Katyn Memorial

Main entrance

Iron plates mark the pits

The Katyn Memorial ( Russian Мемориальный комплекс "Катынь" ) is a memorial in Katyn , Russia . There are approximately 4430 Polish military personnel who at Katyn 3 April to 11 May 1940 by members of the NKVD were killed and about 4,500 Soviet citizens in the 1930s when the Stalinist purges were murdered. The redesigned cemetery was opened on July 28, 2000.

Emergence

Polish forced laborers discovered some bodies in the Katyn forest in 1942 and marked the location with a birch cross. After the discovery and examination of eight mass graves, soldiers of the Wehrmacht allowed a Polish delegation to bury the exhumed corpses after June 7, 1943. Individual graves were also laid for a few murdered Polish generals.

Individual graves of Polish generals in Katyn, June 1943

The Red Army destroyed immediately after the recapture of the area near Katyn in the fall of 1943 that first, provisional cemetery. In 1944, Soviet authorities had a memorial stone erected there, on which, following the wording of a falsified investigation report, it said: Polish officers murdered in 1941 were buried here, who had " brutally tortured the German-fascist occupiers to death". Until 1990, memorial symbols in Katyn served this falsification of history by the Soviet Union , which blamed Nazi Germany for the 1940 massacre . Polish victims' relatives were not allowed to visit Katyn and a public commemoration of the murdered in Poland was prohibited.

Only the successes of the opposition Solidarność in Poland and Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy in the Soviet Union made change possible. On April 26, 1988, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and other members of the Soviet government proposed that the mass graves in Katyn be transformed into a memorial site. A memorial should also commemorate Soviet exhumation workers who were allegedly shot by Germans in 1943. On May 5, 1988, the Politburo decided to give Polish relatives easier access to the Katyn Forest, but left the question of guilt open. In the same year, a Soviet monument was inaugurated in Katyn, the inscription of which again assigned the guilt of the mass murder to the "German fascists" and dated it to 1941.

On March 31, 1989, the Politburo allowed Polish victims' relatives to move soil from Katyn to Warsaw. It is there in the tomb of the unknown soldier . At the end of November 1989, Tadeusz Mazowiecki was the first Polish Prime Minister to visit Katyn on Death Sunday. On February 22nd, 1994 Poland and Russia signed an agreement “On the graves and memorials of the victims of war and political repression”. Afterwards, Polish archaeologists began exhuming again in Katyn in order to determine the size of the graves and the number of victims more precisely, to base a Polish charge on genocide and to prepare the reburial of the dead.

In April 1999, Russia allowed the Polish “ Council for the Preservation of Remembrance of Struggle and Martyrdom ” to redesign the Polish military cemetery in Katyn.

This was given its present form by July 2000. Five religious symbols took into account for the first time that Protestant and Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims were among the victims, who until then had all rested under Roman Catholic crosses. Part of the cemetery is dedicated to Soviet victims of political repression. On June 17, 2000, military cemeteries were also opened for the Polish victims in Kharkov and on September 2 in Mednoje .

Commemoration since the opening

Dmitri Medvedev and Bronislaw Komorowski in Katyn, April 11, 2011

At the opening of the redesigned Katyn Cemetery on July 28, 2000, Poland's Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek said: “The word 'Katyn' will mean genocide and a war crime for generations in Poland and around the world. [...] You will come here to see, remember, forgive. "

On Vladimir Putin's surprising proposal, Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk invited the Prime Minister of Russia to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the massacre together. For the first time, on April 7, 2010, a Russian leader took part in the Polish commemoration of Katyn. Tusk went there with him to the graves of Soviet victims. Putin warned: For decades, people tried to hide the truth about these murders with a "cynical lie". They are in no way justifiable; the condemnation of Stalinism is irreversible. But one should not blame the Russian people for this. According to the historian Cordula Kalmbach, the fact that Putin only generally recalled the 'victims of the Stalinist terror', but not specific Soviet murders of Poles, was "registered bitterly in Poland, as many expect reparations from the neighbor."

Poland's President Lech Kaczyński had criticized the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in the presence of Putin on September 1, 2007 as a "knife stab in the back" and was not invited to the 2010 joint commemoration. On April 10, 2010, he traveled to Katyn for a memorial event organized by the Polish “Council for the Preservation of Remembrance of Struggle and Martyrdom” and died in the plane crash near Smolensk with the other participants who had traveled . As a result, many Russian media reported about Katyn, and state television showed Andrzej Wajda's film The Katyn Massacre : This changed the level of knowledge of many Russians who were previously unaware of the crime or who had believed in the German perpetrators.

Dmitri Medvedev and the new Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski jointly commemorated the Katyn massacre on April 11, 2011, the first anniversary of Kaczynski's death. Medvedev again admitted overall responsibility to the Soviet Union. He proposed an international group to settle a dispute over a Polish plaque that spoke of the genocide in Katyn and had therefore been removed from Russian authorities.