On 13 April 1943 the Katyn Massacre was revealed to the world via German radio. While Nazi forces are guilty of some truly horrendous events before and during WWII, in this case they were actually the ones bringing an enormous atrocity against a protected group to light. That group was Polish prisoners of war, primarily officers and NCOs, who were systematically murdered and disposed of by Soviet Security Forces in April of 1940. Declassified Soviet records put the total number of dead at 21,857, although the number could be higher. While the discovery of the mass graves was quickly transmitted and propagandized by the Germans, it took until 1990 before the Soviet Union officially admitted Soviet secret police responsibility for the act. The pictured weapon, a standard Soviet TT-33, was deliberately not used by the executioners even though it was their primary Army sidearm alongside the 1895 Nagant. The reasoning is brutally simple: The snappy recoil would become uncomfortable during the course of a long night of killing prisoners with shots to the back of the head (one individual is reported to have personally killed 7,000 POWs over 28 days). Instead Walther pistols in .25 ACP were used to deliver the killing blows. TT-33s would have been holstered at the side of line officers and commissars of the Red Army as they occupied “their half” of Poland after they conspired and schemed with Nazi Germany to invade and split the country. The pistol is visually quite similar to the Browning 1903, and uses a barrel system similar to that of the 1911. It fires a bottle-necked cartridge, the 7.62x25, which is nearly dimensionally identical to (but MUCH hotter than) the .30 Mauser cartridge fired from most C96s Produced in 1939 at the Tula Arsenal, this pre-Barbarossa pistol appears to have been used hard during WW2 and possibly beyond. The TT-33 was the official sidearm of the Soviet Army until 1952, when it was replaced by the Makarov. Even so variants were made by numerous Soviet influenced countries, and used by dozens of others Because of this, and our poor relations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, few were imported into the US before the fall of the Iron Curtain. The lack of added “import safety” and import mark, along with the non-refinished condition, make it likely that this weapon was brought back by an American GI from some foreign conflict.
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Jon K.Weapons collector, history buff, Army officer, Pug enthusiast. Archives
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