The Last Mass Execution of World War II: The Roundup Carried Out by Soviet Troops in the Augustów Forest in July 1945

In July 1945, the Red Army and the Polish Army, subordinated to the government imposed by the USSR, conducted a large operation in the Augustów Forest—a large forest complex on the border of Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. As a result of this operation, aimed at destroying the local resistance movement against Stalinist rule in Poland, around 7,000 people were arrested, of which at least 592 people were executed without trial. Although our research has allowed us to significantly extend knowledge about this crime, some fundamental questions have still not been answered. First, we do not know where the graves of the crime’s victims are located. So far, the authorities of the Russian Federation have not made available any documents that would help to solve the mystery.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov offered his comment on the issue of the Augustów roundup for the first and only time in 2012. At a press conference with his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski, he said,

We are ready to ask a committee of historians to analyze all aspects of the situation that happened [following the end of the war in Europe], so that the picture is multi-faceted; we do not intend to treat [it] using one single pattern. There was nothing linear about the Augustów roundup, everything turned out to be difficult and intertwined. I am sure that using this line of thinking the committee of historians will be ready to deal with this issue. The most important thing is that such historical situations should not be used as a tool in contemporary politics. Unfortunately, a tendency to do so is evident. ¹

The very fact that the Russian Federation’s Minister of Foreign Affairs commented on a little-known historical event indicates that the crime continues to burden mutual relations between Poland and Russia. What do we know about the roundup? Is it possible to reconstruct the circumstances in which it was conducted, as well as the motivation of the perpetrators, although the most important documents are presumably still kept top secret? In which direction should further research go? These are some of the questions that we would like to answer in this text. It is based both on the literature on the subject and on the authors’ own archival research conducted in Poland and Russia.

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Germany’s capitulation in May 1945 was not tantamount to the end of military clashes in Europe. In the areas that were annexed by or incorporated into the USSR in 1945 (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, as well as Volhynia and Eastern Galicia), and also in Poland controlled by the Red Army, an anti-communist resistance movement was developing rapidly. Stalin broke off diplomatic relations with the legal authorities of the Republic of Poland in exile as early as 1943, and a year later, after Soviet troops entered Poland, he formed a puppet government headed by communists. Alongside this, both the Soviet repression apparatus and the repression apparatus established by Polish communists under the supervision of the Soviets launched a brutal persecution campaign targeting their political opponents. As a consequence, tens of thousands of Home Army soldiers, a formation that fought against Germany and its authorities and armed forces in occupied Poland, were forced to carry out armed self-defense actions against the USSR as well—this involved fighting the representatives of the communist authorities installed by Stalin, rescuing arrested fellow soldiers from prisons and so on.

In principle, the Soviet leadership placed great emphasis on fighting the underground movement, both due to their intention to ensure security to the rear of the invading Red Army and due to the threat this movement posed to the process of planned Sovietization of the seized areas. From the very beginning, NKVD Internal Troops were following the advancing Western front. This special unit, which was operationally subordinated to the military counterintelligence service known as SMERSH, was involved in carrying out repressive measures and anti-guerrilla operations. However, in the situation of a high density of “criminal” units—which in the jargon used by the communists meant any armed groups that were opposed to communist rule—the NKVD troops were backed or even replaced by regular Red Army units.

In the first weeks following Germany’s capitulation, dragnet operations carried out by Soviet troops, targeting various national underground movements, were no less intensive. The pacification of the Augustów Forest carried out on 12–19 July 1945 by units of the 3rd Belarusian Front commanded by Marshal Ivan Bagramyan, ² backed by sub-units of the Polish Army and officers of the Office of Public Security (UB), was particularly dramatic and bloody. This operation was kept secret for a long time; it was only after the 1989 breakthrough that it began to be studied by historians. ³ Documents revealed in recent years in Russian archives proved to be of key importance for its better understanding.

The operation carried out in the Augustów Forest covered the counties of Augustów and Suwałki, as well as the county of Lazdijai in Lithuania, and was the last military operation conducted by the 3rd Belarusian Front (several weeks later, the Front was finally disbanded). In the 1990s, prosecutors from the Russian Federation, who had access to materials which until then had been unknown to historians, presented the background for this Soviet operation in the following way:

in connection with numerous attacks on the soldiers of the Soviet Army, which had happened in the territory of Poland, in line with the order received from the commander in chief [that is Stalin - Ł.A., G.M.], the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR devised a plan for carrying out a military operation . . . intended to trace and eliminate all units of the anti-Soviet oriented »Home Army«. ⁴

Russian historian Nikita Petrov, who unearthed the key documents regarding this operation, came to different conclusions. In his view, the dragnet operation was connected with Stalin’s trip to Potsdam, where he was to attend the Potsdam Conference, and was intended to ensure security for rail transport operations that were ongoing nearby. ⁵ However, this thesis provokes certain doubts. The Soviet government delegation used the Minsk–Terespol–Siedlce–Warsaw–Kutno–Poznań route. We can conclude from our archival research that it enjoyed careful protection from several divisions of the NKVD. On the section of the route from Minsk in Belarus to Terespol, the railway line was protected by soldiers of the 7th Division of the NKVD. The route from Terespol to Siedlce via Warsaw was protected by NKVD soldiers from the elite 1st Feliks Dzerzhinskii Division normally responsible for ensuring security to Moscow. The section of the route from Siedlce to Kutno and to Poznań was protected by soldiers of the 58th, 59th, and 64th Divisions of the NKVD, and further sections—by soldiers of the 63rd Division and by other units. ⁶ Due to the size of the forces involved in protecting Stalin, guerrilla fighters—in particular those coming from Suwałki and Augustów, both of which are towns situated at a considerable distance from this railway line—were unable to pose a threat to the Soviet delegation, even if they wanted to.

Therefore, another explanation of the reasons behind this operation should be considered, one which has so far remained beyond the attention of historians. In fact, this explanation is to some degree connected with the Potsdam Conference. In June 1945, despite the justified feeling of triumph provoked by Germany’s capitulation, the Red Army’s General Command was no less busy. Some officers were preparing for a war with Japan, while others were seriously considering the hypothetical failure of the Potsdam Conference, which at that time was being prepared, and the hypothetical outbreak of World War III with Western states. The Soviets were aware of the fact that the Allies had devised plans for a war with the USSR. Even if they did not know details of Operation Unthinkable, prepared on Churchill’s request with the intention of liberating Poland among other things, or if they viewed such a plan as very unlikely to be put into practice, the very fact that such plans existed only boosted the Soviet authorities’ feeling of constant threat from a new war. ⁷

This is why it was decided that the area in the vicinity of the possible future front should be cleansed of any forms of armed underground ahead of the start of the Potsdam Conference. Although the content of the relevant order from the General Command is not known—the latter has most probably not been declassified so far—it can be assumed, taking the course of events into account, that the order instructed the soldiers to carry out a series of actions targeting guerrilla fighters in a vast area of land stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, that is, in a belt of land making up the new Polish-Soviet borderland. In the territory incorporated into the USSR, the dragnet operations were to be carried out by NKVD troops temporarily backed by Red Army units. In the territory of post-war People’s Poland, three infantry divisions (1st, 3rd, and 9th) of the Polish “People’s” Army, which was subordinated to the Provisional Government of National Unity controlled by Moscow, were ordered to fight against the underground movement. By conducting a series of dragnet and “Cheka-military” operations, the Soviets intended to eliminate any form of resistance movement in this area. From this point of view, the roundup carried out in the Augustów Forest was merely a part of a more comprehensive cleansing operation. However, due to the fact that its perpetrators scrupulously followed their orders and due to its bloody epilogue, it was this particular operation that imprinted itself in the memory of residents of this region and other regions alike.

The 50th Army that had covered the combat trail from Bryansk to Königsberg ⁸ was entrusted with organizing a roundup in the Augustów Forest. Its commander, Lieutenant General Fyodor Ozerov, was one of the conquerors and later, commandants of Königsberg. ⁹ Given conditions in the USSR—Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship—there is no doubt that the 50th Army must have received this direct order from the commander of the 3rd Belarusian Front, that is, Marshal Ivan Bagramian, on the basis of recommendations from the commander in chief, that is, Joseph Stalin.

As many as four rifle corps (29th, 69th, 81st, and 124th) were used to carry out the operation. They included a total of eleven infantry divisions, additionally backed by the 2nd Armored Corps. This likely was a total of 45,000–50,000 soldiers. The size of these forces was huge, even if it is assumed that the Soviets really thought that a strong group of Polish guerrilla fighters operated in the Augustów Forest. ¹⁰

It remains unknown why the organizers of the Augustów roundup decided to use Red Army units alone. No NKVD troops were used, although they were responsible for ensuring security to the rear of the 3rd Belarusian Front and in principle were used to carry out this type of operation. Research conducted by the authors in the Russian State Military Archive showed that in June 1945, the 3rd Belarusian Front was covered by the 57th Division of NKVD Troops and several independently operating regiments: the 13th, 31st, 33rd, 86th, 132nd, and 217th regiments. Most of these units were involved in carrying out operations intended to “cleanse the territory of criminal, anti-Soviet elements,” albeit in different areas. In July 1945, the 57th NKVD Division maintained “security and order” by providing protection to bridges and railway lines in former East Prussia. On 1 July 1945, three regiments that were components of this Division were stationed in many different locations: the 369th rifle regiment—in Olsztyn, Orneta and Elbląg, the 370th rifle regiment—in Gołdap and Insterburg (nowadays: Cherniakhovsk), as well as in Konigsberg, and the 371st rifle regiment—in Rastembork (German Rastenburg, now Kętrzyn), Pisz, and Bartoszyce. As regards the aforementioned six independently operating regiments, at that time they were “busy” fighting against the underground movement in the territory of Lithuania. ¹¹

Pursuant to recommendations from Marshal Bagramian, on 11 July 1945 Ozerov issued “Operation order no. 005/OP” instructing his soldiers to carry out “an operation involving combing the forest and the inhabited places” in the counties of Augustów and Suwałki on 12–18 July. The whole area was divided into sections to be searched one at a time. The staff of the 50th Army was stationed in Suwałki, and the operational command in Augustów. The Soviets estimated that the “Home Army criminal groups” operating in the forests were composed of as many as eight thousand individuals and were additionally reinforced by artillery. In fact, the underground forces were ten times smaller, composed of five hundred guerrilla fighters at best. General Ozerov ordered the soldiers to

thoroughly comb the entire Augustów Forest area, each inhabited place and all villages and towns in the given area . . . To destroy points of resistance found in the forest, alongside block houses, dugouts and other buildings, as well as caches of arms. ¹²

The area was to be combed by two lines of Red Army soldiers, and the distance between the soldiers in line formation was to be from six to eight meters.

The army was expected to carry out this operation during the daytime, whereas at night the entire encircled region was to be protected by a dense network of posts and guards, with a network of patrols between them. The point was to prevent anyone from escaping this trap. Red Army soldiers were told to “stop all individuals spotted in the forest without exceptions, any armed man, any suspected criminal, as well as individuals suspected of offering assistance to criminals.” ¹³ In practice, this meant that SMERSH units detained and checked all men aged sixteen to sixty. Individuals whose names were on the proscription lists compiled by the local communist security apparatus were arrested first. It is worth noting that all detainees were to be transferred to the SMERSH counterintelligence unit.

The operation started on 12 July as planned. This is how Lieutenant Aleksander Kuczyński, the head of the County Office of Public Security in Augustów, described the events:

On 10 July, a large number of Soviet troops came to the Augustów county with the task of eliminating criminal gangs operating in the county’s territory. On 11-12 July, I made lists of registered active members of the Home Army, in the Russian language version, and I translated several more important documents. I gave these materials to the Soviet military staff and I provided them with information about the approximate whereabouts of these criminal groups. On 12 July, the troops launched their actions, in this operation assisted by UB clerks. ¹⁴

On 12 July, having spent the entire day combing the indicated areas, Red Army soldiers detained at least 820 suspected individuals, including sixty-two Home Army members. On the next day, another 889 individuals or more were detained. In the following days, Red Army soldiers detained between three hundred and nine hundred individuals daily. This is the lowest estimated number—daily figures provided by the Soviets in their reports are frequently mutually exclusive; the final figures indicated that a total of more than seven thousand individuals were detained during the entire operation. Arrests were made in local towns as well, for example, in Augustów. This is how Helena Kondracka recalls the arrest of her husband Paweł on 14 July 1945:

They came at night, they surrounded the house, holding machine guns in their hands. Three of them banged on the door, shouting loud to us to open it. Without turning the light on, we checked and found out that we had no chance of escaping, so I opened the door. One of them ordered my husband to get dressed quickly. They said they were taking him for an interrogation and that he will come back. . . . I yelled that they were taking innocent people—those criminals, but one of them said to me: watch what you’re saying. ¹⁵

If anyone managed to escape, they had to take into account that their family would be exposed to repression. In Białogóra, district of Giby, detainee Stanisław Cieślukowski asked to be allowed to change clothes and—taking advantage of the security guard’s inattention when the guard went outside to have a cigarette—he escaped and hid in the nearby lake in the rushes, breathing through a straw. The Soviets started to look for the fugitive. Cieślukowski’s daughter Maria Krzywak recalled,

The soldiers dispersed in all directions. One of them waded waist-deep into the water, straight into my Father, however at that time someone on the road shouted something, as a result of which he turned away and changed his direction, bypassing my Father . . . they took my stepbrother from the backyard—he was my Father’s son from his first marriage . . . just because his first name was the same as my Father’s—Stanisław. Staś was fifteen at that time. ¹⁶

In the first days of the operation, the Soviets had already managed to defeat a guerrilla fighter unit commanded by Władysław Stefanowski a.k.a. “Grom” ¹⁷ near Lake Brożane. On 15 July, at nine in the morning, soldiers of the 1019th rifle regiment moving in line formation near Lake Brożane clashed with a group of guerrilla fighters. Following a brief exchange of fire, the Poles retreated to a marshland, but the Red Army soldiers did not intend to abandon the pursuit. The commander of the 1st battalion of the 1019th regiment ordered a reserve platoon to surround Lake Brożane from the south-west. Just as they expected, the Red Army soldiers spotted guerrilla fighters on the lake shore and exchanged fire with them. This enabled the main portion of the 1019th rifle regiment to surround the Poles. As a result of this skirmish, three “criminals” were killed and fifty-seven others were captured, including the group’s leader. ¹⁸

The arrests decimated the group of underground activists. Due to the scale of the dragnet operations being carried out, no resistance was possible, which is why members of the underground movement, which was formed after the Home Army was disbanded, told the guerrilla fighters to conceal their weapons and to hide out in bunkers and other shelters.

Although in theory the operation ended on 19 July, in the following days up to 25 July final cleansing actions were carried out in the area. Considerably fewer individuals were detained; however, for example, on 20 July, the soldiers of the 50th Army detained another 225 suspected individuals, including twenty-eight members of the underground movement. ¹⁹

It is worth noting that the Soviet troops were assisted by a small operational group of Polish Army soldiers. ²⁰ On 12 July 1945, a 110-strong sub-unit composed of soldiers of the 1st regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, commanded by Lieutenant Maksymilian Schnepf, was sent to Suwałki region. In the following days, it carried out operations in villages and towns near Suwałki and arrested at least twenty-five individuals. It was revealed that “a portion of this group turned out to be members of the Home Army, one of them collaborating with the Gestapo, and the remaining detainees were individuals evading military service.” ²¹ Between 19 and 23 July, a group of Polish Army soldiers carried out cleansing operations in the following villages: Wiżajny, Rowele, Mierkinie, Płaszczurek, Rudka, Tarta, Kamionka, and so on. The following is known about the results of these actions:

sixteen individuals, who were members of the Home Army’s criminal group, were taken to the Office of Public Security. Next, this group carried out actions in the vicinity of the border with the Lithuanian Republic near Puńsk. During these operations, eleven criminals were detained, who most likely had come from Lithuania to carry out acts of sabotage in Poland. One criminal was killed because he refused to surrender. One rifle was confiscated from the detained eleven criminals. After twelve days of operation, on 25 July the group returned to its barracks with no losses. ²²

The roundup in the Augustów Forest resulted in the detention of a total of 7,049 individuals. Following interrogations and checks, that is, the so-called filtration, those individuals with regard to whom no materials confirming their participation in underground activity were found were released. As a consequence, 5,115 individuals were released, including 1,171 Lithuanians. The remaining detainees were subjected to a more thorough investigation to find out whether there were any “enemies of the people” among them. ²³

When assessing the results of this operation, the commander of the Lithuanian district of NKVD Border Troops Major General Bychkovskii came to the conclusion that “as a result of operations carried out by Red Army units in order to cleanse the Suwałki county of Home Army criminal groups and other hostile elements,” guerrilla fighter units “were completely crushed, most of their members were killed or captured alive, and as regards the remaining members of the crushed criminal groups, they either came out of their hideouts or dispersed.” ²⁴ Leaving aside the language, one has to recognize this opinion was close to the truth. After the Soviet-led pacification, the fight against communism in this area was continued by small groups of guerrilla fighters only.

On 20 July 1945, on the orders of Lavrentii Beria and Viktor Abakumov, Major General Ivan Gorgonov, ²⁵ deputy head of SMERSH’s Main Directorate, traveled by plane to Treuburg [Olecko] accompanied by a group of experienced counterintelligence officers to decide the fate of the people who had been arrested in the Augustów Forest and were considered “criminals.” First, Gorgonov met with the head of the SMERSH Directorate at the 3rd Belarusian Front, Lieutenant General Pavel Zelenin. ²⁶ After this meeting, they decided the fate of the detainees by ordering that all those whose connections with the underground movement were confirmed in a more or less credible way, should simply be shot dead. They communicated their proposal to the head of SMERSH, General Viktor Abakumov, who then requested consent from the USSR’s People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentii Beria. A telegram from Abakumov indicates that among the 1,934 detainees, there were 844 “criminals,” of whom 252 were considered to be Lithuanians (most probably some of them were Poles evacuated from the Vilnius region), and that they were handed over to NKVD-NKGB of the Lithuanian SSR. It was found that among the remaining 1,090 individuals, there were another 262 Lithuanians, who were handed over to Lithuania’s NKVD-NKGB for further investigation as well. Their fate is unknown.

Finally, on 21 July 1945, Gorgonov and Zelenin reported on 592 arrested “criminals” and 828 individuals who had not been checked by that time.

The telegram reads,

We are going to liquidate the criminals in the following way:

1. [We are going to] liquidate all revealed criminals, a total of 592 individuals. An operational team and a battalion of the SMERSH Directorate troops at the 3^rd Belarusian Front will be formed; we have already tested them during numerous counterintelligence actions.

Operational staffers and the line-up of the battalion will receive detailed instructions regarding the manner in which the criminals should be liquidated.

2. During the operation, measures will be taken to prevent the criminals from escaping. ²⁷

In the following days, the Soviets must have received Moscow’s consent for carrying out the extermination operation—it was exactly at that moment that every trace of those people captured in 1945 vanished—exactly as in the case of the victims of the Katyn massacre who “disappeared” in spring 1940 and—as we know from documents revealed as late as 1992—were executed at that time.

A decision was made to sentence 592 Poles, arbitrarily considered “criminals,” to death without trial. The Poles were taken away to an undisclosed location and killed there. Although the location and the details of the mass execution are not known, there is no doubt that it was carried out in a manner so efficient that none of the several hundred detainees managed to escape. The victims’ place of burial was kept secret as well—despite numerous efforts their grave has thus far not been found. It is likely located on the borderland, on the former USSR’s side. The victims’ families were not informed about the fate of their loved ones. It was their efforts, however, which made it possible to reveal and comprehend the extent of the crime. Relatives of the victims prepared, namely, a first list of missing persons and they continued to search for new information related to their relatives, notwithstanding possible repressions which such activity provoked in communist-ruled Poland. The document found by Nikita Petrov, from their perspective, only confirmed their own suppositions about the quick execution of the captive soldiers and civilians; it was the proverbial dot over the “i” in their research.

We also do not know the result of the filtration process of the remaining prisoners; therefore, it remains unknown whether there was another group of detainees in addition to the aforementioned 592 individuals. In theory, this additional group could have even included more than eight hundred individuals. The telegram Nikita Petrov found in the Moscow archive reads, “The remaining 828 detained individuals will be checked over the period of five days and all revealed criminals will be liquidated in the same manner. We will report the number of criminals revealed within this group of detainees.” ²⁸

As can be seen in the light of these data, although the execution was perpetrated by SMERSH officers, it was mainly units of the Red Army that were responsible for the course of events during the roundup. However, it was Major General Gorgonov and the head of the Counterintelligence Directorate at the 3rd Belarusian Front, Lieutenant General Pavel Zelenin, who were immediately responsible for carrying out the murder in an efficient manner.

In the same period when the 50th Army was carrying out the roundup in the Augustów Forest, six NKVD regiments that were protecting the rear of the 3rd Belarusian Front became involved in fighting the Lithuanian underground movement in Lithuania. The 13th NKVD regiment carried out “Cheka-military” operations first in the Birzai region, and—starting from the beginning of August—closer to the Polish border, in the Marijampole region and in the Lazdijai region. The 31st and the 33rd NKVD regiments, alongside the 220th regiment, carried out operations in the Vilnius region and in the Trakai region, and later also in the Kaunas region and in the Raseiniai region (one interesting and at the same time surprising fact is worth noting: there regiments were operationally subordinated to both the 1st Baltic Front and—for unknown reasons—the 1st Ukrainian Front, whose operational area covered southern Poland, southern Germany, and Bohemia). The 86th regiment carried out operations in several locations including near Merkine, the 132nd regiment—in the Rokiskis region, and the 217th NKVD regiment—first in Ukmerge and then in the Siauliai region; they were operationally subordinated to the troops protecting the rear of the Leningrad Front. ²⁹

The 1st Infantry Division of the Polish Army (subordinated to the communist-dominated Polish government) carried out a series of roundups all over the Białystok voivodeship. Between 1 June and 15 July, the Division carried out roundups and searches in forty-nine villages and towns, and “briefly checked” another 103 villages and towns. Three individuals associated with the underground movement were killed and 187 were arrested. In the following weeks, the number of detained members of the underground movement increased further. On the night of 21 to 22 August, the city of Siedlce was combed and twenty individuals were detained.

So far, historians have not turned their attention to the fact that the orders received by the Red Army units carrying out the roundup in the Augustów Forest and by the Polish Army units ordered to carry out anti-guerrilla actions in Białystok region were similar. One can conclude from documents that on 14 June 1945, in the order specifying the character of the anti-guerrilla actions, the deputy commander in chief of the Polish Army, General Marian Spychalski, ³⁰ wrote in order 00123 issued by the High Command of the Polish Army:

2. During the action against the criminals do not detain the following individuals: a) the leadership and officers of sabotage command, b) armed saboteurs putting up resistance. 3. When encircling villages—during the action intended to cleanse specific areas of criminal groups—do not use collective responsibility and do not cause unnecessary and harmful damage, and strive to annihilate criminals and saboteurs by liquidating the individuals specified in point 2 in combat, and bring all the remaining ones to military courts. 4. When detaining unarmed suspected members of criminal groups, bring to military courts not only these suspected individuals but also every individual who provided them with shelter or any other assistance, including their closest family members. ³¹

The ban on detaining those who did not present themselves and who put up armed resistance potentially could have brought about similar results, that is, mass executions. This ban should be viewed as an obvious encouragement to the perpetrators to kill almost all of these guerrilla fighters in a lawless manner and without trial. The fact that in the area where the Polish Army operated no mass executions were carried out resulted from the private soldiers’ reluctance to act against guerrilla fighters. The communist leaders had noticed that the soldiers were reluctant to fight against the guerrilla movement; they frequently deserted and even went over to the other camp ³² . Mass executions of detained members of the underground movement formed after the Home Army was disbanded,would have only aggravated this reluctance. To counteract this attitude, brutal measures were taken. On 11 July 1945, three soldiers of the 1st infantry regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, who had joined the underground, were publicly executed. It was as a result of the consistent use of such methods that in time the Polish Army changed into an obedient tool of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR). It is self-evident that the Red Army soldiers of the 50th Army had no doubts of this type. For them, the arrested individuals were complete strangers. Therefore, they carried out the orders they had received in a mercilessly efficient manner. As a consequence, the course of the operation was so bloody only in the counties of Suwałki and Augustów, where it was carried out directly by Red Army units.

During communist rule in Poland, that is, in 1945–1989, the subject of the several hundred residents of Suwałki region who had “gone missing” was forbidden and censored. The issue was considered dangerous to the system because the perpetrators of the cleansing operation were Soviet soldiers, something which stood in contradiction to the official propaganda narrative presenting the Red Army only in a favorable light. The issue was mentioned in official publications only in a disguised form—for example, one book accused the Polish underground movement of carrying out attacks against Soviet sappers, who were allegedly clearing the area of mines as part of a humanitarian mission. It was falsely suggested that the perpetrators of these attacks were tried in the USSR in accordance with the law of war. ³³ However, despite pressure from the state institutions, the victims’ families made repeated attempts to learn the fate of those who had “gone missing.”

These families’ voices were particularly loud in the final months of the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL), when political repression subsided. In 1987, the Citizens’ Committee for the Search for the Residents of Suwałki Region Who Went Missing in July 1945 was established. This is also when preparations for the exhumation of graves in the forest near Giby were launched; however, it turned out that German soldiers had been buried there rather than Poles. The issue was publicized ahead of the 1989 parliamentary elections (Poland’s first partly democratic elections since World War II), and the victims’ families received support from representatives of the Solidarity Citizens’ Committee who ran in the elections in this region, that is, the well-known film director and Academy Award winner Andrzej Wajda and Professor Bronisław Geremek, an outstanding medievalist, lecturer at College de France, and close advisor to Solidarność leader Lech Wałęsa. As a consequence, the issue reached the Polish public. This triggered the publication of first books to discuss the crime openly.

It soon turned out that this execution was the biggest crime perpetrated on Poles after World War II, which obviously attracted the attention of public opinion. However, it seems that it was only when the Augustów roundup was presented in the context of other acts of repression perpetrated at that time, that its uniqueness was recognized. Although brutal pacifications were carried out by communists all over Poland, the Augustów roundup was the only operation to have resulted in such a huge number of victims. Due to the scale of the crime, that is, at least around six hundred individuals shot dead, the Augustów roundup should be viewed as an extraordinary event. In addition, although during the war and immediately afterward the Soviets carried out hundreds and thousands of anti-guerrilla operations, sometimes with the involvement of Red Army units, most frequently these units were accompanied by strong units of NKVD troops. Meanwhile, in the Augustów region, the guerrilla fighters were hunted and detained by Red Army soldiers supervised by SMERSH officers and in cooperation with the UB.

The magnitude of the crime—the annihilation of several hundred individuals living in two relatively small counties—came as a shock to the local community. The large number of people shot dead in the operation is surprising. There is no doubt that the murder in the Augustów Forest was carried out in a cold-blooded manner, most likely resulting from an earlier decision probably made by Stalin himself. The execution of “useless vermin” was an element of the logic of totalitarian thinking about the state as a garden from which everyone viewed as a weed should be mercilessly eliminated. The Soviets did not hesitate to physically eliminate all those whom they considered a threat, even a potential one. Interestingly, the Soviet leadership tried to hide operations of this type from public opinion, which is why they, for example, always took care to conceal the victims’ bodies. A few analogies are worth considering in this context. Following the battle of Hurby which took place in April 1944 in Volhynia, between NKVD troops and units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, official NKVD figures indicated that two thousand guerrillas were killed, whereas members of the underground movement reported having lost 136 fellow fighters. Due to the fact that in internal documentation one’s own losses are usually reported in their true proportions, the question is whether the Soviets overestimated the losses suffered by the enemy so much, or whether they considered all those killed—both guerrilla fighters and civilians—as members of the underground movement. Members of the underground argued that the Soviets killed around a hundred civilians; however, it cannot be ruled out that the actual number was much higher. The situation was similar during a roundup carried out by the NKVD and the Red Army near Rawa Ruska in August 1944. The Soviets estimated Ukraine’s losses at 625 individuals. ³⁴ Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army admitted that it had lost a mere ten individuals who were killed and around twenty wounded. ³⁵ In this case too it seems likely that the reported number of killed guerrilla fighters included a certain number of civilians who had been captured and then shot dead.

In some Soviet documents, the fact that the crime had happened was concealed even in official reports. In such instances, in official statistics the victims of the execution were concealed and presented as individuals killed in combat. Future studies should focus on finding out whether the Augustów roundup was an incidental event that happened accidentally or perhaps whether it was a “standard” practice used by Soviet troops during World War II when “combing” the area close to the front line. If this was the case, it is the timing and the location of the crime (when fighting in Europe already ended on the territory of Poland) that should be considered unique, rather than the simple fact that it took place.

The magnitude of the execution is another factor that shocked public opinion, in particular given that it happened in the first months following the end of the war in Europe. It seems legitimate to argue that the Augustów roundup was the biggest single mass execution carried out in Europe in the period between the executions of captured Ustashe and their families carried out in 1945 by Tito’s Partisans near Bleiburg (tens of thousands of victims) and the killing of ethnic Italians in Venezia Giulia, and the massacres that happened in the former Yugoslav republics in the 1990s. It is worth noting that in response to the attack on German soldiers carried out in the streets of Rome, during the well-known Ardeatine massacre in March 1944, “a mere” 330 individuals were shot dead. Another known execution is that of American soldiers in Malmedy in the Ardennes region in which a total of eighty-four American prisoners of war were killed. In the case of the execution carried out in the Augustów Forest, the number of those killed is much higher, yet this execution is almost completely unknown outside Poland. It is worth noting that the decision pursuant to which suspected members of the Home Army were sentenced to death (and it is likely that many of them were not Home Army members) was not based on any pretended rule of law. No trial was held (not even a show trial) in which the suspects’ guilt would be proved. In fact, the decision whether a specific individual was to be taken away and shot dead, or not, lay in the hands of the investigators. Even if the victim had casual contact with underground organizations, this was sufficient to issue a death sentence. In this case, this was an administrative decision issued by Soviet bodies.

No sociological research has been ever conducted to find out whether Russian society is aware of the Augustów roundup. It can be assumed that this crime is practically unknown to Russian society. A survey carried out by the Levada Center in June 2020, commissioned by the Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding in connection with research focused on the much better known Katyn massacre (during which twenty-two thousand captured Polish officers and representatives of the Polish elite arrested by Soviet occupation authorities were shot dead without trial on the orders of the top-level leadership of the USSR in Katyn, Kharkiv, Mednoye, and other places) showed that 54 percent of Russians have heard of this massacre, with 43 percent of them believing that Germany organized the killing and 26 percent that it was the USSR. At the same time, 81 percent of Russians believe that the Red Army liberated Poland. ³⁶

The historical policy of Russia aims with increasing intensity to relativize all known crimes of Stalin. In 2017 President Vladimir Putin said: ³⁷

Stalin is a product of his era. You can try to demonize him however much you like. [ . . ] There was such a person in history as Oliver Cromwell—he was a bloodthirsty man who arrived in power on the wave of a revolution and he turned into a dictator and tyrant. And monuments to him are still scattered all across Great Britain. Napoleon is deified. What did he do? He used the surge of revolutionary zeal and arrived in power. And he not only restored the monarchy, he pronounced himself Emperor. And he led France to a national catastrophe, to utter defeat. [ . . .] I think that excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the ways to attack the Soviet Union and Russia.

Thus, the Russian authorities are not interested in revealing new facts that would weigh on Stalin’s image and would support the thesis, opposed by Russian diplomacy, that the Red Army did not bring freedom to Poland and Central Europe. It should come as no surprise that the government of the Russian Federation has never condemned the Augustów roundup. The General Prosecutor’s Office refused to rehabilitate its victims, arguing that they had not been sentenced by Soviet courts, nor were they subject to decisions issued by Soviet administrative bodies. No documents have been revealed which would enable an analysis of the decision-making process that resulted in the killing of these individuals or would help in the identification of their burial places. As a result, the memory of these events remains one of the unhealed wounds in Polish–Russian relations

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Map 1

Map by Anna Bilny-Sachanowicz