Katyn history of tragedy. Katyn case - new facts, or Katyn lie
The case of the "Katyn massacre" still haunts researchers, despite the admission of the Russian side of its guilt. Experts find in this case a lot of inconsistencies and contradictions that do not allow for an unambiguous verdict.
strange haste
By 1940, up to half a million Poles appeared in the territories of Poland occupied by Soviet troops, most of whom were soon released. But about 42 thousand officers of the Polish army, policemen and gendarmes, who were recognized as enemies of the USSR, continued to remain in the Soviet camps.
A significant part (26 to 28 thousand) of prisoners was employed in the construction of roads, and then transferred to a special settlement in Siberia. Later, many of them will be liberated, some will form the “Anders Army”, others will become the founders of the 1st Army of the Polish Army.
However, the fate of approximately 14,000 Polish prisoners of war held in the Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky camps remained unclear. The Germans decided to take advantage of the situation, announcing in April 1943 that they had found evidence of the execution of several thousand Polish officers by Soviet troops in the forest near Katyn.
The Nazis promptly assembled an international commission, which included doctors from controlled countries to exhume corpses in mass graves. In total, more than 4,000 remains were recovered, killed according to the conclusion of the German commission no later than May 1940 by the Soviet military, that is, when this area was still in the zone of Soviet occupation.
It should be noted that the German investigation began immediately after the disaster near Stalingrad. According to historians, this was a propaganda ploy to divert public attention from national disgrace and switch to "the bloody atrocity of the Bolsheviks." According to the calculation of Joseph Goebbels, this should not only damage the image of the USSR, but also lead to a break with the Polish authorities in exile and official London.
Not convinced
Of course, the Soviet government did not stand aside and initiated its own investigation. In January 1944, a commission led by Chief Surgeon of the Red Army Nikolai Burdenko came to the conclusion that in the summer of 1941, due to the rapid advance of the German army, Polish prisoners of war did not have time to evacuate and were soon executed. As proof of this version, the "Burdenko Commission" testified that the Poles were shot from German weapons.
In February 1946, the "Katyn tragedy" became one of the cases that was investigated during the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Soviet side, despite the arguments provided in favor of Germany's guilt, nevertheless, could not prove its position.
In 1951, a special commission of the House of Representatives of the Congress on the Katyn issue was convened in the United States. Her conclusion, based only on circumstantial evidence, declared the USSR guilty of the Katyn murder. As justification, in particular, the following signs were cited: the opposition of the USSR to the investigation of the international commission in 1943, the unwillingness to invite neutral observers during the work of the Burdenko Commission, except for correspondents, and the inability to present sufficient evidence of German guilt in Nuremberg.
Confession
For a long time, the controversy around Katyn did not resume, as the parties did not provide new arguments. It was not until the years of Perestroika that the Polish-Soviet commission of historians began to work on this issue. From the very beginning of work, the Polish side began to criticize the results of the Burdenko commission and, referring to the publicity proclaimed in the USSR, demanded that additional materials be provided.
In early 1989, documents were found in the archives, indicating that the cases of the Poles were subject to consideration at a Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR. It followed from the materials that the Poles held in all three camps were transferred to the disposal of the regional departments of the NKVD, and then their names did not appear anywhere else.
At the same time, the historian Yuri Zorya, comparing the lists of the NKVD for those leaving the camp in Kozelsk with the exhumation lists from the German "White Book" on Katyn, found that these were the same persons, and the order of the list of persons from the burials coincided with the order of the lists for sending .
Zorya reported this to the head of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, but he refused further investigation. Only the prospect of publishing these documents forced in April 1990 the leadership of the USSR to admit responsibility for the execution of Polish officers.
“The revealed archival materials in their totality allow us to conclude that Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen were directly responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest,” the Soviet government said in a statement.
Secret package
Until now, the main evidence of the guilt of the USSR is the so-called “packet No. 1”, which was stored in the Special Folder of the Archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU. It was not made public during the work of the Polish-Soviet commission. The package containing materials on Katyn was opened during Yeltsin's presidency on September 24, 1992, copies of the documents were handed over to Polish President Lech Walesa and thus saw the light of day.
It must be said that the documents from "package No. 1" do not contain direct evidence of the guilt of the Soviet regime and can only indirectly testify to it. Moreover, some experts, drawing attention to the large number of inconsistencies in these papers, call them fake.
In the period from 1990 to 2004, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation conducted its own investigation into the Katyn massacre and nevertheless found evidence of the guilt of Soviet leaders in the death of Polish officers. During the investigation, the surviving witnesses who testified in 1944 were interviewed. Now they said that their testimony was false, as they were obtained under pressure from the NKVD.
Today the situation has not changed. Both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have repeatedly spoken out in support of the official conclusion that Stalin and the NKVD were guilty. “Attempts to question these documents, to say that someone falsified them, is simply not serious. This is done by those who are trying to whitewash the nature of the regime that Stalin created in a certain period in our country,” Dmitry Medvedev said.
Doubts remain
Nevertheless, even after the official recognition of responsibility by the Russian government, many historians and publicists continue to insist on the fairness of the conclusions of the Burdenko commission. In particular, Viktor Ilyukhin, a member of the Communist Party faction, spoke about this. According to the parliamentarian, a former KGB officer told him about the fabrication of documents from “package No. 1”. According to supporters of the "Soviet version", the key documents of the "Katyn case" were falsified in order to distort the role of Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the history of the 20th century.
Chief Researcher of the Institute Russian history Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Zhukov questions the authenticity of the key document of the "package No. 1" - Beria's note to Stalin, which reports on the plans of the NKVD regarding the captured Poles. “This is not Beria’s personal form,” Zhukov notes. In addition, the historian draws attention to one feature of such documents, with which he has worked for more than 20 years.
“They were written on one page, a maximum of a page and one third. Because no one wanted to read long papers. So I want to talk again about the document that is considered key. It is already on four pages! ”, The scientist sums up.
In 2009, at the initiative of an independent researcher Sergei Strygin, an examination of Beria's note was carried out. The conclusion was this: "the font of the first three pages is not found in any of the authentic letters of the NKVD of that period identified so far." At the same time, three pages of Beria's note are printed on one typewriter, and the last page on another.
Zhukov also draws attention to another oddity of the Katyn case. If Beria had received an order to shoot Polish prisoners of war, the historian suggests, he would probably have taken them further to the east, and would not have killed them right here near Katyn, leaving such clear evidence of a crime.
Doctor of Historical Sciences Valentin Sakharov has no doubt that the Katyn massacre was the work of the Germans. He writes: “In order to create graves in the Katyn forest of Polish citizens allegedly shot by the Soviet authorities, they dug up a lot of corpses at the Smolensk civil cemetery and transported these corpses to the Katyn forest, which made the local population very indignant.”
All the testimonies collected by the German commission were extorted from the local population, Sakharov believes. In addition, the Polish residents called to witness signed documents for German which they did not own.
However, some documents that could shed light on the Katyn tragedy are still classified. In 2006, State Duma deputy Andrey Savelyev submitted a request to the archive service of the Armed Forces of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation about the possibility of declassifying such documents.
In response, the deputy was informed that “the expert commission of the Main Directorate of Educational Work of the Armed Forces Russian Federation produced expert assessment documents on the Katyn case, stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and made a conclusion about the inappropriateness of their declassification.
Recently, one can often hear the version that both the Soviet and German sides took part in the execution of the Poles, and the executions were carried out separately in different time. This may explain the existence of two mutually exclusive systems of evidence. However, at the moment it is only clear that the "Katyn case" is still far from being resolved.
(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.
As evidenced by 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 the chairman of the KGB Shelepin, in total about 22 thousand Poles were killed then.
In 1939, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army crossed the eastern border of Poland and the Soviet troops were taken prisoner, according to various sources, from 180 to 250 thousand Polish soldiers, 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" was working in Katyn, headed by the Chief Surgeon of the Red Army Academician Nikolai Burdenko. During the exhumation, inspection of physical 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. According to the 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 into captivity 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 sees no reprisals, answering that "the actions of a number of specific high-ranking officials The USSR were qualified under paragraph "b" of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (1926), as an abuse of power that had grave consequences in the presence of particularly aggravating circumstances, on September 21, 2004, the criminal case against them was terminated on the basis of paragraph 4 of part 1. Art. 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation for 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 over 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 (ECHR) decided to consider the case on a priority basis and also sent a number of questions to the 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.
As Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Yuri Chaika announced on May 19, Russia has almost 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
On April 13, 1943, thanks to a statement by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, a new “sensational bomb” appeared in all German media: German soldiers during the occupation of Smolensk found tens of thousands of corpses of captured Polish officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. According to the Nazis, a brutal execution was carried out soviet soldiers. Moreover, almost a year before the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. The sensation is intercepted by the world media, and the Polish side, in turn, declares that our country has destroyed the “color of the nation” of the Polish people, since, according to their estimates, the bulk of Poland’s officers are teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, scientists and other elites . The Poles actually declare the USSR criminals against humanity. The Soviet Union, in turn, denied any involvement in the execution. So who is to blame for this tragedy? Let's try to figure it out.
First you need to understand, how did the Polish officers in the 40s end up in a place like Katyn? On September 17, 1939, under an agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union launched an offensive against Poland. It is worth noting here that the USSR, with this offensive, set itself a very pragmatic task - to return its previously lost lands - Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, which our country lost in the Russian-Polish war in 1921, and also to prevent the proximity of the Nazi invaders to our borders. And it was thanks to this campaign that the reunification of the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples began within the borders in which they exist today. Therefore, when someone says that Stalin = Hitler only because they divided Poland among themselves by agreement, then this is just an attempt to play on the emotions of a person. We did not divide Poland, but only returned our ancestral territories, at the same time trying to protect ourselves from an external aggressor.
During this offensive, we regained Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, and about 150,000 Poles dressed in military uniform were captured by the Red Army. Here again, it is worth noting that the representatives of the lower class were immediately released, and later, in the 41st year, 73 thousand Poles were transferred to the Polish general Anders, who fought against the Germans. We still had that part of the prisoners who did not want to fight against the Germans, but refused to cooperate with us either.
Polish prisoners taken by the Red Army
Of course, executions of Poles took place, but not in the amount that fascist propaganda presents. To begin with, it is necessary to remember that during the Polish occupation of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine in 1921-1939, Polish gendarmes mocked the population, whipped with barbed wire, sewed live cats into the stomach of people and killed hundreds for the slightest violation of discipline in concentration camps. And the Polish newspapers did not hesitate to write: “A horror must fall on the entire local Belarusian population from top to bottom, from which blood will freeze in their veins.” And this Polish "elite" was captured by us. Therefore, part of the Poles (about 3 thousand) was sentenced to death for committing grave crimes. The rest of the Poles worked at the construction site of the highway in Smolensk. And already at the end of July 1941, the Smolensk region was occupied by German troops.Today there are 2 versions of the events of those days:
- Polish officers were killed by German fascists between September and December 1941;
- the Polish “color of the nation” was shot by Soviet soldiers in May 1940.
The remains of the executed Polish officers
F. Gaek also gives the following arguments against the accusation of the Nazis:
- the corpses of Polish officers had high degree safety, which did not correspond to their being in the ground for three whole years;
- water got into grave No. 5, and if the Poles had really been shot by the NKVD, then the corpses would have begun to adipate (the transformation of soft parts into a gray-white sticky mass) of the internal organs in three years, but this did not happen;
- surprisingly good preservation of shape (the fabric on the corpses did not decay; the metal parts were somewhat rusty, but in some places they retained their luster; the tobacco in the cigarette cases was not spoiled, although both tobacco and the fabric had to be badly damaged by dampness after 3 years of lying in the ground) ;
- Polish officers were shot with German-made revolvers;
- the witnesses interviewed by the Nazis were not direct eyewitnesses, and their testimony is too vague and contradictory.
“The members of the international commission - all, I note, except for the Swiss expert, from countries either occupied by the Nazis or their satellites - were taken by the Nazis to Katyn on April 28, 1943. And already on April 30, they were taken out of there on a plane that landed not in Berlin, but at a provincial intermediate Polish airfield in Biala Podlaski, where the experts were taken to the hangar and forced to sign a prepared conclusion. And if in Katyn the experts argued, doubted the objectivity of the evidence presented to them by the Germans, then here, in the hangar, they unquestioningly signed what was required. It was obvious to everyone that the document had to be signed, otherwise it would have been impossible to reach Berlin. Later, other experts spoke about this.”
In addition, the facts are already known that experts from the German commission in 1943 found a significant number of cartridge cases from German cartridges in the Katyn burials.Geco 7.65 D”, which were badly corroded. And this suggests that the sleeves were steel. The fact is that at the end of 1940, due to a shortage of non-ferrous metals, the Germans were forced to switch to the production of varnished steel sleeves. Obviously, in the spring of 1940, this type of cartridges could not have appeared in the hands of the NKVD officers. This means that a German trace is involved in the execution of Polish officers.
Katyn. Smolensk. Spring 1943 German doctor Butz demonstrates to the commission of experts the documents found in the possession of the murdered Polish officers. On the second photo: Italian and Hungarian "experts" inspect the corpse.
The now declassified documents from the Special Folder No. 1 are also “proof” of the USSR’s guilt. In particular, there is a letter from Beria No. 794 / B, where he gives a direct decree to the execution of more than 25 thousand Polish officers. But on March 31, 2009, the forensic laboratory of one of the leading specialists of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, E. Molokov, carried out an official examination of this letter and revealed the following:
- the first 3 pages are printed on one typewriter, and the last on another;
- the font of the last page is found on a number of obviously genuine letters of the NKVD of 39-40, and the fonts of the first three pages are not found in any of the authentic letters of the NKVD of that time that have been identified so far [from the later conclusions of the examination of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation].
The second version of events is primarily based on the head of the chief military surgeon Academician N. Burdenko in 1944. It is worth noting here that after the performance played out by Goebbels in 43 and forcing, under pain of death, forensic experts to sign medical reports that are beneficial fascist propaganda, the Burdenko commission did not make sense to hide something or hide evidence. In this case, only the truth could save our country.
In particular, the Soviet commission revealed that it was simply impossible to carry out a mass execution of Polish officers unnoticed by the population. Judge for yourself. In pre-war times, the Katyn forest was a favorite vacation spot for the residents of Smolensk, where their summer cottages were located, and there were no prohibitions on access to these places. It was only with the arrival of the Germans that the first bans on entering the forest appeared, reinforced patrols were established, and signs began to appear in many places with the threat of execution for persons entering the forest. In addition, there was even a pioneer camp of Promstrakhkassy nearby. It turned out that there were facts of threats, blackmail and bribery of the local population by the Germans to give them the necessary testimony.
The Commission of Academician Nikolai Burdenko works in Katyn.
Forensic experts of the Burdenko Commission examined 925 corpses and made the following conclusions:
- a very small part of the corpses (20 out of 925) turned out to have their hands tied with paper twine, which was unknown to the USSR in May 1940, but was produced only in Germany from the end of that year;
- full identity of the method of shooting Polish prisoners of war with the method of shooting civilians and Soviet prisoners of war, widely practiced by the Nazi authorities (shot in the back of the head);
- the fabric of clothing, especially overcoats, uniforms, trousers and overshirts, is well preserved and is very difficult to tear with hands;
- the execution was carried out with German weapons;
- there were absolutely no corpses in a state of putrefactive decay or destruction;
- found valuables and documents dated 1941;
- witnesses were found who saw some Polish officers alive in 1941, but were listed as shot in 1940;
- witnesses were found who saw Polish officers in August-September 1941, working in groups of 15-20 people under the command of the Germans;
- Based on the analysis of injuries, it was decided that in 1943 the Germans performed an extremely negligible number of autopsies on the corpses of executed Polish prisoners of war.
As can be seen, the Soviet commission presented very substantial arguments in its defense. But, despite this, among the accusers of our country, in response, there is a version that Soviet soldiers deliberately shot Polish prisoners of war with German weapons according to the Nazi method in order to blame the Germans for their atrocities in the future. First, in May 1940, the war had not yet begun, and no one knew if it would begin at all. And in order to pull off such a cunning scheme, it is necessary to have an exact confidence that the Germans will be able to capture Smolensk at all. And if they are able to capture, then we must be sure that in turn we will be able to win back these lands from them, so that later we can open the graves in the Katyn forest and put our blame on the Germans. The absurdity of this approach is obvious.
It is interesting that the first accusation of Goebbels (April 13, 1943) was made only two months after the end of the Battle of Stalingrad (February 2, 1943), which determined the entire further course of the war in our favor. After the Battle of Stalingrad, the final victory of the USSR was only a matter of time. And the Nazis understood this very well. Therefore, the accusations from the Germans look like an attempt to take revenge by redirecting
worldnegative public opinion from Germany to the USSR, and after their aggression."If you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it."
"We seek not the truth, but the effect"
Joseph Goebbels
However, today it is the Goebbels version that is official version in Russia.April 7, 2010 at conferences in KatynPutin said that Stalin carried out this execution out of a sense of revenge, since in the 1920s Stalin personally commanded the campaign against Warsaw and was defeated. And on April 18 of the same year, on the day of the funeral of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, today's Prime Minister Medvedev called the Katyn massacre "a crime of Stalin and his henchmen." And this is despite the fact that there is no legal court decision on the guilt of our country in this tragedy, neither Russian nor foreign. But there is a decision of the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945, where the Germans were found guilty. In turn, Poland, unlike us, does not repent for its atrocities of 21-39 years in the occupied territories of Ukraine and Belarus. Only in 1922 there were about 800 uprisings of the local population in these occupied territories, a concentration camp was created in Berezovsky-Karatuzskaya, through which thousands of Belarusians passed. Skulsky, one of the leaders of the Poles, said that in 10 years there would not be a single Belarusian on this land. Hitler had the same plans for Russia. These facts have long been proven, but only our country is forced to repent. And in those crimes that we probably did not commit.
Katyn: Chronicle of events
The term "Katyn crime" is collective, it means the execution in April-May 1940 of almost 22 thousand Polish citizens held in various camps and prisons of the NKVD of the USSR:
14,552 Polish officers and policemen taken prisoner by the Red Army in September 1939 and held in three NKVD POW camps, including -
4421 prisoners of the Kozelsky camp (shot and buried in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, 2 km from the Gnezdovo station);
6311 prisoners of the Ostashkov camp (shot in Kalinin and buried in Medny);
3820 prisoners of the Starobelsky camp (shot and buried in Kharkov);
7,305 arrested, held in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSR (probably shot in Kyiv, Kharkov, Kherson and Minsk, and possibly in other unidentified places on the territory of the BSSR and the Ukrainian SSR).
Katyn - only one of a number of places of executions - has become a symbol of the execution of all the above groups of Polish citizens, since it was in Katyn in 1943 that the graves of murdered Polish officers were first discovered. Over the next 47 years, Katyn remained the only reliably known burial place for the victims of this "operation".
background
On August 23, 1939, the USSR and Germany signed a non-aggression pact - the "Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact". The pact included a secret protocol on the delimitation of spheres of interest, according to which, in particular, the eastern half of the territory of the pre-war Polish state was assigned to the Soviet Union. For Hitler, the pact meant the removal of the last obstacle before an attack on Poland.
On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thus unleashing the Second world war. On September 17, 1939, in the midst of bloody battles of the Polish Army, desperately trying to stop the rapid advance of the German army deep into the country, the Red Army invaded Poland in collusion with Germany - without declaring war by the Soviet Union and contrary to the non-aggression pact between the USSR and Poland. Soviet propaganda declared the operation of the Red Army "a liberation campaign in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus."
The offensive of the Red Army came as a complete surprise to the Poles. Some did not even rule out that the introduction of Soviet troops was directed against German aggression. Realizing Poland's doom in a war on two fronts, the Polish commander-in-chief issued an order not to engage in battle with the Soviet troops and to resist only when trying to disarm the Polish units. As a result, only a few Polish units offered resistance to the Red Army. Until the end of September 1939, 240-250 thousand Polish soldiers and officers, as well as border guards, police officers, gendarmerie, prison guards, etc. were taken prisoner by the Red Army. Not being able to maintain such a huge mass of prisoners, immediately after disarmament, half of the privates and non-commissioned officers were sent home, and the rest were transferred by the Red Army to a dozen specially created prisoner of war camps of the NKVD of the USSR.
However, these NKVD camps were also overloaded. Therefore, in October - November 1939, most of the privates and non-commissioned officers left the prisoner-of-war camps: the inhabitants of the territories captured by the Soviet Union were sent home, and the inhabitants of the territories occupied by the Germans, by agreement on the exchange of prisoners, were transferred to Germany (Germany, in return, transferred the captured to the Soviet Union German troops of Polish military personnel - Ukrainians and Belarusians, residents of the territories that went to the USSR).
The exchange agreements also applied to civilian refugees who ended up on the territory occupied by the USSR. They could apply to the German commissions operating in the spring of 1940 on the Soviet side for permission to return to their permanent places of residence in the Polish territories occupied by Germany.
About 25 thousand Polish privates and non-commissioned officers were left in Soviet captivity. In addition to them, army officers (about 8.5 thousand people), who were concentrated in two prisoner of war camps - Starobelsky in the Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk) region and Kozelsky in the Smolensk (now Kaluga) region, as well as border guards, were not subject to dissolution at home or transfer to Germany. police officers, gendarmes, prison guards, etc. (about 6.5 thousand people), who were gathered in the Ostashkov POW camp in the Kalinin (now Tver) region.
Not only prisoners of war became prisoners of the NKVD. One of the main means of "Sovietization" of the occupied territories was the campaign of incessant mass arrests for political reasons, directed primarily against officials of the Polish state apparatus (including officers and police officers who escaped captivity), members of Polish political parties and public organizations, industrialists, large landowners, businessmen. , border violators and other "enemies of Soviet power". Before the verdict was passed, those arrested were kept for months in the prisons of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR, formed in the occupied territories of the pre-war Polish state.
On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided to execute “14,700 Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers located in prisoner of war camps,” as well as 11,000 arrested and held in Western prisons. regions of Ukraine and Belarus "members of various counter-revolutionary espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, manufacturers, former Polish officers, officials and defectors."
The basis for the decision of the Politburo was a note by People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Beria to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to Stalin, in which the execution of the listed categories of Polish prisoners and prisoners was proposed "based on the fact that they are all inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power." At the same time, as a decision in the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo, the final part of Beria's note was verbatim reproduced.
Execution
The execution of Polish prisoners of war and prisoners belonging to the categories listed in the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940, was carried out in April and May of the same year.
All the prisoners of the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky POW camps (except 395 people) were sent in stages of about 100 people to the disposal of the NKVD departments, respectively, in the Smolensk, Kalinin and Kharkov regions, which carried out executions as the stages arrived.
In parallel, there were executions of prisoners in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus.
395 prisoners of war, not included in the execution orders, were sent to the Yukhnovsky prisoner of war camp in the Smolensk region. They were then transferred to the Gryazovetsky prisoner of war camp in the Vologda Oblast, from which, at the end of August 1941, they were transferred to the formation of the Polish Army in the USSR.
On April 13, 1940, shortly after the start of executions of Polish prisoners of war and prison inmates, the NKVD operation was carried out to deport their families (as well as the families of other repressed people) living in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR to a settlement in Kazakhstan.
Subsequent events
On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the USSR. Soon, on July 30, between Soviet government and the Polish government in exile (who was in London) concluded an agreement to invalidate the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 concerning "territorial changes in Poland", to restore diplomatic relations between the USSR and Poland, to form a Polish army on the territory of the USSR to participate in the war against Germany and the release of all Polish citizens who were imprisoned in the USSR as prisoners of war, arrested or convicted, and also kept in special settlements.
This agreement was followed by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 on granting amnesty to Polish citizens who were imprisoned or in a special settlement (by that time there were about 390 thousand of them), and the Soviet-Polish military agreement of August 14, 1941 on the organization Polish army on the territory of the USSR. The army was planned to be formed from amnestied Polish prisoners and special settlers, primarily from former prisoners of war; its commander was General Vladislav Anders, who was urgently released from the inner prison of the NKVD in the Lubyanka. 
In the autumn of 1941 - spring of 1942, Polish officials repeatedly turned to the Soviet authorities with inquiries about the fate of thousands of captured officers who had not arrived at the places where Anders' army was formed. The Soviet side replied that there was no information about them. On December 3, 1941, at a personal meeting in the Kremlin with Polish Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorsky and General Anders, Stalin suggested that these officers might have fled to Manchuria. (By the end of the summer of 1942, Anders' army was evacuated from the USSR to Iran, and later it participated in the Allied operations to liberate Italy from the Nazis.)
On April 13, 1943, German radio officially announced the discovery in Katyn near Smolensk of the graves of Polish officers shot by the Soviet authorities. By order of the German authorities, the identified names of the dead began to be read out over loudspeakers in the streets and squares of the occupied Polish cities. On April 15, 1943, an official refutation of the Soviet Information Bureau followed, according to which Polish prisoners of war in the summer of 1941 were employed in construction work west of Smolensk, fell into the hands of the Germans and were shot by them.
From the end of March to the beginning of June 1943, the German side, with the participation of the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross, carried out an exhumation in Katyn. The remains of 4,243 Polish officers were recovered, and the names and surnames of 2,730 of them were established from the discovered personal documents. The corpses were reburied in mass graves next to the original burials, and the results of the exhumation were published in Berlin in the summer of that year in the book Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. The Germans handed over the documents and objects found on the corpses for detailed study to the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminalistics in Krakow. (In the summer of 1944, all of these materials, except for a small part of them, secretly hidden by employees of the Krakow Institute, were taken by the Germans from Krakow to Germany, where, according to rumors, they burned down during one of the bombings.)
On September 25, 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Only on January 12, 1944, was the Soviet “Special Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War Prisoners of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest” established, whose chairman was Academician N.N. Burdenko. At the same time, since October 1943, specially seconded employees of the NKVD-NKGB of the USSR were preparing falsified "evidence" of the responsibility of the German authorities for the execution of Polish officers near Smolensk. According to the official report, the Soviet exhumation at Katyn was carried out from 16 to 26 January 1944 at the direction of the "Burdenko Commission". From the secondary graves left after the German exhumation, and one primary grave, which the Germans did not have time to explore, the remains of 1380 people were recovered, according to the documents found, the commission established the personal data of 22 people. On January 26, 1944, the Izvestiya newspaper published an official statement from the Burdenko Commission, according to which the Polish prisoners of war, who were in three camps west of Smolensk in the summer of 1941 and remained there after the German troops invaded Smolensk, were shot by the Germans in the autumn of 1941.
To "legalize" this version on the world stage, the USSR tried to use the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried the main Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in 1945-1946. However, having heard on July 1-3, 1946, the testimony of witnesses for the defense (represented by German lawyers) and the prosecution (represented by the Soviet side), in view of the obvious unconvincingness of the Soviet version, the IMT decided not to include the Katyn execution in its verdict as one of the crimes of Nazi Germany.
On March 3, 1959, the chairman of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR A.N. Shelepin sent the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU N.S. Khrushchev, a top secret note confirming that 14,552 prisoners - officers, gendarmes, policemen, “etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland", as well as 7305 prisoners of the prisons of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were shot in 1940 on the basis of the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940 (including 4421 people in the Katyn Forest). The note suggested destroying all records of the executed.
However, throughout all post-war years Until the 1980s, the USSR Foreign Ministry repeatedly made official demarches with a statement about the established responsibility of the Nazis for the execution of Polish military personnel buried in the Katyn forest.
But the "Katyn lie" is not only the attempts of the USSR to impose on the world community the Soviet version of the execution in the Katyn forest. This is also one of the elements of the domestic policy of the communist leadership of Poland, brought to power by the Soviet Union after the liberation of the country. Another direction of this policy was the large-scale persecution and attempts to denigrate the members of the Home Army (AK) - a massive anti-Hitler armed underground, subordinate to the Polish "London" government-in-exile during the war years (with which the USSR severed relations in April 1943, after it turned to the International Red Cross with a request to investigate the murder of Polish officers whose remains were found in the Katyn Forest). The symbol of the smear campaign against AK after the war was the posting on the streets of Polish cities of a poster with the mocking slogan "AK is a spitting dwarf of the reaction." At the same time, any statements or actions that directly or indirectly cast doubt on the Soviet version of the death of captured Polish officers were punished, including attempts by relatives to install memorial plates in cemeteries and churches indicating 1940 as the time of death of their loved ones. In order not to lose their jobs, in order to be able to study at the institute, the relatives were forced to hide the fact that a member of their family had died in Katyn. The Polish state security agencies searched for witnesses and participants in the German exhumation and forced them to make statements "exposing" the Germans as the perpetrators of the execution. 
Soviet Union pleaded guilty only half a century after the execution of the captured Polish officers - on April 13, 1990, an official TASS statement was published about "the direct responsibility for the atrocities in the Katyn forest of Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen", and the atrocities themselves were qualified in it as "one of the grave crimes of Stalinism ". At the same time, the President of the USSR M.S. Gorbachev handed over to President of Poland V. Jaruzelsky the lists of executed Polish prisoners of war (formally, these were lists of instructions for sending stages from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps to the NKVD for the Smolensk and Kalinin regions, as well as a list of records of the departed prisoners of war from the Starobelsky camp) and some other documents of the NKVD .
In the same year, the prosecutor's office of the Kharkiv region opened criminal cases: on March 22 - on the discovery of burials in the forest park zone of Kharkov, and on August 20 - in relation to Beria, Merkulov, Soprunenko (who was in 1939-1943 the head of the USSR NKVD Department for Prisoners of War and internees), Berezhkov (the head of the Starobelsky camp of prisoners of war of the NKVD of the USSR) and other employees of the NKVD. On June 6, 1990, the prosecutor's office of the Kalinin region opened another case - about the fate of Polish prisoners of war held in the Ostashkov camp and disappeared without a trace in May 1940. These cases were transferred to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office (GVP) of the USSR and on September 27, 1990, they were combined and accepted by it for proceedings under No. 159. The GVP formed an investigation team headed by A.V. Tretsky.
In 1991, the GVP investigation team, together with Polish specialists, carried out partial exhumations in the 6th quarter of the forest park zone of Kharkov, on the territory of the holiday village of the KGB in the Tver region, 2 km from the village of Mednoye and in the Katyn forest. The main result of these exhumations was the final establishment in the procedural order of the places of burial of the executed Polish prisoners of the Starobilsk and Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camps.
A year later, on October 14, 1992, by order of the President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, documents exposing the leadership of the USSR in committing the "Katyn crime" were made public and handed over to Poland - the above-mentioned decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940 on the execution of Polish prisoners, Beria's "staged" note to this decision, addressed to Stalin (with handwritten signatures of Politburo members Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, as well as marks of voting "for" Kalinin and Kaganovich), Shelepin's note to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959 and other documents from the Presidential Archive. Thus, documentary evidence became public that the victims of the "Katyn crime" were executed for political reasons - as "hardened, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime." At the same time, for the first time, it became known that not only prisoners of war, but also prisoners of prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR were shot. The decision of the Politburo of March 5, 1940, ordered, as already mentioned, to shoot 14,700 prisoners of war and 11,000 prisoners. From Shelepin's note to Khrushchev it follows that about the same number of prisoners of war were shot, but fewer prisoners were shot - 7305 people. The reason for the "underperformance" is unknown.
On August 25, 1993, Russian President B.N. Yeltsin with the words "Forgive us ..." laid a wreath at the monument to the victims of Katyn at the Warsaw memorial cemetery "Powazki".
On May 5, 1994, the Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, General A. Khomich, handed over to the Deputy Prosecutor General of Poland, S. Snezhko, an alphabetical list of 3,435 inmates in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, indicating the numbers of orders, which, as is known since 1990, meant being sent to execution. The list, immediately published in Poland, became conditionally referred to as the “Ukrainian list”.
The "Belarusian list" is still unknown. If the "Shelepin" number of executed prisoners is correct, and if the published "Ukrainian list" is complete, then the "Belarusian list" should include 3,870 people. Thus, by now we know the names of 17,987 victims of the "Katyn crime", and 3,870 victims (prisoners in the western regions of the BSSR) remain nameless. Burial places are reliably known only for 14,552 executed prisoners of war.
On July 13, 1994, the head of the GVP investigation group A.Yu. Yablokov (who replaced A.V. Tretetsky) issued a decision to terminate 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), and in the decision Stalin, members of the Politburo Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich, Beria and other leaders and employees of the NKVD, as well as the executioners, were found guilty of committing crimes under paragraphs "a", "b", "c" of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity). It was precisely this qualification of the “Katyn case” (but in relation to the Nazis) that was already given by the Soviet side in 1945-1946 when it was submitted for consideration by the MVT. The Chief 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 entrusted with further investigation.
In 2000, Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Russian memorial complexes were opened at the burial sites of executed prisoners of war: on June 17 in Kharkov, on July 28 in Katyn, on September 2 in Medny.
On September 21, 2004, the GVP of the Russian Federation 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). Notifying the public about this only a few months later, the then Chief Military Prosecutor A.N. Savenkov, at his press conference on March 11, 2005, declared secret not only most of the materials of the investigation, but also the very decision to terminate the "Katyn case". Thus, the personal composition of the perpetrators contained in the decision was also classified.
From the response of the GVP of the Russian Federation to the ensuing request from Memorial, it can be seen that “a number of specific high-ranking officials of the USSR” were found guilty, whose actions are qualified under paragraph “b” of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR in force in 1926-1958 (abuse of power by a person in command composition of the Red Army, which had serious consequences in the presence of particularly aggravating circumstances).
The GVP also reported that in 36 volumes of the criminal case there are documents marked "secret" and "top secret", and in 80 volumes - documents marked "for official use". On this basis, access to 116 out of 183 volumes is closed.
In the fall of 2005, Polish prosecutors were familiarized with the remaining 67 volumes, "not containing information constituting state secrets".
In 2005-2006, the GVP of the Russian Federation refused to consider applications submitted by relatives and Memorial for the rehabilitation of a number of specific executed Polish prisoners of war as victims of political repression, and in 2007, the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow and the Moscow City Court confirmed these refusals of the GVP.
In the first half of the 1990s, our country made important steps on the way to the recognition of the truth in " Katyn case". The Memorial Society believes that now we need to return to this path. It is necessary to resume and complete the investigation of the “Katyn crime”, to give it an adequate legal assessment, to make public the names of all those responsible (from decision makers to ordinary executors), to declassify and make public all the materials of the investigation, to establish the names and places of burial of all executed Polish citizens, to recognize executed as victims of political repression and rehabilitate them in accordance with Russian Law"On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression".
Information prepared by the International Society "Memorial".
Information from the brochure "Katyn", issued for the presentation of the film of the same name by Andrzej Wajda in Moscow in 2007.
Illustrations in the text: made during the German exhumation in 1943 in Katyn (published in books: Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. Berlin, 1943; Katyń: Zbrodnia i propaganda: niemieckie fotografie dokumentacyjne ze zbiorów Instytutu Zachodniego. Poznań, 2003), photographs taken by Aleksey Pamyatnykh during the exhumation carried out by the GVP in 1991 in Medny.
In the application:
- Order No. 794/B dated March 5, 1940, signed by L. Beria, with a resolution by I. Stalin, K. Voroshilov, V. Molotov, A. Mikoyan;
- Note by A. Shelepin to N. Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959
In September 1939, Soviet troops entered Poland. The Red Army occupied those territories that were due to it under the secret additional protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that is, the current west of Ukraine and Belarus. During the march, the troops captured almost half a million inhabitants of Poland, most of whom were later released or handed over to Germany. About 42 thousand people remained in the Soviet camps, according to an official note.
Autumn 1939. (Pinterest)
On March 3, 1940, in a note to Stalin, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria wrote that a large number of 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 and defectors.
He branded them “incorrigible enemies of the Soviet government” and suggested: “The cases of prisoners of war in the camps - 14,700 people of former Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers, as well as cases of those arrested and in prison western regions of Ukraine and Belarus in the amount of 11,000 members various to-r espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, manufacturers, former Polish officers, officials and defectors - to be considered in a special order, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution. Already on March 5, the Politburo made a corresponding decision.
Note to Stalin. (Pinterest)
Shooting near Katyn
By the beginning of April, everything was ready for the extermination of prisoners of war: prisons were liberated, graves were dug. The condemned were taken out for execution by 300-400 people. In Kalinin and Kharkov, prisoners were shot in prisons. In Katyn, especially dangerous people were tied up, they threw a greatcoat over their heads, led them to the moat and shot them in the back of the head.
As the subsequent exhumation showed, the shots were fired from Walther and Browning pistols, using German-made bullets. This fact was later used by the Soviet authorities as an argument when at the Nuremberg Tribunal they tried to accuse German troops of shooting the Polish population. The tribunal dismissed the accusation, which was, in fact, an admission of Soviet guilt for the Katyn massacre.
German investigation
The events of 1940 have been investigated several times. The first to investigate were German troops in 1943. They discovered burials in Katyn. The exhumation began in the spring. It was possible to approximately establish the time of burial: spring 1940, since many of the dead had fragments of newspapers dated April-May 1940 in their pockets. It was not difficult to establish the identity of many executed prisoners: some of them had documents, letters, snuff boxes and cigarette cases with carved monograms.
The Poles were shot by German bullets, but they large quantities supplied to the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. Local residents also confirmed that trainloads of captured Polish officers were unloaded at a nearby station and never seen again. One of the members of the Polish commission in Katyn, Józef Matskevich, described in several books how it was no secret to any of the locals that the Bolsheviks shot Poles here.
Remains of the Poles. (Pinterest)
In the autumn of 1943, another commission operated in the Smolensk region, this time a Soviet one. Her report states that there were in fact three prisoner-of-war camps in Poland. The Polish population was employed in the construction of roads. In 1941, the prisoners did not have time to evacuate, and the camps came under the German leadership, which authorized the executions. According to the members of the Soviet commission, in 1943 the Germans dug up the graves, confiscated all newspapers and documents indicating dates later than the spring of 1940, and forced the locals to testify. The famous “Burdenko Commission” was largely based on the data of this report.
Crimes of the Stalinist regime
In April 1990, the USSR pleaded guilty to the Katyn massacre. One of the main arguments was the discovery of documents that indicated that the Polish prisoners were transferred by order of the NKVD and were no longer listed in the statistical documents. Historian Yuri Zorya found out that the same people were on the exhumation lists from Katyn and on the lists of those leaving the Kozelsk camp. Interestingly, the order of the lists for stages coincided with the order of those lying in the graves, according to the German investigation.
Excavated grave in Katyn. (Pinterest)
Today in Russia, the Katyn massacre is officially considered a "crime of the Stalinist regime." However, there are still people who support the position of the Burdenko commission and consider the results of the German investigation as an attempt to distort the role of Stalin in world history.