After Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, slaughtered between 10,000 and 40,000 political prisoners in Western Ukraine in only eight days, a massacre that had been coordinated and planned by Soviet authorities.
The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 is important for several reasons. First, although it is one of the greatest atrocities committed by the Soviet state, the Massacre is largely unknown. Second, the Massacre is critical to an understanding of state-sponsored mass killings in the twentieth century and to human rights violations more generally. Third, the Massacre is central to making sense of Ukrainian and Polish attitudes toward World War II, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Jews. How nationally conscious Ukrainians and Poles responded to World War II and the Holocaust cannot be understood without an appreciation of the magnitude of the trauma of the Massacre of 1941.