Marking the anniversary, the head of Poland’s government-affiliated Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Jarosław Szarek, said that the root cause of that decision of March 5, 1940, was a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
According to historians, that agreement opened the door to those two countries invading Poland in 1939 and paved the way to the horrors of World War II.
Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, thousands of Polish officers were deported to camps in the Soviet Union.
Some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war and intellectuals were killed in the spring of 1940 on orders from top Soviet authorities in what is known as the Katyn Massacre.
Polish Culture and National Heritage Minister Piotr Gliński said on Thursday that the former Soviet Union “lied to the public” for 50 years “about who perpetrated this massacre, confessing to the crime less than two years before its own fall.”
Meanwhile, “the Russian Federation, the legal—and, unfortunately, increasingly ideological—successor of this totalitarian state, has not decided to name or even symbolically punish those responsible for the Katyn Massacre," Gliński said, as quoted by Polish state news agency PAP.
Speaking at the Katyn Pro Memoria conference in Warsaw, Gliński said that Russian military prosecutors in 2004 discontinued an investigation into the Katyn Massacre, citing the death of the perpetrators.
"Their names have never been officially released,” said Gliński, who also serves as a Polish deputy prime minister.
“The Russian authorities believed and still believe that, in their country’s national interests, it is better to keep the names of the perpetrators under wraps," he added.
(gs/pk)
Source: IAR, PAP, ipn.gov.pl