Until 1990 the Soviet Union blamed Nazis for the Katyn massacre of 20,000 Poles
Posted on 06/23/2009 10:06:56 AM PDT by bronxville
There's a Polish joke that goes something like this: "A Russian and German turn up in town. Who do you shoot first?" Answer: "The German, because business comes before pleasure."
Between 1939 and 1945 three million Polish Catholics (as well as three million Polish Jews) were murdered by the two most evil regimes to rule mankind. Of those, the Russians murdered a million, the vast majority prisoners or civilians.
This is the story of 20,000 of them: the officers, policemen and intellectuals who were captured by the Soviets in September 1939 and murdered with a bullet to the head at a NKVD camp in Katyn the following April. It is also the story of how their loved ones fought to challenge the official story that the Nazis had carried out the crime.
The Soviets murdered 14 generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, 200 pilots, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, 20 university professors, 300 physicians, several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers, and more than 100 writers and journalists.
The murders were sanctioned by the Soviet politburo and Stalin signed the execution order. We see Stalin's heartless eyes staring down from the wall as the men are dragged down to a basement room where arterial spray covers the wall.
The killings were done methodically, as this film painfully shows. Each man was taken from a jeep, handcuffed and his identification checked. He was then led to a cell and shot in the back of the head. Some Soviet executioners spent hours murdering prisoners one by one. The body was then dragged out of the window and put in piles on waiting trucks, and the next victim was dragged in. It was all very planned and mechanical and, in the Communist way, mind-numbing. Others were brought alive to the mass graves and shot there, their last image being the lifeless corpses of their friends.
The scene is extremely harrowing, but not overplayed or melodramatic. There is no music or sound effect; we simply see tired, scared men, clutching rosaries and praying to God, brutally murdered. The executioners then share cigarettes, before casually bayoneting the survivors while bulldozers cover up the mass grave.
For years Polish patriots maintained that the Soviets had carried out this attack, but the official line in the Eastern Bloc was that the Nazis were responsible. By the late 1980s, however, the lies surrounding the Soviet Union were crumbling along with the regime itself, and in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the NKVD had committed the murders. Russian President Boris Yeltsin passed on the files to the Polish government three years later.
The film begins with a typically Polish dilemma. Civilians are at the end of a bridge trying to escape Nazi occupation; at the other end are civilians escaping the Soviets. The date is September 17, 1939, the day the USSR invaded a Poland already fatally wounded by the German attack. Stalin hated the Poles with murderous passion; he had been in charge of the Soviet invasion of 1922, and the Poles had humiliated the Soviet Union (and him). His revenge was the Nazi-Soviet pact.
contin:
Until 1990 the Soviet Union blamed Nazis for the Katyn massacre of 20,000 Poles
Ping.
So, what’s the name of the film?
Sorry, I see that my post got a little messed up.
Movie name is “Karyn” - be on the lookout and see it if you can. Let’s support truth-telling movies that the lefties hate.
When I saw the thread title I thought it was going to be about the Iranian protesters being caught between the Mullahs and the Obama administration.
"He who fights that Islam should be superior fights in Allah's cause" - Big Mo
I’m hoping this movie is only the beginning of many more, such as, the Ukrainian famine/genocide. It’s time to expose the evil of Communism as they’ve gotten a pass by the lefties for way too long.
Why is this on the RELIGION Forum?
“Between 1939 and 1945 three million Polish Catholics (as well as three million Polish Jews) were murdered by the two most evil regimes to rule mankind. Of those, the Russians murdered a million, the vast majority prisoners or civilians.”
2nd paragraph in the article.
Great - thanks.
- Katyn Memorial - Baltimore. I think there are two in Baltimore. http://culture.polishsite.us/articles/art245fr.htm
I think you mean “Katyn”.
Gen. Stefaniak and Fr. Francis Okroy, Katyn Memorial Chaplain. Fr. Okroy is a Polish WWII veteran and a survivor of the infamous Nazi German Dachau concentration camp.
A clearer picture of the Katyn Memorial in Baltimore
Yes, thanks. :)
My immediate ancestors are from South-Eastern Poland (Lublin), and what is now the Ukraine, in Volhynia.
We lost many people there.
The fact that the Leftists don’t want this film distributed
does not surprise me in the least bit.
They are up to their old, feeble attempts to white-wash their despicable place in history.
They have always been moral cowards, and are not likely to change their yellow stripes anytime soon.
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