April 13, 1940 one of the worst mass-murders of World War II began. The first announcement was made on Radio Berlin on April 13th, 1943. The German soldiers declared that they found a ditch that was approximately 28 meters long and 16 meters wide with about 3,000 bodies piled up in layers of twelve (The Katyn Wood Massacre). All of the bodies were dressed in military uniforms. Some of the bodies had pistol shots in the back of their heads. The Germans estimated that they would find 10,000 more military bodies, but all in all the total of bodies was 4,500. This was only the start of The Katyn Massacre.
On September 17, 1939 Russian forces invaded Poland and made the Polish soldiers to rise against their political leaders to serve as a punishment for getting the
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The camp site was an old dilapidated monastery known as the Optyn Hermitage...a monastery complex famous in 19th century Russia...It included a cathedral- the main building in which prisoners were lodged - and the skit (secluded part of a monastery) where Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had written some of their works and where the Polish officers were interrogated...On 1 April 1940 the NKVD counted 4,599 prisoners, mostly officers, including four generals and an admiral...Janina Lewandowska, shot down in a reconnaissance plane seems to have been the only female prisoner of war in the three special camps. Ostashkov camp lay 165-170 kilometres (100 miles) west of Kalinin (Tver). It used the church buildings of the former Nil Hermitage, on Stolbny Island in Lake Seliger, 10 kms from the town of Ostashkov...[The] camp was designated for police and gendarmes but also held some army officers... Starobelsk camp was about 210 kilometres (130 miles) southeast of Kharkov...the site was occupied by religious buildings...an old monastery with two churches and