[111] The visit took place on 7 April 2010, when Tusk and Putin together commemorated the 70th anniversary of the massacre. [18] All three burial sites had already been secret cemeteries of the victims of the Great Purge of 1937–1938. In March 1989 this government officially shifted the blame for the Katyn Massacre from the Germans to the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. Some were freed or escaped quickly, but 125,000 were imprisoned in camps run by the NKVD. Although a 1952 U.S. congressional inquiry concluded that the Soviet Union had been responsible for the massacre, Soviet leaders insisted for decades that the Polish officers found at Katyn had been killed by the invading Germans in 1941. Such an investigation would be a fraud and its conclusions reached by terrorism". [45] After extensive preparation, on 13 April, Reichssender Berlin broadcast to the world that German military forces in the Katyn forest near Smolensk had uncovered a ditch that was "28 metres long and 16 metres wide [92 ft by 52 ft], in which the bodies of 3,000 Polish officers were piled up in 12 layers". [48] The Croatian pathologist Eduard Miloslavić managed to escape to the US. But both German and Red Cross investigations of the Katyn corpses then produced firm physical evidence that the massacre took place in early 1940, at a time when the area was still under Soviet control. [16] According to Tadeusz Piotrowski, "during the war and after 1944, 570,387 Polish citizens had been subjected to some form of Soviet political repression". However, the question of responsibility still remained controversial in the West as well as behind the Iron Curtain. [22] In all, the NKVD executed almost half the Polish officer corps. [74] It was not the purpose of the court to determine whether Germany or the Soviet Union was responsible for the crime, but rather to attribute the crime to at least one of the defendants, which the court was unable to do. Thank u 0 0. [55] The journalists were less impressed and not convinced by the staged Soviet demonstration. [22][54] The Burdenko Commission exhumed the bodies, rejected the 1943 German findings the Poles were shot by the Soviet army, assigned the guilt to the Nazis, and concluded all the shootings were done by German occupation forces in late 1941. In 1943, the Germans took two U.S. POWs—Capt. Collectively, these murders are known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. [46] The Germans were so intent on proving the Soviets were behind the massacre they even included some Allied prisoners of war, among them writer Ferdynand Goetel, the Polish Home Army prisoner from Pawiak. [118], In November 2010, the State Duma (lower house of the Russian parliament) passed a resolution declaring long-classified documents "showed that the Katyn crime was carried out on direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet officials". The Russians responded to the German claims that Russia’s secret police did it, by claiming that the massacre was carried out by the Germans themselves. [3] The broadcast went on to charge the Soviets with carrying out the massacre in 1940.[3]. This explanation was accepted without protest by successive Polish communist governments until the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union allowed a noncommunist coalition government to come to power in Poland. [61] Churchill asked Owen O'Malley to investigate the issue, but in a note to the Foreign Secretary he noted: "All this is merely to ascertain the facts, because we should none of us ever speak a word about it. 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