How it was 31.10.2000 (2000)

The program's topic is "The Katyn Tragedy" of 1940. For decades, the topic of the Katyn tragedy remained taboo in the USSR, or rather, it simply did not exist.

But historians, politicians and government officials did not give up trying to find out what really happened in that distant 1940 near Smolensk.

In September 1939, about one hundred and twenty thousand Polish soldiers fell into the hands of the NKVD. In May 1940, news about Poles held in Soviet camps ceased to reach their homeland.

In 1943, the German command reported around the world that burials of Polish officers shot by the NKVD in 1940 had been found near Smolensk.

The discovery of mass graves in the Katyn forest was first reported in 1943 by the head of intelligence of the German Army Group Center, Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff.

An international commission convened by Germany conducted an examination and concluded that the shootings were carried out by the NKVD in the spring of 1940. In turn, the Soviet Union denied its involvement in the incident.

After the liberation of Smolensk by Soviet troops, the Nikolai Burdenko Commission was created, which, after conducting its own investigation, concluded that Polish citizens were shot in Katyn in the fall of 1941 by the German occupation forces.

This conclusion was the official point of view in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries until 1990, when the leadership of the USSR officially recognized the responsibility of the NKVD of the USSR. Documents, facts and eyewitness accounts indicate that thousands of Polish prisoners of war were shot on the orders of the highest leadership of the USSR. Participants of the program: Zalutski Andrzej - Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to the Russian Federation, Natalia Lebedeva - Doctor of Historical Sciences of Poland, investigator of the details of the death of Polish officers at Katyn, Beria Sergo - Soviet scientist.

Chronicle: Soviet-German parade in Brest 1939, Goebbels Joseph on the platform, German newspapers about the shooting in Katyn, international commission at the site of the burial excavation, corpses of the executed.

Fragment of the film "Katyn Case" 1991.