The 1940 Katyń Massacre was for decades “forbidden knowledge” in Poland. Everybody knew that the Russian communists had killed around 25 000 Polish POWs in one of the largest massacres and war crimes of the Second World War. As long as Poland was ruled from Moscow, it was impossible to blame anyone else than the German Nazis for the massacre.
People across Poland commemorate the 25 000 military officers, policemen and members of the intelligentsia who were killed by the Soviet authorities in a series of mass executions in April and May 1940. The Soviets claimed for more than 50 years that it had been the Germans who had killed the Poles, taken prisoners of war in 1939 by the Red Army, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Poles remember the atrocities committed against the Polish nation by the totalitarian and genocidal communist ideology. On April 7th 2019, the 12th annual “Katyn March of Shadows” took place in Warsaw with hundreds of people participating in a historical reenactment commemorating the victims