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Lies about the Katyn massacre added insult to the horror

Alan Philps reveals how many western journalists, duped by Stalinist propaganda, rushed to blame the Nazis for the Soviet atrocity

17 June 2023

9:00 AM

17 June 2023

9:00 AM

The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Disinformation War Alan Philps

Headline, pp.448, 22

On 5 March 1940, as the USSR stamped its authority on a Poland it had partitioned with Hitler, Stalin signed a decree to murder 14,700 Polish officers in the woods by Katyn. These ‘hardened, irremediable enemies of Soviet power’ were not informed of their sentence and simply shot in the back of the head, a form of execution favoured by the secret police, the NKVD, for whom this method was just part of bureaucratic procedure.

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