Tea at Trianon: The Katyn Massacre: When The USSR Purged 22,000 Polish Men

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, September 9, 2019

The Katyn Massacre: When The USSR Purged 22,000 Polish Men

From All That's Interesting:

And on March 5, 1940, Stalin signed an order to execute some 21,857 of these Poles:

“Members of various counter-revolutionary spy and sabotage organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish Army officers, government officials, and fugitives – [are] to be considered in a special manner with the obligatory sentence of capital punishment – shooting.”
In all, some 14,700 Polish servicemen and 11,000 Polish high-ranking civilians were rounded up with the intent to be executed in one of three locations: Katyn, Tver, or the prison of Kharkiv.

The men’s hands were bound behind their backs with wire and then they were summarily shot in the back of the head. Bulldozers had to dig the mass grave for the many thousands killed in Katyn in April and May. Meanwhile, in Tver, the men were individually shot in a soundproof room and their bodies were deposited into a truck outside. The most prolific executioner, Vassily Mikhailovich Blokhin, said he killed 6,000 men in just 28 days. (Read more.)