You are now listening to World War 2 Stories. I'm your host Steve Matthews. Today, we're going to explore one of history's most chilling atrocities and the remarkable half-century conspiracy to conceal it from the world. This is the story of the Katyn Massacre – a crime so devastating and politically inconvenient that governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain would spend decades burying the truth alongside its victims.

In the spring of 1940, approximately 22,000 Polish military officers, police commanders, intellectuals, and civil servants were systematically executed with a single bullet to the back of the head. Their bodies were dumped into mass graves in the forests of western Russia. The perpetrators weren't the Nazis, as the world would be told for decades, but rather the Soviet NKVD – Stalin's secret police – acting on direct orders from the highest levels of Soviet leadership.

The subsequent cover-up would span fifty years, involve three superpowers, and demonstrate the brutal calculus of wartime alliances and Cold War politics. This is a story about how truth becomes the first casualty of war, and how sometimes, even the victors participate in burying history.

You are now listening to World War 2 Stories. I'm your host Steve Matthews. Today, we dive into one of the most morally complex and haunting episodes of the Second World War – a story that challenges our understanding of good and evil in wartime, tests the boundaries between humanity and military necessity, and raises profound questions about what we owe one another even in our darkest hours.

This is the story of the Laconia Incident – a World War II tragedy that began with an act of war, transformed into an unprecedented rescue mission, and ended with a controversial attack that would reshape submarine warfare for generations.

You are now listening to World War 2 Stories. I'm your host Steve Matthews. Today, I'm going to tell you about one of the most extraordinary battles of World War II - a battle so unusual, so contrary to everything we understand about that conflict, that it sounds like Hollywood fiction. Yet it happened.

In the final days of the war in Europe, American soldiers fought alongside former German Wehrmacht enemies to protect French VIP prisoners from fanatical SS troops. It was the only time during the war when Americans and Germans served as allies on the battlefield - a remarkable footnote to history that deserves far greater recognition.

This is the Battle of Castle Itter - a medieval fortress in the Austrian Alps that became the setting for an unlikely last stand as the Third Reich crumbled around it.