What happened in Katyn
In the spring of 1940, in the forest near the village of Katyn, 18 km west of Smolensk, as well as in a number of prisons and camps throughout the country, thousands of captured Polish citizens, mostly officers, were shot by the Soviet NKVD within a few weeks. The executions, the decision on which was made by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in March 1940, took place not only near Katyn, but the term "Katyn execution" is applied to them in general, since about executions in Smolensk region became known in the first place.
In total, according to data declassified in the 1990s, NKVD officers shot 21,857 Polish prisoners in April-May 1940. According to the Russian Chief Military Prosecutor's Office, released in 2004 in connection with the closure of the official investigation, the NKVD filed cases against 14,542 Poles, while documenting the death of 1,803 people.
The Poles executed in the spring of 1940 were taken prisoner or arrested a year earlier, among (according to various sources) from 125 to 250 thousand Polish military personnel and civilians, whom the Soviet authorities, after the occupation of the eastern territories of Poland in the autumn of 1939, considered "unreliable" and were moved to 8 specially created camps on the territory of the USSR. Most of them were soon either released to their homes, or sent to the Gulag or to a settlement in Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan, or (in the case of residents of the western regions of Poland) transferred to Germany.
However, thousands former officers Polish army, former employees of the Polish police and intelligence agencies, members of Polish nationalist counter-revolutionary parties, members of exposed counter-revolutionary insurgent organizations, defectors, etc., the head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, proposed to consider them "hardened, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power" and apply capital punishment to them - shooting.
Polish prisoners were executed in many prisons throughout the USSR. According to the KGB of the USSR, 4,421 people were shot in the Katyn forest, 3,820 in the Starobelsk camp near Kharkov, 6,311 people in the Ostashkov camp (Kalinin, now Tver region), and 7 in other camps and prisons in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus 305 people.
Investigations
The name of the village near Smolensk became a symbol of the crimes of the Stalinist regime against the Poles also because it was from Katyn that the investigation of the executions began. The fact that the first evidence of the guilt of the NKVD was presented by the German field police in 1943 predetermined the attitude towards this investigation in the USSR. Moscow decided that it would be most plausible to lay the blame for the execution on the Nazis themselves, especially since the NKVD officers used Walthers and other weapons that fired German-made cartridges during the execution.
After the liberation of the Smolensk region by the Soviet troops, a special commission conducted an investigation, which established that the captured Poles were shot by the Germans in 1941. This version became official in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries until 1990. The Soviet side also filed accusations about Katyn at the end of the war as part of the Nuremberg Trials, but it was not possible to present convincing evidence of the Germans' guilt, as a result, this episode did not appear in the indictment.
Confessions and apologies
In April 1990, Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski came to Moscow on an official visit. In connection with the discovery of new archival documents indirectly proving the guilt of the NKVD, the Soviet leadership decided to change its position and admit that the Poles were shot by officers of the Soviet state security. On April 13, 1990, TASS published a statement, in particular, stating: "The revealed archival materials in their totality allow us to conclude that Beria, Merkulov were directly responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest ( Vsevolod Merkulov, who in 1940 headed the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD) and their henchmen. The Soviet side, expressing deep regret in connection with the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the grave crimes of Stalinism.
Mikhail Gorbachev handed over to Jaruzelsky the lists of officers sent along the stage - in fact, to the place of execution, from the camps in Kozelsk. Ostashkov and Starobelsk, and the Soviet Prosecutor General's Office soon began an official investigation. In the early 1990s, during a visit to Warsaw, Russian President Boris Yeltsin apologized to the Poles. Representatives of the Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that they share the grief of the Polish people for those killed in Katyn.
In 2000, a memorial to the victims of repressions was opened in Katyn, a common one - not only for Poles, but also for Soviet citizens, whom the NKVD shot in the same Katyn forest.
At the end of 2004, the investigation opened in 1990 was terminated by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation on the basis of paragraph 4 of part 1 of Art. 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation - in connection with the death of suspects or accused. Moreover, out of 183 volumes of the case, 67 were handed over to the Polish side, since the remaining 116, according to the military prosecutor, contain state secrets. The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in 2009.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in an article published in the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza on the eve of his working visit in August 2009: to rid Russian-Polish relations of the burden of mistrust and prejudice that we inherited, to turn the page and start writing a new one."
According to Putin, "the people of Russia, whose fate was distorted by the totalitarian regime, are well aware of the heightened feelings of the Poles associated with Katyn, where thousands of Polish soldiers are buried." "We are obliged together to preserve the memory of the victims of this crime," the Russian prime minister urged. The head of the Russian government is sure that the "Katyn" and "Mednoye" memorials, as well as tragic fate Russian soldiers taken into Polish captivity during the war of 1920 should become symbols of common sorrow and mutual forgiveness."
In February 2010, Vladimir Putin, his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk, will visit Katyn on April 7, where memorial events dedicated to the 70th anniversary of Katyn massacre. Tusk accepted the invitation, Lech Walesa, the first prime minister of post-communist Poland, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as well as family members of the victims of the NKVD executions, will come to Russia with him.
It is noteworthy that on the eve of the meeting of the prime ministers of Russia and Poland in Katyn channel "Russia Culture" showed a film that and .
Rehabilitation Requirements
Poland demands that Poles shot in Russia in 1940 be recognized as victims political repression. In addition, many there would like to hear from Russian officials an apology and recognition of the Katyn massacre as an act of genocide, and not a reference to the fact that the current authorities are not responsible for the crimes of the Stalinist regime. The termination of the case, and especially the fact that the decision to terminate it, along with other documents, was classified as secret and was not made public, only added fuel to the fire.
After the decision of the GVP, Poland launched its own prosecutorial investigation into the "mass murder of Polish citizens committed in the Soviet Union in March 1940." The investigation is headed by Professor Leon Keres, head of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Poles still want to find out who ordered the execution, the names of the executioners, and also give a legal assessment of the acts of the Stalinist regime.
Relatives of some of the officers who died in the Katyn forest in 2008 appealed to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation with a demand to consider the possibility of rehabilitating the executed. The GVP refused, and later the Khamovnichesky Court dismissed the complaint against her actions. Now the demands of the Poles are considered by the European Court of Human Rights.
(mostly captured officers of the Polish army) on the territory of the USSR during the Second World War.
The name comes from the small village of Katyn, located 14 kilometers west of Smolensk, in the area of the Gnezdovo railway station, near which mass graves of prisoners of war were first discovered.
According to the documents handed over to the Polish side in 1992, the executions were carried out in accordance with the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940.
According to an extract from the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee No. 13, more than 14 thousand Polish officers, policemen, officials, landowners, manufacturers and other "counter-revolutionary elements" who were in camps and 11 thousand imprisoned in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus, were sentenced to death.
Prisoners of war from the Kozelsky camp were shot in the Katyn forest, not far from Smolensk, Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky - in nearby prisons. As follows from a secret note sent to Khrushchev in 1959 by KGB chairman Shelepin, in total about 22,000 Poles were killed then.
In 1939, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army passed eastern border According to various sources, from 180 to 250 thousand Polish military personnel were taken prisoner by Poland and Soviet troops, many of whom, mostly privates, were then released. 130,000 servicemen and Polish citizens were imprisoned in the camps, whom the Soviet leadership considered "counter-revolutionary elements." In October 1939, residents of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were liberated from the camps, and more than 40,000 residents of Western and Central Poland were transferred to Germany. The remaining officers were concentrated in the Starobelsky, Ostashkovsky and Kozelsky camps.
In 1943, two years after the occupation of the western regions of the USSR by German troops, there were reports that the NKVD officers shot Polish officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. For the first time, the Katyn graves were opened and examined by the German doctor Gerhard Butz, who headed the forensic laboratory of the Army Group Center.
On April 28-30, 1943, an International Commission consisting of 12 forensic medicine specialists from a number of European countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, Italy, Croatia, Holland, Slovakia, Romania, Switzerland, Hungary, France, Czech Republic) worked in Katyn. Both Dr. Butz and the international commission gave a conclusion on the involvement of the NKVD in the execution of captured Polish officers.
In the spring of 1943, a technical commission of the Polish Red Cross worked in Katyn, which was more cautious in its conclusions, but the fault of the USSR also followed from the facts recorded in its report.
In January 1944, after the liberation of Smolensk and its environs, the Soviet "Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest" worked in Katyn, which was headed by chief surgeon Red Army Academician Nikolai Burdenko. During the exhumation, examination of material evidence and autopsy, the commission found that the executions were carried out by the Germans no earlier than 1941, when they occupied this area of the Smolensk region. The Burdenko Commission accused the German side of shooting the Poles.
The question of the Katyn tragedy remained open for a long time; the leadership of the Soviet Union did not recognize the fact of the execution of Polish officers in the spring of 1940. By official version In 1943, the German side used the mass grave for propaganda purposes against the Soviet Union in order to prevent the surrender of German soldiers and to attract the peoples of Western Europe to participate in the war.
After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR, they returned to the Katyn case again. In 1987, after the signing of the Soviet-Polish Declaration on Cooperation in the Field of Ideology, Science and Culture, a Soviet-Polish Commission of Historians was established to investigate this issue.
The Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the USSR (and then the Russian Federation) was entrusted with an investigation, which was conducted simultaneously with the Polish prosecutor's investigation.
On April 6, 1989, a funeral ceremony was held for the transfer of symbolic ashes from the burial place of Polish officers in Katyn to be transferred to Warsaw. In April 1990, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev handed over to Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski the lists of Polish prisoners of war sent by stage from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps, as well as those who left the Starobelsky camp, who were considered to be shot. At the same time, cases were opened in Kharkov and Kalinin regions. On September 27, 1990, both cases were merged into one by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.
On October 14, 1992, the personal representative of Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed over to Polish President Lech Walesa copies of archival documents about the fate of Polish officers who died in the USSR (the so-called "Package No. 1").
Among the documents handed over, in particular, was the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on March 5, 1940, at which it was decided to propose punishment to the NKVD.
On February 22, 1994, a Russian-Polish agreement "On burials and places of memory of victims of wars and repressions" was signed in Krakow.
On June 4, 1995, a memorial sign was erected at the site of the executions of Polish officers in Katyn Forest. 1995 was declared the year of Katyn in Poland.
In 1995, a protocol was signed between Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Poland, according to which each of these countries independently investigates crimes committed on their territory. Belarus and Ukraine provided the Russian side with their data, which were used in summing up the results of the investigation by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.
On July 13, 1994, the head of the investigation group of the GVP Yablokov issued a decision to dismiss the criminal case on the basis of paragraph 8 of article 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR (for the death of the perpetrators). However, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation canceled Yablokov's decision three days later, and another prosecutor was assigned to continue the investigation.
As part of the investigation, more than 900 witnesses were identified and questioned, more than 18 examinations were carried out, during which thousands of objects were examined. More than 200 bodies were exhumed. During the investigation, all the people who worked at that time in state bodies were interrogated. Director of the Institute of National Remembrance - Deputy Prosecutor General of Poland Dr. Leon Keres was notified of the results of the investigation. In total, there are 183 volumes in the case, of which 116 contain information constituting state secrets.
The chief military prosecutor's office of the Russian Federation reported that during the investigation of the "Katyn case" the exact number of persons who were kept in the camps "and in respect of whom decisions were made" was established - a little more than 14,540 people. Of these, more than 10 thousand 700 people were kept in camps on the territory of the RSFSR, and 3 thousand 800 people - in Ukraine. The death of 1,803 people (out of those held in the camps) was established, 22 people were identified.
On September 21, 2004, the GVP RF again, now definitively, terminated criminal case No. 159 on the basis of clause 4 of part 1 of Article 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation (due to the death of the perpetrators).
In March 2005, the Sejm of Poland demanded that Russia recognize the mass executions of Polish citizens in the Katyn Forest in 1940 as genocide. After that, the relatives of the dead, with the support of the "Memorial" society, joined the struggle for the recognition of those who were shot as victims of political repressions. The Chief Military Prosecutor's Office does not see reprisals, answering that "the actions of a number of specific high-ranking officials of the USSR are qualified under paragraph "b" of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (1926) as an abuse of power that had serious consequences in the presence of particularly aggravating circumstances, 21.09 .2004, the criminal case against them was terminated on the basis of clause 4, part 1, article 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation due to the death of the perpetrators.”
The decision to terminate the criminal case against the perpetrators is secret. The military prosecutor's office classified the events in Katyn as ordinary crimes, and classified the names of the perpetrators on the grounds that the case contained documents constituting state secrets. According to a representative of the GVP of the Russian Federation, out of 183 volumes of the "Katyn case", 36 contain documents classified as "secret", and 80 volumes - "for official use." Therefore, access to them is closed. And in 2005, employees of the Polish prosecutor's office were familiarized with the remaining 67 volumes.
The decision of the GVP of the Russian Federation to refuse to recognize those shot as victims of political repression was appealed in 2007 in the Khamovnichesky Court, which confirmed the refusals.
In May 2008, relatives of the victims of Katyn filed a complaint with the Khamovniki Court of Moscow against what they considered to be an unjustified termination of the investigation. On June 5, 2008, the court refused to consider the complaint, arguing that the district courts have no jurisdiction to consider cases that contain information constituting a state secret. The Moscow City Court recognized this decision as legal.
The cassation appeal was submitted to the Moscow District Military Court, which dismissed it on 14 October 2008. On January 29, 2009, the decision of the Khamovnichesky Court was upheld by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.
Since 2007, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from Poland began to receive claims from relatives of the victims of Katyn against Russia, which they accuse of failing to conduct a proper investigation.
In October 2008, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) accepted for consideration a complaint in connection with the refusal of the Russian legal authorities to satisfy the claim of two Polish citizens who are descendants of Polish officers shot in 1940. The son and grandson of officers of the Army reached the Strasbourg court Polish hedgehog Yanovets and Anthony Rybovsky. Polish citizens justify their appeal to Strasbourg by the fact that Russia violates their right to a fair trial by not fulfilling the provision of the UN Convention on Human Rights, which obliges countries to ensure the protection of life and explain each death. The ECtHR accepted these arguments, taking the complaint of Yanovets and Rybovsky into proceedings.
In December 2009, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) decided to consider the case on a priority basis, and also sent a number of questions Russian Federation.
At the end of April 2010, the Russian Archives, at the direction of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, for the first time posted on its website electronic samples of the original documents about the Poles shot by the NKVD in Katyn in 1940.
On May 8, 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev handed over to the Polish side 67 volumes of criminal case No. 159 on the execution of Polish officers in Katyn. The transfer took place at a meeting between Medvedev and Acting President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski in the Kremlin. The President of the Russian Federation also handed over a list of materials for individual volumes. Previously, the materials of the criminal case had never been transferred to Poland - only archival data.
In September 2010, as part of the execution by the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation of a request from the Polish side for legal assistance, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation handed over another 20 volumes of materials from the criminal case on the execution of Polish officers in Katyn to Poland.
In accordance with the agreement between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Polish President Bronisław Komorowski, the Russian side continues to declassify the materials of the Katyn case, which was conducted by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office. On December 3, 2010, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation handed over another significant batch of archival documents to Polish representatives.
On April 7, 2011, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation handed over to Poland copies of 11 declassified volumes of the criminal case on the execution of Polish citizens in Katyn. The materials contained requests from the main research center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, certificates of criminal records and places of burial of prisoners of war.
On May 19, Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Yuri Chaika announced that Russia had practically completed the transfer to Poland of the materials of the criminal case initiated on the fact of the discovery of mass graves of the remains of Polish servicemen near Katyn (Smolensk region). As of May 16, 2011, the Polish side .
In July 2011, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared admissible two complaints of Polish citizens against the Russian Federation related to the closure of the case on the execution of their relatives near Katyn, in Kharkov and in Tver in 1940.
The judges decided to combine two lawsuits filed in 2007 and 2009 by relatives of the deceased Polish officers into one proceeding.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources
The small village near Smolensk Katyn went down in history as a symbol of the massacre in the spring of 1940 of Polish soldiers held in various Soviet concentration camps and prisons. The secret action of the NKVD to eliminate Polish officers in the Katyn forest began on April 8.
German troops cross the German-Polish border. September 1, 1939
On April 13, 1943, the Berlin radio reported that the German occupation authorities had discovered mass graves of executed Polish officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. The Germans blamed the Soviet authorities for the killings, the Soviet government claimed that the Poles were killed by the Germans. For many years in the USSR, the Katyn tragedy was hushed up, and only in 1992 did the Russian authorities publish documents showing that Stalin had given the order for the murder. (Secret papers from the special archive of the CPSU about Katyn surfaced in 1992, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin proposed to the Constitutional Court that these documents be included in the "case of the CPSU").
In big Soviet encyclopedia In the 1953 edition, the Katyn massacre is described as “the mass execution by the Nazi invaders of Polish officers of war, committed in the autumn of 1941 on the Soviet territory temporarily occupied by Nazi troops”, supporters of this version, despite documentary evidence of Soviet “authorship”, are still sure that it was everything.
A bit of history: how it all happened
At the end of August 1939, the USSR and Germany signed a non-aggression pact, equipped with a secret protocol on the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence between Moscow and Berlin. A week later, Germany entered Poland, and after another 17 days, the Red Army crossed the Soviet-Polish border. As stipulated in the agreements, Poland was divided between the USSR and Germany. On August 31, mobilization began in Poland. The Polish army resisted desperately, all the newspapers of the world made the rounds of a photograph in which Polish cavalry rushed to attack the German tanks.
The forces were unequal, and on September 9 the German units reached the suburbs of Warsaw. On the same day, Molotov sent a congratulation to Schulenberg: “I have received your message that German troops have entered Warsaw. Please convey my congratulations and greetings to the government of the German Empire."
After the first news about the crossing of the Polish border by the Red Army supreme commander Marshal Rydz-Smigly gave the order to the armed forces of Poland: “Do not engage in battles with the Soviets, resist only if they try to disarm our units that came into contact with the Soviet troops. Continue fighting against the Germans. Surrounded cities must fight. In case they fit Soviet troops to negotiate with them in order to achieve the withdrawal of our garrisons to Romania and Hungary.
As a result of the defeat of almost a million-strong Polish army in September-October 1939, the Nazi troops captured more than 18,000 officers and 400,000 soldiers. Part of the Polish army was able to leave for Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia. The other part surrendered to the Red Army, which carried out the so-called operation to liberate Western Ukraine and Belarus. Different sources give different numbers of Polish prisoners of war on the territory of the USSR; in 1939, at a session of the Supreme Soviet, Molotov reported 250,000 Polish prisoners.
Polish prisoners of war were kept in prisons and camps, the most famous of them - Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky. Almost all the prisoners of these camps were exterminated.
On September 18, 1939, a German-Soviet communiqué was published in Pravda: “In order to avoid all sorts of unfounded rumors about the tasks of the Soviet and German troops operating in Poland, the government of the USSR and the government of Germany declare that the actions of these troops do not pursue any goal which runs counter to the interests of Germany or the Soviet Union and contradicts the spirit and letter of the non-aggression pact concluded between Germany and the USSR. The task of these troops, on the contrary, is to restore order and tranquility in Poland, disturbed by the collapse of the Polish state, and to help the people of Poland reorganize the conditions of their state existence.
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| Heinz Guderian (center) and Semyon Krivoshein (right) at the joint Soviet-German military parade. Brest-Litovsk. 1939 |
The population joyfully greeted the Soviet troops - for almost 20 years, Belarusians and Ukrainians were part of Poland, where they were subjected to forcible Polonization (Belarusian and Ukrainian schools were closed, Orthodox churches turned into churches, the best lands were taken from local peasants, handing them over to the Poles). However, with the Soviet army and Soviet power came the Stalinist order. Mass repressions began against the new "enemies of the people" from among the local residents of the western regions.
From November 1939 until the beginning of the Great patriotic war, until June 20, 1940, trains with deportees went to the east, to "remote regions of the USSR". Officers of the Polish army from Starobelsky (Voroshilovgrad region), Ostashkovsky (Stolbny Island, Lake Seliger) and Kozelsky (Smolensk region) camps were originally supposed to be handed over to the Germans, but the opinion in the leadership of the USSR won the opinion that the prisoners should be destroyed. The authorities rightly judged: if these people were free, they would certainly become organizers and activists of anti-fascist and anti-communist resistance. The sanction for destruction was given in 1940 by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and the verdict was directly pronounced by the Special Conference of the NKVD of the USSR.
"Ministry of Truth" at work
The first indications of the disappearance of approximately 15 thousand Polish prisoners of war appeared in the early autumn of 1941. In the USSR, the formation of the Polish army began, the main part of which was recruited from former prisoners of war - after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and the Polish government in exile in London, an amnesty was declared for them. At the same time, it was found that among the arriving recruits there were no former prisoners of the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky camps.
The command of the Polish army repeatedly turned to the Soviet authorities with requests about their fate, but no definite answers were given to these requests. On April 13, 1943, the Germans announced that 12,000 corpses of Polish servicemen were found in the Katyn forest - officers captured by the Soviets in September 1939 and killed by the NKVD. (Further studies did not confirm this figure - the corpses in Katyn were found almost three times less).
On April 15, Moscow radio broadcast a "TASS Statement" in which the blame was placed on the Germans. On April 17, the same text was published in Pravda with the addition of the presence of ancient burials in those places: “In their clumsy and hastily concocted nonsense about the numerous graves allegedly discovered by the Germans near Smolensk, the Goebbels liars mention the village of Gnezdovaya, but they are silent about that it is near the village of Gnezdovaya that there are archaeological excavations of the historical “Gnezdovo burial ground”.
The place of execution of Polish officers in the Katyn forest was one and a half kilometers from the NKVD dacha (a comfortable cottage with a garage and a sauna), where the authorities from the center rested.
Expertise
For the first time, the Katyn graves were opened and examined in the spring of 1943 by the German doctor Gerhard Butz, who headed the forensic laboratory of the Army Group Center. In the same spring, the burials in the Katyn Forest were examined by a commission of the Polish Red Cross. On April 28-30, an international commission consisting of 12 experts from European countries worked in Katyn. After the liberation of Smolensk in Katyn in January 1944, the Soviet “Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest” arrived, headed by Burdenko.
The conclusions of Dr. Butz and the international commission directly blamed the USSR. The Polish Commission of the Red Cross was more cautious, but the facts recorded in its report also implied the fault of the USSR. The Burdenko Commission, of course, blamed the Germans for everything.
François Naville, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Geneva, who headed the international commission of 12 experts that examined the Katyn burials in the spring of 1943, was ready to appear in Nuremberg in 1946 as a defense witness. After the meeting on Katyn, he stated that he and his colleagues did not receive "gold, money, gifts, awards, valuables" from anyone, and all conclusions were made by them objectively and without any pressure. Subsequently, Professor Naville wrote: “If a country that finds itself between two powerful neighbors learns about the destruction of almost 10,000 of its officers, prisoners of war, whose only fault was that they defended their homeland, if this country tries to find out how everything happened, a decent person will not can accept a reward for going to the place and trying to lift the edge of the veil that concealed, and still hides, the circumstances under which this action was carried out, caused by disgusting cowardice, contrary to the customs of war.
In 1973, a member of the international commission of 1943, Professor Palmeri testified: “None of the twelve members of our commission had any doubts, there was not a single reservation. The conclusion is irrefutable. It was willingly signed by Prof. Markov (Sofia), and prof. Gaek (Prague). It should not be surprising that they subsequently withdrew their testimony. Maybe I would have done the same if Naples had been “liberated” Soviet Army... No, there was no pressure on us from the German side. Crime is the work of Soviet hands, there can be no two opinions. To this day, in front of my eyes - Polish officers on their knees, with their arms twisted behind them, kicking their legs into the grave after being shot in the back of the head ... "
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Other news
Today I accidentally went to the Dozhd TV channel, there was an interview with a representative of the Memoral society, who advertised some new book about Katyn, once again accusing Soviet Union in the execution of Polish officers and calling us to repentance before Poland and stuff like that.
(Poland, for example,not going to repent for those tortured in Polish concentration camps during the years of the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1920, captured Red Army soldiers.)
I hope that the "accuser" in his "labor" answered 52 questions once posed
Vladislav Shved to help those who are interested Katyn case, and dispelled, finally, all doubts. And the film has already been made.The questions are:
Questions to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.
Can we assume that the criminal case No. 159 "On the execution of Polish prisoners of war from the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky camps of the NKVD in April - May 1940" was thoroughly investigated, given that:
investigators of the GVP RF were focused on the legalization of Gorbachev's political decision to convict the former leaders of the USSR and the NKVD.,
other versions, including the involvement of the Nazis in the execution of Polish officers in the Katyn forest, were not considered,
only the period of time - March - May 1940 was subject to investigation.
It should also be taken into account that the investigative team of the RF GVP, while conducting an investigation, did not fully understand:
the procedure for preparing documents for the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks,
the procedure for submitting documents to the PB and the specifics of holding meetings of the PB under Stalin,
the procedure for the execution of convicts by the NKVD,
the procedure for keeping prisoners of war in the camps of the NKVD,
rights of the Special Meeting under the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR,
the procedure for obtaining documents from the "closed package",
the procedure for the destruction of top-secret documents in the KGB.
Questions about the official version of the Katyn case.
1. How to explain that before the execution, the Poles were not searched and undressed? Their execution, according to the official version, was to remain a secret forever. However, the NKVD did everything, as it were, so that in the future, when excavating Polish graves, it would be possible to immediately establish who was shot.
2. Why, during the execution of Polish prisoners of war, there is a complete violation of the instructions of the NKVD on the procedure for carrying out executions, according to which sentences were to be carried out with "the obligatory complete secrecy of the time and place of the execution of the sentence"?
3. Is it possible to consider absolutely reliable information about the exhumation of mass graves of Polish prisoners of war in Kozi Gory, carried out in March-June 1943, contained in German "Official Materials on the Katyn Massacres"(Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn) and in the Report of the Technical Commission of the PKK, if it was an action personally approved by Hitler?
On March 13, 1943, Hitler flew to Smolensk and was among the first to meet with the head of the propaganda department of the Wehrmacht, Colonel Hasso von Wedel, whose officers were already working in Smolensk and Kozy Gory, preparing primary propaganda materials. The Reich Minister of Imperial Propaganda J. Goebbels was personally entrusted with overseeing the "Katyn affair". The stakes in this propaganda action "Katyn case" were extremely high. Any deviation from the approved version would be stopped without delay. This is known from other similar promotions.
4. How to evaluate the statement of Colonel Ahrens at the Nuremberg Tribunal that the head of intelligence of the Army Group Center, Colonel von Gersdorf, informed him back in the summer of 1942 that he knew All about burials in the Goat Mountains?
5. Can you believe that the representatives of the Polish Red Cross could be objective witnesses German exhumation, if on April 6, 1943, at a meeting in the Ministry of Imperial Propaganda, they were destined for the role of "witnesses under German control"?
There is no information in the Report of the TC PKK that Soviet prisoners of war worked at the excavations of the graves, that the remains of Polish priests in black cassocks and a female corpse were found in the graves. Perhaps there are other important facts missing?
It has not yet been established whether the first 300 exhumed corpses of Polish prisoners of war, whose skulls were boiled in the village of Borok, were recorded in the German exhumation list (testimony of M. Krivozertsev and N. Voevodskaya)?
7. How great were the chances of the members of the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross (TK PKK) return to Poland, if their conclusions and assessments contradicted the German ones?
It is known that even the international commission of experts was subjected to pressure from the Nazis. On the evening of April 30, without signing any official final document due to disagreements, the commission left Smolensk. On the way back to Berlin, the Germans landed the plane with the commission at the airbase in Biala Podlaska, where right in the hangar they "unobtrusively" offered them to sign a conclusion dated "Smolensk, April 30, 1943." that Polish officers were shot by the Soviet authorities.
8. Why do the dates of the opening of the Katyn graves in official German reports and eyewitness accounts (testimony of Menshagin, Vasilyeva-Yakunenko, Shchebest, Voevodskaya) do not match?
It can be argued that the Germans concealed the real dates of the opening of the Katyn burials in order to gain time for some kind of manipulation with material evidence found on the remains of Polish officers.
9. How to evaluate the fact that the German experts in 1943, in violation of the elementary canons of exhumations, when compiling the official exhumation list of Katyn victims deliberately omitted, from which grave and which layer were the corpses of Polish prisoners of war removed?
The result is an incredible match order surnames of lists of prescriptions for sending prisoners from the Kozelsk camp to the UNKVD in the Smolensk region to the German exhumation list. There is a clear adjustment of surnames from the German list. The fact is that with an arbitrary compilation of an exhumation list, the probability of such a coincidence is equal to the probability that the monkey, hitting the keys of a typewriter, will sooner or later type Tolstoy's War and Peace.
10. Why, despite the statements that 10 thousand Polish officers were shot by the Bolsheviks in Kozy Gory, the Germans didn't want thoroughly investigate all possible burials of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn and its environs?
The following facts testify to this. Referring to "summer time", the Germans ended up opening grave No. 8 to the end, with "several hundred" corpses. The same thing happened with the water-filled moat found in the Kozy Gory, from which "parts of corpses stuck out." The Germans did not give a pump to pump water out of the ditch and ordered to fill it up. Members of the Technical Commission of the PAC, on their own, for 17 hours of work, "pulled 46 corpses out of the water."
11. Why hushed up the fact of discovery in the Katyn burial "double-zlotov military issue". who began walking on the territory of the Polish General Government only after May 8, 1940, and Polish officers from the Kozelsky camp (in the USSR) in the event of execution by the NKVD could not have them?
12. How to explain the fact of the presence in the German exhumation list of 1943 of the so-called "foreign" Poles(twins, civilian and Polish soldiers), that is, those who were not on the lists of the Kozelsk camp, while Polish experts always insisted that only officers and exclusively from the Kozelsk camp were shot in Katyn (Kozy Gory)? The remains of what people in civilian clothes and Polish soldier's uniforms were found in the Kozy Gory, if only officers were kept in the Kozelsky camp, the vast majority of whom were dressed in officer uniforms?
In the Katyn graves, the corpses of the Poles who were kept in the Starobilsk and Ostashkovsky camps were found. For example, Jaros Henryk (No. 2398, identified by a reserve officer’s certificate) and Szkuta Stanisław (No. 3196, identified by a vaccination certificate and a reserve officer’s membership card) were never kept in the Kozelsk camp and were not sent in the spring of 1940 “at the disposal of the chief UNKVD in the Smolensk region.
Based on the analysis of the official Katyn exhumation list, it was established that out of 4143 corpses exhumed by the Germans, 688 corpses were in soldier's uniform and did not have any documents with them, and about 20% of all exhumed were people in civilian clothes. During the work of the commission, N. Burdenko also found many corpses in soldier's clothes. The Poles themselves wrote about this (Matskevich).
13. Is it possible to believe that the NKVD officers descended into the ditch to a depth of 3-4 meters to neatly lay down those who were shot in rows, and even "Jack"?
The British Ambassador to the Republic of Poland, Owen O'Malley, in a telegram from Warsaw to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden dated May 15, 1943, reported that the corpses in the largest Katyn burial No. 1 were "neatly laid out in rows of 9 to 12 people, one on another, heads in opposite directions…”?
14. How are the Germans among first 30 of identified corpses, they managed to extract from the lower layers of the mass of compressed bodies in the Katyn burial No. 1 the corpses of the executed Polish generals Smoravinsky and Bokhatyrevich, if 2500 victims were buried in the grave, 200-250 bodies in each row. The generals arrived in Kozy Gory in a stage with only 771 casualties. Generals could only be in the 3rd-4th row from below, with a total number of rows in the burial 9-12.
15. How to evaluate the testimony of the Frenchwoman K. Deville, a former lieutenant of the Red Army, that when she visited Katyn immediately after her liberation, in the German list of dead Polish officers, she found not only the name of her friend Z. Bogutsky, who, as she knew, was alive, but also "material evidence" that it was he who was shot in Katyn?
In the museum cell with physical evidence of the German Museum of “Soviet atrocities”, Devilier found a photograph of her acquaintance and a copy of his letter to his mother dated March 6, 1940 with a signature that she recognized. Bogutsky himself subsequently, at a meeting after the war, told Katerina that he had never written such a letter. On this occasion, the French historian and TV journalist A. Deco in his study “Katyn: Stalin or Hitler?” wrote that: “in 1945, a young Norwegian Karl Johanssen told the police in Oslo that Katyn - the most successful case of German propaganda during the war". In the Sachsenhausen camp, Johanssen worked with other prisoners on fake Polish documents and old photographs.
On the TV show "Tribune of History" K. Deville was cross-examined in live from the leading French specialist on Central European issues G. Montfort and a former Polish prisoner of war in Soviet camps, Army Major Anders Y. Czapski. She behaved very confidently and adequately withstood this test, convincingly answering all questions.
16. Why Evidence Is Ignored Paul Bredow René Kulmo and Wilhelm Schneider about involvement in the executions in Katyn Nazis?
A. Deco mentioned the Berlin baker Paul Bredow, who served in the fall of 1941 near Smolensk as a signalman at the headquarters of Army Group Center. P. Bredow in 1958 in Warsaw, during the trial of E. Koch, one of the Nazi executioners, declared under oath: “I saw with my own eyes how Polish officers pulled a telephone cable between Smolensk and Katyn”. During the exhumation in 1943, he “immediately recognized the uniform that Polish officers were wearing in the autumn of 1941.” (“Erich Koch before the Polish court.” P. 161).
Alain Decaux dated former prisoner Stalag IIB, located in Pomerania, Rene Kulmo, who stated that in September 1941 300 Poles arrived in their Stalag from the East. “In September 1941, in Stalag II D, we were announced the arrival of six thousand Poles. They were expected, but only three hundred arrived. Everything is in a terrible state, from the East. The Poles at first were like in a dream, they did not speak, but gradually began to move away. I remember one captain, Vinzensky. I understood a little Polish, and he understood French. He said that the Fritz there, in the east, had committed a monstrous crime. Almost all of their friends, mostly officers, were killed. Vinzensky and others said that the SS destroyed almost the entire Polish elite.
Wilhelm Gaul Schneider on June 5, 1947 testified to Captain B. Acht in Bamberg, in the American zone of occupation of Germany. Schneider stated that during his stay in the Tegel remand prison in the winter of 1941-1942, he was in the same cell with a German non-commissioned officer who served in the Regiment Grossdeutschland regiment, which was used for punitive purposes.
This non-commissioned officer told Schneider that: “In the late autumn of 1941, more precisely in October of this year, his regiment committed a massacre of more than ten thousand Polish officers in the forest, which, as he indicated, was near Katyn. The officers were taken on trains from prisoner-of-war camps, from which I do not know, for he only mentioned that they were brought from the rear. This murder took place over several days, after which the soldiers of this regiment buried the corpses.(Archive foreign policy Russian Federation. Fund 07, inventory 30a, folder 20, file 13, fol. 23.).
17. What was the reason that the Polish experts in 2002-2006. when carrying out exhumation work in Bykovna (near Kiev), they went to clear violations canons of exhumation?
As a result, this allowed Polish experts to pass off the remains of 270 executed Polish officers as the burial of 3,500 Polish citizens from the Ukrainian Katyn list, allegedly shot in 1940.
This was stated by representatives of the Kyiv "Memorial". On November 11, 2006, the Kiev weekly "Zerkalo Nedeli" published an article in which it revealed some of the "secrets" of the Polish exhumation in Bykivnia. It was established that in the summer of 2006 excavations were carried out here with gross violations of Ukrainian legislation and ignoring elementary norms and generally accepted methods of exhumations (there was no field description of the finds, there was no numbering of burials, human bones were collected in bags without indicating the number of the grave, no representatives were present during the exhumations local authorities, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the prosecutor's office, the sanitary service, the forensic medical examination, etc.). It also turned out that the previous series of excavations and exhumations in 2001 was carried out in Bykovna with similar violations.
18. During the exhumation work carried out by Polish experts at the special cemetery in Medny repeat a situation similar to Bykovna? Perhaps not 6311 Poles were buried in Medny, but 297 shot Polish officers of the police, gendarmerie, border troops, as well as intelligence officers and provocateurs from the Ostashkovsky camp, who had "compromising evidence", and the rest of the prisoners of the Ostashkovsky camp were sent to other camps?
By 1995, members of the Tver “Memorial” had established on the basis of archival investigative files, and then published the names and surnames of 5.177 Soviet people, shot as "enemies of the people" in Kalinin in 1937-1938. and 1185 - in 1939-1953. It is believed that about 5,000 of them are buried in a special cemetery in "Medny", where 6311 Polish prisoners of war are buried, allegedly shot in the internal prison of the Kalininsky UNKVD. Polish experts claim that they were unable to find specific burial places for repressed Soviet people in this special cemetery! Where did the remains of the executed "enemies of the people" disappear (if they disappeared)?
In addition, in the report on the official activities of the 155th regiment of the NKVD troops for the protection of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. comrade Stalin for the 1st half of 1941 (dated July 9, 1941 No. 00484) it was reported that: from the stages there were only former police officers from the western regions of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs ... ”(RGVA, f. 38291, op. 1, d. 8, l. 99). These former policemen could only be from the Ostashkov camp, and in 1941 they could have been placed, in all likelihood, only in the Matkozhninsky forced labor camp.
In the spring of 1990, Alexander Emelyanovich Bogatikov, a resident of Kalinin, informed the Tver "Memorial" (Maren Mikhailovich Freidenberg) that in 1943 he was serving a term in a camp on Far East. Together with him sat a Pole from the Ostashkov camp, who told how in the beginning of 1940 in Ostashkovo, among the prisoners of war, radio specialists were selected. The rest were later sent to Murmansk.
19. Where to missing archival documents on the prisoners of the Matkozhninsky ITL, in which, in all likelihood, there were former policemen “from the western regions of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSR” who arrived to build the White Sea-Baltic Canal in 1941?
State Duma deputy A. Savelyev's official inquiries on this issue to the Russian archives turned out to be fruitless.
20. From where in the "Polish" graves in Pyatikhatki (near Kharkov) almost 500 extra corpses?
Of the 15 "Polish" graves in Piatikhatki, the remains of 4,302 people were exhumed, which, based on the found Polish paraphernalia, were recognized Polish citizens. From the Starobelsky camp in April-May 1940, only 3,896 Polish prisoners of war were sent to the “order of the head of the Kharkov UNKVD”. According to A. Shelepin's note, 3,820 people were shot in Kharkov.
21. Why was no attention paid to glaring contradictions in the testimony of General D. Tokarev, the former head of the UNKVD for the Kalinin region, regarding the execution of Polish policemen from the Ostashkov camp?
22. Is it possible with the described Tokarev by name-individual a procedure that required successive, fairly lengthy passages of victims inside the NKVD prison, one person to shoot 250 people in 9 hours of "dark time"?
23. Is it possible to agree with Tokarev's statement that the questioning of the victims scheduled for execution was carried out in the "red corner" or "Lenin's room" internal prison of the regional NKVD?
A group of TV reporters from Postkriptum, who visited the premises of the former building of the Kalinin NKVD in November 2007, managed to find out that, in all likelihood, the “Lenin room” was located on the 2nd floor of the building. The internal prison of the UNKVD was located in the basement semi-basement. In this case, the time of movement of the victim before execution could be at least 10 minutes!
24. Why was not held investigative experiment in the premises of the former internal prison of the Kalinin UNKVD?
25. Was it possible to organize secretive the execution of 6,000 Polish policemen in the inner prison of the Kalininsky NKVD, if the building of the NKVD was in the center of the city, and the courtyard was not closed around the perimeter and was partially visible from neighboring houses?
26. Why did not investigate the fact of discovery on the territory of pre-trial detention center No. 1 of the city of Kalinin”, which in 1940 was located on the outskirts of the village of Novo-Konstantinovka (now it is Gagarin Square in Tver) “fragments of a Polish military uniform”?
27. Why are present serious inaccuracies about the places of execution of Polish prisoners of war, the former head of the inner prison of the Kharkov department of the NKVD Syromyatnikov and the former employee of the Smolensk NKVD Klimov?
Syromyatnikov said that: “at night, he led the future victims with their hands tied from the cell and led them to the basement, to the room where the commandant of the local NKVD Kupriy was to shoot them.” However, the head of the Kharkov KGB, General Nikolai Gibadulov, showed the Polish experts (according to the testimony of St. Mikke) in the courtyard of the administration the actual place of execution of the ruins of a detached building.
Klimov claimed that the Poles were shot "in the premises of the Smolensk UNVD or directly in the Katyn forest." In addition, he “was in the Kozy Gory and accidentally saw: the ditch was large, it stretched to the very swamp, and in this ditch there were piles of Poles sprinkled with earth, who were shot right in the ditch ... There were a lot of Poles in this ditch when I looked, they lay in a row, and the ditch was a hundred meters long, and the depth was 2-3 meters. Where did Klimov see a ditch 100 meters long, if the length of the largest grave in Katyn did not exceed 26 meters?
(everything did not fit, questions 28-52 in
)
(scans of Shelepin's note in
)
Katyn: Hitler's provocation turned into a monstrous lie directed against Russia
The investigation into all the circumstances of the massacre of Polish soldiers, which went down in history as the "Katyn massacre", still causes heated discussions both in Russia and in Poland.
According to the "official" modern version, the murder of Polish officers was the work of the NKVD of the USSR.
However, back in 1943-1944. a special commission headed by the Chief Surgeon of the Red Army N. Burdenko came to the conclusion that the Nazis killed the Polish soldiers.
Despite the fact that the current Russian leadership agreed with the version of the “Soviet trace”, there are indeed a lot of contradictions and ambiguities in the case of the massacre of Polish officers.
In order to understand who could have shot the Polish soldiers, it is necessary to take a closer look at the very process of investigating the Katyn massacre.
In March 1942, residents of the village of Kozy Gory, in the Smolensk region, informed the occupying authorities about the mass grave of Polish soldiers.
The Poles who worked in the construction platoon unearthed several graves and reported this to the German command, but it initially reacted to the news with complete indifference.
The situation changed in 1943, when a turning point had already occurred at the front and Germany was interested in strengthening anti-Soviet propaganda. On February 18, 1943, the German field police began excavations in the Katyn forest.
A special commission was formed, headed by Gerhardt Butz, a professor at the University of Breslau, the “luminary” of forensic medical expertise, who during the war years served as captain with the rank of captain as head of the forensic laboratory of Army Group Center.
Already on April 13, 1943, German radio reported on the found burial place of 10,000 Polish officers.
In fact, the German investigators “calculated” the number of Poles who died in the Katyn Forest very simply - they took the total number of officers of the Polish army before the start of the war, from which they subtracted the “living” - Anders’s army.
All other Polish officers, according to the German side, were shot by the NKVD in the Katyn forest. Naturally, the anti-Semitism inherent in the Nazis was not without it - the German media immediately reported that Jews were involved in the executions.
On April 16, 1943, the Soviet Union officially refuted the "slanderous attacks" of Nazi Germany. On April 17, the government of Poland in exile turned to the Soviet government for clarification.
It is interesting that at that time the Polish leadership did not try to blame the Soviet Union for everything, but focused on the crimes of Nazi Germany against the Polish people. However, the USSR broke off relations with the Polish government-in-exile.
Joseph Goebbels, the "number one propagandist" of the Third Reich, managed to achieve an even greater effect than he had originally imagined.
The Katyn massacre was passed off by German propaganda as a classic manifestation of the "atrocities of the Bolsheviks."
Obviously, the Nazis, accusing the Soviet side of killing Polish prisoners of war, sought to discredit the Soviet Union in the eyes of the Western countries.
The cruel execution of Polish prisoners of war, allegedly carried out by Soviet Chekists, was supposed, in the opinion of the Nazis, to alienate the United States, Great Britain and the Polish government in exile from cooperation with Moscow.
Goebbels succeeded in the latter - in Poland, the version of the execution of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD was accepted by many.
The fact is that back in 1940, correspondence with Polish prisoners of war who were on the territory of the Soviet Union ceased. Nothing more was known about the fate of the Polish officers.
At the same time, representatives of the United States and Great Britain tried to “hush up” the Polish topic, because they did not want to irritate Stalin at such a crucial period when the Soviet troops were able to turn the tide at the front.
To ensure a larger propaganda effect, the Nazis even involved the Polish Red Cross (PKK), whose representatives were associated with the anti-fascist resistance, in the investigation.
On the Polish side, the commission was headed by Marian Wodzinski, a physician from Krakow University, an authoritative person who participated in the activities of the Polish anti-fascist resistance.
The Nazis even went so far as to allow representatives of the PKK to the place of the alleged execution, where excavations of graves took place.
The conclusions of the commission were disappointing - the PKK confirmed the German version that the Polish officers were shot in April-May 1940, that is, even before the start of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union.
On April 28-30, 1943, an international commission arrived in Katyn. Of course, it was a very loud name - in fact, the commission was formed from representatives of states occupied by Nazi Germany or maintaining allied relations with it.
As expected, the commission sided with Berlin and also confirmed that Polish officers were killed in the spring of 1940 by Soviet Chekists.
Further investigative actions of the German side, however, were terminated - in September 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk.
Almost immediately after the liberation of the Smolensk region, the Soviet leadership decided that it was necessary to conduct its own investigation in order to expose Hitler's slander about the involvement of the Soviet Union in the massacres of Polish officers.
On October 5, 1943, a special commission of the NKVD and the NKGB was created under the leadership of People's Commissar of State Security Vsevolod Merkulov and Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Sergei Kruglov.
Unlike the German commission, the Soviet commission approached the matter in more detail, including the organization of interrogations of witnesses. 95 people were interviewed.
As a result, interesting details emerged. Even before the start of the war, three camps for Polish prisoners of war were located west of Smolensk. They housed officers and generals of the Polish Army, gendarmes, police officers and officials taken prisoner on the territory of Poland. Most of the prisoners of war were used for road work of varying severity.
When the war began, the Soviet authorities did not have time to evacuate Polish prisoners of war from the camps. So the Polish officers were already in German captivity, moreover, the Germans continued to use the labor of prisoners of war in road and construction work.
In August-September 1941, the German command decided to shoot all Polish prisoners of war held in the Smolensk camps.
The direct execution of Polish officers was carried out by the headquarters of the 537th construction battalion under the leadership of Lieutenant Arnes, Lieutenant Rekst and Lieutenant Hott.
The headquarters of this battalion was located in the village of Kozi Gory. In the spring of 1943, when a provocation against the Soviet Union was already being prepared, the Nazis drove Soviet prisoners of war to excavate graves and, after excavations, seized from the graves all documents dated later than the spring of 1940.
So the date of the alleged execution of Polish prisoners of war was “adjusted”. The Soviet prisoners of war who carried out the excavations were shot by the Germans, and the local residents were forced to give testimonies favorable to the Germans.
On January 12, 1944, a Special Commission was formed to establish and investigate the circumstances of the execution by the Nazi invaders in the Katyn forest (near Smolensk) of Polish officers of war.
This commission was headed by the Chief Surgeon of the Red Army, Lieutenant General of the Medical Service Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko, and included in it whole line prominent Soviet scientists.
It is interesting that the writer Alexei Tolstoy and Metropolitan Nikolay (Yarushevich) of Kiev and Galicia were included in the commission.
Although public opinion in the West by this time was already quite biased, nevertheless, the episode with the execution of Polish officers in Katyn was included in the indictment of the Nuremberg Tribunal. That is, in fact, the responsibility of Nazi Germany for the commission of this crime was recognized.
For many decades, the Katyn massacre was forgotten, however, when in the late 1980s. the systematic “shattering” of the Soviet state began, the history of the Katyn massacre was again “refreshed” by human rights activists and journalists, and then by the Polish leadership.
In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev actually recognized the responsibility of the Soviet Union for the Katyn massacre.
Since that time, and for almost thirty years now, the version that the Polish officers were shot by the employees of the NKVD of the USSR has become the dominant version. Even the "patriotic twist" Russian state in the 2000s did not change the situation.
Russia continues to "repent" for the crime committed by the Nazis, while Poland puts forward increasingly stringent demands for recognizing the Katyn massacre as genocide.
Meanwhile, many domestic historians and experts express their point of view on Katyn tragedy. So, Elena Prudnikova and Ivan Chigirin in the book “Katyn. A lie that has become history ”, draw attention to very interesting nuances.
For example, all the corpses found in burials in Katyn were dressed in the uniform of the Polish army with insignia. But until 1941, insignias were not allowed to be worn in Soviet prisoner of war camps. All prisoners were equal in their status and could not wear cockades and shoulder straps.
It turns out that Polish officers simply could not be with insignia at the time of death, if they were really shot in 1940.
Since the Soviet Union did not sign the Geneva Convention for a long time, the maintenance of prisoners of war with the preservation of insignia in Soviet camps was not allowed.
Apparently, the Nazis did not think through this interesting moment and themselves contributed to the exposure of their lies - Polish prisoners of war were shot after 1941, but then the Smolensk region was occupied by the Nazis. This circumstance, referring to the work of Prudnikova and Chigirin, is also pointed out in one of his publications by Anatoly Wasserman.
Private detective Ernest Aslanyan draws attention to a very interesting detail - Polish prisoners of war were killed with firearms made in Germany. The NKVD of the USSR did not use such weapons.
Even if at the disposal of the Soviet security officers there were copies of German weapons, then by no means in the quantity that was used in Katyn. However, this circumstance is supported by the version that the Polish officers were killed by the Soviet side, somehow not considered. More precisely, this question, of course, was raised in the media, but the answers to it were given some unintelligible ones, Aslanyan notes.
The version about the use of German weapons in 1940 in order to “write off” the corpses of Polish officers to the Nazis really seems very strange.
The Soviet leadership hardly counted on the fact that Germany would not only start a war, but also be able to reach Smolensk. Accordingly, there was no reason to "set up" the Germans by shooting Polish prisoners of war with German weapons.
Another version seems more plausible - the executions of Polish officers in the camps of the Smolensk region were indeed carried out, but not at all on the scale that Hitler's propaganda spoke about.
There were many camps in the Soviet Union where Polish prisoners of war were kept, but nowhere else were mass executions carried out.
What could force the Soviet command to arrange the execution of 12 thousand Polish prisoners of war in the Smolensk region? It is impossible to give an answer to this question.
Meanwhile, the Nazis themselves could well have destroyed the Polish prisoners of war - they did not feel any reverence for the Poles, they did not differ in humanism in relation to prisoners of war, especially to the Slavs. To destroy several thousand Poles for the Nazi executioners was no problem at all.
However, the version about the murder of Polish officers by Soviet Chekists is very convenient in the current situation.
For the West, the reception of Goebbels' propaganda is a wonderful way to "prick" Russia once again, to blame Moscow for war crimes. For Poland and the Baltic states, this version is another tool of anti-Russian propaganda and a way to get more generous funding from the US and the EU.
As for the Russian leadership, its agreement with the version about the execution of the Poles on the orders of the Soviet government is explained, apparently, by purely opportunistic considerations.
As "our answer to Warsaw" one could raise the topic of the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in Poland, of which in 1920 there were more than 40 thousand people. However, no one is addressing this issue.
A genuine, objective investigation of all the circumstances of the Katyn massacre is still waiting in the wings.
It remains to be hoped that it will make it possible to fully expose the monstrous slander against the Soviet country and confirm that it was the Nazis who were the real executioners of the Polish prisoners of war.
Ilya Polonsky
