Josef Stalin's executioners killed 15,131 Polish officers and policemen in the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940, a Soviet newspaper said in an article based on previously secret KGB archives.
The disclosure in the weekly Moscow News Wednesday was the first published admission of the systematic slaughter in the Russian region that has soured Soviet-Polish relations for five decades. The story contradicted previous Soviet claims that Adolf Hitler's Gestapo agents committed the World War II killings.An official Soviet-Polish commission studying the Katyn massacre has not issued any findings.
"15,131 men had kind of disappeared to nowhere," the Moscow News said.
"A study of the whole complex of (KGB) materials affords a conclusion: The Polish officers and policemen were shot between April and May (1940) by the operative detachments of the NKVD," the predecessor of the present-day KGB intelligence agency, it said.
In the first such trip ever allowed by Moscow, hundreds of Poles traveled to Katyn Forest Oct. 30 and wept for their slain fathers and husbands during a prayer service at the massacre site.
Stalin ordered the Poles killed because he feared they would lead an uprising and upset the 1939 secret pact he signed with Hitler, Lebedeva said.