I have posted an analysis of Grover Furr's 2018 book "The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, the Solution":
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... creed.html
I've already dealt with Furr several times, demonstrating his ignorance and lack of honesty and I have already dealt with some key arguments that he uses in his book (which mostly regurgitates other deniers) in various articles. But since it is still used by the deniers of history to whitewash criminals, I thought I will write a detailed refutation of specifically this book, gathering everything in one place as a handy resource.
In my analysis I first introduce the Katyn history and evidence in a compact form, as a memory refresher. Then I deal with Furr's concept of "unimpeachable evidence": Furr at first insists that he will only use the evidence produced against the interest of the side producing it, i. e. only the evidence that (he thinks) could not have been faked. I show both that the principle is not sound when it comes to history-writing and that he abandons it in this very book.
I deal in detail with his numerous assertions that not only the POWs from the Kozelsk POW camp were found in the Katyn forest, but also those from Starobelsk and Ostashkov. That's one of his key points, allegedly undermining the mainstream historiography, but each single example either turns out to be a dud or can be explained equally or more plausibly another way. For example, he thinks that an Ostashkov inventory tag found on a POW's body shows that he was from Ostashkov. I show that he was from Kozielsk (as follows from the letter found on him) and point to numerous Ostashkov POWs transferred to Kozielsk in the early phase. Obviously, this argument doesn't hold water in light of this evidence.
Furr's attempted defense of the Soviet commission's report is shown to be based on ignorance and implausible assumptions (e. g. he claims that he could tell from a document containing a person's surname (which was partially unreadable - "Pr??ulski"), name and patronymic that this person was from Ostashkov; but his candidate's surname is "Kozietulski", obviously not compatible with the partially deciphered name). He attempts to prove the existence of the special "ON" camps for POWs by abandoning his "unimpeachable evidence" principle and simply accepting what the Soviet commission claimed to have found. He never deals with the key fact that the actual archive of the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees fully debunks the existence of such camps. Neither does he deal with the fact that the Polish POWs from the three camps transferred to the local NKVD offices in April-May 1940 simply disappear from the official internal POW stats.
Furr also does not deal with the fact that Friedrich Ahrens, accused by the Soviets of directly leading the massacre in August and Sepember of 1941, actually only arrived in mid-November.
I briefly deal with Furr's arguments regarding Stalin's shooting order and other documents from the so-called sealed envelope nr. 1, linking to my previous detailed refutations of the denier arguments. The arguments in this chapter against a specific document (an excerpt from the Politburo decision), which Furr thinks is particularly weak, are pathetic - he simply lists whatever he sees as strange in this document (like the fact that Beria's name and the original date were deleted and Shelepin's name and the new date in 1959 are added, or the presence of the CPSU stamp on an excerpt made in 1940, when the party had another name) without making an actual argument for forgery. All the allegedly strange elements are actually explained by a particular bureaucratic procedure necessary for sending out such excerpts to specific individuals - their names and the current date had to be on the excerpts (hence the deletions), along with the names of a Central Committee secretary (hence Stalin's name added) and a stamp (since this happened in 1959, a CPSU stamp was added).
Probably the most important evidence for Furr is the finding of police number tags in Volodymyr-Volyns'kiy. Two of these belonged to the policemen POWs who resided in Ostashkov and then were transferred to Kalinin to be shot. Furr argues that the fact that their bodies were found in VV rather than Kalinin disproves the whole story, but never deals with the fact that their bodies actually were never found in VV, the tags were found outside of the grave space and for one of the two POWs it is documented that he had been in VV in 1939 (which was probably the case with the second one). So the most plausible explanation is that their tags were confiscated by the Soviets and remained in the prison, which was overrun by the Germans in 1941, who then disposed on the things they had no need of (there were whole layers of trash near the graves). He goes on and on and on about this supposedly key evidence without understanding that it can be debunked in a single paragraph.
I then deal with the German Katyn report, pointing out that today, in 2023, it can hardly be considered key evidence, given the abundance of the other, much more important documentary complexes. I also point out that the report certainly contains some propaganda lies as well as contradictions, which limit its value, but none of them come close to showing that the Germans committed a grandiose hoax (especially as the Polish Red Cross workers were directly engaged in the exhumations, had their parallel lists of names etc.).
As evidence of a German hoax Furr cites Polish placenames translated into German (like Lviv was often translated into Lemberg). According to Furr, this either points to forgery, or destroys the bona fides of the German list of names (because sometimes such translations appear in direct citations from the found documents). I point out the parallel Polish list, in which the Polish placenames are used, as well as the fact, that admittedly less than scholarly translation practices don't indicate that the whole was a hoax.
Furr claims that the Germans captured a Soviet list of POW names from Kozelsk, which I show to be a list of Polish internees (not POWs) that arrived in the camp after the POWs had been transferred to the Katyn forest, and thus the list had nothing to do with Katyn.
Furr claims that the so-called Ukrainian list had nothing to do with Katyn and contained names of persons arrested in late 1940 and even in 1941. I show in many different ways that the latter claim is untrue and those were simply clerical errors, and point out that the persons on the Ukrainian list had the same sequential numbering system that was used for the Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk POWs buried in the Katyn forest, in Mednoye and in Pyatikhatki, and therefore Furr's claim is basically a lie.
That's just the basic outline - dozens of other topics are dealt with in the debunking.
Conclusion: "Furr is not an honest researcher. What he is writing is not history but "propaganda with footnotes". He has completely failed to undermine the mainstream views about the Katyn massacre.
And as is usual in such cases, I will emphasize that he could neither credibly explain where most of the Polish POWs from three POW camps, transported to three UNKVDs in April-May 1940, resided from May 1940 to July 1941, nor credibly identify any German unit that would have allegedly committed the massacre in the Katyn forest. Without this any "revisionist" project automatically fails. Ta ta!"
