Acting on orders from the Politburo, members of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) executed thousands of Polish officers near the village of Katyn, not far from the Russian city of Smolensk, in the spring of 1940. The mass shootings were part of a larger action against Polish prisoners of war ordered by Stalin’s Politburo. The German Wehrmacht discovered the mass graves in April of 1943 and exploited the massacre in a big anti-Soviet propaganda campaign.