In the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasion of Poland, which took place in September 1939, the territory of Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets had ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion.[6][7] Since 1939 German and Soviet officials coordinated their Poland-related policies and repressive actions. For nearly two years following the invasion, the two occupiers continued to discuss bilateral plans for dealing with the Polish resistance during Gestapo-NKVD Conferences until Germany's Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, in June 1941.[8]
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was broken and the new war erupted, the Soviets had already arrested and imprisoned about 500,000 Polish nationals in the Kresymacroregion including civic officials, military personnel and all other "enemies of the people" such as clergy and the Polish educators: about one in ten of all adult males. There is some controversy as to whether the Soviet Union's policies were harsher than those of Nazi Germany until that time.[9][10] An estimated 150,000 Polish citizens were killed by Soviet repressions.
The Soviet Union took over 52.1% of the territory of Poland (circa 200,000km²) with over 13,700,000 citizens at the end of the Polish Defensive War. Regarding the ethnic composition of these areas: ca. 5.1 million or 38% of the population were Polish by ethnicity (wrote Elżbieta Trela-Mazur),[11] with 37% Ukrainians, 14.5% Belarusians, 8.4% Jews, 0.9% Russians and 0.6% Germans.[11] There were also 336,000 refugees from areas occupied by Germany, most of them Jews (198,000).[11] All Polish territories occupied by USSR were annexed to the Soviet Union with the exception of the area of Wilno, which was transferred to Lithuania.
Initially, the Soviet occupation gained support among some citizens of the Second Polish Republic. Some members of the Ukrainian population welcomed the unification with Soviet Ukraine. The Ukrainians had failed to achieve independence in 1919 when their attempt at self-determination was crushed during the Polish–Soviet and Polish-Ukrainian Wars.[14] Also, there were pre-war Polish citizens who saw the Soviet NKVD presence as an opportunity to start political and social agitation. Many of them committed treason against the Polish state by assisting in round-ups and executions of Polish officials.[14] Their enthusiasm however faded with time as it became clear that the Soviet repressions were aimed at all peoples equally.[15]
Soviet rule
Exhumation of the Katyń forest massacre victims, murdered in 1940 by order of Soviet authorities
The Soviet Union never officially declared war on Poland and ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion.[6][7] The Soviets did not classify Polish military personnel as prisoners of war, but as rebels against the new Soviet government in today's Western Ukraine and West Belarus.[n] The NKVD and other Soviet agencies asserted their control in 1939 as an inherent part of the Sovietization of Kresy. Approximately 250,000 Polish prisoners of war were captured by the USSR during and after the invasion of Poland.[16] As the Soviet Union had not signed international conventions on rules of war, the Polish prisoners were denied legal status. The Soviet forces murdered almost all captured officers, and sent numerous ordinary soldiers to the Soviet Gulag.[17][18] In one notorious atrocity ordered by Stalin, the Soviet secret police systematically shot and killed 22,000 Poles in a remote area during the Katyn massacre. Among some 14,471 victims were top Polish Army officers, including political leaders, government officials, and intellectuals. Some 4,254 dead bodies were uncovered in mass graves in Katyn Forest by the Nazis in 1943, who invited an international group of neutral representatives and doctors to examine the corpses and confirm the Soviet guilt.[15] 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians were killed in the Katyn massacre,[2][19] but thousands of others were victims of NKVD massacres of prisoners in mid-1941, before the German advance across the Soviet occupation zone.
In total, the Soviets killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. Many of them, like General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński, captured, interrogated and shot on 22 September, were killed during the 1939 campaign.[20][21] On 24 September, 1939, the Soviets killed 42 staff and patients of a Polish military hospital in the village of Grabowiec, near Zamość.[22] The Soviets also executed all the Polish officers they captured after the Battle of Szack, on 28 September.[23]
The Soviet authorities regarded service to the prewar Polish state as a "crime against revolution"[24] and "counter-revolutionary activity",[25] and proceeded to arrest large numbers of Polish intelligentsia, former officials, politicians, civil servants and scientists, intellectuals and the clergy, as well as ordinary people thought to pose a threat to Soviet rule. In the two years between the invasion of Poland and the 1941 attack on USSR by Germany, the Soviets arrested and imprisoned about 500,000 Poles. This was about one in ten of all adult males. The arrested members of the Polish intelligentsia included former prime ministers Leon Kozłowski and Aleksander Prystor, Stanisław Grabski and Stanisław Głąbiński, and the Baczewski family. Initially aimed primarily at possible political opponents, by January 1940 the NKVD's campaign was also directed against potential allies, including Polish Communists and Socialists. Those arrested included Władysław Broniewski, Aleksander Wat, Tadeusz Peiper, Leopold Lewin, Anatol Stern, Teodor Parnicki, Marian Czuchnowski and many others.[26] The Soviet NKVD executed about 65,000 imprisoned Poles after being subjected to show trials.[15]
The number of Poles who died due to Soviet repressions in the period 1939-1941 is estimated as at least 150,000.[3][5]
Mass deportations to the East
The "Road of Bones" constructed by inmates of the Soviet Gulag prison camps, including those of Polish citizenship
Approximately 100,000 Polish citizens were arrested during the two years of Soviet occupation.[27] The prisons soon got severely overcrowded, with all detainees accused of anti-Soviet activities.[15] The NKVD had to open dozens of ad-hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region.[28] The wave of arrests and mock convictions contributed to the forced resettlement of large categories of people ("kulaks", Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors, "osadniks") to the Gulaglabour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union.[29] Altogether the Soviets sent roughly a million people from Poland to Siberia.[30] According to Norman Davies,[31] almost half had died by the time the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement had been signed in 1941.[15] Around 55% of the deportees to Siberia and Soviet Central Asia were Polish women.[32]
In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported a total of more than 1,200,000 Poles in four waves of mass deportations from the Soviet-occupied Polish territories.[citation needed] The first major operation took place on February 10, 1940, with more than 220,000 people sent primarily to far north and east Russia, including Siberia and Khabarovsk Krai. The second wave of 13 April 1940, consisted of 320,000 people sent primarily to Kazakhstan. The third wave of June–July 1940 totaled more than 240,000. The fourth and final wave occurred in June 1941, deporting 300,000.[citation needed]
According to the Soviet law, all residents of the annexed area, dubbed by the Soviets as citizens of former Poland,[33] automatically acquired Soviet citizenship. But, actual conferral of citizenship required individual consent and residents were strongly pressured for such consent.[28] Those refugees who opted out were threatened with repatriation to German-controlled territories of Poland.[34][35][36]
The Poles and the Soviets re-established diplomatic relations in 1941, following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement; but the Soviets broke them off again in 1943 after the Polish government demanded an independent examination of the recently discovered Katyn burial pits.[citation needed] The Soviets lobbied the Western Allies to recognize the pro-Soviet Polish puppet government of Wanda Wasilewska in Moscow.[37]
Deportations, though, continued in June 1944, around 40,000 soldiers and Polish Underground State officials who refused to join the Soviet-controlled Army were relocated to the most remote areas of the USSR. The following year, between 40,000 and 50,000 people - mostly from Upper Silesia - were deported to forced labor camps.[38]
Land reform and collectivisation
The Red Army had sown confusion among the locals by claiming that they were arriving to save Poland from the Nazis.[39] Their advance surprised Polish communities and their leaders, who had not been advised how to respond to a Bolshevik invasion. Polish and Jewish citizens may at first have preferred a Soviet regime to a German one,[40] but the Soviets soon proved they were also hostile and destructive towards the Polish citizens.[41][42] They began confiscating, nationalising and redistributing all private and state-owned Polish property. Red Army troops requisitioned food and other goods.[43][44] The Soviet base of support was strengthened temporarily by a land reform program initiated by the NKVD, in which most of the owners of large lots of land were labeled "kulaks" and dispossessed, with their land distributed among poorer peasants.
But, the Soviet authorities started a campaign of forced collectivisation. This action largely nullified the earlier political gains from the land reform as the peasants generally did not want to join the Kolkhoz farms, nor to give away their crops for free to fulfill the state-imposed quotas, which undercut nearly everyone's material needs.[b][45]
Dismantling of Polish governmental and social institutions
While Germans enforced their policies based on racism, the Soviet administration justified their Stalinist policies by appealing to Soviet ideology.[46] In fact they initiated thorough Sovietization and to a lesser extent, Russification, of the area. Immediately after their conquest of eastern Poland, the Soviet authorities started a campaign of sovietization of the newly acquired areas.[29][47] No later than several weeks after the last Polish units surrendered, on October 22, 1939, the Soviets organized staged elections to the Moscow-controlled Supreme Soviets (legislative body) of Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine.[48] The result of the staged voting was to legitimize the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland.[28]
Subsequently, all institutions of the dismantled Polish state were closed down and reopened under the Soviet-appointed supervisors. Lwów University and many other schools were reopened soon, but they were to operate as Soviet institutions rather than continue their former legacy. Lwów University was reorganized in accordance with the Statute Books for Soviet Higher Schools. The tuition was abolished, as together with the institution's Polonophile traditions, this had prevented most of the rural Ukrainophone population from attending. The Soviets established several new chairs, particularly the chairs of Russian language and literature. The chairs of Marxism-Leninism, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism, aimed at strengthening Soviet ideology, were opened as well.[11] Polish literature and language studies were dissolved by Soviet authorities. Forty-five new faculty members were assigned to Lwów, transferred from other institutions of Soviet Ukraine, mainly the Kharkiv and Kiev universities. On January 15, 1940 the Lwów University was reopened; its professors started to teach in accordance with Soviet curricula.[49]
Simultaneously Soviet authorities tried to remove traces of Polish history in the area by eliminating much of what had connections to the Polish state or even Polish culture in general.[11] On December 21, 1939, the Polish currency was withdrawn from circulation without any exchange to the newly introduced rouble; this meant that the entire population of the area lost all of their life savings overnight.[50]
All the media became controlled by Moscow. Soviet authorities implemented a political regime similar to a police state,[51][52][53][54] based on terror. All Polish parties and organizations were disbanded. Only the Communist Party was allowed to exist, with organizations subordinated to it. All organized religions were persecuted. All enterprises were taken over by the state, while agriculture was made collective.[55]
Exploitation of ethnic tensions
The Soviets exploited past ethnic tensions between Poles and other ethnic groups living in Poland; they incited and encouraged violence against Poles, suggesting the minorities could "rectify the wrongs they had suffered during twenty years of Polish rule".[56] Pre-war Poland was portrayed as a capitalist state based on exploitation of the working people and ethnic minorities. Soviet propaganda claimed that the unfair treatment of non-Poles by the Second Polish Republic justified its dismemberment. Soviet officials openly incited mobs to conduct killings and robberies (1939–1945).[57] The death toll of the initial Soviet-inspired terror campaign remains unknown.
As the forces of Nazi Germany were pushed westward in 1945 in the closing months of the war, Poland's formal sovereignty was re-established by the Soviet-formed provisional government, later renamed as the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland.[58] The country remained under de facto military occupation for many years to come, controlled by the Soviet Northern Group of Forces, which were stationed in Poland until 1993. Some 25,000 Polish underground fighters, including 300 top Home Army officers, were captured by NKVD units and SMERSH operational groups in the fall of 1944. They suffered mass deportations to the gulags.[59]
Between 1944 and 1946, thousands of Polish independence fighters actively opposed the new communist regime, attacking country offices of NKVD, SMERSH and the Polish communist secret service (UB).[60] The events of the late 1940s amounted to a full-scale civil war according to some historians, especially in the eastern and central parts of the country (see: the Cursed soldiers). According to depositions by Józef Światło and other communist sources, the number of members of the Polish underground, rounded up by order of Lavrentiy Beria of the NKVD and deported to Siberia and various gulags in the Soviet Union reached 50,000 in 1945 alone.[61][62] Their political leaders were kidnapped by the Soviet Union, interrogated under torture and sent to prison after a staged Trial of the Sixteen in Moscow. None survived.[62][63] About 600 people died as the result of the Augustów roundup.
The documents of the era show that the problem of sexual violence against Polish women by Soviet servicemen was serious both during and after the advance of Soviet forces across Poland.[64] Joanna Ostrowska and Marcin Zaremba of the Polish Academy of Sciences estimate that rapes of Polish women reached a mass scale following the Winter Offensive of 1945.[4] Whether the number of victims could have reached or even exceeded 100,000 is only a matter of guessing,[4] considering the traditional taboos among the women incapable of finding "a voice that would have enabled them to talk openly" about their wartime experiences "while preserving their dignity."[65]
To this day, the events of those and the following years constitute stumbling blocks in Polish-Russian foreign relations. In 1989, the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev apologized for its crimes against Poland. However, in 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin went as far as blaming Poland for starting World War II.[66]
↑ "Terminal horror suffered by so many millions of innocent Jewish, Slavic, and other European peoples as a result of this meeting of evil minds is an indelible stain on the history and integrity of Western civilization, with all of its humanitarian pretensions" (Note: "this meeting" refers to the most famous third (Zakopane) conference). Conquest, Robert (1991). Stalin: Breaker of Nations, New York, N.Y.: Viking. ISBN0-670-84089-0
↑ "In the 1939-1941 period alone, Soviet-inflicted suffering on all citizens in Poland exceeded that of Nazi-inflicted suffering on all citizens. (...) The Soviet-imposed myth about "Communist heroes of resistance" enabled them for decades to avoid the painful questions faced long ago by other Western countries." Johanna Granville, H-Net Review of Jan T. Gross. Revolution from Abroad.
1 2 Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1988). "Ukrainian Collaborators". Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947. McFarland. pp.177–259. ISBN0-7864-0371-3. How are we ... to explain the phenomenon of Ukrainians rejoicing and collaborating with the Soviets? Who were these Ukrainians? That they were Ukrainians is certain, but were they communists, Nationalists, unattached peasants? The Answer is "yes"—they were all three
↑ Out of the original group of Polish prisoners of war sent in large number to the labour camps were some 25,000 ordinary soldiers separated from the rest of their colleagues and imprisoned in a work camp in Równe, where they were forced to build a road. See: "Decision to commence investigation into Katyn Massacre". Institute of National Remembrance website. Institute of National Remembrance. 2004. Archived from the original on July 19, 2006. Retrieved March 15, 2006.
↑ The actual number of deported in the period of 1939-1941 remains unknown and various estimates vary from 350,000 ((in Polish)Encyklopedia PWN'OKUPACJA SOWIECKA W POLSCE 1939–41'Archived 2005-04-20 at the Wayback Machine , last retrieved on March 14, 2006, Polish language) to over 2 million (mostly World War II estimates by the underground). The earlier number is based on records made by the NKVD and does not include roughly 180,000 prisoners of war, also in Soviet captivity. Most modern historians estimate the number of all people deported from areas taken by Soviet Union during this period at between 800,000 and 1,500,000; for example R. J. Rummel gives the number of 1,200,000 million; Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox give 1,500,000 in their Refugees in an Age of Genocide, p.219; in his Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917, p.132. See also: Marek Wierzbicki; Tadeusz M. Płużański (March 2001). "Wybiórcze traktowanie źródeł". Tygodnik Solidarność (March 2, 2001). and Albin Głowacki (September 2003). "Formy, skala i konsekwencje sowieckich represji wobec Polaków w latach 1939-1941". In Piotr Chmielowiec (ed.). Okupacja sowiecka ziem polskich 1939–1941 (in Polish). Rzeszów-Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej. ISBN83-89078-78-3. Archived from the original on 2003-10-03.
↑ Adam Sudoł, ed. (1998). Sowietyzacja Kresów Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej po 17 września 1939 (in Polish). Bydgoszcz: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna. p.441. ISBN83-7096-281-5.
↑ Craig Thompson-Dutton (1950). "The Police State & The Police and the Judiciary". The Police State: What You Want to Know about the Soviet Union. Dutton. pp.88–95.
↑ Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, Princeton University Press, 2002, ISBN0-691-09603-1, p. 35
Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union entered the eastern regions of Poland and annexed territories totalling 201,015 square kilometres (77,612 sq mi) with a population of 13,299,000. Inhabitants besides ethnic Poles included Belarusian and Ukrainian major population groups, and also Czechs, Lithuanians, Jews, and other minority groups.
The Polish minority in the Soviet Union are Polish diaspora who used to reside near or within the borders of the Soviet Union before its dissolution. Some of them continued to live in the post-Soviet states, most notably in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, the areas historically associated with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan among others.
Around six million Polish citizens are estimated to have perished during World War II. Most were civilians killed by the actions of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Lithuanian Security Police, as well as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its offshoots.
Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. The Second World War caused the movement of the largest number of people in the shortest period of time in history. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war ended. The mass movement of people – most of them refugees – had either been caused by the hostilities, or enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers based on ideologies of race and ethnicity, culminating in the postwar border changes enacted by international settlements. The refugee crisis created across formerly occupied territories in World War II provided the context for much of the new international refugee and global human rights architecture existing today.
The NKVD prisoner massacres were a series of mass executions of political prisoners carried out by the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, across Eastern Europe, primarily in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states and Bessarabia. After the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, NKVD troops were supposed to evacuate political prisoners to the interior of the Soviet Union, but the hasty retreat of the Red Army, a lack of transportation and other supplies, and general disregard for legal procedures often led to prisoners being simply executed.
The Polish government-in-exile, officially known as the Government of the Republic of Poland in exile, was the government in exile of Poland formed in the aftermath of the Invasion of Poland of September 1939, and the subsequent occupation of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Slovak Republic, which brought to an end the Second Polish Republic.
Operation Vistula was the codename for the 1947 forced resettlement of close to 150,000 Ukrainians from the south-eastern provinces of post-war Poland, to the Recovered Territories in the west of the country. The action was carried out by the Soviet-installed Polish communist authorities to remove material support to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army continued its guerilla activities until 1947 in Subcarpathian and Lublin Voivodeships with no hope for any peaceful resolution; Operation Vistula brought an end to the hostilities.
Poland was invaded and annexed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the invasion of Poland in 1939. In the pre-war Polish territories annexed by the Soviets the first Soviet partisan groups were formed in 1941, soon after Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Those groups fought against the Germans, but conflicts with Polish partisans were also common.
A sybirak is a person resettled to Siberia. Like its Russian counterpart sibiryák, the word can refer to any dweller of Siberia, but it more specifically refers to Poles imprisoned or exiled to Siberia or even to those sent to the Russian Arctic or to Kazakhstan in the 1940s.
The Soviet invasion of Poland was a military conflict by the Soviet Union without a formal declaration of war. On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, 16 days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west. Subsequent military operations lasted for the following 20 days and ended on 6 October 1939 with the two-way division and annexation of the entire territory of the Second Polish Republic by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This division is sometimes called the Fourth Partition of Poland. The Soviet invasion of Poland was indirectly indicated in the "secret protocol" of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed on 23 August 1939, which divided Poland into "spheres of influence" of the two powers. German and Soviet cooperation in the invasion of Poland has been described as co-belligerence.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD, at Stalin's order in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German Nazi forces in 1943.
As a result of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers became prisoners of war. Many of them were executed; 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians perished in the Katyn massacre alone.
The Polish population transfers in 1944–1946 from the eastern half of prewar Poland, were the forced migrations of Poles toward the end and in the aftermath of World War II. These were the result of a Soviet Union policy that had been ratified by the main Allies of World War II. Similarly, the Soviet Union had enforced policies between 1939 and 1941 which targeted and expelled ethnic Poles residing in the Soviet zone of occupation following the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland. The second wave of expulsions resulted from the retaking of Poland from the Wehrmacht by the Red Army. The USSR took over territory for its western republics.
Amnesty for Polish citizens in USSR was the one-time amnesty in the USSR for those deprived of their freedom following the Soviet invasion of Poland in World War II. The signing of amnesty by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on 12 August 1941, resulted in temporary stop of persecutions of Polish citizens under the Soviet occupation. Their mass persecution accompanied the 1939 annexation of the entire eastern half of the Second Polish Republic in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact against Poland. In order to de-Polonize all newly acquired territories, the Soviet NKVD rounded up and deported between 320,000 and 1 million Polish nationals to the eastern parts of the USSR, the Urals, and Siberia in the atmosphere of terror. There were four waves of deportations of entire families with children, women and elderly aboard freight trains from 1940 until 1941. The second wave of deportations by the Soviet occupational forces across Kresy, affected 300,000 to 330,000 Poles, sent primarily to Kazakh SSR. The amnesty of 1941 was directed specifically at Polish victims of those deportations.
Around 6 million Polish citizens perished during World War II: about one fifth of the entire pre-war population of Poland. Most of them were civilian victims of the war crimes and the crimes against humanity which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union committed during their occupation of Poland. Approximately half of them were Polish Jews who were killed in The Holocaust. Statistics for Polish casualties during World War II are divergent and contradictory. This article provides a summary of the estimates of Poland's human losses in the war as well as a summary of the causes of them.
The flight and forced displacement of Poles from all territories east of the Second Polish Republic (Kresy) pertains to the dramatic decrease of Polish presence on the territory of the post-war Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century. The greatest migrations took place in waves between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and in the aftermath of World War II in Europe.
The occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II (1939–1945) began with the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, and it was formally concluded with the defeat of Germany by the Allies in May 1945. Throughout the entire course of the occupation, the territory of Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR), both of which intended to eradicate Poland's culture and subjugate its people. In the summer-autumn of 1941, the lands which were annexed by the Soviets were overrun by Germany in the course of the initially successful German attack on the USSR. After a few years of fighting, the Red Army drove the German forces out of the USSR and crossed into Poland from the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated as NKVD, was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) secret police organization, and thus had a monopoly on intelligence and state security functions. The NKVD is known for carrying out political repression and the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin, as well as counterintelligence and other operations on the Eastern Front of World War II. The head of the NKVD was Genrikh Yagoda from 1934 to 1936, Nikolai Yezhov from 1936 to 1938, Lavrentiy Beria from 1938 to 1946, and Sergei Kruglov in 1946.
The Lutsk Ghetto was a Nazi ghetto established in 1941 by the SS in Lutsk, Western Ukraine, during World War II. In the interwar period, the city was known as Łuck and was part of the Wołyń Voivodeship (1921–1939) in the Second Polish Republic.
During World War II, Soviet Union, while publicly declaring its support for humane treatment of prisoners of war, routinely ignored them, committing various atrocities against POWs. These actions were carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Red Army. In some cases, the crimes were sanctioned or directly ordered by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet leadership.
References
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York, Basic Books, 2010.
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