Over 20,000 Polish officers, police and civilians taken prisoner during the 1939 partitioning of Poland by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were massacred in the Katyn forest, as well as in prisons and other locations, by the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. The judge said the 1926 Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic should be applied to the crime committed in 1940.