Source: Smash Marxism
The Katyn Massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest Massacre (Polish: zbrodnia katyńska, ‘Katyń crime’), was athe mass murder of thousands Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals and civilian prisoners of war by Soviet NKVD, based on a proposal from Lavrentiy Beria to execute all members the Polish Officer Corps dated March 5, 1940. This official document was then approved (signed) by the entire Soviet Politburo including Stalin and Beria. The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000, with the most commonly cited number of 21,768.
In 1943 German troops exhumated about 4100 corpses and put together a European commission consisting of twelve forensic experts and their staffs from Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, and Hungary. The committe checked the age of the corpses and the way that they were killed, and both proved, that the killings were done by the Soviets.
False accusations:
After the Soviets re-occupied the area, they did their best to show, that the killings were done by Germans. They also tried in Nuremberg to accuse the Germans, but even there, this was not successful.
After the war:
In Poland, the pro-Soviet authorities covered up the matter in accordance with the official Soviet propaganda line, deliberately censoring any sources that might provide information about the crime. Katyn was a forbidden topic in postwar Poland. Censorship in the People’s Republic of Poland was a massive undertaking and Katyn was specifically mentioned in the “Black Book of Censorship” used by the authorities to control the media and academia. Not only did government censorship suppress all references to it, but even mentioning the atrocity was dangerous. In the late 1970s, democracy groups like the Workers’ Defence Committee and the Flying University defied the censorship and discussed the massacre, in the face of beatings, arrests, detentions, and ostracism.
In 1981, Polish trade union Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription “Katyn, 1940”. It was confiscated by the police and replaced with an official monument with the inscription: “To the Polish soldiers—victims of Hitlerite fascism—reposing in the soil of Katyn”. Nevertheless, every year on All Souls Day, similar memorial crosses were erected at Powązki cemetery and numerous other places in Poland, only to be dismantled by the police. Katyn remained a political taboo in communist Poland until the fall of communism in 1989.
– Metapedia
The Katyn Wood Massacre:
The first news of a massacre at Katyn Wood came in April 1943 when the Germans found a mass grave of 4,500 Polish soldiers in German-occupied Russia. The discovery at Katyn Wood was to greatly embarrass the Communist government.
The Communists responded to the German claims that Russia’s secret police did it, by claiming that the massacre was carried out by the Germans themselves. In the context of the war – the Allies were fighting the German war machine and Russia was a ‘valued ally’ the German version was not accepted by the British or other Allied governments. However, in the era of the Cold War, the Russian version was heavily scrutinised and questionned.
The first announcement of what had been found at Katyn Wood was made on Radio Berlin on April 13th, 1943.
“A report has reached us from Smolensk to the effect that the local inhabitants have mentioned to the German authorities the existence of a place where mass executions have been carried out by the Bolsheviks and where 10,000 Polish officers have been murdered by the Soviet Secret State Police. The German authorities went to a place called the Hill of Goats, a Russian health resort situated twelve kilometers west of Smolensk, where a gruesome discovery was made.”
Radio Berlin broadcast.
The Germans found a ditch 28 meters long and 16 meters wide at the Hill of Goats in which were 3,000 bodies piled up in layers of twelve. All the bodies were fully dressed in military uniform; some were bound and all had pistol shots to the back of their heads. The Germans believed that they would find 10,000 bodies (hence the figure in the broadcast) but eventually the final total was 4,500. The Germans claimed that the bodies were in good condition and they even recognised a general Smorawinsky as one of the victims. The soil had done a great deal to preserve the bodies and any documentation found on them.
However, any information relating to this massacre made public during the war came from Goebbel’s propaganda ministry and was treated as suspect by the Allies. In January 1943, the Communists had turned the tide of the war with the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad – a victory Churchill had urged all on the Allied side to celebrate.
As if in a knee-jerk reaction, any criticism about the communists in Easter 1943 would not have been acceptable.
Any connection between the massacre and the Germans, however, would have been more readily accepted by all those fighting against the Germans.
But what exactly did happen at Katyn Wood?
When German forces attacked Poland in September 1939 (due to the slaughter of ethnic Germans in Danzig a German territory), the Blitzkrieg tactic tore great holes in the Polish defence. However, on September 17th, as part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Russian forces also invaded Poland (there was no declaration of war against communist Russia by Britain or France). The communist leadership called on the Polish soldiers to rise up against their officers and political leaders as a punishment for getting the country into an unjust war. Those Polish officers and senior NCO’s captured by the Red Army were arrested and deported to Russia.
