The NKVD prisoner massacres were a series of mass executions carried out by the Soviet NKVD secret police during World War II against political prisoners across Eastern Europe, primarily Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and other parts of the Soviet Union from which the Red Army was retreating following the Nazi German attack on the Soviet positions in occupied Poland, known as Operation Barbarossa.

The launch of Operation Barbarossa surprised the NKVD, whose jails and prisons in territories annexed by the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact were crowded with political prisoners. In occupied eastern Poland, the NKVD was given the responsibility of evacuating and liquidating over 140,000 prisoners (NKVD evacuation order No. 00803). In Ukraine and Western Belarus 60,000 people were forced to evacuate on foot.

“It was not only the numbers of the executed,” historian Yuri Boshyk writes of the murders, “but also the manner in which they died that shocked the populace. When the families of the arrested rushed to the prisons after the Soviet evacuation, they were aghast to find bodies so badly mutilated that many could not be identified. It was evident that many of the prisoners had also been tortured before death; others were killed en masse.”

Approximately two thirds of the total number of 150,000 prisoners were murdered; most of the rest were transported into the interior of the Soviet Union. The NKVD and the Red Army killed prisoners in many places from Poland to Crimea Immediately after the start of the German invasion, the NKVD commenced the execution of large numbers of prisoners in most of their prisons, and the evacuation of the remainder in death marches. Most of them were political prisoners, imprisoned and executed without a trial.

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