KU News Release

Retired professor to lecture on massacre of Polish prisoners during World War II

LAWRENCE — Anna M. Cienciala, a professor emerita of history at the University of Kansas, will give a lecture titled “KATYN — A Stalinist Crime. The Massacre of Polish Prisoners of War in the USSR, Spring 1940” from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13, at the Hall Center for the Humanities. The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the lecture.

In April and May 1940, following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, some 14,500 Polish prisoners, chiefly military officers and policemen, were shot by their Soviet captors. The prisoners were buried in three killing fields, collectively known as Katyn. In April 1943, the German government reported the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest. Stalin’s regime denied responsibility and accused German forces of having committed the killings in the summer of 1941 after invading the Soviet Union. The Soviet denial endured for 50 years. Only in 1990 did officials admit Soviet responsibility.

It is these documents that Cienciala and her co-editors used in their book, “Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment” (Yale University Press, 2008.) Cienciala wrote long introductions to preface each of the three groups of documents.

This event is sponsored by the Friends of the Hall Center.

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