Vasili Blokhin was a Soviet Major-General who served as the chief executioner for the NKVD (Soviet s

Vasili Blokhin was a Soviet Major-General who served as the chief executioner for the NKVD (Soviet secret police).  Blokhin led a company of executioners that performed and supervised numerous mass executions during Stalin’s reign, most notably during the Great Purge and World War II. Vasili Blokhin is recorded as having personally executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including 7,000 condemned Polish POWs in one mass execution, making him the most prolific official executioner in world history.He has the most protracted mass murders by a single individual on record. On 27 April 1940, Blokhin secretly received the Order of the Red Banner from Joseph Stalin. In 1955, Blokhin sank into alcoholism, went insane, and died, with the official cause being “suicide.” In 1943, the government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest. The revelation led to the end of diplomatic relations between Moscow and the London-based Polish government-in-exile. The Soviet Union continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when the government officially acknowledged and condemned the event. -- source link

More pics about