The Katyn Memorial in front of you confronts one of the most systematically concealed war crimes of the twentieth century. The Katyn Memorial commemorates the massacre of approximately 22,000 Polish military officers, police, intellectuals, and professionals by Soviet NKVD forces in the spring of 1940, in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia. The victims were the educated leadership class of Poland, captured when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied eastern Poland in September 1939 under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Stalin ordered their murder to eliminate potential resistance to Soviet domination of Poland. When the mass graves were discovered by German forces in 1943, the Soviet Union blamed the massacre on Germany. The Allied powers, needing Soviet cooperation to win the war, accepted or suppressed evidence pointing to Soviet guilt.
It was not until 1990 that the Soviet government under Mikhail Gorbachev officially admitted responsibility. Baltimore's Polish American community, centered in the Fells Point and Highlandtown neighborhoods, erected this memorial to ensure that the truth of Katyn was not forgotten. The bronze sculpture depicts a Polish soldier bound and falling, bayoneted from behind — a representation of betrayal and murder.
Baltimore's ethnic Polish community was large enough and politically cohesive enough to commission and fund this monument when the official narrative still denied Soviet responsibility.