We Remember: 84 years ago today the order that led to the Katyn Massacre was signed by Josef Stalin

 To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night

 

Josef Stalin in the foreground, and Lavrentiy Beria seated behind him.

On March 5, 1940 the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union passed a resolution to shoot Polish prisoners of war held in the camps in Kozelsk, Starobielsk and Ostashkov and those detained by the NKVD in prisons in Western Belarus and Ukraine. 

Eighty four years ago today Josef Stalin signed Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria's order, condemning 22,000 Polish POWs and civilians to death. Beria was Stalin's  head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) from 1938 until 1945. He was the head of the secret police in the Soviet Union.

Beria's March 5, 1940 note requested that the cases of the Polish POWs and those arrested in a special manner should be dealt the highest penalty - by shooting and without a formal trial.

This crime would forever be linked to the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered. This dark anniversary was observed four years ago in a conference titled "Generations of Memory - Testimonies."

First panel @CPRDiP Katyń conference on "Generations of Memory - Testimonies" underlining how important it is for families to keep visiting the Katyń cemeteries to keep the memory alive and to promote to Russians how to remember own victims of Stalinism. pic.twitter.com/CaYqaISuKx

— Katyń 1940 (@katyn1940) March 5, 2020

This mass execution was carried out while Communist Russia and Nazi Germany were allies that divided Poland and the rest of Central Europe between the two totalitarian powers in the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

During this one year 10 month "honeymoon" between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Stalin's regime also handed over Jewish refugees to the Nazi Gestapo. 

The crimes of Katyn and the Soviet Union's aiding of Nazi Germany's crimes against the Polish and Jewish peoples between September 1939 and June 1941 must not be forgotten at a time that Russia's Vladimir Putin is trying to rewrite history in an Orwellian fashion, while he writes new chapters of infamy in Ukraine.