Edited.

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A picture taken on April 1, 1943, shows men digging out bodies of Polish officers from a mass grave in Katyn.(AFP/Getty Images)

The German Nazi Blitzkrieg stormed across Poland’s western border on Sept. 1, 1939.

Sixteen days later, before the dust had even settled, 650,000 Soviet soldiers — operating under the Molotov/Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact with Germany — attacked Poland from the east, seizing half of its territory up to the old Curzon Line of World War I.

Poland was partitioned for the forth time between these two aggressive super powers.

Initially, some 500,000 Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian prisoners were taken by the Soviets and on Sept. 19, 1939, Russia established the Prisoners of War Office, run by the feared NKVD (mostly of jewish background … Admin.)

Although 350,000 ill-treated captives were eventually released, more than 40,000 Polish prisoners remained confined in three detention camps.

Nearly 30,000 of them would be executed in a plan conceived to devastate Poland’s military and eliminate most of its leaders.

The Katyn Massacre, as it became infamously known, began in the spring of 1940 with the execution of 8,000 members of the Polish Officer Corps, 6,000 senior police officers and 8,000 members of the Polish intelligentsia.

Land and factory owners, lawyers, public officials and clergy members were among those put to death.

The Katyn murders included 20 university professors, 300 physicians, several hundred lawyers, teachers and other professionals, 100 writers and journalists, and half of the Polish Officer Corps, including 14 generals, 24 colonels and 258 majors.

To put this into perspective, if it happened in Canada today, those killed would almost certainly include the prime minister, many of Canada’s most prominent and respected authors, journalists, academics and lawyers, the chief of defence staff and other senior military officers, the mayor of Toronto and thousands of other individuals of influence across the country.

It would be a deliberate, devastating blow, calculated to gut the country emotionally and plunge society into a deep psychological depression, all within a period of about six months.

Those targeted would simply disappear, without a trace, leaving their families bereft of information regarding their fate or whereabouts.

This is exactly what Soviet Russia accomplished with its persecution of Poland and it served its purposes well when it took control of the country after the Second World War.

Ironically, it was the German Nazis, ignoring their own horrific transgressions, like the 1941 massacre of 33,771 Jews in a ravine at Babi Yar in Ukraine, who first brought the horrors of Katyn to international attention by establishing a commission to investigate the mass graves they had uncovered.

In April 1943, while Germany occupied Smolensk, intelligence officer Rudolf von Gersdorf discovered a deep pit in the nearby Katyn Forest.

He supervised its excavation and determined that some 4,243 Polish prisoners died there, each one shot in the back of the head.

This discovery eventually led to the revelation of the murder of more than 27,000 Polish prisoners, arrested after the Soviet invasion.

Josef Stalin, one of the signatories to the Polit Bureau Katyn execution order, had handpicked Major Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin to carry out the evil deed, who took to his assignment with homicidal passion.

Prisoners were lined up in the Katyn Forest, shot in the back of the head, their bodies stacked layer upon layer in an open pit.

Blokhin personally undertook the extermination of over 7,000 Polish prisoners interred at the Ostashkov prisoner of war camp in the Katyn Forest.

They were transported to Kalinin, some 300 kilometres away, where Blokhin, dressed in a leather butcher’s apron, leather gauntlets and leather hat personally committed 300 murders a night for 28 nights — 10 hours of killing every night — within a padded chamber dubbed the Leninist Room.

He used a German, Walther .25 calibre pistol to cast suspicion upon the Nazis.

He killed one human being every three minutes and had the bodies trucked to a mass burial ground in nearby Mednoye.

Throughout the war years and beyond, it is said that Blokhin killed tens of thousands of innocent people by his own hand.

In 2010, Guinness World Records named this monster history’s most prolific executioner.

Blokhin, by then an insane alcoholic, committed suicide in 1955, but not before Stalin rewarded him with a monthly pension and the Order of the Red Banner for his “skill and organization in the effective carrying out of special tasks.”

In 1991, the USSR finally admitted its guilt in the Katyn Massacre.

But even then it took responsibility for only 14,500 of the deaths and to this day the Communist Party of the Russian Federation maintains a position of innocence.

Despite the horrors of Katyn, Poland seem to be thriving 80 years on.

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Some excerpts from  :  https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/taylor-polands-agony-the-katyn-massacre

— Col. Gilbert Taylor (HCol ret’d) is President of LPF Ontario and Past President of the Royal Canadian Military Institute.

Gilbert Taylor