Katyn

The 14,500 Polish army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 were held in three special NKVD camps andexecuted at three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one inKatyn Forestis the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus werealso shot at this time, although many others disappeared without trace.The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government.Three leading historians of the NKVDmassacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tvernow subsumed under Katynpresent 122 documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes coedited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski.The documents, with introductions and notes by Anna M. Cienciala,detail the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the Katyn question in Soviet/RussianPolish relations up to the present.