Pyatychatky (Kharkiv)
Pjatychatky ( Ukrainian П'ятихатки ; Russian Пятихатки Pjatichatki - formerly Пятихатка Pjatichatka ) is a settlement within the city of Kiev in the north of the city of Kharkiv in Ukraine .
history
In 1940, 3,739 to 3,896 Polish officers who were murdered in an NKVD prison in Kharkiv were buried in a wooded area near the settlement .
Discovery and concealment of the mass graves
After children from the nearby village of Pjatychatky found a gold ring, gold crowns and a Polish army button while playing in the forest in 1969, the KGB of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic conducted an investigation, the result of which was a report to the headquarters in Moscow : “It was established that the NKVD buried a considerable number, several thousand, of officers and generals from bourgeois Poland shot there in 1940” and recommended a disinformation campaign among the villagers.
In response to this report, the then KGB chief and later head of state of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov , arranged for the area to be fenced off and guarded. In addition, the human remains were to be sprinkled with slaked lime within four years and then buried deep.
This was made public in 2009 by the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza after the publication of documents by the Ukrainian secret service SBU .
memorial
A memorial today commemorates the victims of the Great Terror and the mass murder of Polish citizens in 1940 .
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Soviet leadership knew of secret service massacres. Vorarlberg online ( last accessed online on September 2, 2013)
Coordinates: 50 ° 5 ' N , 36 ° 15' E