Stalin's Hangmen.The Katyn Massacre - Arte

[Hans1906]

Good evening,

not a movie, but another documentary on the TV channel Arte about the Katyn Massacre:

Link to the documentary, av. on the channel Arte until August 24th, 2020
A french production from the year 2020, 98 minutes, director Cedric Tourbe

Stalins Henker. Das Massaker von Katyn:
Link to the docu: https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/087406-00 ... von-katyn/

Subtitles in other languages are available on the Arte website.
Probably not av. outside the european union, just let me know..?

Hans1906

[Hans1906]

Sorry, I forgot to mention the warning on the Arte channel just before the documentary:

This programme is not suitable for children, young people or sensitive viewers.

Hans1906

[henryk]

In Canada, I get "this video is not available in your country".

[Hans1906]

Good evening henryk,

that was to be expected, maybe a friendly user from europe will send you an online recorded copy of the documentation...

Another hint, download the freeware "Mediathekview": https://mediathekview.de

Or try their german online portal: https://mediathekviewweb.de

The documentary is online in the Arte Mediathek until August 24th, and I am very sure, you will get a good copy, good luck !

Hans1906

P.S. Otherwise just google "katyn 2020 tourbe", I am very sure the whole docu is av. online...
"File sharing" would be another possibility, to sorry, I am not into all this, just an ordinary user.
Internet connection here very slow, just enough to watch a video sometimes...

P.S.S. What I have read long ago, the so called "Nerds" are able to change the internet browser "identity" with only a few clicks.
Special knowledge, not my business, you'll figure it out...

[henryk]

Thank you for the information.
I found one review interesting.
Google translation.
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/ ... 49605.html

Frankfurter Allgemeine
Newspaper
faz.net

ARTE DOCUMENTARY ON WAR MASSACRES:
The silence of Katyń
FROM NIKLAS ZIMMERMANN- UPDATED ON 25.02.2020 - 19:12
In a documentary, Arte shows how Moscow declined responsibility for the Katyń massacre of 4,400 Polish military personnel in 1940 for decades. But the West also had its share.

The film already gives the facts in its opening sequence: there are around 4,400 corpses of Polish officers in Katyń in northwestern Russia, murdered in the spring of 1940 by the Soviet secret police NKVD. However, the documentary by the French filmmaker Cédric Tourbe immediately adds that nearby are the remains of Soviet civilians, who were executed in the same way. The Katyń massacre is just a small example of the murders that Stalin's executioners have carried out throughout the USSR for decades.

Niklas Zimmermann
Volunteer.

The production balances on a fine line in terms of memory. While one school of thought puts the suffering of a victim group, in this case the Poles, in the foreground, the other attempts an overall view; but which repeatedly leads to the accusation of universalizing injustice and keeping it far from the victims. Tourbe circumvents this dilemma by introducing the fate of Polish soldiers Józef Czapski and Salomon Slowes, who survived the horror. Czapski served as a captain, but was actually an artist. Slowes worked as a military doctor and was Jewish. Both were deported to the interior of Russia after the Soviet invasion that followed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.

Goebbels surprising role
After that, Tourbe jumps from the specific to the general, and by 22 years back to 1918. After the October Revolution, it was the founding time of the Cheka, as the secret police were initially called. Right from the start, it had the task of "cleaning up" Soviet society. The Cheka and its successor organizations, the GPU and NKVD, did not shy away from anything. The documentary shows footage from Kiev of how the secret police throw opponents of the regime and randomly present passersby into mass graves.

"The Chekists are trying to force the disappearance of the old world," the film tries to explain the bloodshed. However, fear and terror have always ruled in the Soviet state apparatus and even within the secret police. Lawrenti Beria, who headed the NKVD from 1938 and, like the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, came from Georgia was particularly brutal.

Thereafter, Tourbe uses scenes from the 2007 Andrzej Wajda film "Katyń". They show how the secret police shot the Polish officers and threw them into the pits. But the horror did not end there. Not only in Katyń, but also in other places, 47 Chekists murdered a total of 22,000 people. The Soviet dictator uninhibitedly lied to the surviving soldiers who had to fight with the Red Army as a "Polish army" during World War II, but also asked about the fate of their comrades: they were released, he said.

Józef Czapski and Salomon Slowes, who, fortunately, were sent to Grjasowez Monastery rather than to death, also believed that. Czapski disagreed with Władysław Anders, the leader of the Polish troops, when he suspected that the missing persons had been murdered by the NKVD. When Joseph Goebbels, of all people, made the mass murder of Katyń public in 1943, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda was the most credible conveyer of the news.

Winston Churchill believed in the perpetrators of the NKVD. But the tight anti-communist in the same year when meeting with Władysław Sikorski, the chairman of the Polish government in exile, said: "You know that I am with Poland wholeheartedly." But one cannot afford to throw himself at Stalin.

The intermezzo of the anti-communist McCarthy era in the United States did nothing to change the lack of interest in the West - when a committee of the American Congress found the Soviet guilt. Moscow flagged the verdict as anti-communist propaganda, and no one was interested in endangering the geopolitical thaw after Stalin's death. Even a memorial to the Katyn victims, which exiled Poles erected in London in 1976, was at best tolerated by the British government.

It was the Soviet Union itself that cleared all doubts shortly before its collapse and under pressure from the allied government in Warsaw: On April 13, 1990, Moscow published a concise press release in which the crime was admitted, but the blame was entirely blamed on Beria . It was not until 1993 that Russia's then-president Boris Yeltsin published documents proving that the Soviet state was fully responsible.

The strength of Tourbe's documentation lies particularly in the retelling of the discourses in the years and decades after the massacre : they reveal a very tactical approach to historical facts about a mass murder. It is unfortunate that the film ends with Yeltsin's admission. The commemoration of the Russian and Polish heads of government Vladimir Putin and Donald Tusk in 2010 would also have been worth mentioning - a few days before Poland's president Lech Kaczyński was killed in a plane trip to Katyń. Putin spoke of the "executioners of totalitarianism". This seems almost unthinkable in today's Russia with the new Stalin transfiguration.

Stalin's executioner. The Katyn massacre is on Arte this Tuesday at 8:15 p.m. At 21.55 pm, the documentary follows the Hitler-Stalin pact .

[Helmut0815]

Saw that docu a fews week ago on Arte TV. Did not know much about the details of Katyn and other massacres on polish officers and intelligencia until then. The first time I heard about that infamous NKVD executioner Wassili Blokhin who personally killed over 20,000 people by neck shots.
Highly recommended.


regards


Helmut

[Hans1906]

Good afternoon Helmut0815,

thank you for your comment on this documentary on the TV Channel Arte, a disturbing documentary, and hard to bear...
(And I hope, forum member henryk from Canada found a source, to download the documentary...)

Helmut, I knew very little about the massacre at that time, the superficial knowledge that probably each of us has more or less.
I also saw the Andrzej Wajda movie "Katyń" from the year 2007.

Katyń (film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyń_(film)

OT, I remember our motorcycle friends from Poland from the 1980s, some of them were very often were talking about the
massacres, very affected...

Wassili Michailowitsch Blochin https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassili_M ... ch_Blochin


Hans1906

P.S. Blochin is named nowadays as "The man with the leather apron" (G:) "Der Mann mit der Lederschürze".

[KeelinKaylin]

This is a great movie and it's completely free.

[Hans1906]

Good afternoon,

the documentary "STALIN'S EXECUTIONERS - THE KATYN MASSACRE" is still Online on ArteDistribution for registered users.
2020 production in french and english language versions:

Link: https://distribution.arte.tv/fiche/Les_ ... x_de_Katyn

Several short docus about Wassili Michailowitsch Blochin are av. on YouTube also...

The above link to the FAZ article is also still active: Das Schweigen von Katyń https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/ ... 49605.html

Sorry, thats all, I was able to find so far, I did not search in the french language...


Hans

[Hans1906]

The docu is online again until Sunday, 9. Januar 2022

Link: https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/087406-00 ... ns-henker/

Probably due to high demand, unfortunately, I do not know more...


Hans

[Mark in Cleveland, Tn.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBGZMAg4MEs Been watching the whole series of this type of docu. on YouTube Have no isead of truth or actual facts, but is interesting

[Hans1906]

Sorry Mark,

this is NOT the above mentioned docu.


Hans