ABSTRACT
The murder of 20,000 Polish leaders by Soviet forces in the Katyn forests in 1940 was denied as a Nazi fabrication by the USSR until 1991 and only partially admitted by the Russian Federation government until 2010. On the 70th anniversary of the massacre in April 2010, the Russians invited a delegation of Polish politicians and military leaders to a memorial event at Katyn. The airplane taking president Kaczyn´ski, the former president, leading military officers, the president of the National Bank, other leading Polish politicians and clergy and relatives of victims crashed as it landed at Smolensk: all 96 on board died.
