Author: Thomas Urban
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526775387
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
In the spring of 1940, Stalin‘s NKVD executed 22,000 Polish officers, ensigns and state officials near the Russian village of Katyn and other places. When Wehrmacht soldiers discovered some of the graves three years later, the Soviets succeeded in convincing US President Roosevelt of the German perpetration. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no clear picture of the crime, and therefore made no public comments. Using thousands of recently released US documents, this book refutes the popular thesis that the Western Allies deliberately lied about the Katyn case in order not to endanger the alliance with Stalin. As well as consulting Polish and Russian documentation on this war crime, for the first time, the diaries of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who wrote a great deal about Katyn, have been examined. Completely new for research is the role that Hitler's opponents in the Wehrmacht played in solving the crime: at the Nuremberg trial they convinced the US delegation that the executors were not from the SS, but from the NKVD. Nevertheless, it took until 1990 for Kremlin chief Gorbachev to admit Soviet responsibility. Today in Putin's Russia, however, there is a tendency once more to keep quiet about the crime or even to blame the Germans.
Author: George Sanford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134303009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Examining the Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn and other camps in 1940 – one of the most notorious incidents of the Second World War – this book sheds new light on what took place and how the memory of the massacres long affected, and continues to affect, Polish-Russian relations.
Author: Wojciech Materski
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300151853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 616
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Book Description
In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Union carried out the mass executions of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war - army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians - taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. This work details the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up of the crime, and the subsequent revelations.
Author: Alexander Etkind
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566296X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe. This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn. Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.
Author: Jane Rogoyska
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1786078937
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519
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Book Description
WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE ‘A gripping reconstruction… utterly compelling reading.’ Adam Zamoyski ‘This is a grim story, thoroughly researched and brilliantly told.’ Geoffrey Alderman, Times Higher Education The Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war is a crime to which there are no witnesses. Committed in utmost secrecy in April–May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary. Surviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake – the few survivors of the massacre and the Polish wartime forensic investigators – whose quest for the truth in the face of an inscrutable, unknowable, and utterly ruthless enemy came at great personal cost.
Author: Adam Daniel Rotfeld
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822980959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 707
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Book Description
Poland and Russia have a long relationship that encompasses centuries of mutual antagonism, war, and conquest. The twentieth century has been particularly intense, including world wars, revolution, massacres, national independence, and decades of communist rule—for both countries. Since the collapse of communism, historians in both countries have struggled to come to grips with this difficult legacy. This pioneering study, prepared by the semi-official Polish-Russian Group on Difficult Matters, is a comprehensive effort to document and fully disclose the major conflicts and interrelations between the two nations from 1918 to 2008, events that have often been avoided or presented with a strong political bias. This is the English translation of this major study, which has received acclaim for its Polish and Russian editions. The chapters offer parallel histories by prominent Polish and Russian scholars who recount each country's version of the event in question. Among the topics discussed are the 1920 Polish-Russian war, the origins of World War II and the notorious Hitler-Stalin pact, the infamously shrouded Katyn massacre, the communization of Poland, Cold War relations, the Solidarity movement and martial law, and the renewed relations of contemporary Poland and Russia.
Author: J. K. Zawodny
Publisher: Literary Licensing, LLC
ISBN: 9781258130572
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Author: Allen Paul
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
ISBN: 1501757202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
Twenty years ago, Allen Paul wrote the first post-communist account of one of the greatest but least-known tragedies of the twentieth century: Stalin's annihilation of Poland's officer corps and massive deportation of so-called "bourgeoisie elements" to Siberia. Today, these brutal events are symbolized by one word: Katyn, a crime that still bitterly divides Poles and Russians. Paul's richly updated account covers Russian attempts to recant their admission of guilt for the murders in Katyn Forest and includes recently translated documents from Russian military archives, eyewitness accounts of two perpetrators, and secret official minutes published here for the first time that confirm that U.S. government cover-up of the crime continued long after the war ended. Paul's masterful narrative recreates what daily life was like for three Polish families amid momentous events of World War II—from the treacherous Nazi-Soviet invasion in 1939 to a rigged election in 1947 that sealed Poland's doom. The patriarch of each family was among the Polish officers personally ordered by Stalin to be shot. One of the families suffered daily repression under the German General Government. Like thousands of other Poles, two of the families were deported to Siberia, where they nearly died from forced labor, starvation, and neglect. Through painstaking research, the author reconstructs the lives of these families including such stories as a miraculous escape on the last transport of Poles leaving Russia and a mother's daring ski trek over the Carpathian Mountains to rescue a daughter she had not seen in six years. At the heart of the drama is the Poles' uncommon belief in "victory in defeat"—that their struggles made them strong and that freedom and independence, inevitably, would be regained.
Author: Douglas W. Jacobson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1590135970
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
The German war machine is in retreat as the Russians advance. In Warsaw, Resistance fighters rise up against their Nazi occupiers, but the Germans retaliate, ruthlessly leveling the once-beautiful city. American Adam Nowak has been dropped into Poland by British intelligence as an assassin and Resistance fighter. During the Warsaw Uprising he meets Natalia, a covert operative who has lost everything—just as he has. Amid the Allied power struggle left by Germany's defeat, Adam and Natalia join in a desperate hunt for the 1940 Soviet order authorizing the murders of 20,000 Polish army officers and civilians. If they can find the Katyn Order before the Russians do, they just might change the fate of Poland.
Author: Jozef Czapski
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
A classic work of reportage about the Katyń Massacre during World War II by a soldier who narrowly escaped the atrocity himself. In 1941, when Germany turned against the USSR, tens of thousands of Poles—men, women, and children who were starving, sickly, and impoverished—were released from Soviet prison camps and allowed to join the Polish Army being formed in the south of Russia. One of the survivors who made the difficult winter journey was the painter and reserve officer Józef Czapski. General Anders, the army’s commander in chief, assigned Czapski the task of receiving the Poles arriving for military training; gathering accounts of what their fates had been; organizing education, culture, and news for the soldiers; and, most important, investigating the disappearance of thousands of missing Polish officers. Blocked at every level by the Soviet authorities, Czapski was unaware that in April 1940 many officers had been shot dead in Katyn forest, a crime for which Soviet Russia never accepted responsibility. Czapski’s account of the years following his release from the camp and the formation of the Polish Army, and its arduous trek through Central Asia and the Middle East to fight on the Italian front offers a stark depiction of Stalin’s Russia at war and of the suffering, stoicism, and bravery of his fellow Poles. A work of clear observation and deep compassion, Inhuman Land is one of the twentieth century’s indispensable acts of literary witness.
