Polish war prisoners on their way to prison camp in 1939. After a few months they were taken to forest of Katõn (400 km from Moscow), where they were executed by shots to back of their head. A total of 20 000 polish war prisoners were executed by soviet soldiers in that forest.
It's more complex than that:
"Many of these victims were called to be soldiers due to the outbreak of war, but before WWII, they were outstanding doctors, lawyers, generals, lecturers and professors, scientists, political leaders, and artists. They were well educated, intelligent, open-minded, prominent, distinguished people, either wealthy before the war or with prospects for great careers. Many had graduated from the best universities in the world, were published in worldwide science journals, worked for foreign universities, medical clinics, or legal practices, and were recipients of foreign scholarships, awards, and prizes."
They also wiped out the intelligentsia, many of the victims served in dual roles of military officer and part of academia. In a way the officer corps of Poland was similar in makeup to our own Union army during the civil war in that you had a lot of the elites (Lawyers, politicians , businessmen , college professors ) all of a sudden enlist. Imagine if our entire class of officers had been wiped out— most of them went back into their field — several went on to become Presidents — those positions would have been filled by less capable individuals and our country would have been affected for several generations
The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (Polish: rzeź wołyńska, lit. 'Volhynian slaughter'; Ukrainian: Волинська трагедія, romanized: Volynska trahediia, lit. 'Volyn tragedy'), were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or the UPA, with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and Lublin region from 1943 to 1945. The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children. Many of the Polish victims regardless of age or gender were tortured before being killed; some of the methods included rape, dismemberment or immolation, among others. The UPA's actions resulted in between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths. Tell me more about never forgotten incentive for Poland to reap revenge through assistance to the nation which praises people who actually are responsible for killing almost 100k Polish civilians, not military forces.
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