been carried out, the officers’ families ceased to receive letters from them. The Soviets gave false information about missing persons, saying that they had changed their place of residence or left the country and that the Soviet authorities did not know their new addresses. After the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in June 1941, international relations changed and diplomatic relations were established between the USSR and the Polish Government in Exile. Then the Polish authorities began to deal with the problem of the missing officers. The Soviets, however, gave evasive answers, some of them ridiculous. They said, for example, that Polish officers had fled to Manchuria. In April 1943, mass graves were discovered in Katyn near Smolensk, and exhumation confirmed that these were the bodies of murdered officers. The notes and shreds of newspapers found near the corpses, along with the statements of the survivors, undoubtedly indicated that they had been murdered by the Soviets in spring 1940. Despite obvious evidence, the Soviets consistently rejected this version and tried to persuade the international public that the officers had been murdered by the Germans. This article describes the kind of lies generated by Soviet state institutions and official representatives of the USSR and Russia.

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