Soviet crimes out...
- Benoit Douville
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Soviet crimes out...
When the Nuremberg trial open on november 20 1945, Stalin sends Andrei Vyshinsky(chief prosecutor who executed hundreds of thousands in the 1930) to keep Soviet crimes out, including Katyn. Vyshinsky succeeds. What a shame.
- Richard Miller
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Re: Soviet crimes out...
It was Soviet Chief Prosecutor Rudenko, who was adamant about the Katyn Massacre being brought into the trial.Benoit Douville wrote:When the Nuremberg trial open on november 20 1945, Stalin sends Andrei Vyshinsky(chief prosecutor who executed hundreds of thousands in the 1930) to keep Soviet crimes out, including Katyn. Vyshinsky succeeds. What a shame.
No doubt on direct orders from the Kremlin
In fact, Rudenko tried to delay the start of the proceedings until the Katyn document was prepared.
The Allied judges as well as the prosecution team tried to tactfully dissuade the Soviets from introducing Katyn, because all the evidence pointed to the Soviets themselves as the perpetrators.
It seems unlikely that Vyshinsky, who was the first Soviet Ambassador to the UN, would go against the wishes of the Stalin.
- Benoit Douville
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- Richard Miller
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Source: Justice at Nuremberg, Robert Conot, pg. 66-67Benoit Douville wrote:Uh? What is your source?
Regards
Source: Justice at Nuremberg, Robert Conot, pg. 67Everything appeared ready for the swearing in of the tribunal and the filing of the indictment, scheduled for the tribunal's first public session on Monday, October 15. On the 11th, however, Rudenko informed the tribunal that a problem existed with the indictment's statement:
"Nine hundred and twenty-five Polish officers who were prisoners of war were killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk."
Rudenko said that, according to later information he had received, the number was eleven thousand. Though this seemed a simple enough correction to make, Rudenko, to the puzzlement and irritation of the judges, stalled for three days and demanded a postponement of the inaugural session.
Source: The Trial of the German's, Eugene Davidson, pg 71-72The Russians assumed somewhat niavely, that they need only file the findings of their "Extraordinary State Commission" with the International Military Tribunal, and the commission's conclusions would be accepted and become part of history.
The Nazi conspirators, Goering among them, was charged with the murder of 11,000 Polish soldiers in the Katyn Forest. It was a charge that the Russians insisted on including in the indictment, despite the reluctance of the Americans and British. Any number of people at Nuremberg knew that the evidence against the German's was dubious or worse, for the Poles had already made a careful investigation of the massacre.
They had published a pamphlet on the subject in London, and what they, as well as the American and British intelligence officers, had discovered would be borne out in the future investigations that would in due course,
be conducted by an American congressional committee as well as by historians.
The Russians, not the Germans, had committed the crime in the Katyn Forest, and many people in the courtroom, including no doubt the Russian prosecutors and judges, knew it.