Katyn massacre

Katyn is a rural locality in Smolensky District of Smolensk Oblast, Russia, located approximately 20 kilometers to the west of Smolensk. It is... situated to the west of the city of Smolensk and circa 60 km from the Russian borders with Belarus. It has a station on the Berlin-Warsaw-Minsk-Moscow international railway line. Before the World War I Gnezdovo with the Katyn forest belonged to the Koźliński family. In XIX century Piotr Koźliński married to Leokadia Lefftreu, who was the daughter of director of the English railway construction company in Russia. Under the marriage articles Gniezdovo and Katyn became a co-owned by the British. The Katyn Forest in the vicinity of the village was the site of the Katyn massacre in the time of World War II, in which captured Polish officers and other citizens were killed. Despite claims by the Poles, the Soviet Union blamed Nazi Germany for the mass murders and attempted to hide their involvement, going as far as to ban all mention of the Katyn massacre in the USSR.
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World War II, or the Second World War , was a global war that was under way by 1939 and ended in 1945. It involved a vast majority of the... world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, with more than 100 million people serving in military units. In a state of "total war", the major participants placed their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by significant events involving the mass death of civilians, including the Holocaust and the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare, it resulted in 50 million to over 70 million fatalities. These deaths make the war the deadliest conflict in human history. Although Japan was already at war with China in 1937, the world war is generally said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and most of the countries of the British Empire and Commonwealth.
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