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Following the Soviet invasion of Poland at the onset of World War II, in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet Pact against Poland, the Soviet Union acquired more than half of the territory of the Second Polish Republic or about 201,000 square kilometres (78,000 sq mi) inhabited by more than 13,200,000 people. [1]
[15] 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians were killed in the Katyn massacre, [2] [19] but thousands of others were victims of NKVD massacres of prisoners in mid-1941, before the German advance across the Soviet occupation zone. In total, the Soviets killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war.
Polish prisoners of war captured by the Red Army during the Soviet invasion of Poland. As a result of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers became prisoners of war. Official Soviet estimate for the number of POWs taken during th campaign was 190,584 and is treated as reliable by some historians. [3]
Warsaw Uprising; Part of Operation Tempest of the Polish Resistance and the Eastern Front of World War II: Clockwise from top left: Civilians construct an anti-tank ditch in Wola district; German anti-tank gun in Theatre Square; Home Army soldier defending a barricade; Ruins of Bielańska Street; Insurgents leave the city ruins after surrendering to German forces; Allied transport planes ...
Diplomatic relations were, however, re-established in 1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union forced Joseph Stalin to look for allies. Thus the military agreement from August 14 and subsequent Sikorski–Mayski Agreement from August 17, 1941, resulted in Stalin agreeing to declare the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in relation to Poland null and void, [29] and release tens of thousands ...
In response, Lithuanian police, who had murdered hundreds of Polish civilians since 1941, [179] increased its operations against the Poles, executing many Polish civilians; this further increased the vicious circle and the previously simmering Polish–Lithuanian conflict over the Vilnius Region deteriorated into a low-level civil war under ...
Tadeusz Piotrowski, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire has provided a reassessment of Poland's losses in World War II. Polish war dead included 5,150,000 victims of Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles and the Holocaust, the treatment of Polish citizens by occupiers included 350,000 deaths during the Soviet occupation in 1940 ...
Warsaw's downtown burning after an air raid by the Luftwaffe Polish Army soldier holding last remaining part of destroyed German bomber Heinkel He 111 in Warsaw, September 1939 (Kodachrome photography).