For several months, the Polish prisoners of war were interrogated by the NKVD about their political beliefs, family backgrounds, and education. Older Officers were asked about their involvement in a previous conflict between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1920. About March 1940, the interrogations were completed and a secret communication was made that all three camps would be liquidated. Documentation shows that Stalin and Beria were responsible for the ordered executions. During the evacuation of the three camps, groups of 200 to 300 prisoners were taken to an unknown destination that turned out to be a site in the Katyn Forest. By May of 1940, all of the Polish prisoners had been removed from the camps and all correspondence with between the families ceased. At the time, no one knew that over 15,000 Polish Officers had been brutally murdered and systematically buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest. By May 10, 1940 the executions were completed.

    When the correspondence from the prisoners stopped in May 1940, their families became increasingly frantic in their efforts to find out what had happened to their loved ones. On two separate occasions, Stalin provided conflicting statements about their fate. One fictitious story was that the prisoners were building roads. On another occasion, when general Anders was forming a new Polish army division to fight the Nazis and he personally asked Stalin "Where could they have gone?" "They escaped," Stalin said. When pressed further on the statement, Stalin said, "To Manchuria.".

    On April 13, 1943, the following information was broadcast by the Nazis from Berlin: "From Smolensk comes news that the native population has revealed to German authorities the spot where in secret mass executions the Bolsheviks murdered 10,000 Polish Officers. German authorities made a horrible discovery. They found a pit 28 meters (86 feet) long and 16 meters (52 feet) wide in which, 12 deep, lay the bodies of 4,000 Polish Officers. In full uniform, in some cases shackled, all had wounds from pistol bullets in the back of the neck. Search and discovery of other pits continued.".

    In response, the Soviet Union again lied about their involvement in the mass executions and blamed the Germans. In an effort to expose the truth about the massacre in the Katyn Forest, the Germans took a number of people to the grave site, including two American Army Officers who had been captured and were POW’s. A full report of his conclusions by one of the Officers, Col. Van Vliet, following the end of the war that the Soviet union had been responsible for the massacre. The report was marked TOP SECRET and disappeared.

    Many people suspected the truth and worked hard to reveal the lies and perfidy of the Soviet Union. In September 1951 the U.S. House of Representatives established the Select committee to: Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre. In July 1952, the committee filed and interim report which fixed the responsibility for the executions on the Soviet Union. Despite a growing body of evidence, the Soviet Union continued to deny any involvement in the inhumane torture and murder of the prisoners.

    It took the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 to create an atmosphere where the truth would finally be revealed. In 1991, Gorbachev broadly admitted Soviet guilt. In 1992 Yeltsin turned over to Poland secret documents including the death sentences signed by Stalin and Beria. The world finally knew the truth: the Soviet Union had annihilated the Officers to get rid of potential political opposition to their plans to occupy Poland and establish a puppet government after the war.

    The horror of what happened tests human understanding. At the prison camps, guards called names and men gathered their belongings believing they were going home. Every day, day after day, 200-300 men were loaded in trains on their final journey to Katyn. Once the trains arrived in the forest, the men were loaded on trucks and taken into the woods. Here, a rope was tied around their necks and their hands were tied behind their backs, often with barbed wire. Their heads were pulled back and sawdust thrust into their mouths to silence their cries. Then with swift precision, they were shot in the back of their heads – their bodies falling into the mass graves dug before their arrival. Their blood mingled with the soil and became one of the world’s most unthinkable horrors. The hopelessness, the helplessness and the utter despair they must have felt in those last few minutes of life are almost beyond our comprehension. They had committed no crime and were being stripped of the last shreds of human decency and condemned to silence before being murdered.