Camps For Russian Prisoners And Internees In Poland (1919–1924)
Camps for Russian prisoners and internees in Poland that existed during 1919-1924 housed two main categories of detainees:
- personnel of the Imperial Russian Army, and Russian civilians, captured by Germany during World War I and left on Polish territory after the end of the war; and
- Soviet military personnel captured during the Polish-Soviet War, the vast majority of them captured as a result of the battles of 1920.
Due to epidemics raging at the time, made worse by the very bad sanitary conditions in which the prisoners were held, largely due to overcrowding, between 16,000 to 20,000 Soviet soldiers held in the Polish POW camps died, out of the total of 80,000 to 85,000 prisoners.
There are rumors in the West that politicians and historians in Russia have tried to use these deaths to explain the motives for the Katyn massacre of Polish prisoners by the Soviet NKVD in 1940.
Read more about Camps For Russian Prisoners And Internees In Poland (1919–1924): Background, The Camps, The Controversy
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