Winners A Novel

In early 1943, the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn forest revealed the bodies of thousands of Polish officers, each executed with a bullet to the back of the head. This horrific finding ignited a global controversy, with Nazi Germany proclaiming it a Soviet crime and the Soviet Union immediately denouncing it as vile Nazi propaganda. For nearly five decades, the true perpetrators of this atrocity remained officially unacknowledged, shrouded in a deliberate campaign of denial.

Alexandra Viatteau's Katyn: The Truth About a War Crime meticulously uncovers the documented reality of this event. The book details how, in April and May of 1940, on direct orders from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet NKVD executed approximately 22,000 Polish prisoners of war, primarily officers, captured after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939. Viatteau analyzes the systematic nature of this crime and the extensive efforts to conceal it, tracing the long and arduous struggle for recognition until Moscow officially admitted its culpability in 1990, subsequently releasing incriminating evidence in 1992. This work offers a comprehensive account of a pivotal World War II crime, revealing the historical truth behind one of the 20th century's most enduring deceptions.