Parade of Shame, September 22, 1939: the day the Wehrmacht and Red Army jointly celebrated their invasion of Poland. It's a date the Kremlin prefers to stay silent about. The joint German-Soviet military parade took place in Brest on September 22nd, 1939. German General Heinz Guderian and Soviet brigade commander Semyon Krivoshein reviewed the troops together. The city and its fortress were handed over to the USSR along the partition line agreed upon in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. On September 1, Germany attacked Poland from the west. On September 17, Soviet troops invaded from the east. The two regimes divided the Polish state into two occupation zones. On the German side, mass repression quickly began against the Polish elite, clergy, teachers and other members of the intelligentsia. The goal was to destroy Polish statehood for good. Immediately after German troops entered, special SS operational groups (Einsatzgruppen) began mass executions from prepared lists. In Pomerania alone, during the so-called Piaśnica massacre in the fall of 1939, the Germans shot around 14,000 people in a forest near Gdansk. More than 40,000 members of the intelligentsia were murdered just in the first months of the occupation. Historians note that until the summer of 1941, the Soviet NKVD and the Nazi Gestapo even held joint conferences to coordinate action against the Polish military resistance. On the Soviet side, about 250,000 Polish servicemen were taken prisoner. Soldiers and police officers were sent to special NKVD camps — Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov. In the spring of 1940, Stalin personally signed an order to shoot the 22,000 Polish prisoners who had been held in those camps as well as a number of prisons in Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine. Many of the victims were later found in secret mass graves in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. The POWs were also murdered in Kharkiv, Kalinin, and prisons in western Ukraine and Belarus. Forced deportations of Poles were also carried out at the same time. In 1940–1941, about 320,000 Poles were deported to special settlements and Gulag camps in the Russian Far East, Siberia and Kazakhstan. Many of them didn't make it back alive. Today, Russia is desperately trying to omit any mentions of the joint military parade with the Germans in Brest. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is presented as a “forced step,” the invasion of September 17th as a “liberation campaign.” Russian state propaganda prefers to focus less on what was happening during the two years that Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany 1939-1941 and instead claims that the war only started with Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.