
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 23, 1990                   TAG: 9003232187
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Short

MASSACRE WAS SOVIET, RECORDS SAY

Wartime records concealed for decades show that Soviet secret police, not German invaders, murdered thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn pine forest of western Russia, a newspaper reported.

The weekly Moscow News used information from official records in a two-page article about the Katyn Forest massacre, one of the grisliest chapters of the Stalin era.

Official Soviet accounts have said it was the Germans who mowed down the cream of the Polish officer corps, held prisoner just south of Smolensk.

Katyn fostered a deep distrust of the Soviets in Poland, even during the four decades it spent as a client state of the Kremlin. A Polish-Soviet commission investigated the massacre but did not issue a formal report.

Moscow News concluded the Polish officers were killed in the spring of 1940, well before the Germans invaded the region, not in 1941 as the official version has claimed. - Associated Press

by CNB