Ukrainian dig reveals 950 Soviet victims in 'new Katyn'

[JustJohn or JJ]

Thenews.pl :: News from Poland

Ukrainian dig reveals 950 Soviet victims in 'new Katyn'

27.08.2014 11:00

A Polish-Ukrainian archaeological team has uncovered the remains of Polish WWII soldiers among about 950 victims of Soviet repressions in Volodymyr-Volynsky, western Ukraine.

Photo:

Photo: sxc.hu

The remains were found on the premises of a former NKVD (Soviet secret police) prison that functioned intermittently between 1939 and 1956.

Up until the outbreak of the Second World War in August 1939, Volodymyr-Volynsky (Wlodzimierz Wołyński) had been within Poland's borders.

Alexei Zlatogorski, head of the Ukrainian branch of the archaeological team, believes the victims were killed between 1940 and 1941, before Hitler turned on his Moscow ally and invaded Soviet-occupied territory.

“So far, we have found the remains of about 950 people,” he told the Rzeczpospolita daily.

“These include Polish soldiers, but also civilians,” he clarified.

Polish archaeologist Dr Dominika Sieminska described the remains as being in “very bad condition,” noting that they had been covered with lime.

The Rzeczpospolita paper referred the find as a “new Katyn”, in an allusion to the massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers by the NKVD in 1940 at various points across the Soviet Union, including the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.

The exhumations are scheduled to continue for several more weeks.

[JustJohn or JJ]

Stalin-era mass grave found in Ukrainian castle

Remains of up to a thousand people - many of them Polish - has been discovered in Kazimierz the Great castle in Ukraine, which was the scene of a massacre by Stalin's forces



_{Polish soldiers stand in front of a memorial to thousands of Polish officers murdered in 1940 by Stalin's secret
 police in Katyn. The Polish press has already called the recently found grave in Ukraine a "new Katyn"}

Polish and Ukrainian scientists have unearthed a mass grave containing up to a thousand victims of Stalinist terror in a castle once used as a secret police prison.

Among the victims found in the grave are Polish soldiers, and the Polish press has already called the find a "new Katyn" in reference to a massacre of thousands of Poles by Stalin in 1940. The Katyn massacre still clouds Polish-Russian relations.

The grave was found in the grounds of the Kazimierz the Great castle in the town of Volodymyr-Volynsky in western Ukraine, close to the Polish border.

Although the NKVD had a base on the remains of the 13th-Century castle from 1939-1956—except when it was occupied by the Germans—scientists say the victims were killed between 1940 and 1941.

Following the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 Stalin and his henchmen instigated a reign of terror against Poles, murdering thousands considered a threat to Moscow's rule and deporting hundreds of thousands of other Poles to the wastes of Siberia and present day Kazakhstan.



"At the moment we've found the remains of about 950 people. Some of them are Polish soldiers but other are civilians," Alexi Zlatogorski, head of the Ukrainian team of archaeologists, told the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita.

"We've also found on the site cartridge cases from the TT pistol which indicates they were killed between 1940 and 1941 by the NKVD," he added.

The findings tie in with the one of the secret police's preferred methods of killing: a single pistol shot to the back of the head.

Dominika Sieminska, a Polish scientist involved in the investigation, explained the remains were in a very poor condition and that the NKVD had covered the bodies in quicklime during their burial. She added that it appeared the bodies had been crushed with rifle butts before being dumped in the grave by an excavator.

The finding of the mass grave will provide yet further evidence of the huge scale of the crimes committed against Poles by the Soviet Union in the early years of Second World War that still cast a dark shadow over the relationship between the two countries.

Many Poles feel that Russia – as the inheritor of the Soviet legacy – has done too little to atone for sins of the past, while Moscow has expressed occasional exasperation with what it considers as Poland's transfixion with the past.

The exhumations will continue, and Ukrainian authorities have decided to the remains will be reburied in a local municipal cemetery and a memorial erected on September 23.