The anonymous author asserted that Zarubin and his deputy Markov were directly implicated in the bloody occupation of eastern Poland during the Nazi-Soviet alliance of 1939-41 and the murder of some 15,000 Polish soldiers--officers and NCOs, regulars and reservists--captured by the Red Army. The letter provided accurate and early confirmation of Soviet complicity in the executions in the [[Katyn Massacre|Katyn Forest]] were German occupation forces in April 1943 discovered a mass grave containing 4,300 Polish corpses. Only someone "in the know" could have revealed that Polish soldiers had been interned at Kozelsk and Starobelsk and that Polish soldiers had been killed "near Smolensk." This information was known to only a handful of people in 1943 and was carefully concealed for almost 50 years by Soviet authorities. | The anonymous author asserted that Zarubin and his deputy Markov were directly implicated in the bloody occupation of eastern Poland during the Nazi-Soviet alliance of 1939-41 and the murder of some 15,000 Polish soldiers--officers and NCOs, regulars and reservists--captured by the Red Army. The letter provided accurate and early confirmation of Soviet complicity in the executions in the [[Katyn Massacre|Katyn Forest]] were German occupation forces in April 1943 discovered a mass grave containing 4,300 Polish corpses. Only someone "in the know" could have revealed that Polish soldiers had been interned at Kozelsk and Starobelsk and that Polish soldiers had been killed "near Smolensk." This information was known to only a handful of people in 1943 and was carefully concealed for almost 50 years by Soviet authorities. |