The investigation into all the circumstances of the massacre of Polish soldiers, which went down in history as the "Katyn massacre", still causes heated discussions both in Russia and in Poland. According to the "official" modern version, the murder of Polish officers was the work of the NKVD of the USSR. However, back in 1943-1944. a special commission headed by the Chief Surgeon of the Red Army N. Burdenko came to the conclusion that the Nazis killed the Polish soldiers. Despite the fact that the current Russian leadership agreed with the version of the “Soviet trace”, there are indeed a lot of contradictions and ambiguities in the case of the massacre of Polish officers. In order to understand who could have shot the Polish soldiers, it is necessary to take a closer look at the very process of investigating the Katyn massacre.

In March 1942, residents of the village of Kozy Gory, in the Smolensk region, informed the occupying authorities about the mass grave of Polish soldiers. The Poles who worked in the construction platoon unearthed several graves and reported this to the German command, but it initially reacted to the news with complete indifference. The situation changed in 1943, when a turning point had already occurred at the front and Germany was interested in strengthening anti-Soviet propaganda. On February 18, 1943, the German field police began excavations in the Katyn Forest. A special commission was formed, headed by Breslau University professor Gerhardt Butz, the "luminary" of forensic medical expertise, who during the war years served as captain with the rank of captain as head of the forensic laboratory of Army Group Center. Already on April 13, 1943, German radio reported on the found burial place of 10,000 Polish officers. In fact, the German investigators “calculated” the number of Poles who died in the Katyn Forest very simply - they took the total number of officers of the Polish army before the start of the war, from which they subtracted the “living” - Anders's army. All other Polish officers, according to the German side, were shot by the NKVD in the Katyn forest. Naturally, the anti-Semitism inherent in the Nazis was not without - the German media immediately reported that Jews participated in the executions.

On April 16, 1943, the Soviet Union officially refuted the "slanderous attacks" of Nazi Germany. On April 17, the government of Poland in exile turned to the Soviet government for clarification. It is interesting that at that time the Polish leadership did not try to blame the Soviet Union for everything, but focused on the crimes of Nazi Germany against the Polish people. However, the USSR broke off relations with the Polish government-in-exile.

Joseph Goebbels, the "number one propagandist" of the Third Reich, managed to achieve an even greater effect than he had originally imagined. The Katyn massacre was passed off by German propaganda as a classic manifestation of the "atrocities of the Bolsheviks." Obviously, the Nazis, accusing the Soviet side of killing Polish prisoners of war, sought to discredit the Soviet Union in the eyes of the Western countries. The cruel execution of Polish prisoners of war, allegedly carried out by Soviet Chekists, was supposed, in the opinion of the Nazis, to alienate the United States, Great Britain and the Polish government in exile from cooperation with Moscow. Goebbels succeeded in the latter - in Poland, a lot of people accepted the version of the execution of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD. The fact is that back in 1940, correspondence with Polish prisoners of war who were on the territory of the Soviet Union ceased. Nothing more was known about the fate of the Polish officers. At the same time, representatives of the United States and Great Britain tried to "hush up" the Polish topic, because they did not want to irritate Stalin at such a crucial period when the Soviet troops were able to turn the tide at the front.

To ensure a larger propaganda effect, the Nazis even involved the Polish Red Cross (PKK), whose representatives were associated with the anti-fascist resistance, in the investigation. On the Polish side, the commission was headed by Marian Wodzinski, a physician from Krakow University, an authoritative person who participated in the activities of the Polish anti-fascist resistance. The Nazis even went so far as to allow representatives of the PKK to the place of the alleged execution, where excavations of graves took place. The conclusions of the commission were disappointing - the PKK confirmed the German version that the Polish officers were shot in April-May 1940, that is, even before the start of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union.

On April 28-30, 1943, an international commission arrived in Katyn. Of course, it was a very loud name - in fact, the commission was formed from representatives of states occupied by Nazi Germany or maintaining allied relations with it. As expected, the commission sided with Berlin and also confirmed that Polish officers were killed in the spring of 1940 by Soviet Chekists. Further investigative actions of the German side, however, were terminated - in September 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Almost immediately after the liberation of the Smolensk region, the Soviet leadership decided that it was necessary to conduct its own investigation in order to expose Hitler's slander about the involvement of the Soviet Union in the massacres of Polish officers.

On October 5, 1943, a special commission of the NKVD and the NKGB was created under the leadership of People's Commissar of State Security Vsevolod Merkulov and Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Sergei Kruglov. Unlike the German commission, the Soviet commission approached the matter in more detail, including the organization of interrogations of witnesses. 95 people were interviewed. As a result, interesting details emerged. Even before the start of the war, three camps for Polish prisoners of war were located west of Smolensk. They housed officers and generals of the Polish Army, gendarmes, police officers and officials taken prisoner on the territory of Poland. Most of the prisoners of war were used for road work of varying severity. When the war began, the Soviet authorities did not have time to evacuate Polish prisoners of war from the camps. So the Polish officers were already in German captivity, and the Germans continued to use the labor of prisoners of war in road and construction work.

In August - September 1941, the German command decided to shoot all Polish prisoners of war held in the Smolensk camps. The direct execution of Polish officers was carried out by the headquarters of the 537th construction battalion under the leadership of Lieutenant Arnes, Lieutenant Rekst and Lieutenant Hott. The headquarters of this battalion was located in the village of Kozi Gory. In the spring of 1943, when a provocation against the Soviet Union was already being prepared, the Nazis drove Soviet prisoners of war to excavate graves and, after excavations, seized from the graves all documents dated later than the spring of 1940. So the date of the alleged execution of Polish prisoners of war was “adjusted”. The Soviet prisoners of war who carried out the excavations were shot by the Germans, and local residents forced to give evidence favorable to the Germans.

On January 12, 1944, a Special Commission was formed to establish and investigate the circumstances of the execution by the Nazi invaders in the Katyn forest (near Smolensk) of Polish officers of war. This commission was headed by the Chief Surgeon of the Red Army, Lieutenant General of the Medical Service Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko, and a number of prominent Soviet scientists were included in it. It is interesting that the writer Alexei Tolstoy and Metropolitan Nikolay (Yarushevich) of Kyiv and Galicia were included in the commission. Although public opinion in the West by this time was already quite biased, nevertheless, the episode with the execution of Polish officers in Katyn was included in the indictment of the Nuremberg Tribunal. That is, in fact, the responsibility of Nazi Germany for the commission of this crime was recognized.

For many decades, the Katyn massacre was forgotten, however, when in the late 1980s. the systematic “shattering” of the Soviet state began, the history of the Katyn massacre was again “refreshed” by human rights activists and journalists, and then by the Polish leadership. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev actually recognized the responsibility of the Soviet Union for the Katyn massacre. Since that time, and for almost thirty years now, the version that the Polish officers were shot by the employees of the NKVD of the USSR has become the dominant version. Even the “patriotic turn” of the Russian state in the 2000s did not change the situation. Russia continues to “repent” for the crime committed by the Nazis, while Poland puts forward increasingly stringent demands for recognizing the Katyn massacre as genocide.

Meanwhile, many domestic historians and experts express their point of view on the Katyn tragedy. So, Elena Prudnikova and Ivan Chigirin in the book “Katyn. A lie that has become history ”, draw attention to very interesting nuances. For example, all the corpses found in burials in Katyn were dressed in the uniform of the Polish army with insignia. But until 1941, insignias were not allowed to be worn in Soviet prisoner of war camps. All prisoners were equal in their status and could not wear cockades and shoulder straps. It turns out that Polish officers simply could not be with insignia at the time of death, if they were really shot in 1940. Since the Soviet Union did not sign the Geneva Convention for a long time, the maintenance of prisoners of war with the preservation of insignia in Soviet camps was not allowed. Apparently, the Nazis did not think through this interesting moment and themselves contributed to the exposure of their lies - Polish prisoners of war were shot already after 1941, but then the Smolensk region was occupied by the Nazis. This circumstance, referring to the work of Prudnikova and Chigirin, is also pointed out in one of his publications by Anatoly Wasserman.

Private detective Ernest Aslanyan draws attention to a very interesting detail - Polish prisoners of war were killed with firearms made in Germany. The NKVD of the USSR did not use such weapons. Even if at the disposal of the Soviet security officers there were copies of German weapons, then by no means in the quantity that was used in Katyn. However, for some reason, this circumstance is not considered by supporters of the version that the Polish officers were killed by the Soviet side. More precisely, this question, of course, was raised in the media, but the answers to it were given some unintelligible ones, Aslanyan notes.

The version about the use of German weapons in 1940 in order to “write off” the corpses of Polish officers to the Nazis really seems very strange. The Soviet leadership hardly counted on the fact that Germany would not only start a war, but also be able to reach Smolensk. Accordingly, there was no reason to "set up" the Germans by shooting Polish prisoners of war with German weapons. Another version seems more plausible - the executions of Polish officers in the camps of the Smolensk region were indeed carried out, but not at all on the scale that Hitler's propaganda spoke about. There were many camps in the Soviet Union where Polish prisoners of war were kept, but nowhere else were mass executions carried out. What could force the Soviet command to arrange the execution of 12 thousand Polish prisoners of war in the Smolensk region? It is impossible to give an answer to this question. Meanwhile, the Nazis themselves could well have destroyed the Polish prisoners of war - they did not feel any reverence for the Poles, they did not differ in humanism in relation to prisoners of war, especially to the Slavs. To destroy several thousand Poles for the Nazi executioners was no problem at all.

However, the version about the murder of Polish officers by Soviet Chekists is very convenient in the current situation. For the West, the reception of Goebbels' propaganda is a wonderful way to once again "prick" Russia, to blame Moscow for war crimes. For Poland and the Baltic countries, this version is another tool of anti-Russian propaganda and a way to get more generous funding from the US and the EU. As for the Russian leadership, its agreement with the version about the execution of the Poles on the orders of the Soviet government is explained, apparently, by purely opportunistic considerations. As "our answer to Warsaw" one could raise the topic of the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in Poland, of which in 1920 there were more than 40 thousand people. However, no one is addressing this issue.

A genuine, objective investigation of all the circumstances of the Katyn massacre is still waiting in the wings. It remains to be hoped that it will make it possible to fully expose the monstrous slander against the Soviet country and confirm that it was the Nazis who were the real executioners of the Polish prisoners of war.

The “case of the Katyn massacre” will dominate Russian-Polish relations for a very long time, cause serious passions among historians, and even ordinary citizens.

In Russia itself, adherence to one or another version of the “Katyn massacre” determines a person’s belonging to one or another political camp.

Establishing the truth in the Katyn story requires a cool head and prudence, but our contemporaries often have neither one nor the other.

Relations between Russia and Poland have not been smooth and good neighborly for centuries. Decay Russian Empire, which allowed Poland to regain state independence, did not change the situation in any way. New Poland immediately entered into an armed conflict with the RSFSR, in which it succeeded. By 1921, the Poles managed not only to take control of the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, but also to capture up to 200,000 Soviet soldiers.

They do not like to talk about the further fate of prisoners in modern Poland. Meanwhile, according to various estimates, from 80 to 140 thousand Soviet prisoners of war died in captivity from the horrific conditions of detention and bullying of the Poles.

Unfriendly relations between the Soviet Union and Poland ended in September 1939, when, after the German attack on Poland, the Red Army occupied the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, reaching the so-called "Curzon Line" - the border, which was to become the line of separation of the Soviet and Polish states according to offer British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon.

Polish prisoners taken by the Red Army. Photo: Public Domain

Missing

It should be noted that this liberation campaign of the Red Army in September 1939 was launched at the moment when the Polish government left the territory of the country, and the Polish army was defeated by the Nazis.

In the territories occupied by Soviet troops, up to half a million Poles were captured, most of whom were soon released. About 130 thousand people remained in the NKVD camps, recognized by the Soviet authorities as representing a danger.

However, by October 3, 1939, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided to disband the privates and non-commissioned officers of the Polish army who lived in the territories that had ceded to the Soviet Union. Ordinary and non-commissioned officers who lived in Western and Central Poland returned to these territories, controlled by German troops.

As a result, a little less than 42,000 soldiers and officers of the Polish army, policemen, and gendarmes remained in the Soviet camps, who were regarded as "hardened enemies of the Soviet regime."

Most of these enemies, from 26 to 28 thousand people, were employed in the construction of roads, and then sent to Siberia for special settlements. Many of them would later join the “Anders Army” that was being formed in the USSR, while the other part would become the founders of the Polish Army.

The fate of approximately 14,700 Polish officers and gendarmes held in the Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky camps remained unclear.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War the question of these Poles hung in the air.

The cunning plan of Dr. Goebbels

The Nazis were the first to break the silence, in April 1943 they informed the world about the "unprecedented crime of the Bolsheviks" - the execution of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest.

The German investigation began in February 1943, based on the testimony of local residents who witnessed how, in March-April 1940, NKVD officers brought captured Poles to the Katyn Forest, who were never seen alive again.

The Nazis assembled an international commission, consisting of doctors from the countries under their control, as well as Switzerland, after which they exhumed the corpses in mass graves. In total, the remains of more than 4,000 Poles were recovered from eight mass graves, who, according to the conclusions of the German commission, were killed no later than May 1940. Evidence of this was declared that the dead had no things that could indicate a later date of death. The Hitler commission also considered it proved that the executions were carried out according to the scheme adopted by the NKVD.

The start of Hitler's investigation of the "Katyn massacre" coincided with the end of the Battle of Stalingrad - the Nazis needed an excuse to divert attention from their military catastrophe. It was for this that the investigation of the "bloody crime of the Bolsheviks" was started.

Calculation at Joseph Goebbels was not only to cause, as they say now, damage to the image of the USSR. The news of the destruction of Polish officers by the NKVD was bound to cause a break in relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London.

Employees of the UNKVD of the USSR in the Smolensk region, witnesses and / or participants in the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

And since official London stood behind the Polish government in exile, the Nazis cherished the hope of quarreling not only the Poles and Russians, but also Churchill co Stalin.

The plan of the Nazis was partly justified. Head of the Polish government in exile Wladyslaw Sikorsky really went into a rage, severed relations with Moscow and demanded a similar step from Churchill. However, on July 4, 1943, Sikorsky died in a plane crash near Gibraltar. Later, a version will appear in Poland that the death of Sikorsky was the work of the British themselves, who did not want to quarrel with Stalin.

The guilt of the Nazis in Nuremberg could not be proved

In October 1943, when the territory of the Smolensk region came under the control of Soviet troops, a Soviet commission began to work on the spot to investigate the circumstances of the Katyn massacre. The official investigation was launched in January 1944 by the "Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest (near Smolensk)," which was headed by chief surgeon of the Red Army Nikolai Burdenko.

The commission came to the following conclusion: the Polish officers who were in special camps on the territory of the Smolensk region were not evacuated in the summer of 1941 due to the rapid advance of the Germans. The captured Poles ended up in the hands of the Nazis, who carried out the massacre in the Katyn forest. To prove this version, the "Burdenko Commission" cited the results of an examination, which testified that the Poles were shot from German weapons. In addition, Soviet investigators found belongings and objects from the dead, indicating that the Poles were alive at least until the summer of 1941.

The guilt of the Nazis was also confirmed by local residents, who testified that they saw how the Nazis brought the Poles to the Katyn forest in 1941.

In February 1946, the "Katyn massacre" became one of the episodes considered by the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Soviet side, blaming the Nazis for the execution, nevertheless failed to prove its case in court. Adherents of the “NKVD crime” version are inclined to consider such a verdict in their favor, but their opponents categorically disagree with them.

Photos and personal belongings of those shot near Katyn. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

Package number 1

Over the next 40 years, no new arguments were presented by the parties, and everyone remained in their previous positions, depending on their political views.

A change in the Soviet position occurred in 1989, when documents were allegedly found in the Soviet archives, indicating that the execution of the Poles was carried out by the NKVD with the personal sanction of Stalin.

On April 13, 1990, a TASS statement was released in which the Soviet Union admitted guilt for the execution, declaring it "one of the grave crimes of Stalinism."

The main evidence of the guilt of the USSR is now considered to be the so-called “package number 1”, which was stored in the secret Special folder of the Archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

Meanwhile, the researchers draw attention to the fact that the documents from the "package number 1" have a huge number of inconsistencies, allowing them to be considered fake. A lot of such documents, allegedly testifying to the crimes of Stalinism, appeared at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, but most of them were exposed as fakes.

For 14 years from 1990 to 2004, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office investigated the "Katyn massacre" and eventually came to the conclusion that the Soviet leaders were guilty of the death of Polish officers. During the investigation, the surviving witnesses who testified in 1944 were again interrogated, and they stated that their testimonies were false, given under pressure from the NKVD.

However, supporters of the “guilt of the Nazis” version reasonably note that the investigation of the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office was carried out in years when the thesis about “Soviet guilt for Katyn” was supported by the leaders of the Russian Federation, and therefore, it is not necessary to talk about an impartial investigation.

Excavations in Katyn. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

"Katyn-2010" "hang" on Putin?

The situation has not changed today. Insofar as Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev in one form or another, they expressed support for the version of “the guilt of Stalin and the NKVD”, their opponents believe that an objective consideration of the “Katyn case” in modern Russia is impossible.

In November 2010, the State Duma adopted a statement “On the Katyn tragedy and its victims”, in which it recognizes the Katyn massacre as a crime committed on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders, and expresses sympathy for the Polish people.

Despite this, the ranks of opponents of this version are not shrinking. Opponents of the State Duma's decision of 2010 believe that it was caused not so much by objective facts as by political expediency, by the desire to improve relations with Poland through this step.

International Memorial to the Victims of Political Repressions. Brotherly grave. Photo: www.russianlook.com

Moreover, this happened six months after the topic of Katyn received a new sound in Russian-Polish relations.

On the morning of April 10, 2010, the Tu-154M aircraft, on board of which was Polish President Lech Kaczynski, as well as 88 more political, public and military figures of this country, at the Smolensk airport. The Polish delegation flew to the mourning events dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Katyn tragedy.

Despite the fact that the investigation showed that the main cause of the plane crash was the erroneous decision of the pilots to land in bad weather, caused by pressure from high-ranking officials on the crew, there are still many in Poland who are convinced that the Russians deliberately destroyed the Polish elite.

No one can guarantee that in half a century another “special folder” will not suddenly pop up, which will contain documents allegedly indicating that the plane of the President of Poland was destroyed by FSB agents on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

In the case of the “Katyn massacre”, all the “i” are still not dotted. Perhaps the next generation of Russian and Polish researchers, free from political bias, will be able to establish the truth.

Slobodkin Yuri Maksimovich was born on November 7, 1939. In 1965 he graduated from the Sverdlovsk Law Institute. Since 1976 - Chairman of the Solnechnogorsk City People's Court. In December 1989, he was elected chairman of the Qualification Board of Judges of the Moscow Region. In November 1991, he joined the Russian Communist Workers' Party (RKRP). He was repeatedly elected a member of the Central Committee of the RKRP. In 1990-93 - People's Deputy of the Russian Federation. Author of an alternative to the "Yeltsin" Draft Constitution of the Russian Federation. Slobodka project on Yu.M. was submitted to the Constitutional Commission of the Russian Federation, but, of course, was rejected by the "Yeltsinists".
Slobodkin Yu.M. talented publicist, regularly published in the newspaper Trudovaya Rossiya.

On the eve of the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War, a grandiose provocation is being prepared against the victors. It will defile and litter the Victory Day and the winners and all our difficult heroic past in Goebbels' shit. The beginning of this provocation was laid by the falsification by the Germans and the "London Poles" in 1943 of the so-called "Katyn case". The "Katyn card" of the Nazis, with the active complicity of the Polish government in exile in London, headed by General Sikorsky, contributed to delaying the opening of a second front and the final defeat of European fascism. In the 70-80s of the last century, the propaganda campaign of Hitler and Goebbels was revived by certain Polish forces and the Germans through their "agents of influence" in the USSR.

The proof that the vile brown vomit will be spewed out by the current Russian government and its Polish accomplices on the eve of Victory Day, in order to humiliate and “smear” the victorious people and whitewash the defeated fascists, is the publication in Komsomolskaya Pravda dated September 29, 2004 under more than symptomatic heading "Russia will reveal the secret of the Katyn forest" (it is customary for Russians to write "Katyn", that is, without a soft sign and without a Polish accent). Even more significant is the subtitle of the mentioned publication - "Presidents Putin and Kwasniewski agreed on this yesterday in the Kremlin." There is no doubt about the essence of the presidents' agreements in the paragraph: “And one more noteworthy outcome of the meeting. After its completion, the President of Poland told reporters sensational news: “We received information that on September 21 the investigation into the Katyn massacre was completed. After the classification is removed, the documents can be handed over to the Institute of National Remembrance... We received such a promise.” The behavior and words of Kwasniewski confirm what conclusions the “Russian-Polish-German” side made as a result of its investigation: Stalin, Beria and the “NKVD troops” were guilty of the execution of Polish officers near Katyn, and Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and their henchmen were slandered by the “Stalinist regime” and subject to rehabilitation.

In general terms, the provocative version of Goebbels and those who support it today is presented as follows. The German authorities became aware of the execution of the Poles near Smolensk as early as August 2, 1941, from the testimony of a certain Merkulov, who was in German captivity, but they did not verify these testimony. Then, according to this version, the graves of Polish officers were discovered and excavated in February-March 1942 by Poles from a construction battalion stationed in the Katyn region. Again, the Germans were informed about this, and again their burials "were not interested." They "interested" them only after the crushing defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad and a radical turning point in the war. Then, according to the lawyers of Hitler and Goebbels, the Germans energetically set about "investigating" and on February 18, 1943, they carried out partial excavations, "discovering" several common graves of Polish officers. Then they "found" witnesses from local residents, who, of course, "confirmed" that the Poles were shot in the spring of 1940, when the Nazis were just finishing developing a plan for attacking the USSR. The Nazi leadership put their professor Gerhard at the head of the "international commission" for the exhumation of the corpses Butch and began a noisy anti-Soviet campaign Already on March 16, 1943, the Polish government in exile joined them. At the same time, the Poles did not even bother to ask their ally the USSR for any clarifications, but immediately joined Goebbels' propaganda campaign, justifying their vile behavior by the impression of "abundant and detailed German information regarding the discovery of the bodies of many thousands of Polish officers near Smolensk and the categorical assertion that they were killed by the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940.” This is not the cretinism of the "London Poles", but their conscious and prearranged complicity.

In order to give their slanderous fabrications greater impact, high-ranking figures of fascist Germany even discussed the issue of the arrival from Katyn of the head of the Polish government in exile, General Sikorsky: judging by indirect evidence, he was their long-standing and reliable agent. This is convincingly evidenced by the exchange of views between Himmler and Ribbentrop on this issue. In particular, Ribbentrop informs Himmler that this idea is seductive from a propaganda point of view, but "there is a basic attitude regarding the interpretation of the Polish problem, which makes it impossible for us to have any contact with the head of the Polish government in exile." In the correspondence between the two Nazi bosses, their complete confidence is amazing that General Sikorsky will not dare to disobey if he is invited to fly to Katyn. And the “basic attitude regarding the interpretation of the Polish problem” was formulated by Adolf Hitler in 1939: “The Poles should have only one master - a German. Two masters cannot and should not exist side by side, therefore all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia must be destroyed. It sounds cruel, but such is the law of life. According to the data of the foreign author D. Toland, by mid-autumn 1939, three and a half thousand representatives of the Polish intelligentsia, whom Hitler considered "pedlars of Polish nationalism", were liquidated. “Only in this way,” he argued, “can we get the territory we need.” The terror was accompanied by the ruthless expulsion of more than a million ordinary Poles from their lands and the placement of Germans there from other parts of Poland and the Baltic states. This happened in winter, and more Poles died from the cold during the resettlement than as a result of executions. The cretinism of the majority of representatives of the Polish gentry consisted in the fact that they, not doubting the victory of Nazi Germany, counted on the preservation of their gentry privileges by the Nazis. They either didn't know or didn't want to know about the Germans' "basic directive" for solving the "Polish problem".

By the way, the Nazis also had “personal” claims against the Poles. When Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, the political and military leadership of the latter consoled themselves with the thought that they were only dealing with a demonstration by the Germans of their provocative power. In response to the “provocation”, the Poles massacred the entire German population, including women and children, in the cities of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) and Schulitz located near the Polish-German border. The Nuremberg Tribunal named the destruction of Belarusian Khatyn, Czech Lidice, French Oradour by the Nazis as examples of war crimes against civilians, but if we follow the historical truth, the palm should be given to the Poles: in World War II they committed the first gravest crime against civilians. In the Soviet period, it was not customary to talk about this; we considered them our friends in the socialist camp and allies in arms. But now, when the rulers of bourgeois Poland have betrayed us, joined the aggressive NATO bloc and, together with the Russian “fifth column”, are hitting us backhand and slandering us, we, in the words of Chernyshevsky, must respond with blow for blow. By and large, our previous position was flawed. Because of her, over decades of friendship, we never demanded from the Poles an account of what they had done to 120,000 Red Army soldiers who were captured by them in 1920 due to the utter mediocrity and politicking of the "commander" Tukhachevsky. Even now they do not tell us anything intelligible on this score and are not going to say anything, and the Russian bourgeois government scatters pearls in front of them and lays the blame for the crime committed by the Nazis on the Soviet people.

And more about the real, not imaginary crimes associated with the pan-Poland. Stanislav Kunyaev, the author of the famous book "Poetry, Fate, Russia", tells about the events in Jedwabno, our border town before the attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR. “... For almost two years Jedwabno was our frontier outpost. But on June 23, 1941, German troops again occupy Jedwabno. And then in the nearby towns of Radzivilov, Voneoshi, Vizne, Jewish pogroms broke out. Local Poles kill several hundred Jews, the survivors flee to Jedwabno. But on July 10, a total pogrom of the local Jewish community takes place in Jedwabno, along with refugees. At least 2,000 Jews were slaughtered…” The Polish historian of Jewish origin, Tomasz Gross, who wrote the book Neighbors, adds: “The main facts look indisputable. In July 1941, a large group of Poles living in Jedwabno took part in the brutal extermination of almost all the Jews there, who, by the way, made up the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the town. At first they were killed one by one - with sticks, stones, tortured, cut off their heads, defiled the corpses. Then, on July 10, about one and a half thousand survivors were driven into a barn and burned alive. (Didn’t the Nazis borrow this medieval method of execution from the Poles, when they burned Soviet people alive in barns, barns and houses in the occupied territory?) After the publication of the book by T. Gross, the nationalist gentry was backed to the wall. in the absence of local residents, in the absence of right-wing politicians and even the local priest, who had locked himself in his house, he repented in Jedwabno before world Jewry on behalf of Poland.

Now the Poles are hungry for compensation: moral, psychological, political and material. And the Russian Katyn should become such compensation for them.

The traitors and their Polish-German customers were let down by haste and an irrepressible desire to have the CPSU declared an "anti-constitutional" organization, to bury the "communist hydra" much deeper than the Nazis buried Polish officers near Smolensk. At a meeting of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation on October 16, 1992, representatives of the Yeltsin side, S. Shakhrai and A. Makarov, filed a petition to add to the case file the top-secret documents on the Katyn tragedy that had just been “discovered” in the archives, indicating that Polish officers were shot by decision governing bodies of the CPSU(b). According to S. Shakhrai, these documents were kept in a sealed envelope - package No. 1 and passed from hand to hand by the first secretaries and general secretaries of the Central Committee. The entire press, which called itself democratic, chokingly wrote, and television broadcast about sensational finds and that the personal representative of the president in the person of the archivist R. Pikhoi handed these documents to L. Walesa on October 14, 1992. The Poles thanked the messenger B. Yeltsin, looked, turned over the documents and demanded that the Russian authorities provide the originals. Until now, the Russian side "provides" them.

In the autumn of 1992, the Russian media ran a brown wave against the Communist Party and the Communists with the same frenzy as the propaganda of the Nazis in 1943, which Goebbels taught: murder. The world needs to be shown these Soviet atrocities through the continuous presentation of new facts. In particular, it must be shown in the comments that these are the same Bolsheviks about whom the British and Americans claim that they allegedly changed and changed their political convictions. These are the same Bolsheviks who are prayed for in the so-called democracies and who are blessed in solemn ceremonial by the English bishops. These are the same Bolsheviks who have already received from the British absolute authority for domination and Bolshevik penetration into Europe. In general, we need to talk more often about 17-18-year-old warrant officers who, before being shot, still asked for permission to send a letter home, etc., since this works especially amazingly. From Goebbels' instructions it is clear that the fascists erected slander against the Soviet Union to achieve two goals. The first of these was to quarrel the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition, and the second was to intimidate the population of countries that were vassal dependent on Germany, and to involve them more widely in the war against the USSR on the side of the Nazis. We admit that the Nazis did not try in vain. In the short term, they managed to delay the opening of the second front for more than a year, and in the long term they realized all the goals of fascist Germany, because in 1946, W. Churchill, speaking in the small US university town of Fulton, laid the foundation for the cold war between the former allies.

It is obvious that the Yeltsinists, having dumped their “original documents” more than once or twice, regretted this more than once or twice, having thrown out their “original documents” during the trial in the Constitutional Court, which lasted (with interruptions) from May 26 to November 30, 1992. To give a general legal assessment of the Katyn "documents" on behalf of the communist side was entrusted to the author of these lines and Professor Rudinsky F.M. We expressed doubts about the authenticity of three main documents - a note by L. Beria dated March 5, 1940, an extract from the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated March 5, 1940 and a note by A. Shelepin dated March 3, 1959 addressed to Khrushchev, stating, that they should be subjected to a handwriting examination. One of the signs indicating the falsification of Beria's note and the extract from the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was the complete coincidence of the dates of sending the note (March 5, 1940) and the meeting of the Politburo (also March 5, 1940). This has never happened in the practice of the Politburo. The gap in time between the date of sending this or that document with a proposal to consider some issue at a meeting of the Politburo and the meeting itself was at least 5-6 days.

For representatives of the presidential side, the accusation of falsifying documents was a real blow. They tried not to show confusion and even promised to present “genuine archival documents”, but, of course, they never presented any originals to anyone. And the Constitutional Court, in its decision of November 30, 1992, did not say a word about the Katyn tragedy and essentially rehabilitated the top Soviet party and state leadership. He indirectly recognized the validity of the conclusions of the commission of Academician N.N. Burdenko that among the more than 135 thousand people killed by the German fascists in the temporarily occupied territory of the Smolensk region, there were also Polish officers who were in three forced labor camps near Katyn and were used during the period of the perfidious German attack on the Soviet Union for road work.

But our domestic Goebbels falsifiers, urged on by the Polish-German side, could not think of anything better than to continue moving in the same direction. They "corrected" the original fake. This was expressed in the fact that from Beria's "note" to Comrade Stalin "they etched an indication of the number and the number" 5 "failed in no one knows where: it was" March 5, 1940 "and it became" ... March 1940 ". In this form, the "note" ended up in the sixth volume of the "Materials of the case on the verification of the constitutionality of the decrees of the President of the Russian Federation concerning the activities of the CPSU and the Communist Party of the RSFSR, as well as on the verification of the constitutionality of the CPSU and the Communist Party of the RSFSR." I don’t know who exactly in the Constitutional Court became an accomplice of the presidential side in the repeated falsification, but it is obvious that the Yeltsinists had such opportunities that they could, without any difficulty, after exposure, replace a fake photocopy with another of the same dignity and value. Only manipulations with the notorious "Beria's note" are enough to conclude that all accusations against the Soviet leaders in the execution of Polish officers are a global lie.

The "work on the mistakes" of the slanderers of the workers' state required a lot of time and was accompanied by the rejection of many statements that they had previously circulated. It became especially bad for them after the publication in 1995 of Y. Mukhin’s book “The Katyn Detective” (M., 1995), small in volume, but full of facts that are murderous for them. Among the many indirect evidence indicating that the murder of Polish officers was committed in the autumn of 1941, Yu. Mukhin names three direct evidence 1) The conclusions of forensic experts, including a number of those who in 1943 were members of the commission of the German professor G. Butz, that that, based on the degree of decomposition of the corpses, the condition of their clothes and other signs, by the time they were exhumed by the Nazis, the dead had lain in the ground for no more than a year, at most one and a half, that is, the time of their murder dates back to the autumn of 1941. 2) The bullets and cartridge cases found in the graves of the buried have a caliber of 7.65 mm and 6.35 mm and are marked by the German cartridge factory "Genshovik", abbreviated as "Geko", that is, they were produced in Germany. 3) Approximately 20% of the corpses had their hands tied with paper twine, which was not produced at all in the USSR before the war, but was produced in Germany.

Of considerable interest is how the Nazis prepared the Katyn provocation in the winter of 1943. This was done with German pedantry and thoroughness. The "necessary" writers, journalists, experts in the field of forensic medicine were selected. The territory of Kozy Gory, which before the arrival of the occupiers was a favorite place for festivities of the inhabitants of Smolensk, was made by the Nazis into a restricted area. By the beginning of the propaganda action, they had increased security; in addition to the Poles who served in the Wehrmacht, the SS began to carry it out. A German propaganda company was stationed in Katyn. Goebbels admonished his subordinates: “The German officers who will take over the leadership must be exceptionally politically trained and experienced people, able to act deftly and confidently. Some of our people should be there earlier so that everything is prepared when the Red Cross arrives and so that during the excavations they do not come across things that do not correspond to our line. It would be expedient to elect one person from us and one from the UWC who would already now prepare a minute-by-minute program in Katyn. Thus, Goebbels did not hide from his subordinates that the Katyn case was a fake and therefore demanded that they act "meaningfully."

The International Red Cross did not take part in the Goebbels provocation, despite the blackmail and threats of the Nazis. But the "London Poles", having entered into a shameful collusion with the Germans, sent the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross to Katyn, hereinafter referred to as the PC. - Yu.S.). She stayed there from April 17 to June 9, 1943. It was headed by the Pole K. Skarzhinsky, and at the final stage - by his compatriot M. Vodzinsky. They compiled reports on the work of the commission, which are kept in London. In their research, modern Goebbels prefer to give fragments only from Skarzhinsky's report, since they do not like Vodzinsky's excessive meticulousness of the latter, indicating, for example, that "all bullet wounds were made from a pistol using Geco 7.65 D brand ammunition." But they are also afraid to reproduce Skarzhinsky's report in full. The report contains details and details that indicate that the Germans assigned the Poles the miserable and humiliating role of extras, designed by their presence to give the propaganda performance the appearance of an "investigation." The following excerpts from the report are characteristic: “The corpses carried out on a stretcher from the ditches were laid in a row and began to search for documents in such a way that each corpse was separately searched by two workers in the presence of one member of the PKK commission ... Members of the commission engaged in the search for documents did not have the right viewing and sorting them. They were only required to pack the following items: a) wallets with all their contents; b) all kinds of papers found in bulk; c) awards and memorabilia; d) medallions, crosses, etc.; e) shoulder straps; e) wallets; g) all kinds of valuable items. Thus, the scanned, sorted and numbered envelopes were put into boxes in the order of numbering. They remained at the exclusive disposal of the German authorities. The lists typed by the Germans on a typewriter in German could not be verified by the commission against the draft, since it no longer had access to them. During the work of the technical commission of the PKK in the Katyn forest in the period from April 15 to June 7, 1943, a total of 4243 corpses were exhumed, of which 4233 were removed from seven graves located at a short distance from one another and excavated in March 1943 by the German military authorities. Very carefully and throughout the territory, the probing carried out by the Germans in order to ensure that the figure of 12 thousand corpses announced by propaganda does not differ too much from reality, suggests that there will be no more graves. This probing of the territory revealed a number of mass graves of Russians in varying degrees of decomposition, down to skeletons. Skarzhinsky's report is remarkable not only because the Germans did not show the Poles from the Technical Commission a single document, that is, they treated them like cattle. In it, the Poles, as it were, inadvertently mentioned that in the territory probed by the Germans, where the graves of Polish officers were located, there were also graves with "mass graves of Russians."

A kind of allusion to the fact that the Poles were shot by the one who shot the Russians as well.

And the commission of forensic experts, headed by G. Butz, stayed in Katyn for only two days and, having opened nine corpses prepared in advance by the Nazis, flew to Berlin on May 1, 1943. But instead of Berlin, the plane landed on a remote, secluded airfield. Subsequently, the Bulgarian doctor Markov recalled: “The airfield was clearly a military one. We had lunch there, and immediately after dinner we were asked to sign copies of the protocol. We were offered to sign them right here, on this isolated airfield!” In addition to the general protocol, each member of the commission wrote his own conclusion. The Bulgarian Markov, in his conclusion, despite the pressure of the Germans, evaded the conclusion that the Polish officers were killed in 1940. In turn, the Czechoslovakian professor F. Gaek, who was also a member of the Butz commission, published in 1945 in Prague the pamphlet "Katyn Evidence", where he presented impartial and scientifically irreproachable arguments confirming that the Polish officers could not have been shot earlier autumn 1941. As for G. Butz himself, his fate turned out to be sad. Our Goebbels are trying not to remember him, because they really don’t want to say that in 1944 Butz was killed by the Germans themselves, suspecting that he would reveal their scam with the Katyn burials.

And what happened to the “material evidence” in the form of documents and various items that the Germans, with the help of the Poles from the Technical Commission, packed in boxes in April-June 1943? After all, the entire “investigation” of the Germans, in addition to delusional medical conclusions, was based on collecting documents from corpses and asserting that there were no papers with dates later than May 1940 among them. These papers, either in 9 or in 14 boxes, numbering 3184 units, were transported on two trucks farther and farther into the territory of the "Reich", farther and farther from the Soviet offensive. burned, in accordance with the order, the documents, ”as the famous modern Goebbelsian C. Madajczyk writes. A team of slanderers is trying to pretend that, they say, it's nothing special if the defendant destroyed the documents exculpating him. And I argue that the Germans burned these documents precisely because they contained evidence of their guilt.

In 1990-1991, the "historians" N. Lebedeva and Yu. Zorya, who were part of the academic part of the supporters of the Goebbels version of the fate of Polish officers, stated in their writings that "... in April-May 1940, more than 15 thousand Polish prisoners of war - officers and policemen - were taken out of the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky camps and transferred to the UNKVD of the Smolensk and Kalinin regions. This was their last route, the end points of which were Katyn, Mednoe and the 6th quarter of the forested park zone of Kharkov. Knocking out a tear from a gullible reader with passages “about the last route”, they expressed the idea that it was permissible “... to conclude that it is possible for the Special Meeting of the NKVD to pass a death sentence on prisoners of war.” Following the "scientists-experts", the idea of ​​the execution of the Poles by decision of the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR was picked up by narrow-minded investigators from the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the USSR In Mednoye, Tver Region, in the summer of 1991, "exhumers" from the investigative brigade of the Main Military Police Directorate of the USSR, with the participation of the Poles, dug up the entire cemetery. In fact, no shot Poles were found in Medny and could not be found, since no one shot them there, but they did not fail to put up a monument in the cemetery with an inscription that 6,000 Poles “shot by the Russians” were buried here. The Polish priest Peshkovsky, together with other Poles and investigators from the GVP of the USSR, were engaged in the exhumation of corpses near Kharkov from July 25 to August 7, 1991. Found 169 skulls and 62 of them found traces of bullet wounds; on the site where gravediggers worked, criminals and members of the Soviet "fifth column" were buried. But on the basis of the "data" known only to them, these search engines determined that 4,000 Polish prisoners of war from the Starobilsk camp near Kharkov were buried in the cemetery.

According to the film, which recorded the course of the exhumation, it is clear that the investigating team did not find anything that could indicate that the corpses belonged to the Poles. However, four years later, it suddenly turns out that numerous “material evidence” were found, about which priest Peshkovsky, who managed to publish two books, told the whole world. The simple-hearted and at the same time sly priest in his writings reported a curious detail related to the excavations in Medny and near Kharkov. According to him, the bulk of the items called material evidence was found not in the graves, but in some separate pits and pits. It turns out that snuffboxes, newspapers, notes, rings were taken from the Poles before the execution, and, having buried the executed, then they dug special pits and pits, where they buried the objects taken from the doomed. Poor priest! In his presentation, the assurance sounds very touching that the wooden snuffbox, the newspaper, and the note, having lain in the blue-black liquid for 51 years, did not decay, but were preserved so that they could be read "with the balcony door open."

It is striking that the handwriting, methods and techniques used by the Poles and their co-investigators in 1991 directly echo the handwriting, methods and techniques of the Germans in 1943 near Katyn. The only difference is that the Germans concealed and then destroyed material evidence of their guilt, while the Poles, with the assistance of our collaborators, fabricate evidence of someone else's guilt. But this is a difference that makes the actions of the Polish-Russian side even more vile. The Poles really want their POW officers to be declared victims of the Russians, not the Germans. You can demand compensation from the Russians in Eurocurrency, but you can’t demand from the Germans.

As we have already mentioned, in the writings of the Russian-Polish Goebbelsites, one can often find, combined with fear and trembling, mention of the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR, which is credited with the decision to shoot Polish officers. Our democrats of all colors and shades so intimidated themselves and others with “extrajudicial repressive bodies of the totalitarian regime” that, putting forward delusional fabrications about the sinister role of the Special Conference in the fate of the Poles, they did not even bother to look into the Regulations on this body. And the regulation says:

1. Provide the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs with respect to persons recognized as socially dangerous, exile for a period of up to 5 years under public supervision in the area, the list of which is established by the NKVD; deport for up to 5 years under open supervision with a ban on living in the capitals, large cities and industrial centers of the USSR; socially dangerous.

2. To grant the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs the right to imprison persons suspected of espionage, sabotage, sabotage and terrorist activities for a period of 5 to 8 years.

3. For the implementation of the specified in paragraphs 1 and 2, under the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, under his chairmanship, there is a Special Conference ...

Thus, the Special Meeting did not have the right to sentence anyone to death, and therefore the horror stories invented by our Goebbels burst like a soap bubble and the Russian-Polish slanderers once again exposed themselves. It must be added that no "Special Meetings" at the level of republics, territories, regions have ever existed; it operated only under the NKVD of the USSR. And one more characteristic feature of the Special Meeting: it was always controlled by the USSR Prosecutor, who, if he disagreed with his decision, had the right to bring a protest to the Presidium of the USSR Central Executive Committee, which suspended the execution of the decision of the Special Meeting. The meanness of domestic Goebbels lies in the fact that they constantly resort to substitution of concepts, to identifying the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR with the "troikas" that have sunk into oblivion back in 1938.

Before the falsifiers, who fabricated an investigative case on the execution of Polish officers by the NKVD troops, at the final stage, two delicate problems arose, in my opinion:

1. How to eliminate the discrepancy between the statement of the Nazis, who announced in 1943 that about 12 thousand Polish officers were shot in Katyn, and the current Russian-Polish "investigation", which determined that 6 thousand Poles were "shot" near Medny, near Kharkov - 4 thousand and in Katyn - a little over 4 thousand people.

2. Which state body of the USSR should be held responsible for the decision to execute Polish officers, if all attempts to drag the Special Conference of the NKVD into this by the ears turned out to be so untenable that only complete cretins and complete scoundrels can insist on them. (However, if the Polish President Kwasniewski is pleased with the "investigation" and radiates joy over its results, then we are dealing with both at the same time).

After the entry of Soviet troops into the territory of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine in September-October 1939 as internees, and after the declaration of a state of war with the USSR by the emigrant government of Poland in November 1939 - as prisoners of war - about 10 thousand officers of the former the Polish army and about the same number of gendarmes, policemen, intelligence officers, prison workers - only about 20 thousand people (not counting privates and non-commissioned officers). By the spring of 1940 they were divided into three categories.

The first category is dangerous criminals exposed in the murders of communists on the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, in sabotage, espionage and other serious crimes against the USSR. After being arrested by the judicial authorities of the USSR, they were sentenced - partly to imprisonment with serving their sentences in labor camps, partly to death. Taking into account the data that, as a result of various kinds of slips and slips, Russian-Polish Goebbelsists tell us, the total number of those sentenced to death amounted to about one thousand people. It is impossible to give an exact figure due to the fact that the Russian falsifiers destroyed the files on all the Polish criminals in the archives they got, so that it would be easier for them, together with the Polish accomplices, to build a version about the execution of Polish officers by the “Stalinist regime”.

The second category - persons from among the Polish officers, who for the world community were supposed to designate Polish prisoners of war - about 400 people in total. They were sent to the Gryazovets POW camp in the Vologda region. Most of them were released in 1941 and handed over to General Anders, who began to form the Polish army on the territory of the USSR. This army, numbering several divisions, General Anders, with the consent of the Soviet leadership, who was convinced that the Andersovites did not want to fight against the Nazis on the Eastern Front along with the Red Army, led through Turkmenistan and Iran to the Anglo-Americans in 1942. By the way, the British, who had Anders’ units at their disposal, did not stand on ceremony with the arrogant Poles and in the spring of 1944 threw them under German machine guns into the mountainous neck of the Italian town of Montecassino, where they died in large numbers.

The third category was the bulk of the Polish army officers, gendarmes and policemen, who could not be released for two reasons. Firstly, they could join the ranks of the Home Army, which was subordinate to the Polish emigrant government and launched semi-partisan military operations against the Red Army and Soviet power structures. Secondly, based on the inevitability of a war with Nazi Germany, about which the Soviet leadership had no illusions, normalization of relations with the Polish government in exile and the subsequent use of the Poles for the joint struggle against fascism were not ruled out.

A painful and painful solution to the fate of the third, main part of the Polish prisoners of war was found in the fact that they were recognized as socially dangerous by the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR, convicted and imprisoned in forced labor camps. Their dispatch from the Kozelsky, Ostashsky and Starobelsky prisoner of war camps (prisoner of war camps and forced labor camps are of a completely different nature, since the latter contain only convicts) was carried out in April-May 1940. Convicted Poles were transported to special-purpose labor camps located west of Smolensk, and there were three of them. The Poles kept in these camps were used in the construction and repair of highways until the Nazis invaded the territory of the USSR. The beginning of the war for the Soviet Union was extremely unfavorable. Already on July 16, 1941, German troops captured Smolensk, and the camps with Polish prisoners of war were with them even earlier. In an atmosphere of confusion and elements of panic, it was not possible to evacuate the Poles deep into Soviet territory by rail or road, and they refused to leave on foot to the East along with a few guards. Only a few of the Polish Jewish officers did so. In addition, the most determined and courageous of the officers began to make their way to the West, thanks to which some of them managed to survive.

In the hands of the Nazis was the entire card file on the Poles, which was kept in labor camps. This allowed them to announce in 1943 that the number of those executed was about 12,000. Using the data of the card index, they published "Official materials..." of their investigation, where they included various "documents" in support of their slanderous version of the execution of Polish officers by the Soviets. But, despite German pedantry, among the documents cited were those that testified that their owners were alive as of October 1941. Here is what, for example, he wrote about the "Official materials ..." of the Germans V.N. Pribytkov, who worked as the director of the Central Special Archive of the USSR before it came under the control of the Yeltsinists: "... The decisive document cited is a certificate of citizenship issued to Captain Stefan Alfred Kozlinsky in Warsaw on October 20, 1941. That is, this document contained in the official German edition and extracted from the Katyn grave, completely crosses out the version of the Nazis that the executions were carried out in the spring of 1940, and shows that the executions were carried out after October 20, 1941, that is, by the Germans. The available data convincingly testify that the Germans started shooting Poles in the Katyn Forest in September 1941 and completed the action by December of the same year. In the materials of the investigation conducted by the commission of Academician N.N. Burdenko, there is also evidence that the Germans, before demonstrating the graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943 to various "semi-official" organizations and individuals, opened the graves and brought the corpses of the Poles who had been shot by them in other places into them. Soviet prisoners of war involved in these works in the amount of 500 people were destroyed. Next to the graves of the Poles shot in the Katyn forest, there are mass graves of Russians. In them, dating mainly to 1941 and partly to 1942, the ashes of 25,000 Soviet prisoners of war and civilians rest. It's hard to believe, but "academic experts" and unfortunate investigators suffering from the Smerdyakovism syndrome, having produced mountains of papers over 14 years of "investigation", do not even mention it!

In the story of the Polish prisoners of war, the actions of the then political leadership headed by Stalin do not look legally irreproachable. Some norms of international law were violated, namely the relevant provisions of the 1907 Hague and 1929 Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War in General and Prisoners of War Officers in Particular. There is no need to deny this, since in this case denial plays into the hands of our enemies, who, with the help of the "Katyn case", want to finally rewrite the history of the Second World War. We must admit that the condemnation of Polish officers by the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR and their sending to forced labor camps with a change in their status from prisoners of war to prisoners, if it can be justified from the standpoint of political and economic expediency, is in no way justified from the standpoint of international law . We must also admit that the dispatch of Polish officers to camps near the western border of the USSR deprived us of the opportunity to provide them with adequate security in connection with the perfidious attack of Nazi Germany. And it becomes clear why Stalin and Beria in November-December 1941 could not say something definite to Generals Sikorsky, Anders and the Polish Ambassador Kot about the fate of the Polish officers captured by the Red Army in September-October 1939. They really did not know what happened to them after the occupation by the Nazis of a significant part of the territory of the USSR. And to say that at the time of the German invasion the Poles were in labor camps west of Smolensk meant an international scandal and would create difficulties in creating an anti-Hitler coalition. Meanwhile, in early December 1941, the Polish government in London received reliable information about the execution of Polish officers by the Germans near Katyn. But it did not bring this information to the attention of the Soviet leadership, but mockingly continued to "find out" where their compatriot officers had gone. Why? The first reason is that the Poles in 1941-1942 and even in 1943 were confident that Hitler would defeat the Soviet Union. The second reason, arising from the first, is the desire to blackmail the Soviet leadership for the subsequent refusal to participate in hostilities against the Germans on the Soviet-German front.

Goebbels' falsification of the "Katyn case" was exposed in the course of an investigation conducted between October 5, 1943 and January 10, 1944 by the Extraordinary State Commission chaired by Academician N.N. Burdenko. The main results of the work of the Commission N.N. Burdenko were included in the indictment of the Nuremberg Tribunal as "Document USSR-48". In the course of the investigation into the case of Polish officers, 95 witnesses were interrogated, 17 statements were checked, the necessary examination was carried out, and the location of the Katyn graves was examined.

As an indirect proof of their version, all modern Goebbels cite the fact that the Nuremberg Tribunal excluded the Katyn episode from the crimes of the leaders of Nazi Germany. The conclusion of the Burdenko commission was presented as a document of the prosecution, which, as an official one, in accordance with Article 21 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, did not require additional evidence. After all, the leaders of fascist Germany were not accused of personally shooting someone or burning them alive in huts. They were accused of pursuing a policy that resulted in such massive crimes that mankind did not know. The accusers showed that the genocide against the Poles, which also manifested itself near Katyn, was the official policy of the Nazis. However, the judges of the Nuremberg Tribunal, not taking into account the conclusions of the Burdenko commission, only imitated the judicial investigation into the execution of Polish officers near Katyn. After all, the embers of the Cold War were already smoldering! Several years later, in 1952, the American member of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Robert X. Jackson, admitted that his position on Katyn was determined by a corresponding instruction from the government of President G. Truman. In 1952, a committee of the US Congress fabricated the version of the Katyn case they wanted and, in its conclusion, recommended that the US government refer the case to the UN for investigation. However, as the Polish Goebbels complain, "...Washington did not consider it possible to do this." Why? Yes, because the question of who killed the Poles has never been a secret for the Americans. And in 1952, Washington found itself in the position of the current Goebbels, who were afraid to take the case to court. It is beneficial for the US government to chew this case in the press, but it could not allow it to be tried. The US government was smart enough not to drag fakes to the UN. But our stupid provincials, Gorbachev and Yeltsin., with any fake rushed to Warsaw to the Polish presidents. But even this is not enough: Yeltsin instructed his oprichniki to lay out fakes before the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and, together with them, was convicted of forgery. Bottom line: The Constitutional Court did not say a word about the Katyn tragedy, and according to the logic of the Russian-Polish Goebbels, this should be interpreted as an acquittal to the Soviet Union and its leadership. One cannot but agree with Nobel, who once said: "Any democracy very quickly turns into a dictatorship of scum." The current investigation of the Katyn case by two "big democracies" - Russian and Polish - confirms the validity of the words of the famous Swede.

In these notes, it is impossible not to touch on the role of the Germans in the so-called "investigation" of the Katyn events. This role is almost invisible, but clearly present. After the Poles, or rather, together with them, the Germans are the most interested party in the fact that the responsibility for the execution of Polish officers was assigned to the Soviet Union. With bated breath and quiet triumph, they accepted Kwasniewski's pleasurable statement after the meeting with Putin that the "investigation" was over and that the "documents" would soon be transferred to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. The Germans do not forgive anyone and nothing and know how to wait in the wings. They did not forgive the Serbs for their active resistance to the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, and in 1989, together with the Americans and the British, they furiously and furiously bombed Yugoslav cities and villages. They have not forgiven and will not forgive us the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, and in the subconscious of many of them lives a sizzling hatred for I. Stalin and for us - the Soviet people who broke the back of the Wehrmacht. They are trying to pour out this hatred towards us through their agents of influence. One of their most hidden and most valuable agents of influence in the Soviet Union long years was Valentin Falin. For us, this person is interesting because it was he who became the person in the Central Committee of the CPSU who launched Goebbels' version of the Katyn tragedy. Falin belonged to the generation of Soviet people who were born successfully - in the very late twenties, early thirties. They were small enough to be at the front, and became old enough so that in the post-war years, with virtually no competition, it was easy to enter and graduate from prestigious universities and quickly move up the career ladder. In 1971-1978. Falin was the USSR ambassador to the FRG, which, taking into account the previous experience of communicating with the West Germans, predetermined his extremely hostile attitude towards the Soviet period in the history of our country. Upon completion of the ambassador's mission to the FRG, Falin was appointed deputy head of the Department of International Information of the Central Committee of the CPSU and began to vigorously "spin" the "Katyn case" in the interests of the Germans, but Yu. Andropov prevented him, removing him from the Central Committee. For some time he had to be content with the post of political observer for the Izvestia newspaper. His "finest hour" struck in the era of Gorbachev: from 1988 to August 1991 he was the head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and then the secretary of the Central Committee. Since the end of 1991, Falin ended up in Germany: the Germans made sure that he lived comfortably on German soil. I will clarify right away that I did not and do not consider Falin to be some ordinary spy: the Germans did not need him in such a capacity. The main thing they were striving for was to ensure that he looked at the pre-war, military and post-war history of Europe and the world and the role of the Soviet Union through their eyes. Undoubtedly, their great success was that, as a result of numerous private conversations with Falin, including during his seven-year stay as ambassador to the FRG, they managed to convince him that Goebbels' version of the execution of Polish officers in Katyn was correct. And this was the unmistakable step of the Germans, for Falin believed that he had become the owner of "secret Knowledge." As we have already mentioned, his first attempt to launch a slanderous campaign on Katyn from the Central Committee of the CPSU in the interests of Germany failed. But upon his return to the Central Committee in 1988, Falin, with the support of M. Gorbachev, who began to dismantle the socialist camp and destroy socialism under the banner of building a "common European home", was again at the center of the "investigation" of the Katyn case.

Falin's book "Without allowances for circumstances" is very indicative of understanding how our Goebbels fabricated lies about Katyn. Firstly, Falin, who had long ago learned the “truth” from the West Germans, concluded that the execution of Polish officers was a crime of Beria and his henchmen, since they were transported by escort troops from Kozelsk to Katyn (indeed, they were transported, but not to execution, but to labor camps). Secondly, Falin admits that, on the basis of some "indirect" evidence, he achieved, together with A.N. Yakovlev, in order for Gorbachev to make an official apology to Polish President W. Jaruzelski, and the General, not without hesitation, agreed to "accuse himself" for the alleged execution of officers, followed by a brief report on April 28, 1990 by TASS on this subject. Thirdly, there was no notorious "package No. 1" with documents on Katyn, which was allegedly passed from one General to another, did not even exist. Fourthly, neither Gorbachev, nor Yakovlev and Falin, when deciding to apologize to Jaruzelsky, even saw with their eyes what kind of documents were in the Katyn file kept in the KGB archive and what their contents were. The homely truth from what Falin said is this: when the head of the KGB, A. Kryuchkov, and his employees finally bothered to look into the Katyn case, they discovered documents testifying to the conviction of Polish officers to imprisonment. Kryuchkov then clutched his head and was forced to report the “mistake” to Gorbachev, who had already “crowed” to the whole world regarding the guilt of the Soviet Union. It was like death for Gorbachev to admit that he had collapsed under the pressure of his comrades-in-arms, Falin and Yakovlev. And the Poles and Germans constantly demand visible documentary evidence that it does not exist, and Gorbachev, in order to somehow get out of the situation, instructs the USSR Prosecutor General's Office to start an “investigation” in the direction confirming his apologies to the Poles.

But having shoveled mountains of mandrels, the GVP investigative team could only state: “The collected materials allow us to draw a preliminary conclusion that the Polish prisoners of war could have been shot on the basis of the decision of the Special Meeting of the NKVD ...” There are no documents on the Katyn case confirming the Goebbels version, except for Falin's numerous notes and those whom he involved in his provocative fuss could not be found. This explains the real nonsense of Gorbachev in his letter written in October 1992 to the new President of Poland, L. Walesa, where he states that he opened the envelope with the inscription "do not open" at the very end of his presidency in December 1991, in the presence of Yeltsin, and invited him to dispose of these documents himself.

Yeltsin's awareness of the Katyn tragedy was zero, but when he saw that with the help of such "documents" it was possible to get even with the "cursed Soviet past", he instructed to voice them. "Package No. 1" in the Katyn case was invented by a greedy and unprincipled pack of archivists and lawyers from Yeltsin's team, falsifying documents. Subsequently, having made sure that the original documents completely refute the Goebbels version, the Yeltsinists began to forge them. Willingly or unwittingly, favorable conditions for falsifying the case about the fate of Polish officers were created at one time by the Soviet leadership itself. 8 post-war Soviet historiography, information on this subject was extremely scarce. The political elite of the USSR did not want to make public the information that on the eve of the war, Polish officers were not in prisoner-of-war camps, but in forced labor camps. In addition, the Poles and Germans were our allies under the Warsaw Pact and fraternal peoples in the socialist camp. To remind about Katyn meant to remind that the Poles were shot by the Germans. We didn't even mention it, and now the blame for the destruction of the Polish officers is being thrown on us through malicious falsification.

In Poland, the so-called union of "Katyn families" has been created and is operating, which has its own administration, banners, banners. This "alliance" has more than 800 thousand people and is a breeding ground for anti-Russian sentiments. It not only cultivates hatred for Russia, but also aims to receive huge compensation from us, similar to what Jews receive from Germany for the "Holocaust". And the goal can be achieved. Back in January 2002, during a visit to Poland, V. Putin said that "he does not rule out the possibility of extending the Russian law on victims of political repressions to the Poles." That is, V. Putin has long finished the "investigation" of the case of the Polish officers and talks only about what legal norms to adapt for compensation payments. But no matter what schemes they build, all this is one endless lie to attribute the crimes of Hitler, Goebbels, Nazi Germany to us - the winners of European fascism.

The rewriting of history and the global revision of the results of the Second World War are in full swing. In 20-25 years, the Americans will classify all information related to their atomic bombings of Japanese cities, and the whole fooled world, like today's Japanese youth, will point to the not-yet-extinct Russians, as a fiend of the human race, who wanted to destroy the whole world with using nuclear weapons. Fortunately, the glorious American guys from the Marine Corps prevented the evil Russians. The real Russophobia and real Nazism dominate in the USA, other NATO countries, the Baltic countries. And Putin keeps talking about manifestations of Russian nationalism. He is pursuing a policy in which we, who bore the brunt of the Victory in the Second World War, constantly find ourselves indebted to someone and guilty before someone. Most recently, during a visit to China, he took and gifted the Chinese with primordially Russian lands with an area of ​​340 square kilometers. Now he has swung wider: together with Foreign Minister Lavrov, he is going to give the Japanese two islands of the Kuril chain. Despite Putin's "generosity", the Japanese are bold and declare that they will conclude a peace treaty (we need it as a fifth wheel) only after the transfer of all the islands to them. Next in line is the Kaliningrad region, in German East Prussia. It's obvious to everyone! It is also obvious that the president is spitting on the Constitution of the Russian Federation, article four of which proclaims that the Russian Federation "...ensures the integrity and inviolability of its territory."

The vile falsification of the "Katyn case", carried out by the current regime of the Russian Federation, indicates the greatest danger hanging over our country and our people. Such "stones" are thrown into the past of the USSR-Russia with far-reaching goals. Unfortunately, many of us are not sufficiently aware of this danger and continue to believe the rulers who betrayed us long ago.

Notes

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 unspecified 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 departed 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 the 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 a declaration of 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 the doom of Poland 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 contain such a huge mass of prisoners, immediately after disarmament, half of the privates and non-commissioned officers were dismissed to their homes, 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 territories ceded 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, landlords, policemen, intelligence agents, 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 for 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 executions of Polish prisoners of war and prison inmates began, 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, an agreement was concluded between the Soviet government and the Polish government in exile (who was in London) 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 the territory of the USSR of the Polish army 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 a special settlement.

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, in 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 established 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, the Soviet “Special Commission for Establishing and Investigating the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest” was created, chaired by 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 January 16 to January 26, 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 report 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 in 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.

At the same time, throughout all the 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 soldiers 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 consisted in large-scale persecution and attempts to denigrate the members of the Home Army (AK) - a massive anti-Hitler armed underground, subordinate during the war years to the Polish "London" government in exile (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 a 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 organs searched for witnesses and participants in the German exhumation and forced them to make statements "exposing" the Germans as the perpetrators of the execution.
The 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 dacha 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 Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camps.

A year later, on October 14, 1992, by order of the President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, documents were made public and handed over to Poland, exposing the leadership of the USSR in committing the "Katyn crime" - 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 prisoners in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, indicating the numbers of orders, which, as it has been 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 there are 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 RF GVP 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 took important steps towards recognizing the truth in the 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 burial places of all executed Polish citizens, to recognize executed as victims of political repression and rehabilitate them in accordance with the 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

Today I accidentally went to the Dozhd TV channel, there was an interview with a representative of the Memoral society, who advertised some new book about Katyn, once again accusing the Soviet Union of shooting Polish officers and calling us to repent before Poland, and that's it. in such a spirit.
(Poland, for example,not going to repent for the prisoners of the Red Army tortured in Polish concentration camps during the years of the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1920.)

I hope that the "accuser" in his "labor" answered 52 questions once posed

Vladislav Shved to help those interested in the Katyn case, and finally dispelled all doubts. And the film has already been made.
The questions are:

Questions to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.

Can we assume that the criminal case No. 159 "On the execution of Polish prisoners of war from the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky camps of the NKVD in April - May 1940" was thoroughly investigated, given that:

investigators of the GVP RF were focused on the legalization of Gorbachev's political decision to convict the former leaders of the USSR and the NKVD.,

other versions, including the involvement of the Nazis in the execution of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, were not considered,

only the period of time - March - May 1940 was subject to investigation.

It should also be taken into account that the investigative team of the RF GVP, while conducting an investigation, did not fully understand:

the procedure for preparing documents for the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks,

the procedure for submitting documents to the PB and the specifics of holding meetings of the PB under Stalin,

the procedure for the execution of convicts by the NKVD,

the procedure for keeping prisoners of war in the camps of the NKVD,

rights of the Special Meeting under the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR,

the procedure for obtaining documents from the "closed package",

the procedure for the destruction of top-secret documents in the KGB.

Questions about the official version of the Katyn case.

1. How to explain that before the execution, the Poles were not searched and undressed? Their execution, according to the official version, was to remain a secret forever. However, the NKVD did everything, as it were, so that in the future, when excavating Polish graves, it would be possible to immediately establish who was shot.

2. Why, during the execution of Polish prisoners of war, there is a complete violation of the instructions of the NKVD on the procedure for carrying out executions, according to which sentences were to be carried out with "the obligatory complete secrecy of the time and place of the execution of the sentence"?

3. Is it possible to consider absolutely reliable information about the exhumation of mass graves of Polish prisoners of war in Kozi Gory, carried out in March-June 1943, contained in German "Official Materials on the Katyn Massacres"(Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn) and in the Report of the Technical Commission of the PKK, if it was an action personally approved by Hitler?

On March 13, 1943, Hitler flew to Smolensk and was among the first to meet with the head of the propaganda department of the Wehrmacht, Colonel Hasso von Wedel, whose officers were already working in Smolensk and Kozy Gory, preparing primary propaganda materials. The Reich Minister of Imperial Propaganda J. Goebbels was personally entrusted with overseeing the "Katyn affair". The stakes in this propaganda action "Katyn case" were extremely high. Any deviation from the approved version would be stopped without delay. This is known from other similar promotions.

4. How to evaluate the statement of Colonel Ahrens at the Nuremberg Tribunal that the head of intelligence of the Army Group Center, Colonel von Gersdorf, informed him back in the summer of 1942 that he knew all about burials in the Goat Mountains?

5. Can you believe that the representatives of the Polish Red Cross could be objective witnesses German exhumation, if on April 6, 1943, at a meeting in the Ministry of Imperial Propaganda, they were destined for the role of "witnesses under German control"?

There is no information in the Report of the TC PKK that Soviet prisoners of war worked at the excavations of the graves, that the remains of Polish priests in black cassocks and a female corpse were found in the graves. Perhaps there are other important facts missing?

It has not yet been established whether the first 300 exhumed corpses of Polish prisoners of war, whose skulls were boiled in the village of Borok, were recorded in the German exhumation list (testimony of M. Krivozertsev and N. Voevodskaya)?

7. How great were the chances of the members of the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross (TK PKK) return to Poland, if their conclusions and assessments contradicted the German ones?

It is known that even the international commission of experts was subjected to pressure from the Nazis. On the evening of April 30, without signing any official final document due to disagreements, the commission left Smolensk. On the way back to Berlin, the Germans landed the plane with the commission at the air base in Biala Podlaska, where right in the hangar they "unobtrusively" offered them to sign a conclusion dated "Smolensk, April 30, 1943." that Polish officers were shot by the Soviet authorities.

8. Why do the dates of the opening of the Katyn graves in official German reports and eyewitness accounts (testimony of Menshagin, Vasilyeva-Yakunenko, Shchebest, Voevodskaya) do not match?

It can be argued that the Germans concealed the real dates of the opening of the Katyn burials in order to gain time for some kind of manipulation with material evidence found on the remains of Polish officers.

9. How to evaluate the fact that the German experts in 1943, in violation of the elementary canons of exhumations, when compiling the official exhumation list of Katyn victims deliberately omitted, from which grave and which layer were the corpses of Polish prisoners of war removed?

The result is an incredible match order surnames of lists of prescriptions for sending prisoners from the Kozelsk camp to the UNKVD in the Smolensk region to the German exhumation list. There is a clear adjustment of surnames from the German list. The fact is that with an arbitrary compilation of an exhumation list, the probability of such a coincidence is equal to the probability that the monkey, hitting the keys of a typewriter, will sooner or later type Tolstoy's War and Peace.

10. Why, despite the statements that 10 thousand Polish officers were shot by the Bolsheviks in Kozy Gory, the Germans didn't want thoroughly investigate all possible burials of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn and its environs?

The following facts testify to this. Referring to "summer time", the Germans ended up opening grave No. 8 to the end, with "several hundred" corpses. The same thing happened with the water-filled moat found in the Kozy Gory, from which "parts of corpses stuck out." The Germans did not give a pump to pump water out of the ditch and ordered to fill it up. Members of the Technical Commission of the PAC, on their own, for 17 hours of work, "pulled 46 corpses out of the water."

11. Why hushed up the fact of discovery in the Katyn burial "double-zlotov military issue". who began walking on the territory of the Polish General Government only after May 8, 1940 and Polish officers from the Kozelsk camp (in the USSR) in the event of execution by the NKVD could not have them?

12. How to explain the fact of the presence in the German exhumation list of 1943 of the so-called "foreign" Poles(twins, civilian and Polish soldiers), that is, those who were not on the lists of the Kozelsk camp, while Polish experts always insisted that only officers and exclusively from the Kozelsk camp were shot in Katyn (Kozy Gory)? The remains of what kind of people in civilian clothes and Polish soldier's uniforms were found in Kozi Gory, if only officers were kept in the Kozelsky camp, the vast majority of whom were dressed in officer uniforms?

In the Katyn graves, the corpses of the Poles who were kept in the Starobilsk and Ostashkovsky camps were found. For example, Jaros Henryk (No. 2398, identified by a reserve officer's certificate) and Szkuta Stanisław (No. 3196, identified by a vaccination certificate and a reserve officer's membership card) were never kept in the Kozelsk camp and were not sent in the spring of 1940 "at the disposal of the chief UNKVD in the Smolensk region.

Based on the analysis of the official Katyn exhumation list, it was established that out of 4143 corpses exhumed by the Germans, 688 corpses were in soldier's uniform and did not have any documents with them, and about 20% of all exhumed were people in civilian clothes. During the work of the commission, N. Burdenko also found many corpses in soldier's clothes. The Poles themselves wrote about this (Matskevich).

13. Is it possible to believe that the NKVD officers descended into the ditch to a depth of 3-4 meters to neatly lay down those who were shot in rows, and even "Jack"?

British Ambassador to the Republic of Poland Owen O'Malley, in a telegram from Warsaw to British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden dated May 15, 1943, reported that the corpses in the largest Katyn burial No. 1 were "neatly laid out in rows of 9 to 12 people, one on another, heads in opposite directions…”?

14. How are the Germans among first 30 of identified corpses, they managed to extract from the lower layers of the mass of compressed bodies in the Katyn burial No. 1 the corpses of the executed Polish generals Smoravinsky and Bokhatyrevich, if 2500 victims were buried in the grave, 200-250 bodies in each row. The generals arrived in Kozy Gory in a stage with only 771 casualties. Generals could only be in the 3rd-4th row from below, with a total number of rows in the burial 9-12.

15. How to evaluate the testimony of the Frenchwoman K. Deville, a former lieutenant of the Red Army, that when she visited Katyn immediately after her liberation, in the German list of dead Polish officers, she found not only the name of her friend Z. Bogutsky, who, as she knew, was alive, but also "material evidence" that it was he who was shot in Katyn?

In the museum cell with physical evidence of the German Museum of "Soviet atrocities" Devilier found a photograph of her acquaintance and a copy of his letter to his mother dated March 6, 1940 with a signature that she recognized. Bogutsky himself subsequently, at a meeting after the war, told Katerina that he had never written such a letter. On this occasion, the French historian and TV journalist A. Deco in his study “Katyn: Stalin or Hitler?” wrote that: “in 1945, a young Norwegian Karl Johanssen told the police in Oslo that Katyn - the most successful case of German propaganda during the war". In the Sachsenhausen camp, Johanssen worked with other prisoners on fake Polish documents and old photographs.

On the TV show “Tribune of History”, K. Deville was cross-examined live by the leading French specialist on Central Europe G. Montfort and the former Polish prisoner of war in Soviet camps, Army Major Anders Y. Czapsky. She behaved very confidently and adequately withstood this test, convincingly answering all questions.

16. Why Evidence Is Ignored Paul Bredow René Kulmo and Wilhelm Schneider about involvement in the executions in Katyn Nazis?

A. Deco mentioned the Berlin baker Paul Bredow, who served in the fall of 1941 near Smolensk as a signalman at the headquarters of Army Group Center. P. Bredow in 1958 in Warsaw, during the trial of E. Koch, one of the Nazi executioners, declared under oath: “I saw with my own eyes how Polish officers pulled a telephone cable between Smolensk and Katyn”. During the exhumation in 1943, he “immediately recognized the uniform that Polish officers were wearing in the autumn of 1941.” (“Erich Koch before the Polish court.” P. 161).

Alain Decaux met with a former prisoner of Stalag IIВ, located in Pomerania, Rene Culmo, who stated that in September 1941 300 Poles arrived in their Stalag from the East. “In September 1941, in Stalag II D, we were announced the arrival of six thousand Poles. They were expected, but only three hundred arrived. Everything is in a terrible state, from the East. The Poles at first were like in a dream, they did not speak, but gradually began to move away. I remember one captain, Vinzensky. I understood a little Polish, and he spoke French. He said that the Fritz there, in the east, had committed a monstrous crime. Almost all of their friends, mostly officers, were killed. Vinzensky and others said that the SS destroyed almost the entire Polish elite.

Wilhelm Gaul Schneider on June 5, 1947 testified to Captain B. Acht in Bamberg, in the American zone of occupation of Germany. Schneider stated that during his stay in the Tegel remand prison in the winter of 1941-1942, he was in the same cell with a German non-commissioned officer who served in the Regiment Grossdeutschland regiment, which was used for punitive purposes.

This non-commissioned officer told Schneider that: “In the late autumn of 1941, more precisely in October of this year, his regiment committed a massacre of more than ten thousand Polish officers in the forest, which, as he indicated, is located near Katyn. The officers were taken on trains from prisoner-of-war camps, from which I do not know, for he only mentioned that they were brought from the rear. This murder took place over several days, after which the soldiers of this regiment buried the corpses.(Archive of the foreign policy of the Russian Federation. Fund 07, inventory 30a, folder 20, file 13, sheet 23.).

17. What was the reason that the Polish experts in 2002-2006. when carrying out exhumation work in Bykovna (near Kyiv), they went to clear violations canons of exhumation?

As a result, this allowed Polish experts to pass off the remains of 270 executed Polish officers as the burial of 3,500 Polish citizens from the Ukrainian Katyn list, allegedly shot in 1940.

This was stated by representatives of the Kyiv "Memorial". On November 11, 2006, the Kyiv weekly "Zerkalo Nedeli" published an article in which it revealed some of the "secrets" of the Polish exhumation in Bykivnia. It was established that in the summer of 2006 excavations were carried out here with gross violations of Ukrainian legislation and ignoring elementary norms and generally accepted methods of exhumations (there was no field description of the finds, there was no numbering of burials, human bones were collected in bags without indicating the number of the grave, no representatives were present during the exhumations local authorities, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the prosecutor's office, the sanitary service, the forensic medical examination, etc.). It also turned out that the previous series of excavations and exhumations in 2001 was carried out in Bykovna with similar violations.

18. During the exhumation work carried out by Polish experts at the special cemetery in Medny repeat a situation similar to Bykovna? Perhaps not 6311 Poles were buried in Medny, but 297 shot Polish officers of the police, gendarmerie, border troops, as well as intelligence officers and provocateurs from the Ostashkov camp, who had "compromising evidence", and the rest of the prisoners of the Ostashkov camp were sent to other camps?

By 1995, members of the Tver "Memorial" established, according to archival investigative cases, and then published the names and names of 5.177 Soviet people who were shot as "enemies of the people" in Kalinin in 1937-1938. and 1185 - in 1939-1953. It is believed that about 5,000 of them are buried in a special cemetery in "Medny", where 6311 Polish prisoners of war are buried, allegedly shot in the inner prison of the Kalininsky UNKVD. Polish experts claim that they were unable to find specific burial places for repressed Soviet people in this special cemetery! Where did the remains of the executed "enemies of the people" disappear (if they disappeared)?

In addition, in the report on the official activities of the 155th regiment of the NKVD troops for the protection of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. comrade Stalin for the 1st half of 1941 (dated July 9, 1941 No. 00484) it was reported that: from the stages there were only former police officers from the western regions of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs ... ”(RGVA, f. 38291, op. 1, d. 8, l. 99). These former policemen could only be from the Ostashkov camp, and in 1941 they could have been placed, in all likelihood, only in the Matkozhninsky forced labor camp.

In the spring of 1990, Alexander Yemelyanovich Bogatikov, a resident of Kalinin, informed the Tver "Memorial" (Maren Mikhailovich Freidenberg) that in 1943 he was serving a sentence in a camp in the Far East. Together with him sat a Pole from the Ostashkov camp, who told how in the beginning of 1940 in Ostashkovo, among the prisoners of war, radio specialists were selected. The rest were later sent to Murmansk.

19. Where to missing archival documents on the prisoners of the Matkozhninsky ITL, in which, in all likelihood, there were former policemen “from the western regions of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSR” who arrived to build the White Sea-Baltic Canal in 1941?

State Duma deputy A. Savelyev's official inquiries on this issue to the Russian archives turned out to be fruitless.

20. From where in the "Polish" graves in Pyatikhatki (near Kharkov) almost 500 extra corpses?

Of the 15 "Polish" graves in Piatikhatki, the remains of 4,302 people were exhumed, who, on the basis of the Polish paraphernalia found, were recognized as Polish citizens. From the Starobelsky camp in April-May 1940, only 3,896 Polish prisoners of war were sent to the “order of the head of the Kharkov UNKVD”. According to A. Shelepin's note, 3,820 people were shot in Kharkov.

21. Why was no attention paid to glaring contradictions in the testimony of General D. Tokarev, the former head of the UNKVD for the Kalinin region, regarding the execution of Polish policemen from the Ostashkov camp?

22. Is it possible with the described Tokarev by name-individual a procedure that required successive, fairly lengthy passages of victims inside the NKVD prison, one person to shoot 250 people in 9 hours of "dark time"?

23. Is it possible to agree with Tokarev's statement that the questioning of the victims scheduled for execution was carried out in the "red corner" or "Lenin's room" internal prison of the regional NKVD?

A group of TV reporters from Postkriptum, who visited the premises of the former building of the Kalinin NKVD in November 2007, managed to find out that, in all likelihood, the “Lenin room” was located on the 2nd floor of the building. The internal prison of the UNKVD was located in the basement semi-basement. In this case, the time of movement of the victim before execution could be at least 10 minutes!

24. Why was not held investigative experiment in the premises of the former internal prison of the Kalinin UNKVD?

25. Was it possible to organize secretive the execution of 6,000 Polish policemen in the inner prison of the Kalininsky NKVD, if the building of the NKVD was in the center of the city, and the courtyard was not closed around the perimeter and was partially visible from neighboring houses?

26. Why did not investigate the fact of discovery on the territory of pre-trial detention center No. 1 of the city of Kalinin”, which in 1940 was located on the outskirts of the village of Novo-Konstantinovka (now it is Gagarin Square in Tver) “fragments of a Polish military uniform”?

27. Why are present serious inaccuracies about the places of execution of Polish prisoners of war, the former head of the inner prison of the Kharkov department of the NKVD Syromyatnikov and the former employee of the Smolensk NKVD Klimov?

Syromyatnikov said that: “at night, he led the future victims with their hands tied from the cell and led them to the basement, to the room where the commandant of the local NKVD Kupriy was to shoot them.” However, the head of the Kharkov KGB, General Nikolai Gibadulov, showed the Polish experts (according to the testimony of St. Mikke) in the courtyard of the administration the actual place of execution of the ruins of a detached building.

Klimov claimed that the Poles were shot "in the premises of the Smolensk UNVD or directly in the Katyn forest." In addition, he “was in the Kozy Gory and accidentally saw: the ditch was large, it stretched to the very swamp, and in this ditch there were piles of Poles sprinkled with earth, who were shot right in the ditch ... There were a lot of Poles in this ditch when I looked, they lay in a row, and the ditch was a hundred meters long, and the depth was 2-3 meters. Where did Klimov see a ditch 100 meters long, if the length of the largest grave in Katyn did not exceed 26 meters?

(everything did not fit, questions 28-52 in )
(scans of Shelepin's note in )