Whereas, on August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union secretly pledged nonaggression toward one another through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which they divided Poland between themselves; Whereas Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west on September 1, 1939, and the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on September 17, 1939; Whereas over 60,000 Polish soldiers died in combat defending Poland from these invasions; Whereas, after the Red Army invaded Poland, it captured thousands of Polish military personnel and civilians, many of whom had fled east from the Nazi invasion; Whereas the Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, took charge of the Polish prisoners from the Red Army and transferred them to the Kozelsk, Starobilsk, and Ostashkov internment camps in the western Soviet Union, where many were subject to lengthy interrogations; Whereas, on March 5, 1940, Soviet General Secretary Josef Stalin and three Soviet Politburo members signed an NKVD order to execute nearly 22,000 prisoners by shooting that also identified more than 10,000 additional Polish prisoners for possible execution; Whereas, in April and May 1940, the NKVD summarily executed the condemned Polish prisoners at several sites in the Soviet Union, including at the Katyn Forest west of Smolensk in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and buried them in mass graves; Whereas, in April 1943, occupying Nazi troops discovered eight mass graves in the Katyn Forest with the remains of many of those Polish prisoners; Whereas, following this discovery in the Katyn Forest, the mass executions by the Soviets of the Polish prisoners from all three camps became known as the Katyn Massacre; Whereas the 21,892 victims of the Katyn Massacre included military officers, chaplains, professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, journalists, and refugees, many of whom were military reservists who had been mobilized as a result of the Nazi invasion