On the eastern front, the Red Army had advanced from the Ukraine into Romanian and Polish territory. Both Churchill and Roosevelt felt forced to take Stalin's side purely to maintain the alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. The Polish government in exile raised the fate of the thousands of missing Polish officers, nearly 22,000 of whom had been executed on Stalin and Beria's orders, 4,400 of them in the forest of Katyn. In 1940, at the time of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the NKVD secret police had tried to eliminate all potential opponents, including teachers, landowners, officers, lawyers and academics. Stalin's hatred of the country since their victory on the Vistula in the Soviet-Polish war of 1921 meant that he intended to dominate the country totally and even absorb the eastern part into the Soviet Union. In some cases, especially in Poland, hope was overshadowed by foreboding at what a Soviet occupation would mean.
In many cases they wanted to take liberation through into revolution and settle accounts with those who had collaborated or profited. Resistance groups in German-occupied countries across the continent burned with impatience. A great sense of expectancy dominated Europe in the spring of 1944.
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