The Katyn Massacre and Smolensk 2010: History, Facts, Curiosities

In the spring of 1940, NKVD officers murdered over 21,000 Polish prisoners of war and detainees by shooting them in the back of the head: professional and reserve officers, policemen, officials, doctors, teachers, lawyers, engineers, and clergymen. The decision was made on March 5, 1940, by the leadership of the Soviet Union, headed by Joseph Stalin. For half a century, Moscow blamed the Germans, and in the People's Republic of Poland, speaking the truth about Katyn was met with repression. The Soviet Union only admitted to the crime in 1990.

This guide describes the entire history: from September 17, 1939, and the camps in Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostaszków, through the decision of March 5, 1940, transports, and executions in Katyn, Kalinin (now Tver), and Kharkov, to the Katyn lie, the path to the truth, and how Russia has recently retreated from previous agreements. A separate section is dedicated to the disaster on April 10, 2010, near Smolensk, in which the Polish delegation flying to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the crime perished. In this section, we stick to the facts and findings of various commissions and prosecutors, attributing each disputed thesis to the one who formulated it. Where sources differ or something could not be confirmed, we state this directly.

September 17, 1939 and Captivity

The history of the Katyn massacre begins with a document that Moscow did not acknowledge for half a century. On August 23, 1939, a secret protocol was added to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, in which the Third Reich and the USSR divided among themselves "spheres of interest" in the event of "territorial and political changes" in Poland. On September 17, 1939, when the Polish Army had been fighting the Germans for over two weeks, the Red Army crossed the eastern border of the Republic without declaring war. Moscow announced that the Polish state had ceased to exist, and therefore the agreements made with it, including the non-aggression pact of 1932, were no longer valid.

On that day, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły issued a so-called general directive in Kołomyia: "Do not fight the Bolsheviks, except in the event of an attack from their side or an attempt to disarm units." Many units surrendered without a fight, while others – such as the Border Protection Corps and the defenders of Grodno – put up resistance. Executions occurred on the spot: near Sopoćkinie, Red Army soldiers shot General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński and his aide in front of the general's wife. On September 22, General Władysław Langner surrendered Lviv to the Red Army on honorable terms – officers were to retain their freedom and be allowed to leave for abroad. The Soviet side broke the agreement almost immediately. Most of the Lviv officers ended up in Starobielsk, and in the spring of 1940, in Kharkov.

A Quarter of a Million Prisoners

The exact number of soldiers who fell into Soviet captivity is not known. The IPN estimates about 250,000 Polish military personnel, including several tens of thousands of officers. Other estimates range from about 125,000 to over 450,000, as some count all detainees, while others only those handed over to the NKVD. Most of the privates were quickly released or handed over: in October 1939, about 42,400 soldiers from the territories occupied by the USSR were sent home, and in the autumn, the Soviets handed over over 42,000 prisoners from areas occupied by the Reich to the Germans. About 25,000 were sent to forced labor, including in the construction of a road in Volhynia.

Officers and policemen were treated differently. Already on September 19, 1939, Lavrentiy Beria issued order no. 0308, establishing the NKVD Department for Prisoners of War, headed by Piotr Soprunienko, and ordered the creation of camps. Initially, there were transit camps in fortresses, barracks, barns, and stables surrounded by barbed wire. According to the IPN, about 30,000 soldiers passed through the largest one in Szepietówka.

Three Monasteries

Three special camps were set up in former Orthodox monasteries. Kozielsk was located in the Optina Monastery, where famous monk elders had once been visited by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. When the Poles arrived there in November 1939, the crosses that had been thrown down after the revolution and the demolished towers still lay uncleared. Starobielsk occupied the buildings of a former women's monastery.

The most surprising is the history of the "Ostaszków" camp. Contrary to its name, it was not located in the town of Ostaszków, but about 10 km away, on a nearly five-hectare island of Stołbnyj on Lake Seliger, in the former Nilovo-Stolobensky Monastery. According to the IPN, a camp for Polish prisoners from the Polish-Bolshevik War operated there as early as 1919-1920, and later a juvenile penal colony. Among the prisoners, there was a story that one of the monastery buildings was built by exiled January Uprising participants – the IPN cites it as a camp rumor, not as an established fact.

Who Was in Which Camp

In Kozielsk, according to data cited by the IPN, on December 1, 1939, there were 4,727 people, including 4 generals, about 100 colonels and lieutenant colonels, about 300 majors, and about 1,000 captains and rotmistrz. Approximately half were reserve officers: 21 professors, associate professors, and university lecturers, over 300 doctors, several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers, many writers and journalists. In Starobielsk, on December 4, there were 3,907 people, including 9 generals and about 2,450 lieutenants and second lieutenants. Among the reservists were over 20 professors, about 400 doctors, about 600 aviators, as well as the entire scientific staff of the Anti-Gas Institute of the Polish Army and almost the entire staff of the Armament Institute of the Polish Army.

Ostaszków was a camp for uniformed personnel, but mostly not military. According to the IPN, on December 1, 1939, there were 5,963 people, although the categories listed by the IPN sum up to 6,364: 240 police and gendarmerie officers, 775 non-commissioned officers, and 4,924 police privates, 189 prison guards, KOP soldiers, 9 agents of Polish intelligence, 5 clergymen, 35 settlers, and even 4 merchants. Other listings from December provide slightly different numbers (e.g., 4,594 people in Kozielsk, 3,894 in Starobielsk, and exactly 6,364 in Ostaszków), also because the state of the camps was constantly changing.

Bunks, Lice, and "Clay Bread"

The conditions are known mainly from the accounts of survivors: Stanisław Swianiewicz, Józef Czapski, Bronisław Młynarski, Jan Bober. They slept on multi-tiered bunks, for the first few months on bare boards, and about 600 people were crammed into the Kozielsk church. There was a lack of latrines, fuel, and drinking water, and lice, bedbugs, and rats were a plague. The hardest conditions were in Ostaszków: porridge, soup with spoiled fish, 500 g of bread for an officer. In the first three months, 16 people died there. Surprisingly few guards were on duty – in the winter of 1939, there were 32 guards in Ostaszków, 46 in Kozielsk, and 52 in Starobielsk, often in tatters. A Soviet report from Kozielsk in October 1939 noted that the guards walked "in tattered hats, in rubber boots tied with strings." In Starobielsk, about 2 tons of inedible bread "sticky as clay" were buried.

Interrogations and Prayer

In Starobielsk, loudspeakers broadcast programs from 6:00 AM to 11:00 PM, starting and ending the day with the International. In Kozielsk, the radio system – as the prisoners noted with relief – was notoriously broken. From the second half of December 1939, interrogations took place, usually at night. In Kozielsk and Starobielsk, beatings were generally not used, but threats were made, interrogations were conducted under bright lights, weapons served as props, and older officers were offered coffee and cognac. In Kozielsk, the investigation was led by Vasily Zarubin, an agent of Soviet intelligence. They were looking for people willing to cooperate and identifying the "most dangerous".

Religious practices were prohibited, but they continued. In Kozielsk, in the evening, from the dark choir of the church, the call "I order a three-minute break" was heard, and several hundred people – Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews, and non-believers – fell silent in prayer. On Christmas Eve 1939, the NKVD took clergymen from the camps. Sources differ on the scale: some studies mention about 200 chaplains from all camps, while the IPN mentions ten clergymen separated before the holidays in Starobielsk. The fate of most remains unexplained.

"Ukrainian" and "Belarusian" Prisons

At the same time, prisons in the Borderlands, which the USSR called "Western Ukraine" and "Western Belarus," were filling up. Following the Red Army, several dozen NKVD operational groups went with prepared lists of "landowners," policemen, officials, and party activists. By October 1, 1939, only in Western Ukraine, 3,914 people had been arrested, and in December, with the consent of the Politburo, 1,057 officers of the Polish Army were detained there. Among those in Lviv prisons, in Zamarstynów and Brygidki, were, among others, retired generals Kazimierz Dzierżanowski and Mieczysław Linde, as well as Wiktor Chajes, the founder of the Jewish Museum in Lviv. Not only Poles were arrested – for example, former Ukrainian senators of the Republic of Poland Helena Łewczaniwska and Mykola Maslov were also detained. By early March 1940, over 18,000 people were in NKVD prisons in the Borderlands, including over 10,000 Poles.

The Decision of March 5, 1940

In early March 1940 (according to published documents, on March 2), Beria sent a secret note no. 794/B to Stalin. In it, he listed 14,736 people in prisoner-of-war camps – "former officers, officials, landowners, policemen, gendarmes, prison service members, settlers, and intelligence agents," 97% of whom were Poles – and 18,632 people in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus, including 10,685 Poles. All of them were, according to him, "hardened, irredeemable enemies of Soviet power" – this is the translation cited by Russian historian Alexander Gurjanov, while another Polish edition translates it as "declared and hopeless enemies of Soviet power."

The conclusion: execute 14,700 prisoners of war and 11,000 detainees, a total of 25,700 people. The matters were to be considered "without summoning the convicted, without presenting charges, without a decision to conclude the investigation and an indictment." The convicted person did not know that anyone was judging them.

Six Names

On the note are the signatures of Joseph Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Anastas Mikoyan, along with annotations from the secretary: "Kalinin – for," "Kaganovich – for." On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) adopted resolution no. P13/144 with this content. Lazar Kaganovich, as the people's commissar of communications, soon received a request from Beria for wagons for a "urgent operational task." The IPN notes that he must have known what it was about – he himself voted "for."

The sentences were to be issued by the NKVD "troika": Beria's deputies Vsevolod Merkulov and Bogdan Kobulov, and Leonid Bashtakov, head of the 1st Special Department. Kobulov's name was handwritten in place of a crossed-out name, most likely Beria's own. The resolution defined the convicted very generally: "members of various counter-revolutionary organizations, landowners, manufacturers, officers, officials, and fugitives." The latter were people caught in the autumn of 1939 when they fled from German occupation to the Soviet side. The IPN emphasizes that previously prisoners from the Borderlands were directed to the so-called Special Council of the NKVD, which could not impose the death penalty, and its highest sentence was eight years in a labor camp. According to the IPN, without Beria's initiative, most of them would likely have survived.

How the Lists Were Prepared

On March 14, 1940, a meeting was held in Kobulov's office with Soprunienko and the heads of the NKVD of the Smolensk, Kalinin, and Kharkov regions – they were entrusted with the executions. Even before March 5, a representative of the Ostaszków command advised that the deportation should be organized like the previous sending of prisoners home, "so that the convicted will think they are being prepared for sending home," and to respond to questions: "To work in another camp." On March 22, Beria issued order no. 00350 on the "unloading" of prisons: 3,000 prisoners from western Ukraine were to be sent to Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson, and 3,000 from western Belarus to Minsk. Why 6,000, since 7,305 were killed, is unknown.

The camps were emptied according to lists sent from Moscow. Each was a death sentence for dozens or hundreds of people – apart from a few that directed to the camp in Pawliszczewo Bory, meaning to life. We know the lists for Kozielsk and Ostaszków; the lists for Starobielsk have not been found. At the end of March, Soviet intelligence also provided a list of prisoners who were not to be killed and supplemented it during the deportations.

Why

No document directly explaining the motive has been found. Historians speak of the desire to eliminate elites capable of rebuilding Poland, of the "class" nature of the terror known from the 1930s, and the IPN also mentions the hypothesis that Moscow feared a rebellion in the camps in the event of a war with Great Britain and France, which in the winter of 1940 were considering helping Finland and attacking the oil fields in Baku. Russian historian Alexander Gurjanov points out that the motive was provided by Beria himself: "irredeemable enemies." None of the hypotheses has been proven. Already on March 2, 1940, a decision was also made to deport to Kazakhstan the families of the arrested and the relatives of officers and policemen.

How They Were Taken Away and Executed

In the documents, this was referred to as "unloading" the camps. From the beginning, it was accompanied by disinformation. Prisoners were fed rumors about returning home or going to neutral countries. In Starobielsk – recalled Józef Czapski – prisoners were once awakened at night and asked who spoke Romanian and Greek. In Kozielsk, everyone was vaccinated against typhoid and cholera, which Swianiewicz later considered one of the most puzzling measures: four and a half thousand vaccines for people who had only a few weeks to live. Each person received 800 g of bread, a little sugar, and three herring wrapped in brand new gray paper – in a camp where a piece of paper was a treasure, this was considered sensational. Most left believing they were heading for something better.

Kozielsk – Gniezdowo – Katyn

Transport from Kozielsk took place from April 3 to May 12, 1940, in groups of 50 to 344 people. The train traveled for about a day to Smolensk and then to the Gniezdowo station. There, the prisoners were transferred to prison buses, known as "black crows," and taken to the Kozie Góry clearing in the Katyn Forest, where the NKVD's vacation villa was located. They were killed in the villa and directly over the pits. The younger and stronger ones had coats thrown over their heads, their hands tied with Soviet hemp rope. They were shot at close range, usually once in the back of the head, with a Walther pistol caliber 7.65 mm; some victims had wounds from a four-sided bayonet. They were buried in eight mass graves. A Smolensk NKVD employee, Piotr Klimow, later wrote: "the trench was large, stretching all the way to the marshes, and in this trench lay Poles buried in layers under the earth."

Major Adam Solski kept a notebook until the last moments. It was found with the corpses in 1943. The last entry from April 9, 1940, begins: "Five in the morning. The day began particularly at dawn. Departure in a prison ambulance from the cells (terrible!). Brought somewhere to the forest" – and further – "something like a summer resort. Here a detailed search. My watch, which showed 6:30 (8:30), was taken. They asked me about the ring, which (...)" The last transport from Kozielsk, on May 12, was inexplicably turned back to the Babynino station, and those prisoners survived.

Geco Ammunition

In the Katyn pits, shells and bullets marked Geco, produced in the German factory of Gustav Genschow in Durlach, were found. This detail is still cited today as alleged evidence of German guilt. Historian Janusz Zawodny explains that such ammunition was mass-exported to the USSR before 1939. Without indicating a source, there is also information that it reached Poland and the Baltic states – this has not been confirmed. Who fired the shots was established after 1990 by investigations – including Russian ones – based on NKVD documents and testimonies from the officers themselves. German Walthers were consciously chosen: according to Polish biographies, Błochin quickly replaced the overheating Soviet Nagant revolvers with them, and English-language sources mention the excessive recoil of the Nagants. Accounts differ here, and in Kharkiv, Nagants were indeed used.

Kalinin and Miednoje

Prisoners from Ostaszków were taken away from April 4 to May 16, 1940, to Kalinin (now Tver), to the prison in the basements of the NKVD headquarters at 2 Soviet Street (now a medical university). On March 20, 1991, the mechanism was described to the Soviet military prosecutor by Colonel Anatoliy Yablokov, General Dmitry Tokarev's deputy, who was the head of the Kalinin NKVD in 1940. The doors were lined with felt "so that the shots could not be heard." The sentenced person was led to the "red lounge," their identity checked against a list, handcuffs were put on, and they were taken to a cell where a shot was fired in the back of the head. On the first night, with a transport of over 300 people, the executioners did not finish before dawn, so subsequent transports did not exceed 250 people. Bodies were taken by truck about 20 km to Miednoje, to the NKVD's summer resort area, to pits previously dug by an excavator. There are 23 graves. According to the IPN, this area was not under German occupation, and the Germans did not conduct exhumations there, so the world learned about Miednoje only in 1990.

According to Tokarev, a team came from Moscow, which included Major Vasily Błochin, a member of Stalin's security, referred to by historian Wojciech Materski as "one of the bloodiest executioners known in history." Tokarev testified: "Błochin put on his special clothing: a brown leather cap, a long brown leather apron, and brown leather gloves with cuffs above the elbows. It made a huge impression on me – I saw the executioner." It is often repeated on the internet that Błochin personally shot about 7,000 people in Kalinin. This number should be treated cautiously: about 6,300 people were murdered from Ostaszków, and he was not the only one who shot. For participating in the action, he received a bonus equal to a month's salary. On October 26, 1940, Beria secretly rewarded 125 NKVD officers. In 1954, Błochin was stripped of his general's rank, and a year later he died. He is buried in the alley of the honored at the Don Cemetery in Moscow, under a tombstone with an Orthodox cross and the inscription "Eternal Memory."

Kharkiv and Piatichatki

Prisoners from Starobielsk were taken from April 5 to May 12, 1940, to the internal prison of the NKVD in Kharkiv. Officer Mitrofan Syromiatnikov testified in 1991 that they were brought in "about 15 people," searched, their luggage and rubles taken – for which receipts were issued – "after which they were taken to the NKVD basement and executed." Here, they were shot in the neck with Nagant revolvers. Bodies with coats tied over their heads were taken at night to mass graves about 1.5 km from the village of Piatichatki.

Ukrainian List and Belarusian List

We know much less about the prisoners from the Kresy. In 1994, the Ukrainian security service handed over to the Polish prosecutor's office a list of 3,435 Polish citizens executed in 1940 in Ukraine – the so-called Ukrainian Katyn List. According to the work of Andrzej Przewoźnik and Jolanta Adamska, 900 of them came from Lviv. They were killed in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson, but it is unknown how many in each city. How they were killed, the IPN can only speculate: in Kyiv, from 1937, prisoners were taken by elevator to a special cell, ordered to kneel facing the wall, and shot in the back of the head. Some bodies ended up in the forest near Bykivnia, in an area fenced off by the NKVD with a green fence 2.5 m high. Items belonging to people on the list were found there, and archaeologists identified the names of nine of them. In 2012, a Polish military cemetery was opened in Bykivnia. No exhumation was carried out in Kherson – today a residential estate stands on the burial site of NKVD victims.

The Belarusian list remains the greatest unknown. The number 3,870 people is the difference between the 7,305 prisoners mentioned in Shchelepina's note (discussed below) and the 3,435 names from the Ukrainian list. We do not know the names because the list itself has not been found in either Belarusian or Russian archives. The IPN considers it most likely that they were killed in the Minsk prison and are mainly buried in Kuropaty. This is based on two documents from Beria dated March 21 and 22, 1940. In the second, we read: "3,000 arrested to be transported from prisons in the western districts of the Belarusian SSR to the Minsk Prison." However, this is a conclusion, not a documented fact. The IPN illustrates what this means for families, using the example of Aleksander Morżała, a senior police officer from Wołkowysk. In early 1940, "probably in March," as his daughter recalled, the family was told in the Grodno prison that their father was no longer there and "had probably been sent to Minsk." He is not listed among the murdered, and in one of the studies, he appears as missing.

How Many There Were

The most frequently cited numbers come from a note by KGB chief Alexander Shchelepin to Nikita Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959, in which he proposed the destruction of 21,857 files of victims: 4,421 executed in the Katyn Forest, 3,820 prisoners from Starobielsk, 6,311 from Ostaszków, and 7,305 people from prisons in Western Ukraine and Belarus. Shchelepin mistakenly wrote that the prisoners were killed in the camps themselves – in reality, they died in Kharkiv and Kalinin. Compilations based on named lists indicate at least 21,768 murdered. Whether the files were burned is unknown – Professor Wojciech Materski stated in May 2010 that there is no evidence of their destruction. According to the IPN, however, it is certain that in 1956, in Kyiv, on Moscow's orders, 2,500 registration cards of those murdered in Ukraine were burned.

395 Survivors and a Witness from Gniezdowo

From the three camps, 395 people survived, taken by Juchnów (Pawliszczew Bor) to Griazowiec. For years, the number 448 was given, but Soprunienko's report lists 395 and provides reasons: 47 people were indicated by the NKVD intelligence, 47 – by the German embassy, 19 – by the Lithuanian embassy, 24 survived as Germans wanting to leave for the Reich, 91 – on the orders of Mierkułow, with 167 no reason given (among them were several dozen camp informants). Painter Józef Czapski, according to some studies, was on the list of people indicated by the German embassy after the intervention of Ferdinand du Chastel. Culture.pl, describing the correspondence found on this matter, states, however, that the German diplomacy responded negatively, so the actual reason for his survival is uncertain. Among the survivors was also Lieutenant Colonel Zygmunt Berling, later the commander of the army formed alongside the Red Army.

The only Pole who saw the last stage of the journey to Katyn and survived was Professor Stanisław Swianiewicz, an economist from Stefan Batory University in Vilnius. On April 29, 1940, he was sent from Kozielsk on a transport to death, but at the Gniezdowo station, he was taken out of the wagon at the last moment and handed over to the NKVD, which suspected him of connections with Polish intelligence, and the Soviet intelligence was interested in his work on the economy of the Third Reich. Through a gap in the wagon, he saw his companions being taken away by buses with windows smeared with lime. He went through the Lubyanka, and in February 1941, he received eight years in a labor camp for "espionage for Poland and Germany," and was released in April 1942. Between 1951 and 1952, he testified in disguise before a U.S. Congress committee. His "In the Shadow of Katyn" was published by the Paris Literary Institute in 1976.

Families: The Night of April 12 to 13, 1940

In the same days when the executions were taking place, the NKVD came for the families. On the night of April 12 to 13, 1940, operational groups entered the homes of the families of officers, policemen, prison guards, and officials in the Kresy. Mainly urban populations were taken away – women, children, and the elderly – to Kazakhstan. According to compilations cited in Polish literature, the deportation affected about 22,000–25,000 families of the victims, or over 60,000 people.

Who the Murdered Were

The victims of the Katyn crime were not just "officers." They were about 22,000 people: professional military personnel and reservists, policemen, prison guards, border guards, settlers, officials, judges, landowners, political activists, and civilians caught at the "border." Among them were Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews – in English-language literature, it is estimated that Polish Jews constituted about 8% of the victims.

Why so many doctors and professors? In the Second Polish Republic, a university graduate after military service usually became a reserve officer. In 1939, therefore, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and scientists were mobilized, and in September, as officers, they ended up in Kozielsk and Starobielsk. We have not been able to find a complete, widely accepted statistic of professions for all victims, so we provide numbers for the camps, as sources do.

Generals and an Admiral

Generals Bronisław Bohatyrewicz, Henryk Minkiewicz, and Mieczysław Smorawiński were killed in Katyn. In Kharkiv – Leon Billewicz, Stanisław Haller, Aleksander Kowalewski, Kazimierz Orlik-Łukoski, Konstanty Plisowski, Franciszek Sikorski, Leonard Skierski, and Piotr Skuratowicz. On the Ukrainian list are Generals Romuald Dąbrowski, Kazimierz Dzierżanowski, Władysław Jędrzejewski, Szymon Kurz, Mieczysław Linde, Franciszek Paulik, and Rudolf Prich. The total number depends on the counting method (some were in retirement or held titular ranks), hence the differences between sources. Two survived: Jerzy Wołkowicki and Czesław Jarnuszkiewicz.

Rear Admiral Xawery Czernicki, born in 1882, was a shipbuilding engineer. Before World War I, he built battleships "Sevastopol" and "Petropavlovsk" for the Russian fleet, and in the Second Polish Republic, he oversaw the construction of Polish destroyers and submarines in France. He was killed in Katyn in May 1940. His body was not identified.

The Only Woman: Janina Lewandowska

Janina Lewandowska, née Dowbor-Muśnicka, daughter of General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, was born on April 22, 1908, in Kharkiv. She was a glider pilot and parachutist. She was captured around September 22, 1939, near Husiatyn. In Kozielsk, she provided a false year of birth and a false name for her father. On April 22, 1940, on her 32nd birthday, she was handed over to the Smolensk NKVD, and on April 23 or 24, she was killed in Katyn – as the only woman among the murdered prisoners there.

Her posthumous fate is extraordinary. In 1943, the Germans exhumed her body, and the skull, along with six others, was taken to Wrocław by the exhumation leader, Professor Gerhard Buhtz. After the war, they ended up with Professor Bolesław Popielski, who hid them for decades from the UB and NKVD, revealing the secret shortly before his death in 1997. In 2005, her identity was confirmed, and on November 4, 2005, her remains were buried in the family grave in Lusowo. Her younger sister Agnieszka, an activist of the underground organization "Wilki," was executed by the Germans in Palmiry on June 20 or 21, 1940. Both are commemorated by the NBP coin "Katyn–Palmiry 1940."

Mathematician, Rabbi, Chaplain, Athletes

Józef Marcinkiewicz, born in 1910, a student of Antoni Zygmund and an associate professor at Stefan Batory University, published over 50 works during six years of scientific work. His interpolation theorem is a classic of mathematical analysis. In 1939, he was on a scholarship in Paris and then in England, but in August, when the political situation became dangerous, he returned to the country. As a reserve officer, he fought near Lviv, passed through Starobielsk to Kharkiv, and died at the age of 30. He entrusted his manuscripts to his parents – the NKVD deported them to Siberia in 1940, where they died, and the notes disappeared without a trace.

Baruch Steinberg, serving as the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, was killed in Katyn in April 1940. For years, it was said that he survived as one of those taken to Lubyanka – only Soviet archives later revealed that this was not true. The chief Orthodox chaplain of the Polish Army, Lieutenant Colonel Szymon Fedorońko, was also killed in Katyn. Father Jan Leon Ziółkowski, a chaplain and veteran of the 1920 war, probably avoided the Christmas deportation of clergy from Kozielsk because he was then in solitary confinement. According to another hypothesis by Stanisław Swianiewicz, he was not recognized as a priest in an officer's uniform. He gained less than four months: he was likely killed in Katyn on April 9, 1940.

According to dzieje.pl, among the victims were several hundred athletes and sports activists, including nine Olympians. Captain Zdzisław Kawecki, a silver medalist in team eventing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was killed in Katyn on April 13 or 14, 1940. Marian Spojda, Polish champion with Warta Poznań in 1929, was shot there on April 16, 1940. Note the mistakes: rower Stanisław Urban, a bronze medalist from Los Angeles, is sometimes mentioned among the victims, including in the aforementioned dzieje.pl text, but he does not appear in the Katyn cemetery book or in the list of those murdered from Kozielsk compiled by Memorial. Another Stanisław Urban, born in 1899, a reserve second lieutenant, was killed in Katyn.

Traces in Pockets

We know much thanks to items found with the corpses. In the pocket of reserve engineer Lieutenant Stefan Bierzyński, a handwritten plan of the Kozielsk camp was found in 1943. Dobiesław Jakubowicz wrote on Christmas Eve 1939, addressing his wife: "Today, Marysieńko's villa," and described a homemade wafer, hay, and a tiny Christmas tree in the hall where fifteen prisoners had dinner. For many people on the Ukrainian list, only the surname, father's name, and year of birth remain. The IPN openly asks who, for example, Franciszek Zajączkowski, born in 1897, or Izaak Margulis, born in 1911, were – and admits that it does not know.

The brother of Major Adam Solski, Captain Kazimierz Solski, was in the same camp and was killed in Katyn on April 17, 1940. Kazimierz's son, Leszek Solski, died on April 10, 2010, in the Tu-154 plane crash near Smolensk while flying to the 70th anniversary of the crime.

"Intelligentsia"

In Polish texts about Katyn, the word "intelligentsia" appears constantly. In Polish tradition, it means not only people with diplomas but a layer that felt responsible for the community: doctors, teachers, lawyers, engineers, officials, priests, and officers. The IPN describes the selection for special camps as the isolation of people "particularly active, raised on independence traditions, and above all, highly educated." However, not all those murdered belonged to the intelligentsia in this sense – most of the prisoners from Ostaszków were ordinary policemen. What connected them was that in the eyes of the NKVD, they were "enemies" who needed to be removed.

The Katyń Lie

The crime of spring 1940 was surrounded for half a century by a second crime: systematic lying. It began before anyone in the West knew about the graves in the Katyń Forest, and lasted until April 13, 1990. The Soviets lied, the Allied governments remained silent, and in the People's Republic of Poland, speaking the truth could cost one their job, freedom, and in several still unexplained cases, even their life.

"They escaped to Manchuria"

After the Sikorski–Majski agreement of July 30, 1941, Poles began to emerge from Soviet camps and prisons, and General Władysław Anders was forming a Polish army in the USSR. It quickly became apparent that thousands of officers, known to have fallen into Soviet captivity, were not reporting to the army. Among those searching was Captain Józef Czapski, himself a survivor from Starobielsk. Until April 1942, he knocked on the doors of various Soviet offices and never received a reliable answer. He later described this in "Inhuman Land" (1949).

On December 3, 1941, in the Kremlin, General Władysław Sikorski, in the presence of General Anders, directly asked Joseph Stalin about the missing. According to the Polish record of the conversation, Stalin replied, "They escaped." When Anders asked, "Where could they have escaped to?" he answered, "Well, to Manchuria, for example." In brief discussions, this exchange is often summarized as "they escaped to Manchuria."

April 13, 1943

In February 1943, local residents, Ivan Kriwoziercew and Parfien Kisielew, pointed out to the Germans the burial site in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk. On April 13, 1943, the Reichssender Berlin radio announced the discovery of a pit "28 meters long and 16 meters wide," in which 3000 Polish officers were said to lie in twelve layers. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary the next day that the discovery was being used in anti-Bolshevik propaganda "on a large scale."

On April 15, the Soviet Information Bureau accused the Germans. The Germans invited the International Medical Commission to Katyń: twelve forensic medicine specialists from occupied countries, allied with the Reich or neutral. The commission worked in Katyń from April 28 to 30, 1943, and indicated spring 1940 as the time of death. Its fate after the war is a separate story: Bulgarian Marko Markow and Czech František Hájek were forced to retract their signatures and defend the Soviet version, while Croatian Eduard Miloslavić managed to escape to the USA.

The PCK Technical Commission

The Germans also demanded the participation of the Polish Red Cross, threatening reprisals in case of refusal. The Secretary General of the PCK, Kazimierz Skarżyński, to avoid being drawn into German propaganda, established a strictly technical commission. Its members included, among others, doctor Hieronim Bartoszewski, criminologist Tadeusz Susz-Pragłowski, Dr. Marian Wodziński from the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Kraków, and Father Stanisław Jasiński. According to the PCK, the commission began its work on April 17, and the exhumations lasted until June 7, 1943. The PCK reported a total of 4243 bodies exhumed. The German commission counted 4143. It was estimated that about 4400 prisoners from Kozielsk lay in the Katyń graves.

Skarżyński prepared a confidential 60-page report on the commission's work (published in Paris in 1955, and in Poland only in 1989). Boxes with documents extracted from Katyń traveled through Kraków, Wrocław, and Radebeul in Saxony. According to the PCK, they were to be burned before the entry of the Red Army on the orders of the German doctor who transported them, but whether this actually happened is unknown. Commission members were interrogated after the war; some were arrested, and some had to flee the country. Skarżyński died in 1962 in Calgary, Canada.

Break in Relations and the Diplomacy of Silence

The Polish government in London requested an investigation into the matter from the International Red Cross. Stalin used this as a pretext: on the night of April 25 to 26, 1943, the Polish ambassador received a note about the severance of diplomatic relations. The Allies did not stand by the Poles. On April 24, Minister Anthony Eden urged Sikorski to withdraw the request for a Red Cross investigation, and Winston Churchill assured Stalin that the British would be "energetically opposed" to any such "investigation."

Privately, London knew more. Churchill ordered the matter to be investigated by the ambassador to the Polish government, Sir Owen O'Malley. His secret report from May 24, 1943, indicated Soviet guilt and was full of uncomfortable questions. O'Malley wrote that there was "much negative evidence" available that collectively cast serious doubt on the Soviet denials. Churchill forwarded the report to President Roosevelt on August 13, 1943. Roosevelt's response has not been found.

In May 1943, the Germans also brought American and British prisoners to Katyń. Among them were Lieutenant Colonel John H. Van Vliet and Captain Donald B. Stewart. They were most convinced by the good condition of the shoes and uniforms of the dead: these people could not have lived long after being taken prisoner. Even from captivity, both sent an encrypted report to military intelligence in Washington, stating that the German claims were, in their opinion, "fundamentally true." In 1945, Van Vliet submitted a written report to General Clayton Bissell, head of military intelligence. The report was classified and disappeared from the Pentagon archives. Van Vliet reconstructed it in 1950. Stewart was ordered in 1950 to "never speak" about the secret dispatch regarding Katyń. All of this was confirmed only by documents declassified by the U.S. National Archives on September 10, 2012, about a thousand pages.

The Burdenko Commission

When the Red Army recaptured Smolensk, a special NKVD and Smiersh counterintelligence team took over the area in September 1943 and spent the following months preparing false evidence and witnesses. On January 13, 1944, the Politburo established a commission chaired by Nikolai Burdenko, president of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. It included, among others, writer Alexei Tolstoy, and no one from abroad was allowed. The commission's communiqué, published on January 26, 1944, attributed the crime to the Germans in the autumn of 1941 and spoke of 11,000 victims. Russian investigators from 1990 to 1994 found that the commission fabricated evidence. On January 30, 1944, a ceremony was held at the site attended by representatives of the 1st Corps of the Polish Armed Forces in the USSR, including General Zygmunt Berling, who endorsed the version of German guilt.

Nuremberg: The Charge That Disappeared

The Soviets included Katyń in the indictment before the International Military Tribunal. Prosecutor Roman Rudenko accused the Germans of murdering about 11,000 Polish officers. At the stage of preparing the indictment at the London conference, Soviet negotiators provided another number: 925 officers killed in September 1941. The tribunal allowed three witnesses from each side. On July 1, 1946, Colonel Friedrich Ahrens, commander of the German 537th Communication Regiment, whose unit was blamed by the Soviet side, testified. Ahrens stated that he took command of the regiment only at the end of November 1941, "if I remember correctly, on November 30." On the Soviet side, witnesses included Bulgarian Marko Markow, a former member of the 1943 commission, and astronomer Professor Borys Bazylewski, who was deputy mayor of Smolensk during the occupation. Katyń did not appear at all in the tribunal's verdict. According to findings described many years later, former OSS chief William Donovan, convinced by German officer Fabian von Schlabrendorff, persuaded the U.S. delegation to block this charge. However, this is a thread known from later studies, not from the records of the trial itself.

In Poland, the case was investigated by prosecutor Roman Martini. On March 30, 1946, he was murdered in Kraków by a 17-year-old girl and her fiancé. Whether the murder was related to Katyń is not determined by sources.

The Madden Commission

The most serious Western investigation was conducted by the U.S. Congress. On September 18, 1951, the House of Representatives passed Resolution No. 390 by a vote of 398 to 0 and established a special commission. It was chaired by Congressman Ray Madden from Indiana, and all seven members represented districts with large Polish communities. The commission was the first in the history of Congress to hear witnesses abroad: in London, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Naples. It heard 81 witnesses, collected 183 pieces of physical evidence, and over 100 written testimonies. Among those who testified before the commission were Captain Donald Stewart and former PCK Secretary General Kazimierz Skarżyński. Historians point out weaknesses in the commission, such as hearing a hooded anonymous witness "John Doe," who claimed to have seen executions in Katyń in November 1939.

The final report, dated December 22, 1952, unanimously blamed the NKVD and called the crime "one of the most barbaric international crimes in history." The commission established that the Roosevelt administration suppressed information about the crime, although it admitted it acted in the name of wartime necessity: the Office of War Information pressured Polish-language broadcasts in Detroit and Buffalo to stop talking about Katyń, and Roosevelt himself arranged for one of the naval officers to be transferred to American Samoa so he could not publicly speak about Katyń. The commission recommended bringing the case against the USSR to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The Eisenhower administration ignored this recommendation. In 2000, the Polish Sejm thanked the commission for establishing the truth. Epilogue: even in a letter from the State Department dated August 12, 1992, it was stated that during the hearings in 1951–1952, the U.S. did not have facts that would unequivocally refute the Soviet version, and these only came to light in 1990. Franciszek Herzog from Connecticut, who lost his father and uncle in Katyń, commented years later: "There is a big difference between ignorance and unwillingness to know."

London, 1976

When the Polish community unveiled the Katyń monument on September 18, 1976, at the Gunnersbury Cemetery in London, the British government did not send representatives or active duty soldiers. Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland explained to the House of Commons on October 11, 1976, that successive governments did not consider the evidence strong enough to officially name the guilty parties, and such a monument presupposes such a judgment. Five years earlier, BBC2 aired a documentary about Katyń with the telling title "The Issue Should be Avoided."

Taboo in the PRL

In the People's Republic of Poland, Katyń was a forbidden topic, included in the "Black Book of Censorship." In February 1952, the government of Józef Cyrankiewicz, in an official statement, attributed the crime to "Hitlerite criminals." Władysław Gomułka, upon coming to power in 1956, ordered silence on the matter and instructed that the PWN encyclopedia should not include the entry "Katyń" at all. A censorship note from January 14, 1974, instructed to adhere to the findings of the Soviet commission.

Resistance persisted nonetheless. On March 21, 1980, in the Main Market Square in Kraków, former AK soldier Walenty Badylak set himself on fire in protest against the Katyń lie. On July 31, 1981, at the initiative of Father Stefan Niedzielak, a Katyń cross with the date 1940 was erected at the Military Powązki Cemetery. The Security Service removed it that same night. Father Niedzielak, the creator of the Sanctuary for the Fallen and Murdered in the East at St. Charles Borromeo Church, died in the rectory on the night of January 20 to 21, 1989. The autopsy revealed facial and head injuries and a broken cervical spine. The investigation was closed on October 2, 1990, accepting the version of a fatal fall from a chair, and materials from the autopsy and traces from the scene disappeared under unclear circumstances. The SB was suspected of murder. The perpetrators have not been identified to this day.

Chatyń – Similar Name, Different Crime

It is often repeated that the Soviets built a "false Katyń" in Belarus. The facts are as follows: Chatyń is a real village about 50 km from Minsk, burned on March 22, 1943, by the collaborationist Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118 with the participation of the SS Dirlewanger unit. About 149 residents were killed, including 70 or 75 children. The crime was authentic, committed by formations in German service. In 1969, Chatyń became a national memorial site of the Belarusian SSR, with a "village cemetery" commemorating 185 destroyed localities. The thesis that the Soviets used the similarity of names to confuse foreign guests with Katyń is put forward, among others, by British historian Norman Davies. This is an interpretation of a historian, not a confirmed document of decision. It is certain that both places were often confused.

The Truth Comes to Light

The first cracks appeared in 1989. After the publication in February and March in "Odrodzenie" of the findings of Polish historians from the commission on "white spots," government spokesman Jerzy Urban admitted that the crimes were committed by "NKVD officers." On April 18, 1989, an urn with soil from Katyn was placed in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and in the Katyn Valley at Powązki. On October 30, 1989, the Katyn Forest was visited by a several hundred-person delegation of Katyn Families, which included Zbigniew Brzezinski.

April 13, 1990

Exactly 47 years after the German announcement, during Wojciech Jaruzelski's visit to Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev handed him copies of NKVD documents, including lists of deportations from Kozelsk and Ostashkov. At 2:30 PM Moscow time, the TASS agency announced that Polish prisoners had been executed by the NKVD, naming Lavrenti Beria and Vsevolod Merkulov and calling the crime "one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism." Russian dissident Leonid Pochivalov soon noted in "Literaturnaya Gazeta" that the admission was made "as if through clenched teeth."

In September 1990, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the USSR initiated an investigation. Concurrently, on November 3, 1990, Gorbachev ordered the collection of materials regarding the fate of Soviet prisoners in Poland after the 1920 war. Historians interpret this as an attempt to find a counterweight, the so-called "anti-Katyn." This theme was later raised multiple times by Russia, including in September 1998.

"Package No. 1"

The most important documents lay for decades in the so-called special file No. 1, accessible only to the highest authorities. According to historians, Gorbachev, as the leader of the USSR, must have known their content, but he did not disclose it. Boris Yeltsin did. On October 14, 1992, at the Belvedere, the head of the Russian state archives, Rudolf Pikhoya, handed President Lech Wałęsa authenticated copies, including the Politburo decision from March 5, 1940, signed by Stalin, and a note from Shelepin from 1959. From that moment, there was no doubt that the order came from the very top.

Russian investigators did a lot of work at that time, including questioning the former head of the Kalinin NKVD, Dmitry Tokarev, in March 1991. On August 2, 1993, the expert commission at the Russian Main Military Prosecutor's Office recognized the killing of 14,522 prisoners from three camps and 7,305 prisoners from the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus as a crime against peace, a war crime, a crime against humanity, and genocide.

Exhumations and Cemeteries

Exhumation work began in 1991 in Piatichatki, Miednoje, and Katyn, and Polish-Russian and Polish-Ukrainian research continued in the mid-1990s. In 23 pits in Miednoje, the remains of about 2,300 people were found. In June 1998, Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Aleksander Kwaśniewski agreed to build memorial complexes. In 2000, three Polish Military Cemeteries were opened: in Kharkiv on June 17 (about 3,800 prisoners from Starobielsk), in Katyn on July 28 (about 4,400 from Kozelsk), and in Miednoje on September 2 (about 6,300 from Ostashkov). The cemeteries were established, among others, at the initiative of the Federation of Katyn Families.

2004: Investigation Closed, Decision Secret

The Russian investigation (case No. 159) was conducted successively by Colonel Alexander Trietiecki and Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Yablokov, who on July 13, 1994, closed it due to the death of the perpetrators, recognizing in the ruling Stalin and members of the Politburo guilty of, among other things, genocide. Superiors annulled this decision a few days later and transferred the case to another prosecutor. Ultimately, the investigation was closed on September 21, 2004, but the world learned about it only on March 11, 2005, from a conference by General Alexander Savienkov. The prosecutor's office then confirmed the death of only 1,803 people out of 14,542 sentenced, rejected the classification of genocide, and classified the very decision to close the case. Out of 183 volumes of documents, 116 were classified: according to Polish historians' compilations, 80 of them were marked "for official use only," and 36 with the labels "secret" and "top secret." The European Court of Human Rights also lists these 36 volumes as "top secret." On January 26, 2011, the Supreme Court of Russia dismissed the complaint of the Memorial association regarding the classification of this decision.

The year 2010 brought a brief thaw. On May 8, Dmitry Medvedev handed over 67 public volumes of documents to acting President Bronisław Komorowski, which included materials known to Poland since 1992. In total, Poland received 148 volumes of copies, the last batch in 2011 (sources indicate April or July 2011). About 35 volumes and a copy of the decision to close the case remained classified. On November 26, 2010, the State Duma adopted a statement by a vote of 342 to 57 that the crime was carried out on the direct orders of Stalin and other leaders of the USSR. But on October 6, 2011, Deputy Minister of Justice Georgy Matiushkin argued before the court in Strasbourg that there was no evidence of the murder of Polish officers and that they should be treated as "missing persons."

Strasbourg: Janowiec and Others v. Russia

Complaints were filed by 15 Polish citizens, relatives of 12 victims: military and police officers, a military doctor, and a primary school principal. On April 16, 2012, the chamber of the Court found that Russia treated ten of the complainants inhumanely (Article 3 of the Convention) and did not cooperate with the Court (Article 38). It referred to the crime as a "war crime." On October 21, 2013, the Grand Chamber composed of 17 judges ruled differently. By a majority vote, it found that it had no jurisdiction to assess the investigation because Russia ratified the Convention in May 1998, 58 years after the executions, and there was a lack of "genuine connection" between the crime and the entry into force of the Convention. It also found that there was no violation of Article 3. However, it unanimously stated that Russia, by refusing to provide the classified decision to close the case, violated its obligation to cooperate. Five judges submitted separate opinions.

IPN Investigation, Bykownia, and the Belarusian List

On November 30, 2004, the investigative branch of the IPN initiated its own investigation (case number S 38/04/Zk) regarding the murder of at least 21,768 Polish citizens. The acts were classified, among other things, under Article 118 of the Penal Code, as genocide, and in the case description also as a war crime and a crime against humanity. According to a statement from August 11, 2011, prosecutors interviewed 4,193 witnesses, mainly relatives of the victims. In 2007, the IPN requested the Ukrainian prosecutor's office for an authenticated copy of the so-called Ukrainian list (3,435 names). Some of these victims rest in Bykownia near Kyiv, where the fourth Polish Military Cemetery was opened on September 21, 2012.

The copies of documents provided by Russia do not include documents with the names of 3,870 prisoners from western Belarus, known as the Belarusian list. In 2003, Belarus responded to Polish prosecutors that in its proceedings regarding those buried in Kurapaty near Minsk, the nationality of the victims was not established.

Russia's Retreat

After a brief thaw in 2010, a retreat followed. In August 2019, the Moscow museum managing the complex in Miednoje announced searches for the remains of Soviet citizens, including wounded Red Army soldiers from nearby hospitals. Alexander Gurianov from Memorial saw this as pressure from deniers: "They want to prove that all these graves are graves of Red Army soldiers." In the fall of 2019, the prosecutor's office in Tver found that the inscriptions on two plaques on the building of the former NKVD (now a medical university) "are not based on documented facts." The plaques, placed there in 1991-1992, were removed in May 2020. In 2021, the Russian Ministry of Culture downgraded the status of the Katyn complex from federal to regional.

After the invasion of Ukraine, the situation worsened further. On April 10, 2022, equipment with Russian flags and the symbol "Z" was parked in front of the Katyn cemetery. On June 24, 2022, it was noted that the Polish flag had disappeared from the Katyn complex. The mayor of Smolensk, Andrei Borisov, wrote: "There can be no Polish flags on Russian memorials" and attributed the decision to the Russian Ministry of Culture. Poland also protested against the removal of flags in Miednoje. On June 28, 2022, a court in Kaliningrad banned the dissemination of the book "Katyn. Traces of the Crime." In May 2025, the Virtuti Militari Cross and the September Campaign Cross were removed from the monument at the Miednoje cemetery by order of the prosecutor's office, which deemed them inconsistent with the law on commemorating the Great Patriotic War. Minister Radosław Sikorski stated: "We will defend these crosses." Then it was Katyn's turn: by order of the Smolensk regional prosecutor's office, bas-reliefs with the Virtuti Militari and the September Campaign Cross were dismantled, which were condemned by Polish authorities in November 2025. Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz called it a "shameful act." On April 10, 2026, three days before the Polish Day of Remembrance, the Russian Military Historical Society led by Vladimir Medinsky opened an exhibition titled "Ten Centuries of Polish Russophobia" in front of the entrance to the Polish Military Cemetery in Katyn.

The liquidation of Memorial became a symbol of this retreat. On December 28, 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered the dissolution of the International Memorial Association, which had been instrumental in documenting the crimes of Stalinism. Its researchers had established the names of the victims for years. In 2019, Memorial published a three-volume book with 6,287 names of Ostashkov prisoners. In 2012, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs honored Memorial with the "Pro Dignitate Humana" award for revealing the truth about the Katyn crime.

Memory

After 1989, the memory of Katyn emerged from underground. The Sejm, by resolution on November 14, 2007, established April 13 as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Katyn Crime, "in tribute to the Victims of the Katyn Crime and to honor the memory of all those murdered by the NKVD by the decision of the supreme authorities of the Soviet Union on March 5, 1940." On July 24, 2024, the Sejm declared 2025 the Year of Polish Heroes from Katyn, Kharkiv, Miednoje, Bykownia, and other places of slaughter.

Katyn Museum

The museum was opened on June 29, 1993, thanks to the efforts of the Katyn Families and at the initiative of the Polish Army Museum. Until 2009, it was located in Fort IX "Czerniaków." On September 17, 2015, on the anniversary of the Soviet aggression, a new headquarters was opened in the Warsaw Citadel at 4 Jana Jeziorańskiego Street. The most moving items are personal belongings recovered during exhumations in Katyn, Miednoje, Kharkiv, and Bykownia, as well as mementos donated by families. In 2015, a bullet-riddled Katyn Bell, illuminated by a beam of light from a symbolic grave, was hung at the museum, and in 2019, an installation by Kalina titled "Sarcophagi" – three stone railway cars – was placed in front of the entrance.

Monuments Worldwide and in America

Katyn monuments and plaques can be found in Cannock Chase (1979), Toronto, Johannesburg, Adelaide, and Vienna. In the United States, the most famous are two monuments by Polish-American sculptor Andrzej Pityński. The Katyn Monument in Jersey City was unveiled in June 1991 at Exchange Place, on the banks of the Hudson River, opposite Manhattan. It is about 10 meters tall and depicts a bound, gagged Polish soldier pierced by a bayonet. On the pedestal, there is a woman with a child, a reminder of the deportations to Siberia, and soil from Katyn is enclosed in the granite base.

In April 2018, it was revealed that due to plans to redevelop Exchange Place into a park, the monument was to be removed. Mike DeMarco, head of the local business organization, called the sculpture "politically incorrect." The Polish community protested, as did Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg. A compromise was announced: the monument was to be moved about 60 meters (200 feet) but remain on the waterfront. On May 16, 2018, President Andrzej Duda visited the monument and discussed its relocation with Mayor Steven Fulop. On December 20, 2018, the nine-member City Council of Jersey City unanimously passed a resolution stating that the monument remains at Exchange Place "forever."

In Baltimore, in the Inner Harbor East neighborhood, at Aliceanna Street, stands the National Katyn Memorial, also a work of Pityński, unveiled in 2000. The sculpture itself is about 13.4 meters tall, and with the base, about 17 meters high. It is the tallest statue in Baltimore and was created thanks to the efforts of the local Polish community. Katyn commemorations also exist in Orchard Lake, Michigan (the monument by Marian Owczarski from 1985), Detroit, Niles in Illinois, and Doylestown in Pennsylvania.

"Katyn" by Andrzej Wajda

For many people around the world, the first encounter with this history was the film by Andrzej Wajda. The director's father, Captain Jakub Wajda from the 72nd Infantry Regiment, ended up in Starobielsk after September 1939 and was murdered in Kharkiv in the spring of 1940. He lies in a mass grave in Piatichatki, and his symbolic grave is in the Salwator Cemetery in Kraków.

The film, based on the novel by Andrzej Mularczyk "Post mortem. A Katyn Tale," with music by Krzysztof Penderecki and cinematography by Paweł Edelman, had its solemn premiere on September 17, 2007, in Warsaw. In Poland, it was viewed by about 2.8 million viewers and was nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. Wajda was inspired, among others, by the diary of Major Adam Solski, and excerpts from the notes were quoted in the script. In Russia, the film was shown before the 70th anniversary of the crime on the Rossiya K channel, and the day after the Smolensk disaster, on April 11, 2010, it was broadcast by Rossiya 1, right after the main news edition of "Vesti."

Katyn Families

The memory was preserved primarily by families. On December 3, 1992, at the initiative of Bożena Łojek, the Federation of Katyn Families was established, uniting associations from all over Poland. The long-time chaplain of the Families was Father Zdzisław Peszkowski, himself a former prisoner of Kozelsk, one of the few survivors. Its president, Andrzej Sariusz-Skąpski, died on April 10, 2010, in the Tu-154 plane crash near Smolensk, on his way to the 70th anniversary of the crime. Several other people associated with the Federation also perished with him. Since 2010, the Federation has been led by Izabella Sariusz-Skąpska.

Since 2008, there has been a campaign to plant Memory Oaks, commemorating the 21,857 murdered. Every year in April, the Katyn Shadow March, organized among others by the IPN, takes place through the streets of Warsaw. And on April 13, the anniversary of the German announcement that began the fight for the truth, ceremonies are held at Katyn monuments in Poland and around the world.

April 10, 2010

The seventieth anniversary of the Katyn massacre was to be commemorated exceptionally solemnly in Poland and Russia. Ultimately, two separate visits took place. On April 7, 2010, in the Katyn Forest, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met. According to documents later described by OKO.press, the invitation was made during a phone conversation between Putin and Tusk on February 3, 2010, and the next day, the head of the Prime Minister's Office, Tomasz Arabski, and Russian diplomat Yuri Ushakov agreed on the date of April 7. The President's Office was separately preparing for Lech Kaczyński's trip to the main ceremonies on April 10. The manner in which the two visits were separated later became the subject of sharp political dispute, with different parties describing it differently to this day.

Who flew to Smolensk

On Saturday, April 10, 2010, a government Tu-154M Lux with tail number 101 took off from Warsaw, built in the spring of 1990 at the factories in Kuibyshev (now Samara) and used by the 36th Special Transport Aviation Regiment. There were 96 people on board. Sources differ in how they divide them into passengers and crew: some report 88 passengers and 8 crew members, counting a person from the Government Protection Bureau working in the cabin as part of the crew, while others mention 89 passengers and 7 crew members from the 36th regiment. The aircraft was piloted by Capt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk and Maj. Robert Grzywna, with Lt. Artur Ziętek as navigator and Cpl. Andrzej Michalak as mechanic. Three stewardesses were also on board.

The delegation was led by President Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria. Accompanying them was 90-year-old Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last president of the Republic of Poland in exile. The list of victims includes Deputy Marshals of the Sejm Krzysztof Putra and Jerzy Szmajdziński, Senate Deputy Marshal Krystyna Bochenek, and several other deputies and senators. The entire top military command was killed: Chief of the General Staff Gen. Franciszek Gągor, Commander of the Air Force Gen. Andrzej Błasik, Commander of the Land Forces Gen. Tadeusz Buk, Commander of the Navy Vice Adm. Andrzej Karweta, Operational Commander Gen. Bronisław Kwiatkowski, Commander of Special Forces Gen. Włodzimierz Potasiński, and the Commander of the Warsaw Garrison Gen. Kazimierz Gilarski.

Heads of state institutions also perished: IPN President Janusz Kurtyka, NBP President Sławomir Skrzypek, Ombudsman Janusz Kochanowski, Head of the Office for Veterans Affairs Janusz Krupski, and President of the Polish Olympic Committee Piotr Nurowski. On board was Secretary of the Council for the Protection of Memory of Struggles and Martyrdom Andrzej Przewoźnik, who had been organizing Polish cemeteries in Katyn, Kharkiv, and Mednoje for years. The 80-year-old Anna Walentynowicz, co-founder of "Solidarity," was also on board. There were several clergymen, including Field Bishop Tadeusz Płoski, Orthodox Military Ordinary Archbishop Miron Chodakowski, and Evangelical chaplain Rev. Adam Pilch. Finally, representatives of the Katyn Families flew, led by the president of the Federation of Katyn Families Andrzej Sariusz-Skąpski, as well as heads of the Polish Katyn Foundation and the Katyn Committee. The oldest victim was Ryszard Kaczorowski, and the youngest was 22-year-old stewardess Natalia Januszko.

Fog over Siewierny

Smolensk-Siewierny Airport was a military airport. It did not have an ILS system that guides the aircraft to land "on a string," only two NDB beacons. Some of the approach lights were not functioning. That morning, dense fog hung over the airport. At the time of the disaster, visibility was later recorded at 300–500 meters, with cloud base at 40–50 meters, while the minima for this approach were 100 meters for cloud base and 1000 meters for visibility. The airport was not closed.

About an hour and a half earlier, at 9:15 Smolensk time, a Jak-40 with journalists landed there. Its crew assessed visibility at about 200 meters. A Russian Il-76 attempted to land twice and then diverted to an alternate airport near Moscow.

The Tu-154M crashed at 8:41 Polish time (10:41 Moscow time), several hundred meters before the runway threshold. According to findings from both official commissions, the Russian and Polish ones, the aircraft descended too low, clipped trees, and after hitting a birch tree, lost part of its left wing, spun around, and hit the ground inverted. No one survived. Other groups, primarily the later subcommittee led by Antoni Macierewicz, presented a different version of the events in the final seconds of the flight (as discussed below).

The First Hours and Days

The duties of the president were taken over by the Marshal of the Sejm, Bronisław Komorowski. He declared a national mourning from the evening of April 10, which was later extended to April 18. In the evening, Prime Ministers Donald Tusk and Vladimir Putin were in Smolensk, followed by a second Polish delegation with Jarosław Kaczyński, who identified his brother's body. The coffin with the president's body returned to Warsaw on Sunday, April 11. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev declared April 12 a day of mourning in Russia. The funeral of the presidential couple took place on April 18, 2010, in Kraków, and their coffins were laid to rest in the crypt at Wawel.

Identification of Victims and Exhumations

Autopsies of the victims were conducted in Moscow. After being brought to Poland, the coffins were not opened, and no further autopsies were performed. The National Prosecutor's Office later investigated who was responsible for this. As early as 2011–2012, exhumations ordered by the military prosecutor revealed that six victims, including Ryszard Kaczorowski and Anna Walentynowicz, were buried in the wrong graves under other names. The body of President Kaczorowski was identified in April 2010 by then Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Jacek Najder. The president in exile was reburied on November 3, 2012, in the Pantheon of Great Poles at the Temple of Divine Providence.

In 2016, the National Prosecutor's Office deemed it necessary to exhume 83 victims. The process began in November 2016 with Lech and Maria Kaczyński. The decision met with opposition from some families. In April 2018, spokesperson for the National Prosecutor's Office Ewa Bialik reported that after 77 exhumations, 69 human remains belonging to 26 individuals were found in the coffins of other victims, two more body swaps were identified, and surgical gloves and other items were left in the bodies. According to the prosecutor's office, the Russian documentation contained gross errors regarding 90 percent of the victims, and over one-third of the autopsies in Moscow were not conducted at all. In total, including six mistakes detected in 2011–2012, eight body swaps were revealed.

Investigations and Their Findings

The disaster was investigated by several institutions, which reached different, partially conflicting conclusions. Below we present what each of them determined, without resolving disputes that cannot be settled without full access to evidence.

MAK Report (January 2011)

Based on Annex 13 to the Chicago Convention, the technical investigation was conducted by the Russian Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) led by Tatiana Anodina. The final report was published on January 12, 2011. As direct causes, MAK indicated: failure to decide to divert to an alternate airport despite bad weather, descending below 100 meters without visual contact with the ground, and lack of response to warnings from the TAWS system. It added that the presence of the Commander of the Air Force in the cockpit exerted psychological pressure on the captain. MAK also reported that alcohol was detected in Gen. Błasik's blood. The head of the Polish commission, Jerzy Miller, responded that the general was a passenger, not a crew member, and such data should not have been included in the report. In January 2013, Polish prosecutors, citing expert opinions, challenged the previously accepted findings regarding the presence of the general in the cockpit in the final phase of the flight. Among the causes of the disaster, MAK did not mention controller errors.

Miller Commission (July 2011)

The Polish Commission for Investigation of Aviation Accidents, led by Interior Minister Jerzy Miller, presented its report on July 29, 2011. It identified the cause as descending below the minimum descent height with excessive rate of descent, in conditions preventing visual contact with the ground, and a delayed decision to go around. The result was a collision with terrain obstacles, detachment of part of the left wing, loss of control, and impact with the ground. The commission pointed to deficiencies in training and organization within the 36th regiment. Unlike MAK, it also blamed the Russian side: according to the report, the controller informed the crew that the aircraft was "on course and on path," although it was deviating from them, and issued the command "Horizon" too late. The commission did not find direct pressure on the crew but mentioned indirect pressure related to the significance of the flight. It also found no technical faults. Following the report, Defense Minister Bogdan Klich resigned, and the 36th regiment was disbanded.

Prosecutor's Office

The investigation was initiated on the day of the disaster by the Military District Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw. On June 27, 2013, the military prosecutor announced that experts from the Central Forensic Laboratory of the Police found no traces of explosive materials on the examined samples. This was partly a result of a dispute triggered by an article in "Rzeczpospolita" on October 30, 2012, about traces of TNT on the wreckage, which the prosecutor's office denied. After the disbandment of the military prosecutor's office, the case was taken over on March 21, 2016, by Investigative Team No. 1 of the National Prosecutor's Office. As of April 2025, the case files number nearly 2000 volumes, over a thousand witnesses have been interviewed, and the prosecutor's office has been simultaneously checking several hypotheses: controller errors, crew errors, aircraft malfunction, and various forms of sabotage. In April 2024, spokesperson for the National Prosecutor's Office Przemysław Nowak stated that "the opinions obtained so far do not substantiate the criminal version related to any form of sabotage."

In 2019, the prosecutor's office established an international team of experts (according to PAP and TVN24 from the USA, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Hungary). Its extensive opinion reached investigators in September 2024 and was subsequently translated. On December 15, 2025, the then-head of the team, Krzysztof Schwartz, decided to request a supplementary opinion from the experts, which, according to the prosecutor's office, was to clarify "ambiguities and contradictions." Shortly thereafter, he was dismissed from his position, and prosecutor Jerzy Gajewski took over the leadership of the team. According to PAP from August 2026, the supplementary opinion was received and translated, and the investigation was extended until December 31, 2026. The prosecutor's office has not officially announced the experts' conclusions. In July 2026, "Gazeta Wyborcza," which obtained the opinion, reported that the experts found no basis to confirm the hypothesis of an attack, and assessed the victims' injuries as typical for an aviation disaster, not an explosion. Earlier, Schwartz had stated about the prosecutor's experts' opinion, prepared after the re-autopsies, that "it does not allow for the conclusion that explosive material was involved."

Charges Against Controllers and Russian Experts

In March 2015, the prosecutor's office charged two Russian controllers from Smolensk, Pawel Plusnin and Viktor Ryzhentsev, with involuntary manslaughter. In April 2017, the charges were changed to intentional manslaughter, and for the first time, a third Russian officer, Nikolai Krasnokutski, was also charged, who, according to the prosecutor's office, issued commands to the flight manager. The prosecutor's office claims that the controllers did not abort the approach, even though the aircraft's marker disappeared from their monitors and they did not know its position, accepting the possibility of a disaster. The charges could not be delivered because Russia did not respond to requests for legal assistance and ultimately refused, citing threats to its interests.

In 2020, the prosecutor's office requested the arrest of three controllers, as without it, an arrest warrant could not be issued. The district court in 2021 initially denied the arrest of Plusnin, and the prosecutor's office appealed. In subsequent years, courts issued orders for temporary arrest, and according to the National Prosecutor's Office (as of 2025), the suspects are wanted by arrest warrants. Russia refused to interrogate them. Separately, the prosecutor's office charged 41 Russian forensic experts with falsifying documents in connection with 61 autopsies of 60 victims. The charges were not delivered because Russia refused. One of the experts could not be identified. According to PAP from August 2026, courts applied arrest warrants against 14 of the remaining 40, who are wanted by arrest warrants, while 26 were denied arrest (some of these decisions were appealed).

In Poland, a former deputy head of the Government Protection Bureau was legally convicted in connection with the protection of visits to Katyn (one and a half years in prison suspended, appellate court ruling from 2017). The trial of former Prime Minister's Office head Tomasz Arabski regarding the organization of flights ended in December 2024 with an acquittal in a retrial. In 2026, the prosecutor's office also discontinued, in two stages (March and August), the investigation into the so-called diplomatic treason, initiated in 2016 based on notifications from, among others, Antoni Macierewicz. It concluded that the legal basis for cooperation with Russia chosen in 2010 was the most advantageous for Poland from the available options.

Macierewicz's Subcommittee (2016–2023)

On February 4, 2016, Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz established the Subcommittee for the Re-examination of the Aviation Accident. It was initially led by Wacław Berczyński, later by Macierewicz himself. On April 11, 2018, the subcommittee presented a technical report indicating explosions on board, and on August 10, 2021, it adopted a resolution declaring Miller's report invalid. In the final report, announced in April 2022, it stated that two explosions occurred in the final phase of the flight, the pilots did not make mistakes, and Russian controllers misled them.

The subcommittee's conclusions have not been confirmed by any other institution investigating the disaster. Four of its members were removed, and they rejected the report. Critics pointed out that some of the theses were based on an unreviewed publication by Wiesław Binienda. In September 2022, TVN24 and "Gazeta Wyborcza" reported that the subcommittee presented results from the American institute NIAR contrary to their content.

On December 15, 2023, the new Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz dissolved the subcommittee. In January 2024, the Ministry of National Defense established a team led by Col. Pilot Leszek Błach, which presented a 799-page report on October 24, 2024. The team negatively assessed the work of the subcommittee in all examined areas (legality, economy, purposefulness, reliability). Deputy Minister Cezary Tomczyk called the subcommittee's "nullification" of Miller's report "absolutely unlawful," as only the main commission had such authority. According to the Ministry of National Defense, the subcommittee cost the State Treasury about 81.5 million PLN, of which about 47 million PLN was the value of the twin Tu-154M No. 102, irreversibly damaged according to the Ministry during the subcommittee's work. The ministry filed 41 notifications to the prosecutor's office, of which 24 concern Macierewicz and 10 former minister Mariusz Błaszczak. Macierewicz rejects these findings. On August 5, 2025, the Sejm lifted his immunity (240 votes in favor, 190 against, 9 abstentions), and the prosecutor's office charged him with disclosing classified information between 2018 and 2022. He did not plead guilty.

The Wreck and Black Boxes

According to the latest available information, the remains of the aircraft are still located at Smolensk-Siewierny Airport. Russian authorities have been repeating the same for years: the wreck is evidence in the Russian investigation conducted by the Investigative Committee and will be returned only after its conclusion. In 2018, Russian investigator Svetlana Petrenko stated that the case files number 700 volumes and cannot be closed as long as Poland continues to submit further requests for legal assistance.

How the Remains Were Stored

In 2013, RMF FM published photos from October 2010, showing fragments of the aircraft, mixed with soil, lying pushed into concrete hangars. According to the prosecutor's office, at least part of the remains were stored this way until the autumn of 2012, and the Polish request to secure all parts, submitted in April 2010, was not executed for over two years. Among the remains, personal belongings of the victims were found, which were brought to Poland in December 2012. Polish prosecutors and experts inspected the wreck on-site several times, including in 2011 and 2012. In September 2018, five prosecutors and forensic technicians worked on it for a week, for the first time in four years. The Russians then reported that the aircraft had broken into about 17,000 fragments. All activities were carried out by Russian specialists, with Poles accompanying them.

Efforts for Return

According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' response provided in 2019, from April 11, 2010, to May 2019, Poland sent 12 diplomatic notes to Russia regarding the wreck. According to a later response from the Ministry, additional notes were sent, including in December 2019 and April 2020. In March 2015, the European Parliament, in a resolution regarding the murder of Boris Nemtsov, called on Russia to promptly return the wreck and black boxes to Poland. In October 2018, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted Resolution 2246 (with Dutch rapporteur Pieter Omtzigt), which recognized the continued refusal to return the wreck as an abuse of rights and called on Russia to return it "without further delay." Both resolutions are not legally binding. In April 2023, Poland's ambassador to the UN, Krzysztof Szczerski, called on Russia to return the wreck at the Security Council forum.

The last known request from the prosecutor's office for the return was sent in October 2024 and reached the Russian side in January 2025. According to the National Prosecutor's Office, Russia has not fully complied with requests for legal assistance submitted since 2018, and some of them were rejected without justification. Prosecutor Krzysztof Schwartz stated that since 2015, Russia has not cooperated with Polish investigators despite nearly 40 requests. "We have photos, but photos are not the wreck," he said in April 2025. We have not been able to find credible information about any change in Russia's position in 2025–2026.

Flight Recorders

The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder were found undamaged on the day of the disaster, and an additional quick access recorder (ATM-QAR) was found on April 12. The originals remained in Russia. On May 31, 2010, Interior Minister Jerzy Miller signed a memorandum under which Poland received copies of them. On June 1, 2010, the Ministry of Interior and Administration published the transcript of the cockpit conversations, and in January 2012, a new reading was prepared by experts from Kraków. The matter of the memorandum was part of the investigation into the so-called diplomatic treason. The memorandum stipulated that the originals could be transferred after the conclusion of the Russian investigation. The prosecutor's office concluded in 2026 that signing it did not harm Poland, as the Polish side had exhausted negotiation possibilities, and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov excluded further talks.

Interesting Facts

• In Jersey City, on the Exchange Place waterfront opposite Manhattan, there stands a ten-meter monument to Katyn by Andrzej Pityński, unveiled in June 1991. In 2018, city officials announced its removal from the waterfront, but after protests from the Polish community, the city council unanimously decided on December 20, 2018, that it would remain in place permanently.
• When the Katyn monument was unveiled on September 18, 1976, at Gunnersbury Cemetery in London, the British government did not send a representative, and no uniformed soldiers participated in the ceremony. Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland explained in Parliament that successive governments did not consider the evidence of guilt to be sufficiently certain, and the inscription on the monument prejudges that assessment.
• Historian Norman Davies believes that the Soviet authorities deliberately highlighted the monument in the Belarusian village of Chatyn, which was burned on March 22, 1943, by the collaborationist Schutzmannschaft 118 police battalion and the SS Dirlewanger unit, to confuse foreign guests into thinking it was Katyn. This is his interpretation, not a documented decision by the authorities.
• On July 31, 1981, activists from the Katyn Committee brought a ready monument with a cross and the inscription "Katyń 1940" to Powązki Cemetery using a truck from the municipal cleaning company, as garbage trucks entered the cemetery unchecked. After a protest from the Soviet embassy, the monument was stolen overnight from July 31 to August 1 by "unknown perpetrators" using heavy equipment.
• According to Russian sources cited by PAP in 2010, in the Katyn Forest, alongside Poles, lie thousands of Soviet citizens executed by the NKVD during the Great Terror of 1937–1938. The reported numbers vary: 7,088 executed in 1937–1938 or about 10,000 buried.
• Between April 10 and 12, 2010, Russian soldiers from the Smolensk garrison made 11 withdrawals from the payment cards of Andrzej Przewoźnik, totaling around 6,000 zlotys. Four Russian soldiers from the unit guarding the crash site were charged.
• Just before the first anniversary of the disaster, in April 2011, the Russians removed a Polish plaque from the stone at the crash site that referred to the "Soviet crime of genocide" in Katyn. They replaced it with a bilingual plaque that made no mention of Katyn. According to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Russians argued that the Polish plaque had not been agreed upon with anyone, and the spokesperson for the Smolensk Oblast governor stated that the replacement was a decision of the oblast authorities. On May 13, 2011, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs handed over the original to the Katyn Families Association 2010.
• U.S. President Barack Obama did not attend the funeral of Lech and Maria Kaczyński. He canceled the flight on April 17, 2010, just hours before departure, due to volcanic ash from Iceland hovering over Europe. The United States was represented by Ambassador Lee Feinstein.
• The twin government Tu-154M with the number 102 was used for experiments by both commissions: in 2011 by the Miller commission and later by the Macierewicz subcommittee. The Ministry of National Defense assessed in 2024 that during the work of the subcommittee, the aircraft was irreparably damaged. Representatives of the former subcommittee deny this.
• In February 2025, part of the investigation was discontinued due to the statute of limitations. It concerned the desecration in Moscow in April 2010 of the remains of 17 victims of the disaster.
• The Smolensk investigation is one of the longest in the history of the Polish prosecutor's office: it has been ongoing since April 10, 2010, which is over sixteen years. According to PAP from August 2026, it has been extended to December 31, 2026.