The Katyn Diaries

The Katyn Diaries PDF Author: Marek Sobieralski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Execution sites
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
"Denied by the Soviets, and hushed up by Poland's allies. The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia that was carried out by the Soviet Union's secret police - the NKVD - in April and May 1940. Mass graves were discovered in 1942, and with the bodies there were numerous Polish artefacts such as letters, diaries, photographs and identification tags. There were packed into crates and evacuated westward in 1944. There was a small crate, into which were placed twenty-two diaries and personal notes. Four copies of these items were made soon afterwards in Krakow, and the Polish Home Army then delivered its transcripts to the Polish government in exile, in London. Presented for you here are English translations of twelve of those diaries, which open a window into the individual and personal tragedies of these very different individuals. They give us an insight into their everyday lives in captivity, and the very real and very human emotions and hardships they experienced during what was undoubtedly a difficult and testing time." --Page 4 of cover.

The Katyn Diaries

The Katyn Diaries PDF Author: Marek Sobieralski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Execution sites
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
"Denied by the Soviets, and hushed up by Poland's allies. The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia that was carried out by the Soviet Union's secret police - the NKVD - in April and May 1940. Mass graves were discovered in 1942, and with the bodies there were numerous Polish artefacts such as letters, diaries, photographs and identification tags. There were packed into crates and evacuated westward in 1944. There was a small crate, into which were placed twenty-two diaries and personal notes. Four copies of these items were made soon afterwards in Krakow, and the Polish Home Army then delivered its transcripts to the Polish government in exile, in London. Presented for you here are English translations of twelve of those diaries, which open a window into the individual and personal tragedies of these very different individuals. They give us an insight into their everyday lives in captivity, and the very real and very human emotions and hardships they experienced during what was undoubtedly a difficult and testing time." --Page 4 of cover.

The Katyn Massacre 1940

The Katyn Massacre 1940 PDF 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.

Children of the Katyn Massacre

Children of the Katyn Massacre PDF Author: Teresa Kaczorowska
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786483768
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
World War II was--and remains--one of the bloodiest wars in history. Not only did millions of soldiers die in combat but millions of civilians lost their lives--some for no greater crime than their religious heritage or their nationality. The Soviets, at first allied with the Germans, incarcerated thousands of Polish military officers and reservists in the pre-established Soviet camps of Ostashkov, Starobelsk and Kozelsk. On March 5, 1940, Joseph Stalin and his lieutenants signed an execution order for 25,700 Polish prisoners of war. After months of hardship and interrogation, 14,700 prisoners from these camps were taken to remote areas, murdered with a shot to the back of the head and buried in mass graves. Later, when Germany turned its sights on the Soviet Union, the USSR allied itself with the West. With the discovery of the first of the mass burials by the Germans in the Katyn Forest (the area from which the entire massacre gets its name), the Soviets attempted to place the blame for the atrocities on the Germans in spite of a plethora of evidence to the contrary. Only in 1990, with the fall of communism, did President Mikhail Gorbachev admit Soviet responsibility for the Katyn murders. Compiled from a series of interviews, this emotionally moving account records the stories and fates of 18 men and women, 16 of whom lost their fathers in the Katyn massacre. The author traveled to Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Canada and the United States to talk extensively with the 18, recording their thoughts, feelings, memories and experiences of the hardships during and after the war. Photographs and maps are included.

The Katyn Forest Massacre

The Katyn Forest Massacre PDF Author: United States. Congress. House. Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances on the Katyn Forest Massacre
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Katyn Massacre, Katynʹ, Russia, 1940
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Book Description


Confessions of a Home Army Executioner

Confessions of a Home Army Executioner PDF Author: Roger Moorhouse
Publisher: Greenhill Books
ISBN: 9781805000280
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This book is moral dynamite. It reveals not only what men can do in war but also what war can do to men." - Norman Davies, historian and academic Stefan Dąmbski joined the Polish Home Army in 1942 when he was just 16 years old. The Home Army formed the military wing of the Polish Underground, the resistance movement established to fight the Nazi occupation of Poland during the Second World War. During this occupation, the Home Army passed death sentences on hundreds of individuals - both Nazi enemies and colluding Polish compatriots. As one of the few Home Army members who volunteered to carry out these death sentences, the young Dąmbski quickly became a seasoned executioner. In July 1945, Dąmbski was transferred to the West and ended up in the United States where he remained until his death in 1993. In his final years, Dąmbski recorded his story in fascinating, shocking detail. After his death, his memoirs came into the possession of his niece and nephew before eventually arriving at the KARTA Foundation in 2005. Initially published in the original Polish, Sobieralski's translation of Dąmbski's records now gives English-language readers a hugely important insight into the mind of this seasoned executioner. Readers are made aware of the facts and actions of Dąmbski's life, but are witness to the lifelong moral struggle that accompanied these actions and led him to reflect on ideas of heroism, patriotism, guilt and on the very act of war itself.

Death in the Forest

Death in the Forest PDF Author: Janusz Kazimierz Zawodny
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Katyn Massacre, Katynʹ, Russia, 1940
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This scholarly work by an American professor, if an analysis of the cold blooded murder of more than 15,000 Polish officers, captured when the USSR invaded Poland in 1939. Mass graves of more than 4,000 of them were discovered after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The Soviets still have not admitted this heinous crime which has poisoned the relations between Poland and the Soviet Union.--

Katyn

Katyn PDF 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.

The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre

The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre PDF Author: Grover Furr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692134252
Category : Katyn Massacre, Katynʹ, Russia, 1940
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In April 1943, German authorities claimed that they had found the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish prisoners of war buried near Katyn, in the Western Soviet Union. The Polish exile government in London agreed with the Germans. In January, 1944, Soviet authorities issued a report claiming that the Germans had murdered the Polish POWs. In 1990-92 Soviet, then Russian authorities agreed that the Soviets were indeed the guilty party. But by 2010 serious evidence had been discovered that cast doubt on Soviet guilt. There has never been an objective, thorough study of this mystery - until now. All mainstream accounts blame the USSR - Stalin - for the deaths, while all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Grover Furr has identified, obtained, and studied all the evidence, and has also studied all the supposedly "authoritative" scholarly accounts of Katyn, with skill and - what is most important - with objectivity. In this book he lays out the evidence and solves this mystery for once and for all.

The Katyn Forest Massacre

The Katyn Forest Massacre PDF Author: United States. Congress. House. Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances on the Katyn Forest Massacre
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Katyn Massacre, Katynʹ, Russia, 1940
Languages : en
Pages : 1432

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Book Description


The Maisky Diaries

The Maisky Diaries PDF Author: Ivan Mikhaĭlovich Maĭskiĭ
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300180675
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 633

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Book Description
Highlights of the extraordinary wartime diaries of Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Churchill's rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the intense debate over the opening of the second front. Maisky was distinguished by his great sociability and access to the key players in British public life. Among his range of regular contacts were politicians (including Churchill, Chamberlain, Eden, and Halifax), press barons (Beaverbrook), ambassadors (Joseph Kennedy), intellectuals (Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), writers (George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells), and indeed royalty. His diary further reveals the role personal rivalries within the Kremlin played in the formulation of Soviet policy at the time. Scrupulously edited and checked against a vast range of Russian and Western archival evidence, this extraordinary narrative diary offers a fascinating revision of the events surrounding the Second World War.