The truth of the Katyn Forest Massacre

The Katyn Forest Massacre

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1. 1. The Katyn Forest MassacreUnravelling One of the Many Secrets of the Second World War
2. 2. The Katyn Forest MassacreUnravelling One of the Many Secrets of the Second World War
3. 3. A complex edifice of deception has been thoroughly dismantled by patient and persistent perseverance and pressure.
4. 4. Mission to Poland When I first visited Poland in 1990, and saw a monument for the victims of the Katyn Forest Massacre in 1940, I questioned whether they did not mean 1941?"Surely you dont believe the Russian propaganda?" they challenged me.
5. 5. I did not know what they were talking about. The Polish Christians were most agitated over my ignorance on this matter.
6. 6. A Lesson in HistoryThey explained that although Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany, 3 September 1939, ostensibly because Germany had invaded Poland
7. 7. so Russia also invaded Poland in September 1939. "Of course most history books omit that fact."
8. 8. The Katyn Forest was in Soviet territory, they pointed out.
9. 9. Over 22,000 Polish prisoners,including over 8,000 officers,were murdered in cold blood by the Soviet NKVD in the Spring of 1940.
10. 10. When this crime was discovered, Stalins Soviet Russia was an ally of Great Britain and the United States of America. Therefore they found it more convenient to attribute this Russian atrocity to their German enemies.
11. 11. Judicial Fraud The Polish Christians informed me that the British, Americans, andFrench chose to participate in judicial fraud at the Nuremberg Trials by indicting the German Army with what were plainly Communist atrocities committed by Soviet Russia.
12. 12. Missing Polish Prisoners of WarIn December 1941, the head of the London based Polish government-in- exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski enquired of Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, what had become of Polish prisoners of war captured
13. 13. by the Soviets during their invasion of Poland in September 1939 ? Stalin assured Sikorski that all Polish POWs had been released. He opinioned that some may have moved to Manchuria.
14. 14. Mass Graves Exhumed In 1943, a German intelligence officer, Rudolph von Gersdorff, serving with theAbwehr, received reports about mass graves of Polish military officers near Katyn.A ditch 28 m long and 16 m wide was foundwhich contained the bodies of 3,000 Polish officers piled up in 12 layers.
15. 15. This was only the first of many such graves to be unearthed. Germansoldiers unearthed numerous mass graves of many thousands of Polish officers who had been massacred in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.
16. 16. German news reports claimed that this was yet another evidence of the war crimes and atrocities committed by the Communist commissars of the Soviet Union.
17. 17. When the Germangovernment announced thediscovery of the mass graves in the Katyn Forest, the London based Polish government-in-exile requested an investigation by the InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross.
18. 18. Stalin immediately severed diplomatic relations with it and claimed that the victims had been murdered by the Nazis.
19. 19. InvestigationThe German government brought in aEuropean Commission of 12 forensic experts and their staff from Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy,Croatia, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia and Hungary.
20. 20. Even Polish, American and British Prisoners of War were included in theinvestigation. The reports of these neutral investigators confirmed that the victims were indeed Polish officers, NCOs and intellectuals who were victims of Russian forces in the Summer of 1940.
21. 21. When the Polish government-in-exile insisted on bringing the matter before the International Red Cross, General Sikorski died in an aircraft crash in July 1943.
22. 22. An event that was described as "convenient to the allied leaders." Numerous books and documentary films have been made of "The Assassination of General Sikorski."
23. 23. The Burdenko CommissionThe Soviets hastened to orchestrate an alternative Soviet version of the now disclosed massacre, to claim that the Polish POWs had been massacred, not by the Soviets, but by the Nazis..
24. 24. Nikolai Burdenko, the President of the Soviet Academy of Medicine, presided over a commission appointed by Stalin to investigate the incident.
25. 25. Burdenko claimed to have interviewed more than ahundred eyewitnesses who swore that the Nazis hadmassacred the Polish POWs in Autumn, 1941
26. 26. The Nuremberg TrialsAt the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-1946, the Germanmilitary were proclaimed guiltyof shooting Polish Prisoners of War in the Katyn Forest.
27. 27. So the Soviet version of the Katyn Massacre moved from war-time propaganda into school history books: The Germans shot Polish Prisoners of War in the Katyn Forest in 1941.
28. 28. DuplicityThe Polish-Soviet crisis threatened Western-Soviet relations and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt were torn between their commitment to their Polish ally and the demands of Stalin.
29. 29. In private, Churchill agreed that the atrocity was most likely carried outby the Soviets. According to Edward Raczynski, Churchill admitted on 15 April 1943, during a conversation with General Sikorski: "Alas, theGerman revelations are probably true. The Bolsheviks can be very cruel."
30. 30. However, on 24 April 1943, Churchill assured the Soviets:"We shall certainly oppose vigorously any investigation by the International Red Cross or any other body…"
31. 31. Classified UK documents concluded that Soviet guilt was "a near certainty", but the alliance with the Soviets was deemed to be moreimportant than the moral issue. The official version parroted the Soviet propaganda and the censors suppressed all contradictory accounts.
32. 32. Cover-UpThe British Foreign Secretary pointed out several inconsistencies, and near impossibilities, in the Soviet version.
33. 33. Churchills post-war account of Katyn skirts over the Katyn Massacre by referring to the 1944 Soviet Enquiry whichattributed guilt to the Germans adding cryptically:"belief seems an act of faith."
34. 34. Suppressed When US Navy LieutenantCommander George Earle produced a report concluding that the massacres were committed by the Soviet Union, President Roosevelt ordered Earles report to be supressed.
35. 35. When Earle formally requested permission to publish his findings, the President issued a written order forbidding it. Earle was reassigned andspent the rest of the War in the remote island of American Samoa.
36. 36. Reports Destroyed Two senior American Prisoners of War, Lieutenant Colonel DonaldStewart and Colonel John van Vliet, taken by the Germans to Katyn for investigation, submitted a report, after their release in 1945, that the Soviets were definitely responsible for the Massacre.
37. 37. George Marshalls AssistantChief of Staff for Intelligence,Major General Clayton Bissell,destroyed the report.
38. 38. During the 1951-1952 Congressional Investigations, General Bisselldefended his action before Congress arguing that it was not in the US interest to antagonise the Soviet Union which was Americas ally.
39. 39. EmbarrassedThe Americans and British were embarrassed by the Soviet inclusion of the Katyn Forest Massacre in the indictments against the German military at Nuremberg.
40. 40. Soviet General Roman Redenko, at the Nuremberg Tribunal stated that "One of the most important criminal acts for which the major warcriminals are responsiblewas the mass execution of Polish Prisoners of War shot in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk by the German Fascist invaders."
41. 41. The Katyn was: "The worst massacre ofPrisoners of War in history."
42. 42. Hypocrisy For sheerbare-facedhypocrisy this accusation was classic.All present at the trial, including the one making the accusation, knew that this wasjudicial fraud and farce.
43. 43. Censorship The Black Book of Censorship in thePeoples Republic of Poland expressly stated: "Any attempt to burden the SovietUnion with the responsibility for the deaths of Polish officers in Katyn Forest is forbidden."
44. 44. Further evidence that everyone knew who was really responsible,was that even the most simple memorial erected in Poland such as Katyn 1940, was confiscated by police and destroyed.
45. 45. The Polish practice was to erect memorial crosses on All SaintsDay. These were always dismantled by the police. If Katyn had really been a Nazi atrocity, it would not have been a taboo subject in Communist controlled countries.
46. 46. Not only did the Soviet Unionforbid any monuments to be erected to victims of the Katyn Massacre, but the British government also objected to plans to build a Katyn monument in the UK.
47. 47. Disinformation Campaign In the 1960s, the Soviets launched a Disinformation Offensive to sidetrack the persistent accusations of Soviet atrocities and massacres throughout Eastern Europe.
48. 48. A village in Belarus, Khatyn, whose name is very similar to Katyn, waschosen as a site for a memorial to commemorate the victims of Nazi atrocities. Apparently 149 Khatyn villagers had been massacred by Ukrainian and Belarus soldiers fighting for the Nazis in March 1943.
49. 49. This Khatyn Memorial becamean obligatory stop for all foreign visitors. This Disinformation Campaign scored its major success in 1974 when US President Richard Nixon was brought to Khatyn to remember the Polish victims of the Nazis!
50. 50. From this time all Sovietpublications displaced Katyn with Khatyn, including in Polish encyclopaedias and historical dictionaries.
51. 51. Facts are Stubborn ThingsEvery Soviet leader had to deal with the persistent Polish charges of the Katyn Forest Massacre. The Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s used underground printing presses to expose the Soviet duplicity and print the facts about the Katyn Forest Massacre.
52. 52. Gorbachev’s GlasnostMikhail Gorbachev launched anhistorical commission in 1987 to create a new Soviet version of what had actually happened at Katyn.
53. 53. Gorbachevs Politburo proposedin 1988 to build a memorial to the victims of the massacre "executed by Hitlerites in Katyn" alongside a memorial to 500 Soviet POWs supposedly also killed at Katyn by the Germans - a myth created by the Burdenko Commission with absolutely no evidence that it ever happened at all.
54. 54. Gorbachev also offered the Poles "a simplified procedure" for relatives wishing to visit the sites where their loved ones lay buried.
55. 55. One of the Worst Crimes Ever However the Polish historians tenaciously exposed the Russian responsibility and the Catholic church in Poland labelled the Katyn Massacre"one of the worst crimes in the history of mankind."
56. 56. Exposure Gorbachevs trusted advisor, Valentin Falin, reported that Polishhistorians subverted the Soviet Commission by producing their own evidence exposing the 1944 Burdenko Report as spurious.
57. 57. Without waiting for the Soviet Commissions response, the Poles began publishing the facts. The problem stubbornly refused to go away.
58. 58. Even the communistpuppet government of Jaruzelski was forced to admit that "the liquidation ofthe Polish officers was the responsibility of the USSR."
59. 59. AdmissionOn the symbolic date of 13 April 1990, 47 years after Berlin radio had announced the discovery of the massacre site, Gorbachev handed over two boxes of evidence to the Poles.
60. 60. The documents made clear that theKatyn Massacre was the work of thehead of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria.!
61. 61. Gorbachev attempted to convince the Poles that more than 20,000 Polish nationals had been executed by the secret police chief without any authority from the Soviet Politburo
62. 62. Deception RejectedThis limited confession and further attempts at deception only enragedthe Polish people further. An investigation conducted by the Prosecutor Generals Office of the Soviet Union in 1991, and later by the Russian Federation, confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres.
63. 63. However the Russian Federation later tried to diminish the numbers of the deaths to 1,803 Polish citizens.
64. 64. They also refused to classify the action as a war crime, or as an act ofgenocide. They declared the investigation closed on the grounds that the perpetrators of the massacre were already dead.
65. 65. Finally the Truth Comes OutIn October 1992, Boris Yeltsin, who had replaced Gorbachev, lowered the Soviet flag, abolished the Soviet Union and handed over "newly found" secret documents from the Soviet Politburo to Polish president Lech Walensa.
66. 66. The Politburo order dated 5 March 1940, was entitled, Question of the NKVD.
67. 67. In it Beria informed Stalinthat 14,736 Polish officers, officials, police officials, gendarmes and other
68. 68. intellectuals were being held in prison camps in occupied Polish territory and that 18,632 similar people were being held in camps in the Western Provinces of Ukraine and Belarus. Beria requested permission to shoot them all.
69. 69. Stalin’s Order Stalins "in favour" and bold signature are scrawled at the top of Berias question.Three other Politburo members also signed And two more approved the execution order by phone. The document was labelled Top Secret.
70. 70. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were Polish military officers taken prisoner during the September 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland.
71. 71. Another 6,000 were police officers, with the rest being Polish Intelligentsia arrested for being "bourgeois".
72. 72. The Katyn Forest Massacre was justified by Stalins Politburo asnecessary to deprive a potential future Polish military of its leadership.
73. 73. Since Russia intended to keep the Eastern portion of Poland, he was determined to deprive it of a large proportion of its military and intellectual elite.
74. 74. Cold Blooded Mass Murder Those who were murdered, in the first batch alone, included: anAdmiral, 2 Generals, 24 Colonels, 79 Lieutenant Colonels, 258 Majors,
75. 75. 654 Captains, 17 Naval Captains, 3,420 NCOs, 7 Chaplains, 20 UniversityProfessors, 300 Physicians, hundreds of lawyers, engineers and teachers, more than one hundred writers and journalists and over 200 pilots.
76. 76. Altogether during the massacres, the NKVD murdered 14 Polish Generals.
77. 77. Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin, the Chief Executioner for the NKVD, is reported to have personally shot and killed 7,000 of the condemned,From the Ostashkov Camp, over a period of 28 days in April 1940.
78. 78. A Legacy of DeceptionFurther documents revealed that every Soviet chairman since JosephStalin had signed out the Politburos Katyn file and were well aware of the Russian complicity in this crime.
79. 79. In a Memo dated 20 March1959, to Chairman Khrushchev, Interior Minister Alexander Shelepin reported: "The Committee of State Security…has held, since 1940, case files and other materials regardingprisoners and interned officers,policemen, gendarmes, military settlers, landowners, etc.
80. 80. Persons from formerbourgeois Poland who were shot in the same year. In all, on the basis of the decision of a special Troica of the NKVD, USSR, 21,857 people were shot… the entire operationwas carried out on thebasis of the decision ofthe Central Committee of 5 March 1940.
81. 81. Since 1940, no information from these files wasreleased to anyone. All of the files, numbering 21,857, have been stored in a sealed location. To Soviet organs, all of these files represent neither operational interest, nor historical value.
82. 82. It is also doubtful that they could be of any real value to our Polish friends. Quite the contrary, any unforeseen incident may lead to revealing the operation with all the undesirable consequences for our state.
83. 83. This is especially so because regarding those shot in the Katyn Forest,there is an official version supported by an Investigation carried out onthe initiative of the Soviet state in 1944, by the Burdenko Commission…
84. 84. whichconcluded that all of the Polesliquidated there areconsidered to havebeen killed by the German invaders.
85. 85. The conclusions of the commission became firmly established in international public opinion.
86. 86. It seems appropriate to destroy all of the records regarding the persons shot in 1940, in the above mentioned operation."
87. 87. Evidence Destroyed Shelepins recommendation to purge the records was carried out with these over 21,000 case files destroyed. However, the PolitburoExecution Order and Memo from Beria remained in the official record.
88. 88. Files later released from Gorbachevs time included advice from advisors that should the truth of the Katyn Forest Massacre come out, people could be convinced that the Soviet Union was no better than, and may have been worse than,Nazi Germany during the war, and that the Soviet Union bears no lessresponsibility for the war.
89. 89. Polish DeportationsPolish historians point out that during the 1930s, hundreds-of-thousands of Poles living in the Western areas of the Soviet Union were marked out for persecution by Stalin - either execution, or deportation to Central Asia.
90. 90. The Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, was followed by more waves of arrests and mass deportations to the East..
91. 91. When the Katyn Forest Massacre took place, hundreds-of-thousands of Poles, mostly the better-educated and economically active citizens, were already in exile in Siberia, or in labour camps in Central Asia.
92. 92. They were herded there in horribly overcrowded freight trains and at least one out of every five of them died during transportation to the Soviet concentration camps
93. 93. OppressionBetween 320,000, to possibly up to 1 million, Polish citizens were deported to the Soviet Union. Of one group of 12,000 Poles incarcerated in Delstroy, near Kolyma, in 1940, only 583 survived by 1942.
94. 94. Over 570,000 Polish citizens were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps by the Soviets during the war.
95. 95. Polish prisoners were subjected to lengthyinterrogations between October 1939 to February 1940.
96. 96. These interviews were a selection processto determine who would live and who would die.
97. 97. According to NKVD reports, if the prisoners could not be persuaded to adopt a pro-communist attitude, they were declared "hardened anduncompromising enemies of Soviet authority" and condemned to death.
98. 98. Further MassacresWhen Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in the Summer of 1941,the NKVD concentration camp guards massacred thousands of Polish prisoners before fleeing eastwards to avoid the German advance.
99. 99. The Betrayal of WarsawWhen the war was reaching its end and the Red Army wasat the very gates of Warsaw, radio broadcasts from Russia urged the Polish citizens to rise up in revolt!
100. 100. The Soviet Army was then ordered to stand by and render no assistance as the Germans crushed the Warsaw Uprising.
101. 101. Stalin said that it was better that all resistance in Poland be crushed before a Soviet occupation.
102. 102. South Africa’s Support Remembered The Polish Christians in 1990 reminded me that only the South African Air Force had flown in weapons and aid to the Polish underground during the Warsaw Uprising. I was surprised.
103. 103. I had read that the RAF had done so - but that was another lie. It wasactually the SAAF, but because of apartheid, historians had expunged South Africas role and replaced it with the RAF.
104. 104. The fact thathistory books could be re-written to conform to politically correct dictatesis disturbing.
105. 105. Never Liberated Polish citizens strenuouslyobjected to any suggestion that they had been "liberated" by the Soviets. "The Soviets never liberated anyone!“ they insisted.
106. 106. The first act of the Soviets on occupying Poland was arresting all leaders of the underground army and government.
107. 107. Polish Christians pointed out that most of the atrocities attributed to the Germans were actually communistatrocities committed by the Soviets and conveniently blamed on their enemies.
108. 108. Polish relatives of the victims continued to urge the European Court of Human Rights to rule on the crimes of the Stalin regime.
109. 109. Putin’s Perspective To Vladimir Putins Russia, the Katyn Forest Massacre isan inconvenient truth which taints Russian war-time heroism.
110. 110. Putins chief military prosecutor, Alexander Savenkov, issued a ruling onKatyn on 11 March 2005, in which they acknowledged that NKVD Troikafound 14,542 Polish citizens, held in NKVD camps, guilty of committing
111. 111. Putins representative claims that these Soviet officials"abused their authority," but that no criminal cases could be opened against them because the guilty parties had since died.
112. 112. The Polish claim of genocide was rejected and although they agreed to hand over 67 of the 183 volumes of evidence, two thirds of the remaining evidence was to remain classified.
113. 113. OutrageThe Polish parliament was outraged and demanded that Russias Katyn archives all be declassified and that Russian courts rule that the Katyn Forest Massacre was an act of genocide.
114. 114. Communiststhroughout the world wouldprefer the truthabout Katyn to be buried, but Christians in Poland, and throughoutEastern Europe, determined to exhume the secrets andexpose the true nature of Soviet Communism.
115. 115. PressureHuman Rights societies continued to pressure the Russian government,
116. 116. until in November 2010, the Russian state, Duma, approved the declaration
117. 117. blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for havingpersonally ordered the Massacre of Polish Prisoners of War.
118. 118. This was only after the disastrous plane crash of Polish leaders enroute to Katyn for the 70th Anniversary Commemoration.
119. 119. Death FlightOn 10 April 2010, an aircraft carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 87 other politicians and high-ranking army officers, crashed near Smolensk, killing all 96 on board the aircraft.
120. 120. The passengers were to attend a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre.
121. 121. The Polish people were convinced that they were the victims ofa communist terror campaign which assassinated their president and senior leaders on the eve of the most important and solemn anniversary of this massacre.
122. 122. Many observed that it was like the assassination ofGeneral Sikorski in 1943.
123. 123. In the furore following the death flight of the Polish government,
124. 124. the Russian Duma finally acknowledged Russias guilt for the Katyn Forest Massacre.
125. 125. War CrimeIn 2011, the European Court of Human Rights declared admissible two complaints of relatives of the massacre victims against Russia concerning the inadequacy of their investigations.
126. 126. In a ruling on 16 April 2012, the court found that Russia had violated the rights of victims relatives and described the Massacre as a war-crime.
127. 127. It has taken 72 years, but facts are stubborn things.
128. 128. "They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity…" 2 Peter 2:19
129. 129. THE TRUTH SETS FREE.That is why it is absolutely essential that we know the truth of historyto recognize the lies of propaganda..
130. 130. Yet, very few books havedealt with the overallhuman cost of “death bygovernment” (The BlackBook of Communismbeing one exception).
131. 131. This astonishing statistic isthe result of decades ofresearch, by politicalscience Professor R.J.Rummel of the University ofHawaii. Prof. Rummel’sshocking research ispresented in the 500 pagebook: Death ByGovernment (2006,Transaction Publishers,New Branswick, NJ).
132. 132. We need to study the truth in the Bible
133. 133. so that we canbe freed from the deceptions of the world.
134. 134. “You shall know the truth and the truthshall makeyou free.” John 8:32
135. 135. REFORMATION SOCIETY PO Box 74 Newlands, 7725 Cape Town South AfricaE-mail: info@ReformationSA.org Web: www.ReformationSA.org