In the spring of 1940, Stalin‘s NKVD executed 22,000 Polish officers, ensigns and state officials near the Russian village of Katyn and other places. When Wehrmacht soldiers discovered some of the graves three years later, the Soviets succeeded in convincing US President Roosevelt of the German perpetration. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no clear picture of the crime, and therefore made no public comments. Using thousands of recently released US documents, this book refutes the popular thesis that the Western Allies deliberately lied about the Katyn case in order not to endanger the alliance with Stalin. As well as consulting Polish and Russian documentation on this war crime, for the first time, the diaries of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who wrote a great deal about Katyn, have been examined. Completely new for research is the role that Hitler's opponents in the Wehrmacht played in solving the crime: at the Nuremberg trial they convinced the US delegation that the executors were not from the SS, but from the NKVD. Nevertheless, it took until 1990 for Kremlin chief Gorbachev to admit Soviet responsibility. Today in Putin's Russia, however, there is a tendency once more to keep quiet about the crime or even to blame the Germans.

Examining the Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn and other camps in 1940 – one of the most notorious incidents of the Second World War – this book sheds new light on what took place and how the memory of the massacres long affected, and continues to affect, Polish-Russian relations.

World War II was--and remains--one of the bloodiest wars in history. Not only did millions of soldiers die in combat but millions of civilians lost their lives--some for no greater crime than their religious heritage or their nationality. The Soviets, at first allied with the Germans, incarcerated thousands of Polish military officers and reservists in the pre-established Soviet camps of Ostashkov, Starobelsk and Kozelsk. On March 5, 1940, Joseph Stalin and his lieutenants signed an execution order for 25,700 Polish prisoners of war. After months of hardship and interrogation, 14,700 prisoners from these camps were taken to remote areas, murdered with a shot to the back of the head and buried in mass graves. Later, when Germany turned its sights on the Soviet Union, the USSR allied itself with the West. With the discovery of the first of the mass burials by the Germans in the Katyn Forest (the area from which the entire massacre gets its name), the Soviets attempted to place the blame for the atrocities on the Germans in spite of a plethora of evidence to the contrary. Only in 1990, with the fall of communism, did President Mikhail Gorbachev admit Soviet responsibility for the Katyn murders. Compiled from a series of interviews, this emotionally moving account records the stories and fates of 18 men and women, 16 of whom lost their fathers in the Katyn massacre. The author traveled to Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Canada and the United States to talk extensively with the 18, recording their thoughts, feelings, memories and experiences of the hardships during and after the war. Photographs and maps are included.

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By the time Pearl Harbour had ripped apart America's peacetime pretensions, the German blitzkrieg had already blasted the Red Army back to the gates of Moscow. Yet, less than four years later, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flew above the ruins of Berlin, stark symbol of a miraculous comeback that destroyed the German army and shattered Hitler's imperial designs.