Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
[Regnum] The investigation into the Katyn tragedy of 1940, when thousands of Polish officers and soldiers were shot, was hardly objective. This opinion was expressed by the former Prosecutor General of Russia Yuri Skuratov, who held this post until 2000.
“I don’t know what prompted the new investigation after I left. But I have great doubts that this investigation was objective. There was probably some kind of political decision,” Skuratov noted in an interview with the TASS analytical center.
He added that during his tenure as prosecutor general (since October 1995), the “Katyn case” was not investigated. According to him, initially there were statements by the first and only president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who gave the Poles copies of some political documents. Then in 1993 there was a statement by the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin.
According to the former Prosecutor General, Polish law enforcement agencies turned to the Russian side with a request to participate in the investigation. Moscow agreed, but on the condition of a parallel investigation into the case of genocide in 1920, when 60 thousand Red Army soldiers who were captured on Polish territory died, and in fact were killed. However, Skuratov pointed out, after that the Polish side took a break and fell silent.
As Regnum reported, in April–May 1940, 4,421 Polish officers deported to the territory of the Soviet Union were shot in the Katyn Forest, 18 km west of Smolensk. Their remains were buried here.
Residents of Smolensk erected a memorial stone at the site of the tragedy. In 2000, Russia’s first international memorial complex-monument to the victims of the totalitarian repression “Katyn” was created there. Next to the burials of Poles in the memorial complex lie the ashes of almost 10 thousand repressed Soviet citizens.
More from Boris Rozhin:
Katyn case. Shot at Russia
Text taken from a news article which appeared in zvezdaweekly.ru, written by Evgeniy Kirichenko.
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
The Zvezda TV channel raises the issue of falsification of the Katyn case. The truth makes its way.
How a provocation developed in the Abwehr and implemented by Joseph Goebbels became a catalyst for the destruction of the USSR
THE BOMB PLANTED BY GOEBBELS
The Russian FSB published archival documents confirming that the mass execution of Polish officers in the Smolensk region was organized by the Hitlerite Gestapo, and not at all by the Stalinist NKVD, as was claimed in the years "perestroika". Among the declassified materials are certificates from military counterintelligence SMERSH, interrogation reports of Poles who served with the Germans, and testimony from former SS man Arnaud Duret, who participated in the burial of executed Poles.
According to the latter, in September 1941 he was sent to a penal company to dig graves for mass burials in the Katyn Forest. SS units brought the bodies of the dead there and threw them into a ditch 15-20 meters deep. He estimates that they buried up to 20 thousand bodies there. Later, in 1943, when Arno came on vacation, he saw in the newspapers a photograph of a ditch, under which it was written that the Russians had done it.
“I told my mother that it was not the Russians who did it, but the Germans, but my mother didn’t believe me,” Duret recalled. According to him, he did not tell anyone else about this because he signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Another prisoner of war, Eduard Potkansky, admitted during interrogation that the Germans shot many Polish officers in the Katyn Forest for the purpose of provocation against the Soviet regime. In June 1943, the Nazis showed their work battalion the graves, next to which lay personal belongings, money and documents of the killed. However, they were in a form “in which they could not have been preserved in the ground since 1939,” when NKVD officers allegedly carried out executions.
The FSB removed the secrecy label from these and other archival materials on the eve of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Katyn, which is celebrated in Poland annually on April 13, although the mass execution of captured Poles, as established by Nikolai Burdenko’s commission, occurred in the fall of 1941. However, for some reason Warsaw chose the same day as the memorial date when, in 1943, Berlin announced the “brutal crime of the Bolsheviks,” who allegedly shot 20 thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. A few days after the newspapers of the anti-Hitler coalition published the stunning news, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his personal diary: “The Katyn affair is becoming a colossal political bomb, which under certain conditions will cause more than one blast wave.”
The words of the main propagandist of Nazi Germany turned out to be prophetic. Half a century after the Nuremberg Tribunal, which condemned the Nazis for the execution of the Poles, a “blast wave” again covered Europe. And the head of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, blamed Stalin and the NKVD for the crime. During Wojciech Jaruzelski's visit to Moscow on April 13, 1990, he gave him copies of the “execution lists” with the names of Polish officers allegedly executed in the Katyn Forest. Although in fact these were stage lists of captured Poles sent to NKVD camps.
On the same day, the TASS agency, “expressing deep regret,” admitted Soviet responsibility for Katyn, thereby overthrowing the verdict of the International Military Tribunal. Based on this fact, the Prosecutor General's Office will initiate a criminal case, which will then be closed after the death of the perpetrators. However, Warsaw, at the instigation of Gorbachev, already believed that the execution of the Poles was the work of Stalin’s NKVD. This is where the collapse of the Warsaw Bloc countries, and then the entire socialist system, will begin.
President Boris Yeltsin will go even further - he will hand over to the Polish side not copies, but genuine lists of “package No. 1” as evidence of Russia’s guilt in the Katyn massacre. The head of state will decide to take this step, despite the fact that the Constitutional Court, obedient to him, was never able to establish the authenticity of archival materials. But Yeltsin didn’t care much about this - he needed a tool with which to discredit the CPSU. The “Katyn Affair” was perfectly suited for this purpose.
An aerial view of the exhumation site with rows of bodies of Polish officers lying on the ground near the mass graves (filmed by Nazi cameramen).
It was these supposedly authentic documents that were presented in 2009 to the European Court of Human Rights as the main evidence of Russia’s guilt in the Katyn case. Relatives of the 12 executed Polish officers were counting on huge financial compensation. Poland was also going to file a claim for $100 billion. But the incredible happened: on June 18, 2012, the Strasbourg court decided that our country was not responsible for the execution of Poles in Katyn, and the “documents” presented as evidence of guilt were fake. True, by that time Russia had already rushed to apologize for what it had not done.
So, what is the essence of the “Katyn Affair”? When and by whom was it fabricated? And most importantly - for what?
EVIDENCE THAT CANNOT BE DESTROYED
As you know, in 1939, after the Wehrmacht attacked Poland and the flight of its government to Romania, the USSR sent troops to take protection of the population of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. At the same time, more than 150 thousand Polish soldiers, without offering resistance, surrendered. Of these, 42 thousand returned to the territory occupied by the Germans, and another 42 thousand were liberated in the territory occupied by the Red Army (Red Army). The rest were interned in three camps west of Smolensk. With the beginning of the war, the NKVD tried to organize the evacuation of captured Poles, but only 3 thousand were taken out; the rest expressed a desire to stay in the camps, waiting for the Germans and hoping that they would return them home.
However, in order to secure the rear in the occupied territory, SS units executed all the Poles in the fall of 1941. Most of them were killed in the Goat Mountains, which would later be called Katyn. The execution was carried out without disguise as the “NKVD handwriting”, using German-made pistols. If the Germans had known that they would later need to shift the blame onto the Soviet security officers, they would probably have shot them with Russian revolvers and Mosin three-line guns. But no one set such a task.
In the spring of 1943, after the Battle of Stalingrad, Western states began to realize that the days of the Third Reich were numbered, and began to prepare for the opening of a second front in Europe. The Nazis urgently needed to split the ranks of the anti-Hitler coalition, and then they remembered the mass grave near Smolensk.
This is how the Abwehr came up with a plan for the Katyn provocation, in which not only the “dead”, but also the “living” Poles were supposed to participate. That is, those who had already been shot, and those to whom these remains needed to be demonstrated. The Polish government in exile, warmed by the British in London, was supposed to stir up an international scandal.
In order to give a larger scale to the “crime of the Bolsheviks,” in Berlin they decided to increase the number of victims in the place where representatives of the Polish Red Cross were supposed to arrive. The Germans opened the graves in the Goat Mountains and brought remains there from other burial sites, carefully checking the bodies and confiscating documents with dates after April-May 1940. For greater persuasiveness, papers with the “needed” dates were placed on the corpses, but here the Gestapo made a mistake, since many of the owners of the documents later turned out to be alive: Remigiusz Bezhanek, Franciszek Biernacki and others.
However, the Nazis did not have time to check all the remains - a commission of the Polish Red Cross had already arrived, and the bodies “unprepared” for inspection were transferred to a separate ditch, to which experts were not allowed. However, there was no need to guard him - the International Commission already worked under German control and did not even keep its own list of identified bodies.
But even such an obedient commission could not ignore the shell casings with German markings discovered in the graves. To explain this, the Nazis said that the NKVD shot Poles with German pistols using cartridges supplied to the USSR back in the 1920s. The question arises: why would security officers use ammunition with a long-expired shelf life, which usually does not exceed five years? After all, the cartridges would inevitably misfire. In addition, the Nazis never provided documents confirming the supply of 7.65 mm Walter pistols to Russia.
By the way, half a century later, during our own excavations in 1994-1995. In Kozye Gory, Polish experts discovered 79 steel cartridges with the date “41” stamped on them, which could not possibly have been used in April 1940.
As for other evidence, it later disappeared. From the end of March to the beginning of June 1943, after the exhumation of the remains of 4,243 Polish officers, the names of 2,730 of them were established. The Germans transferred the documents and objects found on the corpses to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Krakow, from where they were taken to Germany, where, according to rumors, they were soon burned during the bombing. It is no longer possible to establish who these documents belonged to. The ends are hidden.
EXECUTION WITH GERMAN HANDWRITING
Moscow resolutely rejected Berlin's accusations, and as soon as the Red Army liberated the Smolensk region, a commission of forensic experts headed by Nikolai Burdenko was sent to Katyn. After exhuming the remains, she carefully examined everything that could be collected from the site of the mass execution. Then, in the clothes of some of the bodies, receipts and receipts were found dating from June - August 1941, which did not fit into Goebbels’ scheme. Based on the data received, the commission was able to expose the Abwehr’s provocation and came to the conclusion that the mass execution in the Katyn Forest was carried out by the Nazis after the occupation of the Smolensk region.
It is noteworthy that local residents, whose testimony was cited by the Germans to accuse the Soviet regime, recanted their testimony when they were questioned by the Burdenko commission. Some of the international experts whom the Germans brought to the burial site also renounced their testimony. In particular, pathologist Marko Markov did not sign the German protocol, because he believed that the remains presented for inspection had lain in the ground not for three years, but clearly less. By the way, Markov left detailed memories of this terrible story, in which he expressed doubt about the German version of events.
It should be emphasized that the materials of the Burdenko commission were presented to the international tribunal in Nuremberg, which held the Hitler regime responsible for this atrocity. However, very few years will pass, former allies will become irreconcilable enemies, and the Cold War period will begin. Western countries will shake off the archival dust from the Katyn Affair, and the Nazi version will once again become the main ideological tool of anti-Soviet propaganda. The task of Russia's enemies was to destroy the Soviet Union, but first they needed to discredit the CPSU. And Goebbels’ plan turned out to be very useful.
ARCHIVAL FAKES?
The propaganda campaign in favor of the version of the USSR's guilt in the Katyn Affair, which unfolded in the early 1990s, was based on archival materials that were later found to be fake. The most important document allegedly confirming the fact of the execution of captured Poles by NKVD officers is considered to be a “note” from the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR Alexander Shelepin dated March 3, 1959, addressed to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Khrushchev. It reported that 21,857 officers, gendarmes “etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland" were shot based on the decision of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee of March 5, 1940. However, it is worth noting that in 1940 the party had a different name - the VKP(b). It is strange that until now none of the historians have paid attention to this error, which sticks out like an awl from a bag.
How did this archival document come about? It is assumed that having headed the KGB, Shelepin received access to the records of captured Poles and came to the conclusion that it would be advisable to “destroy documents on all persons executed in 1940 as part of the said operation.” Perhaps it was from here that the notorious “execution lists” of Polish officers in Katyn arose, which in 1990 were slipped to Mikhail Gorbachev as a “gesture of goodwill” towards Poland. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria would write:
“During Jaruzelski’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev gave him only copies of the lists of prisoners of war and internees of the NKVD of the USSR found in the Soviet archives, which included the names of Polish citizens who were in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky NKVD camps in 1939 - 1940. None of these documents speak of the participation of the NKVD in the execution of prisoners of war.”
The execution of Poles was discussed in another document from “package No. 1” - a 4-page letter from Beria dated March 5, 1940, addressed to Stalin, where the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR proposed that the cases of Polish citizens held in NKVD camps be “considered in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution."
According to the famous historian Yuri Zhukov, when he turned to the archives of the President of the Russian Federation for this document in the early 1990s, he was provided with a photocopy of Beria’s note on one page. The resolution in the upper left corner, as the historian explained, was covered during copying.
“I believe she rejected the People’s Commissar’s proposal to be shot,” Zhukov told the author. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have hidden her.” They needed to blame everyone and everything for our past. Therefore, all my attempts to obtain the original document were rejected - a state secret.”
Today, a color scan of this note, known as “Beria’s letter No. 794/B dated March 5, 1940,” is circulating on the Internet, with all 4 pages of it printed on typewriters with different fonts. Historians note that this is the first sign of forgery when they try to add or change any phrases in the text.
On the title page there are sweeping signatures of Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, who supported Beria’s proposal to shoot captured Poles. Moreover, they were all made with the left hand and a pencil of the same color. This is the same resolution of the members of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which was supposed to be proof of the guilt of the Stalinist regime in the Katyn tragedy. It was this “letter”, along with other archival materials from “package No. 1”, that Boris Yeltsin presented to the Constitutional Court of the RSFSR, where the “CPSU case” initiated by him was considered, but for some reason the accommodating Constitutional Court refused to recognize them as authentic documents.
“YAKOVLEV GROUP”
In 2010, State Duma deputy Viktor Ilyukhin and research experts Sergei Strygin and Vladislav Shved became aware of how the falsification of the aforementioned “Beria’s letter” was being prepared, which proposed shooting more than 25 thousand Polish prisoners of war. Ilyukhin, at a plenary session of parliament, released information that in the early 1990s, a group of specialists in forging archival documents was allegedly organized, headed by Alexander Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee.
“In 1943, Goebbels, trying to destroy the anti-Hitler coalition and quarrel between the USSR and the USA, spread a lie that Stalin and Beria ordered the execution of 10 thousand Polish officers,” said Ilyukhin. - This lie was supported by the Polish government in exile, which was most motivated by a sense of anger at the Soviet Union for the defeat of the Polish army in Western Belarus and Ukraine and the annexation of these territories to the USSR. The well-known Alexander Yakovlev actually advocated for such a compromise of the USSR that the whole world would turn away from our country. After this, the greatest fraud and falsification of archival documents of the CPSU Central Committee took place.”
The “Yakovlev Group” worked in the structure of the security service of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, located in the village of Nagornoye, Moscow Region, until 1996, and then was relocated to another locality - Zarechye. From there, according to Ilyukhin, hundreds, if not thousands of false documents were thrown into the archives, and the same number were falsified by introducing distorted information into them and forging signatures.
One of the members of this group gave Ilyukhin samples of forms, seals, stamps and postmarks of counterfeiters, which the deputy demonstrated by making a video message, but the official media ignored him. Viktor Ilyukhin initiated a parliamentary review of archival documents, but his death from a heart attack prevented him from completing the work begun, as always happens in such cases.
It is noteworthy that in 2004, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of Russia confirmed that the NKVD troika imposed death sentences on 14,542 Polish prisoners of war, but the death of only 1,803 people was reliably established. And where, in this case, did the rest go?
Researchers admit that after the publication of new archival data in the early 1990s, complete clarity on the “Katyn case” did not emerge. Moreover, digital copies of documents from “package No. 1,” which, by order of the president, were previously posted on the website of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, have now become inaccessible. Is this due to the fact that their authenticity raises questions among lawyers?
The forgery of documents has been recognized by the courts.
The results of studies of signs of forgery of the “Katyn” documents from “package No. 1” have been published in many publications and are well known. To date, their falsity has been determined by decisions of at least three Russian courts. In addition to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, which received documents as evidence of the alleged guilt of the CPSU (b) - CPSU in the execution of captured Poles, they were also considered by the Basmanny and Tverskoy district courts of Moscow on October 13, 2009 and September 21, 2010. And everyone, having verified the falsification of archival materials, refused to recognize as true the information that Stalin and members of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks had decided on capital punishment for the Poles.
I would like to hope that the time will come when the impartial court of history will give an objective assessment not only of all the facts of this tragedy, but also of those individuals who tried to speculate on it, fabricating fakes to discredit the Soviet Union. Involuntarily, I recall the sincere confession of the main ideologist of the CPSU A. Yakovlev: “We had to partially lie, be hypocritical, dissemble - there was no other way. We had to break the totalitarian communist party."
But they broke something completely different. As the former Soviet dissident and philosopher Alexander Zinoviev put it, “they aimed for communism, but ended up in Russia.”
(c) Evgeniy Kirichenko
And to the heap. Today, former Prosecutor General of Russia Skuratov spoke on the topic of Katyn.
Former Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Skuratov doubts the objectivity of the investigation in Russia of the “Katyn case,” which led to the admission of guilt by the NKVD in the execution of Polish officers and soldiers in 1940.
“There was probably some kind of political decision. After all, we were still full of desire to please the West, and a lot of different kinds of concessions on our part were thrown into this firebox, so to speak,”
PS. My position on this matter has not changed since the 2000s - the Poles were shot by the Germans in 1941.
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