The Katyn Massacre

I was doing some research for a story I was working on about World War II and I found out about this event that happen in World War II that I am amazed I hadn't heard about.



Above is a photo of the memorial at Katyn Forrest to mark the deaths of potentially 20,000 Polish citizens and soldiers at the hands of the Russian army. These people were murdered for being soldiers in the Polish army or for being intellectuals, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and journalists were some of the people who were gunned down.

Beyond the horror of the event is an the fact that the powers in the West, England and America, knew that the executions were going on, yet did nothing to prevent their ally at the time, The Soviet Union, from caring out the murders. If Churchill and Roosevelt pressed the Soviets too hard they could potentially lose their help in trying to defeat the Nazis.

Both the brutality of the murders and the reaction by America and England, show how ugly war really is. Once you start a war, you lose your moral base the longer the war goes on.

As Americans when we think of World War II, we rightly remember and honor our soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, died in the oceans of the Pacific, and battled in the German countryside. But it's important to look at the lives lost in a war due to outright cruelty and how a nation loses a part of it's soul when it ignores or participates in that cruelty.