On 31 July 1981, members of the Civic Committee Building the Katyń Monument set up the first Katyń monument in Poland in the Katyń Valley. It was a stone cross with a tallness of 4.5 meters, dated 1940, an eagle in the crown, a plaque with the inscription Katyń and letters WP and posts with the names of NKVD camps, where Poles were imprisoned after russian aggression against Poland in 1939. That same night the cross was dismantled and exported by the PRL safety Service. SB besides removed the temporary birch cross and the foundation stone and erection act placed under the construction of the fresh monument in 1981.
Four years later, in 1985, the communist authorities installed a white granite cross of 4 metres in this place, with the inscription: “Polish soldiers to the victims of Nazi fascism resting in Katyn land – 1941”. This provoked outrage and many critical comments, especially in the West Germany, due to the attribution of crimes to the Germans.
On 1 August 1988, thousands of people gathered again in the Katyn Valley, and the government's Katyn monument was adorned with the Polish national flag with the inscription "We request the fact – Katyn 1940". In April 1989 a fresh inscription was unveiled on the monument, which read: “Polish officers murdered in Katyn”. In 1989, the Council for the Protection of the Memory of Combat and Martyrdom – at the appeal of the Warsaw Katyń household – added to the inscriptions of the name of the 3 russian POW camps: Kozielska, Ostashkowa and Starobielska, and the date 1940. The letters installed in the day were broken at night by alleged "unknown perpetrators".
The Social Monument, which was dismantled in 1981, was re-established in the Katyń Valley in 1995. On 31 July 1995, a ceremony of authoritative unveiling of both monuments, social and government was held. So there are now 2 monuments in the Katyń Valley in the form of crosses: social ones, which were set in the Katyń Valley twice (for the first time in 1981 and for the second time in 1995), and government ones, erected in 1985, originally with another inscriptions. Due to the common minute of unveiling, both monuments are frequently treated as 1 monument and called the Katyn Cross. Source: IPN
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