Major General Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin and his execution companions carried out numerous atrocious mass executions during The Great Purge and World War II.

Major General Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin and his execution companions carried out numerous atrocious mass executions during The Great Purge and World War II.

Blokhin served as the chief executioner of the NKVD during Stalins reign. He was personally chosen by Stalin already in 1926.

Executing thousands of prisoners by his own hand, his most notable mass murder took place during the Katýn Massacre in 1940 in 5 March, where he personally executed around 7,000 Polish prisoners.

The total amount of deaths during the massacre reached up to over 20,000. The prisoners consisted of military personnel taken as POWs during the invasion of Poland in 1939, police officers, landowners, factory owners, saboteurs, lawyers, officials, priests and intelligentsia.

Blokhin is said to have murdered 300 people per night with his own effective system. The prisoners were individually led to a small chamber for identification, handcuffed, then led into the execution room next door.

The room had padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose to wash away all the blood, and a log wall. The prisoner was led inside without any further information, Blokhin stood hidden behind the door, waiting, then shot them in the head from behind.

Blokhin had a briefcase full of his own German Walther pistols, which he liked better than the standard-issued Soviet TT-30. The use of a German pistol would also provide deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later.

This is exactly what happened. During their own mass murdering way through Poland, the Germans discovered the graves from the Katýn Massacre, in 1943. The Soviet government quickly blamed the Germans for the massacre, and continued to do so until the fall of the Soviet Union, when the secret documents about the massacre came to light and revealed the true story.

In 2010, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration that blamed Stalin and the Soviet officials for the massacre.

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