Katyn massacre uncovered

13th April 1943: The Nazis publicise a Soviet atrocity committed early in the war - leading to decades of controversy

A Nazi photograph of the hands of a Polish officer, illustrating how thousands had met their end.

On the 13th April 1943 Berlin Radio announced that:

A report has reached us from Smolensk to the effect that the local inhabitants have mentioned to the German authorities the existence of a place where mass executions have been carried out by the Bolsheviks and where 10,000 Polish officers have been murdered by the Soviet Secret State Police. The German authorities went to a place called the Hill of Goats, a Russian health resort situated twelve kilometers west of Smolensk, where a gruesome discovery was made.

It was the start of a controversy that would remain unresolved until the end of the Cold War.

Days after Hitler invaded Poland from the West in 1939, the Red Army invaded Poland from the East. Poland soon collapsed and was divided between the two totalitarian regimes. Polish POWs marching to Soviet labour camps in September 1939. The officers were soon separated - and were regarded as a ‘counter- revolutionary threat’ by the Soviets.