hoover-katyn-exhibit-image-2010-november-19.jpg

The touring exhibition was at the Hoover Institution from November 30, 2010, through January 29, 2011.

After the the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Poland in September 1939, tens of thousands of Polish professional military officers and reservists, policemen, landowners, lawyers, doctors, educators, and civil servants—the political, social and intellectual elite of the area—were arrested. In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Communist Party Politburo ordered the execution of some 22,000 of those prisoners. The mass shootings, some of them carried out in the spring of 1940 in the Katyn forest near the Russian city of Smolensk, are remembered as the Katyn Forest Massacre. The touring exhibition, produced by Poland's Council for the Protection of the Memory of Struggle and Martyrdom, chronicles the genocide of Poland's elites carried out by the Soviet security service and attempts by communist leaders to bury, for half a century, the truth about this crime against humanity.

See related links
Hoover exhibit revisits mass murder of Polish soldiers in 1940
Giving voice to the voiceless

Upcoming Events

Thursday, November 12, 2026 4:30 PM PT
250_Graphic-Nov.png
25 Years After 9/11: The History And Future Of Surveillance, Technology, And Democracy
How does a free society use increasingly powerful technologies to protect itself without compromising the freedoms it exists to protect? Register To… Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Monday, November 16, 2026
Reading Adam Smith in North Korea An Insider's View of the State
The Northeast Asia History Working Group of the Hoover History Lab invites you to attend Reading Adam Smith in North Korea: An Insider's View of the… Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building
Tuesday, November 17, 2026
Rural America
Symposium On Domestic Rural Life And Institutions
Rural America encompasses diverse communities and experiences, shaped by a wide range of political, economic, social, and environmental forces. 
overlay image