A document attesting to the origins of the Bykovnia victims was found by the Polish émigré historians in Nazi German archives after the war . Polish researchers estimate that , apart from the Soviet victims of the Great Terror , the site might be the final resting place of 3,435 Polish officers captured by the Red Army during the Soviet invasion of Poland together with Nazi Germany in 1939 , most of whom were executed in the spring of 1940 with over 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn massacre . However , as the Soviet authorities denied responsibility , there was no way to confirm that the victims of the Stalinist purges were indeed buried there . During the Soviet era the existence of the site was brought up to authorities numerous times with the most famous incident occurring in 1962 . The Ukrainian poet Vasyl Symonenko was beaten up by law enforcement agents and died in hospital from kidney failure soon after
Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre
Bykivnia graves