Katyn massacre

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The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of Poles carried out by the Soviet Union between April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the NKVD prisons in Kalinin, Kharkiv and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by Nazi German forces in 1943. Nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia were executed by the NKVD (Soviet secret police), on Joseph Stalin's orders. The massacre is qualified as a crime against humanity, a crime against peace, a war crime and (within the Polish Penal Code) a Communist crime. According to a 2009 resolution of the Polish parliament's Sejm, it bears the hallmarks of a genocide. The order to execute captive members of the Polish officer corps was secretly issued by the Soviet Politburo led by Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers...

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