Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

The invasion came after the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which
allowed Germany and the Soviet Union to carve up Poland between
them. But the fate of the officers remained unknown until the bodies were
discovered after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
Even as the Nazis were liquidating Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, Goebbels’s
propaganda machine trumpeted the atrocity as evidence of Bolshevik
brutality. Stalin counterinsisted that the mass murders had been
committed by the Nazis.
Churchill knew the brutal truth, but it made sense to keep quiet. Stalin was
our ally in the epic fight against Nazism, and his nose was not to be put out
of joint. British silence remains one of the worst stains on our country’s
war record.
Even by the grisly standards of the 20th century, the Katyn Massacre was a
crime of appalling enormity: a concerted attempt to wipe out an entire
stratum of a great European nation. Behind the slaughter was a grisly piece
of forward planning.
Stalin’s long-term intention was for Poland to become a friendly
neighbour under the Soviet sphere of influence. The fewer bourgeois
enemies of Communism to oppose him, the better. So he started
liquidating those Polish officers who, in long, punitive interrogations,
could not be coaxed into taking a pro-Soviet stance.
The butchery of the cream of Polish manhood was characterised by a
breathtaking lack of fuss. In the Katyn forest, the soldiers were frogmarched
to deep, open pits. As his blindfold was removed, each officer would have
seen the corpses mounting at his feet, and then heard the trigger.
In other locations - PoWs from camps at Starobilsk, near Kharkov, and
Ostashkov, near Kalinin, the extermination took place indoors.
One by one, the officers were dragged to a prison cell, their hands tied
behind them with wire, and then shot from behind. To drown out the noise,
the cell door was lined with felt, and the drone of loud machines masked the
incessant sound of gunshots-The bodies were unceremoniously lugged out
through another door to a line of waiting trucks.
On that first night of killing, the NKVD butchers managed to dispatch 390
men. In subsequent days they confined the nightly tally to 250.
The grim cargo was then driven to the site of the mass grave in the forest,
and its contents dumped. It was a function of Soviet efficiency that, to
make use of every cubic inch of space, the corpses were neatly stacked.
(When the pits were exhumed, some were found to contain the bones of
murdered Poles up to 12 deep. One pit had 1,200 corpses). Only one
detail was unvarying: there were 22,000 holes in 22,000 Polish skulls.
Yet for some reason, the name of Katyn has never entered the global
consciousness as other atrocities have.
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