With this, in fact, no one has ever argued. The Katyn massacre was called a war crime not only by the US Congress and the Polish government in exile, but also by Stalin and Hitler.
The only dispute was about who exactly committed this crime. Until the 80s of the twentieth century, everyone (except for the US Congress and Polish emigrants) knew that the Germans did it, then that the NKVD did it on Stalin's orders. The authorities of the USSR in the late 1980s themselves openly admitted this, what else to want?
Nevertheless, the Poles are not satisfied with the recognition by the Soviet and then Russian authorities of the guilt of the USSR in the Katyn execution. The Polish side in Strasbourg challenged the closure of the official investigation into the Katyn massacre, which was decided by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of Russia in 2004, motivating it with the death of criminals. Poles demand further investigation and legal rehabilitation of the killed officers.
Oddly enough, many Russian citizens are demanding the same. Like the Poles, they are not satisfied with the state of this case, they would like to continue the investigation and establish the truth. In short, apart from the vague confessions of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, it would be desirable to get at least some more facts.
It was this desire for facts that prompted me and the Moscow researcher Ivan Chigirin to write a book about Katyn two years ago. It turned out to be surprisingly easy to do this - practically all Soviet primary materials are in the fund of the "Burdenko Commission" in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, there are also German sources. We analyzed this entire array of information in detail in the book, and here I will only report the main facts and results.
Your word, mister accuser
The dislike of the Russian intelligentsia for the Stalinist period of our history played a cruel joke on the participants in the "Katyn" discussion. They completely focused on discussing the materials of the Soviet commission. We were interested in the evidence collected by the German side, which is much more muffled.
Promotional video:
The progress of the investigation was covered in a book published in 1943 in Berlin, the bulk of which was occupied by the report of the pathologist Dr. Butz. The famous scientist talks for a long time and with pleasure about his work on a new topic for pathologists in the state of bodies in mass graves, and in the end he makes an absolutely wonderful conclusion: when these people were killed, science does not know, the time of their death should be determined on the basis of other data. Which ones - he also said, but more on that below.
Soviet pathologists worked a little later - nine months later, in January 1944. By that time, they already had vast experience of working in mass graves, which was provided by the German side, and they did not have to refer to the lack of data. Commission verdict: the most likely date of execution is 1941.
The Germans were also unlucky with witnesses. As a result of several months of hard work, they managed to find 12 witnesses. The testimony of seven of them is presented in the book. Six of them claim that they saw the Poles being brought to the Gnezdovo station and taken away somewhere in trucks - however, the Soviet side did not deny this fact. And only one - the farmer Parfen Kiselev said that he saw how people were brought into the forest in closed cars, and heard shots and shouts. One witness is not enough, even if we are talking about stealing firewood from a neighbor's woodpile, frankly …
And even this witness was not saved by the Germans for history. Before the liberation of Smolensk, he went into the forest and returned back only when ours arrived. He did not deny his testimony before the Chekists, moreover, he told NKGB investigators in detail how he was treated in the Gestapo, demanding that he play the role of a witness (apparently, in fact, after all, in the Feljandarmerie or Abwehr unit). After a month of beatings, he agreed.
For comparison: the NKVD-NKGB brigade interviewed 96 witnesses during the investigation. Supporters of the "Soviet" version put forward an amusing argument: the Chekists allegedly "knocked out" the necessary testimony. Well, and who prevented the Germans from doing this? Is the beatings not in the traditions of the German occupation administration, because they contradict the honor of knighthood? Can we not believe it?
So why did the Germans, who surpassed all their contemporaries in the art of torture, fail to obtain 96 testimonies?
And now about the "other data" of Dr. Butz. Both he himself and the German commission determined the time of death on the basis that there were no documents and newspapers in the pockets of the prisoners that had a later date than May 1941. I think any reader of detective stories will understand that this "proof" lends itself to falsification with extraordinary ease. Especially if you have as much cheap labor as you want, which can be expended after work.
That, in fact, is all the evidence from the German side that is worth talking about. There was still a number of clues that were not worth talking about, like three-year-old trees supposedly growing on the graves. However, since even Dr. Butz did not see these trees growing, there is nothing to talk about.
You need to be more attentive, more attentive …
But in the course of work, the German commission made several punctures, of which two were extremely significant. First: Polish prisoners were killed from German weapons. Since the shells from the excavation were stolen quite intensively, including the excursionists brought to the place of execution, the Germans had to admit this fact. The main service weapon of the NKVD personnel was the revolver, from which the executions were carried out. Where did the German shells come from, including those from large-caliber weapons that were not used at all in the USSR?
Of course, an explanation was found for this fact - but such a frank stretching of the owl on the globe … Like, the NKVD leadership, for some unknown reason, specially for this execution supplied the performers with "Walters". Why, excuse me? Why is the revolver bad?
The second puncture is much more significant. The Germans constantly write that they recognized the titles of those executed by insignia. Meanwhile, according to the Soviet "Regulations on Prisoners of War" of 1931 and the secret regulations of 1939, prisoners were not allowed to wear cockades and insignia - this was one of the differences between our "Regulations" from the Geneva Convention. All this was allowed to be worn only by the "Regulations" of July 1, 1941. And the fact that epaulets were present on the uniforms of the executed, and cockades on their caps, proves that they were killed either after that date, or were held captive not by the USSR, but by a state that respected the Geneva Convention. This fact defies explanation, so supporters of the "Soviet" version simply keep silent about it.
On the question of customs
This is also an essential question, isn't it? If the ruling regime of a state constantly practices massacres, then in each specific case the question of motivation does not arise. During the occupation, the Germans killed about 430 thousand people on the territory of the Smolensk region. What other special motives are needed? They beat the Russians, beat the Poles too. The German Nazi regime systematically destroyed those whom it considered "Untermensch" in thousands and tens of thousands. Nobody has ever tried to challenge this.
But with our country, everything is far from so simple. Mass shootings in the USSR ended in 1938. In 1940 they were not produced at all. None. This was proved long ago (ten years ago) by historians, and after the publication of the statistics of the NKVD it became a well-known fact.
Moreover, the execution of the Poles contrived not to enter even this very statistics. All sentences to capital punishment, both judicial and non-judicial, both central and regional, are meticulously reflected in it. According to these statistics, in 1939, 1,863 death sentences were passed. How to accommodate from 10 thousand to 22 thousand killed Poles is a question for the supporters of the "Soviet" version. I don't know how to fit. The argument that such exceptional importance was attached to this operation that the NKVD kept it secret from its own internal statistics is such a blatant indulgence of Polish ambition that it is somehow inconvenient.
The documents from the notorious "package number 1" also did not clarify the situation. Let's leave aside the question of their authenticity, let's look at the essence. The NKVD considers it necessary to shoot Polish prisoners, "on the basis that they are all inveterate, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime."
Could the Soviet government have had such a motivation? But how! In the TV series, it is just that. But if we talk about real history, then we again indulge the Polish ambition, because both before and after March 5, 1940, in order to receive a sentence, it was required to commit a crime. "Inveterate enemies" could get at most three years for anti-Soviet agitation - if they put their attitude into words.
And if you start reading documents of that time, then already in the second hundred you become convinced that the style of business correspondence at that time was completely different, and the rules for processing documents were not the same, and the syllable of Beria and his assistants was also different. In general, the archival authorities can beat themselves in the chest even to the point of breaking their ribs, swearing that not a single false piece of paper will leak into their citadel, but without a comprehensive, multilateral examination (and not only the authenticity of the paper and typewriter, which was carried out by the prosecutor's office), this "package" cannot be taken seriously. What, by the way, is known to any graduate of history faculty who knows how to "oud" in source studies.
How old was Katynia?
One, you say? If!
The first katyn-like sensation arose back in 1940. This is the so-called "Bromberg affair", which is described in the brochure "Polish atrocities against the Germans in Poland." Its authors claimed that in September 1939, Polish troops committed mass killings of German civilians, not excluding women and children, and named the number: 58 thousand people.
By the way, why not ask Warsaw for a report on this story? In the "Bromberg case" there are expert reports, and as for the evidence, there are much more of them than in the "Katyn case".
In January 1942, Dr. Goebbels's department published another book: "German soldiers in the Soviet Union: letters from the East." It contains evidence of something like this:
“The Bolsheviks left the city (Lvov - EP) after heavy fighting. The Bolsheviks and Jews brutally murdered 12,000 Germans and Ukrainians. I saw a pregnant woman hanging by her legs in the GPU prison. Other women had their eyes gouged out, their noses, ears, fingers, hands, legs were cut off, some had their hearts torn out (and eaten ?! - E. P.), 300 orphans from two to 17 years old were nailed to the wall and stabbed to death … After torture they threw people, most of whom were still alive, into a three-meter pile in the basement and set them on fire (I wonder how this can be done technically? - EP)."
However, a breakthrough in exposing the atrocities of Bolshevism was made after Stalingrad. Simultaneously with Katyn, the Germans carried out exactly the same "exhumation" in Vinnitsa - they dug up 9,500 corpses, and a certain Ukrainian commission conducted a "medical examination" and determined the date of death: three to five years ago.
Romanians tried to arrange the same show in Odessa. However, Hitler rarely found censorship words for these allies - and deservedly so! The Germans were not too lazy to bring experts from Europe, and entrust the investigation to their own personnel. The Romanians hired a local photographer and local pathologists, which instantly caused a leak of information throughout Odessa. As a result, it turned out that you can't imagine it on purpose …
“Lvov Letters” was later dully mentioned in Bandera propaganda, but even Ukrainian nationalists did not use either Vinnytsia or Odessa provocations. So they sank into the swamp …
It's simple …
What actually happened to the Polish prisoners of war from the camps near Smolensk?
Based on the materials of the Burdenko Commission, later testimony and transcripts of the Nuremberg trial, their fate can be established with a high degree of probability.
The Germans approached Smolensk three weeks after the start of the war. In the turmoil of the evacuation, the camp administrations were not given carriages to take out the prisoners, and they did not want to walk. In general, according to NKVD informants, the Poles treated the Germans with much more sympathy than the Russians. The guards of the camps and some of the prisoners (mostly Jews) fled to the east, the rest went to the Germans.
In August 1941, construction of the headquarters of Army Group Center began five kilometers from Katyn. Usually, during the construction of secret facilities, the Germans used prisoners who were then destroyed. And since they had at their disposal ready-made working teams of the Polish camps, much more loyal to the Germans than Russian prisoners of war, it made sense to use them for such an important construction. After the completion of construction work, the Poles were taken to the Katyn forest and shot. There is nothing particularly outstanding in this, the Germans practiced this method throughout the war.
Another thing is that neither in Strasbourg, nor anywhere else, this story will surprise anyone. You can't make films about her, you can't sing songs and you can't write books, because there is no dramatic effect here, and there is nothing to be proud of. And I probably want …
Elena Prudnikova