KATYN - an un-punished war crime !

[Peter]

The massacre of Katyn has gone un-punished, it is symptomatic of Soviet crimes in as much as NONE have been adequately addressed.

Stalin ordered the murder of 14,700 Polish officers (at Katyn) plus 11,000 others held in the Ukraine and Byelorussia. In the forest near the Polish mass burials is another section which was used to bury the Russian civilians and military victims of purges, estimated 10,000 just at this one site.

I do not think anything serious has yet been done to bring the former executioners to trial and I'd like to see some of their names, can anybody even name them (not Stalin and Beria), but the men who organised and carried out the KATYN massacre ??

Pete

[wildboar]

The massacre of Katyn has gone un-punished, it is symptomatic of Soviet crimes in as much as NONE have been adequately addressed.

Stalin ordered the murder of 14,700 Polish officers (at Katyn) plus 11,000 others held in the Ukraine and Byelorussia. In the forest near the Polish mass burials is another section which was used to bury the Russian civilians and military victims of purges, estimated 10,000 just at this one site.

I do not think anything serious has yet been done to bring the former executioners to trial and I'd like to see some of their names, can anybody even name them (not Stalin and Beria), but the men who organised and carried out the KATYN massacre ??



Pete

Yes my friend i agree with you that Katyn was a preplanned soviet warcrime and it was immunised by nuremburg trial.

[David Thompson]

wildboar -- I agree with you and Iltis about Katyn, but how do you figure that criminal liability for the Katyn massacre "was immunised by nuremburg trial?"

[witness]

I also fail to see any connection.
The massacre in Katyn remains to be a dirty stain in Russian history.
AFAIK nothing was done to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Curious - there are people in Russia who continue to deny that this was NKVD crime . Russian Deniers...?
That is interesting -the crimes of Communism in Russia also being denied
and '' revisioned ". How would be such people ( mostly Commies who are
still quite strong in Russia AFAIK ) classified ?
Red Revisionists ?

[Kokampf]

I also fail to see any connection.

They officially blamed the Germans for it in their case at Nuremburg, to the embarrassment of Western Allies.

The massacre in Katyn remains to be a dirty stain in Russian history.
AFAIK nothing was done to bring the perpetrators to justice.

It's only been admitted by the Russian government since 1992, and is still a point of political contention there. Since the government is full of former Soviet officials and even former members of the communist security apparatus this is less than surprising.

The history of the decline of official Soviet denial:
http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99-00/art6.html

Curious - there are people in Russia who continue to deny that this was NKVD crime . Russian Deniers...?
That is interesting -the crimes of Communism in Russia also being denied
and '' revisioned ". How would be such people ( mostly Commies who are
still quite strong in Russia AFAIK ) classified ?
Red Revisionists ?

Neo-Stalinists?

I believe there is a Chinese expression, gong fei (communist b*st*rd), which covers it quite well.

If you look at http://www.memorial.ru, you will find that it has actually been necessary for people to protest against plans for a statue of Felix Dzhersinsky in Moscow.

A modern satirical take on this:
http://exile.ru/152/152030033.html[/i][/url]

[Kunnar Kesküla]

I'm pretty sure that Katyn was not only one mass murder where russian blamed german side. About 80% from that which Soviet Union talk to world last 60 years was a lie. In so many crimes which they do with herself they blamed german side. That was so easy during this years.

[Alexx]

It's been over 10 years since communism fell. Why haven't there been any investigations ?

Is it known exactly who the perpetrators were ? I mean what military or NKVD-unit it was ? That shouldn't be to hard to establish.

I have never seen any rational explanation why the Soviets commited the Katyn massacre. Has anybody bodered to ask them the question ?
And what was their answer ?

" Oh, It was just a little accident" or " During the war we had a general policy to kill of all Polish officers and intellectuals."

Has it been any investigations if (like kunnar is saying) the soviets commited other massacres and blamed the Germans ?
Or was really "Katyn" an isolated incident ?

Any comments ?

Regards Alexx

[Kunnar Kesküla]

Thanks Alexx for support! My english is not sogood to explain all what i want to say and what i know. But i'll try.
I'm reading few books since 1960-s written by communists. In this books
is persons from german side precent like some freaks who had nothing more in his mind as killing or torture. They precent those persons like drunkards who were always in drunkenness. They precent those as chicken-hearted who's always were ready to sell hisself to enemy for his life. They percent those as murderers who a lot were killing civilians.
All those propertys are the old people in Estonia giving to soviets side.
During WWII was one case:
front was moving back and forward. Germans found massgrave where was so many bodys. Germans make a pictures from grave and bring to this place scientists who fixed time of death of those bodys. then german
correctly bury bodys down. Now when come russians back with front they
"found" a grave and telling to whole world about bloody mass murders which was maken by germans. I really don't remember where this case was but i guess that somewhere i Poland or Ukraine.

[Peter]

Stalin did not wish to have the potential threat from the Polish officer class and intelligentsia. He knew how brave the Poles could be in fighting for their homeland, they would be a thorn in his side.

It is the ID of the killers and the NKVD unit which I am VERY keen to have.

cheers
Peter

[Panzermahn]

I do agree with all of you...from the end of ww2 to the late 80s, all these Russian bolsheviks spewed out to the world is just pure bullshit....

Not to mention names like, Broniki, Feodosia, Nemmersdorf, Hohensalza, Vienna, Berlin, Wilhelm Gustloff, Minsk, Mogilev, Vitebsk, Korsun, Gumbinnen, Goldap, Grischino,


But i believe that those war crimes were committed by the NKVD bolsheviks bastards, godless, savage hordes and barbarians....not the Red Army who fought valiantly against the Germans

[qdave]

hey, can someone give me a link where can i find all of people who were trialed in Nürnberg,and theyr sentences. i know this was asked lots of times before bust search button doesnt seems to be working

[chalutzim]

hey, can someone give me a link where can i find all of people who were trialed in Nürnberg,and theyr sentences. i know this was asked lots of times before bust search button doesnt seems to be working

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/war_criminals.htm

Good luck!

[qdave]

ohhh,many thanks to you!!

[Roberto]

Has it been any investigations if (like kunnar is saying) the soviets commited other massacres and blamed the Germans ?
Or was really "Katyn" an isolated incident ?

It probably was. The German occupiers committed so many large-scale massacres on the territory of the Soviet Union, widely documented in their own files and reports, that there was no need to pin anything additional on them. Katyn was a special case, however. Here the Soviets had to get rid of the blame for a crime of theirs that made them look bad in the eyes of their allies.

I found an assessment of the handling of the Katyn killings at Nuremberg on a German web site under

http://www.h-ref.de/ar/misc/katyn.shtml

My translation:

In April 1943 German units found mass graves with the corpses of more than 4,100 murdered Polish officers next to the village of Katyn. Examinations revealed that the shootings had taken place in March and April 1940. During the Nuremberg Trials the Soviets tried to blame these mass murders on the Germans.

The other prosecutors urged Rudenko to do without this accusation which – whatever it was that had happened in reality – would give the German defense the right to reject it and thereby to implicate the powers charged with carrying out the trial in a horrible atrocity.
T. Taylor, The Nuremberg Trial [German translation by Heyne editors, 1996], page 148 and following.

But the Soviets would not give in. They insisted in changing the indictment accordingly and charging the Germans with the murder of 11,000 captured Polish officers ( Taylor, p. 157), which seems to more or less correspond to the number of those actually murdered. The Russians for this purpose submitted an "expert report" that dated the murders to the autumn of 1941, when the area was already controlled by German troops.
Taylor points out that the question who was to blame for these mass murders did not constitute a "tu quoque" – argument, for in the case of Katyn

the circumstances were such that only the Soviet Union or Germany could have committed the atrocity. Thus there was only one way for one of these countries to prove its innocence: it had to prove that the other was guilty.
Taylor, p. 541

Thus, as Taylor goes on explaining, a strange situation had come about. Until now the prosecutors had always tried to prove the defendants guilty of concrete deeds. In this case, however, as Taylor presumes, the Soviets were out not so much to incriminate [emphasis in original] a given defendant as to relieve [emphasis in original] themselves.
With a procedural trick and a self-serving interpretation of the statutes General Nikitshenko tried to block the German objections against the unjustified accusations,

but Biddle rightly recognized that he and the others could not give in this time, for if the tribunal allowed the Soviet prosecution to pronounce the Germans guilty of the Katyn massacre but blocked every German counter-argument, this would render the trial an absurdity.
Taylor, S. 543

Against the vote of Soviet judge Nikitshenko German witnesses for the defense were admitted. Thereupon Soviet prosecutor Rudenko submitted to the tribunal another petition in which he accused the tribunal of not fulfilling its duty. Biddle, the American judge, called this submittal "outrageous" (Taylor, p. 543) and instructed his assistant Herbert Wechsler […] to clarify the issue.

When the tribunal on 6 April discussed the petition, Biddle had armed himself with an opinion prepared by Herbert Wechsler, which was as full of dignity as it was convincing and swept Rudenko’s petition off the table.
Taylor, p. 543

Rudenko’s petition, Biddle declared, was defamatory and could in the US have led its author to be charged with disrespecting the court.

The he turned to Nikitshenko and asked him what he thought was to be done. The completely flabbergasted general murmured something that could not be understood. Biddle thereupon read the opinion to his listeners and said that it could be "read in open session before we arrest general Rudenko".
Taylor, S. 543

After some negotiations the issue was off the table, and besides three German three Soviet witnesses were interrogated. As the Soviets stuck to their version, the question who was responsible for the Katyn massacre could not be finally clarified, but Taylor remarks: "According to all indications the guilt for Katyn lay heavily on the Soviet Union ..." (Taylor, p. 546). Rudenko had through his insistence only made things worse, Taylor states at the end.

At that time there was not yet a clear proof that the Russians rather than the Germans were responsible, but many thought so and thus the tribunal had a hot iron on its hands. Cleverly it allowed both the Russians and the Germans to make their depositions about the Katyn massacre, but did not mention this tremendous occurrence with a single syllable in the judgement.
Taylor, pages 738 and following

And indeed you will find nothing about Katyn in the IMT’s judgement, which is transcribed under

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/judcont.htm

[Erik]

Roberto wrote:

I found an assessment of the handling of the Katyn killings at Nuremberg on a German web site under

http://www.h-ref.de/ar/misc/katyn.shtml

Here is a later part of the same assessment:

1951/1952 beschäftigte sich ein Ausschuß des amerikanischen Kongresses noch einmal mit diesem Thema. Durch Befragung der Gerichtsmediziner konnte bestätigt werden, dass die Morde vor dem Jahr 1941 stattgefunden hatten, als dieses Gebiet noch in Händen der Sowjets war. Demnach ist der westlichen Geschichtsschreibung seit Anfang der fünfziger Jahre bekannt, dass die Sowjets für dieses Massaker verantwortlich sind; doch erst im April 1990 konnte sich die sowjetische Regierung entschließen, dies auch offiziell einzuräumen.

(My emphasis.)

Jürgen Langowski ‘s relation above seems to suggest that the medical examiners (Gerichtsmediziner) of the US Congress Committee were able to set Western historiography right concerning Katyn?

Here is from another thread:
Mr. Thompson wrote:

Erik wrote:
2) "The hearings of the US Congress demolished the Soviet report “clearly”(?), and this time without submission, admission or “judicial notice of its factual nature”, since a hearing is clearly not a trial(?).
Did the US Congress send independent forensic experts to Katyn?
Hardly possible in the late 1940s. So they must have done what they did at Nuremberg – look at the available evidence, i.e. the two existing reports."

This is not quite correct. The US Congressional hearings called a number of witnesses to testify, who had not testified in the IMT proceedings, in an effort to get at the truth of the Katyn killings. For the IMT, Katyn was just one of a very large number of allegations against the defendants. For the US Congressional hearings, there were no defendants and the hearings focussed on Katyn.

http://www.thirdreichforum.com/phpBB2/v ... 336#127336


Did the forensic expertise of the US Congress use the German report to “set history right”? German witnesses?

Or the forensic expertise (from neutral countries) originally mustered by the Nazis for their WWII report?

From Roberto’s quote:

Against the vote of Soviet judge Nikitshenko German witnesses for the defense were admitted. Thereupon Soviet prosecutor Rudenko submitted to the tribunal another petition in which he accused the tribunal of not fulfilling its duty. Biddle, the American judge, called this submittal "outrageous" (Taylor, p. 543) and instructed his assistant Herbert Wechsler […] to clarify the issue.

(My emphasis).

Where those “witnesses” later called to USA for the hearing of the Congress?

Who were they? German POW’s? Or German forensic experts present at the “original” German/Nazi investigations of Katyn?

Why were such people trustworthy, all of a sudden?

But the Russians had German witnesses ready, too, hadn’t they? – those who made affidavits of having been perpetrators of the massacre?

After some negotiations the issue was off the table, and besides three German three Soviet witnesses were interrogated. As the Soviets stuck to their version, the question who was responsible for the Katyn massacre could not be finally clarified, but Taylor remarks: "According to all indications the guilt for Katyn lay heavily on the Soviet Union ..." (Taylor, p. 546). Rudenko had through his insistence only made things worse, Taylor states at the end.

(My emphasis).

I suppose that those three “Soviet witnesses” were not the confessing German POW’s, but Soviet forensic experts.(?)

Were they “given the lie”, all of a sudden?

Isn’t that the same as accepting the German Report as “evidence” on Katyn?

“Rudenko had through his insistence only made things worse, Taylor states at the end.”

Which “things”?

The following?

the circumstances were such that only the Soviet Union or Germany could have committed the atrocity. Thus there was only one way for one of these countries to prove its innocence: it had to prove that the other was guilty.

Taylor, p. 541

What would have happended if the Germans had not previously undertaken an investigation of the massacre at Katyn?

Would Rudenko had made things “better” at the IMT then, without any need for “insistence”?

No need to “prove that the other was guilty” of the massacre?

No “insistence” necessary to the following indictment(“Count3”):

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/count3.htm

(Erik INSISTS that you read this indictment, “count three”, from the first to the end!!!)

Except to the following: (i.e.,“insistence” needed to this) :

In September 1941, 11,000 Polish officers who were prisoners of war were killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.

The rest of the “count” was “common knowledge”, according to Article 21?

Article 21.
The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. (…)

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/imtconst.htm

Thus no need for “technical evidence”, according to Article 19 of the Charter.