A view from the air of the massacre site.
Polish Army uniform buttons dug up near Minsk (Belarus / Byelorussia). Whether these pitiful artefacts relate to the 22,000 Polish prisoners of war, systematically murdered by the Soviet Union NKVD in April and May 1940, is open for debate. The executions, ordered by Stalin and the Soviet Politburo took place at various locations across Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. One of the largest burial sites in the Katyn Forest was uncovered by the German Army in 1943. Covered up at the time by the Allies for political reasons, the Soviet Union continued to keep up the pretence for the next 50 years that the atrocity had been committed by the Nazis and refused to accept any responsibility for the massacres, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It was only at the end of the Cold War, that the Soviet and more latterly Russian Governments finally admitted carrying out the executions. However, the Russian government to this day still refuses to release many of the key files surrounding this dark episode in its history.
A Major of the Polish Army exhumed from the mass graves at Katyn in 1943.
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