Secret NKVD documents reveal that thousands of Katyn massacre victims executed in Kharkov were later covered with lime to conceal traces of mass murder.

A letter, branded ‘top secret,’ has recently been found by the Ukrainian Security Service in post-Soviet archives. It reads: “In a forest about 100 metres from Kharkov-Bilgorod road, within a 50-metre radius, are many spots of collapsed earth. The holes are rectangular, 3x6 metres. One of the holes has been dug out and human bones and skulls can be seen. Some of the bones are scattered on the ground. There are also the remains of foreign-made military boots.”

The letter was written by General Vitaliy Nikitchenko to KGB head Yuri Andropov and to Petro Shelest, leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine, on 7 June 1969.

General Nikitchenko, head of the Committee of State Security of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, further reports that the grave has been dug out by three pupils of fifth and sixth grade from Pyatikhatki. They robbed a gold ring engraved with the initials AK and the date 29 June 1924, gold tooth crowns and military buttons with the image of the Polish eagle.

“It has been established that here in 1940 the NKVD from Kharkov region buried several thousands executed officers and generals of bourgeois Poland, whose remnants have been accidentally discovered by children,” writes Nikitchenko.

Pyatikhatki, along with Katyn and Miednoye, is the burial place of over 3,700 Polish war prisoners executed by the NKVD in 1940 as ordered by Stalin and other Soviet leaders.

In order to conceal the discovery and truth about the mass murder, Nikitchenko proposed announcing that it was Germans who executed deserters from their own army and the allied armies. The General suggested that people be warned that victims who were buried here died of cholera, typhus, syphilis and other infectious diseases. Andropov decided that that kind of disinformation campaign will not be enough, and, in a letter to General Petro Feshchenko from the Kharkov branch of the NKVD, ordered the site destroyed. The burial place in Pyatikhatki was to be surrounded by barbed-wire fence and guarded by 21 men. The remnants of Polish officers were to be destroyed by being covered with lime and the graves were to be filled in. Andropov gave his subordinates four years and 10,000 rubles (220 euro) to do that.

Source: Gazeta Wyborcza