Who shot the Polish officers? Katyn massacre. Historical reference

There are still many unclear and contradictory aspects in the Katyn events, many inconsistencies that give rise to well-founded questions. But there are no clear and unambiguous answers to these questions.

However, so far the Katyn disputes have led to nothing. Opponents do not hear each other. Therefore, new versions are born. And new questions arise.

This article is devoted to different versions of the Katyn tragedy, as well as questions to which there is no answer.

Deep roots

The Katyn tragedy has a rich backstory. The roots of those events lie in the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the subsequent division of its former territories.

Poland, which gained independence, wanted more - the restoration of the state within the historical borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1772 and the establishment of control over Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. But Soviet Russia also wanted to control these territories.

Because of these contradictions, the Soviet-Polish war began in 1919, which ended in 1921 with the defeat of the Soviet Republic. Tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers ended up in Polish captivity, where many of them died in concentration camps. In March 1921, a peace treaty was signed in Riga, according to which Western Ukraine and Western Belarus went to Poland.

The USSR was able to win back the situation with the borders after 18 years. In August 1939, Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Previously, similar documents were concluded between Nazi Germany and Poland, Great Britain, France, Romania and Japan. Soviet Union was the last state in Europe to conclude such an agreement.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had an additional secret protocol, which discussed new possible borders of the USSR and Poland in the “case of territorial and political reorganization.”

On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland from the west and north. The Soviet Union began fighting against Poland only on September 17th. By that time, the Polish army was practically destroyed by the Germans. The few pockets of Polish resistance were also eliminated. According to the agreement, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were returned to the Soviet Union. And on September 22, Germany and the USSR held a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk.

Thousands of Poles were captured by the Soviets, and it was decided to send them to several concentration camps for filtering and determining their future fate. This is how Polish prisoners of war ended up in the USSR. There is still debate about what happened to them next.

Two truths about Katyn

Historically, in the case of the execution of prisoners of war of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, there are two main mutually exclusive versions. Each of them has its own system of evidence, which opponents cannot ignore and cannot refute. Historians and ordinary citizens are divided into two irreconcilable camps that have been arguing with each other until they are hoarse for more than 70 years. Each side accuses opponents of falsifying facts and lying.

Katyn, Rosja, 04.1943

The first version was outlined by the Nazi occupation authorities in April 1943. An international commission consisting of 12 forensic doctors, mainly from countries occupied or allied with Germany, came to the conclusion that the Poles were shot before the war (in March-April 1940) by the Soviet NKVD. This version was voiced personally by the Nazi Minister of Education and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

The second version was presented by the Soviet side after an investigation by a special commission in 1944, headed by surgeon Nikolai Burdenko. The commission came to the conclusion that the Soviet authorities in 1941 did not have time to evacuate captured Polish officers due to the rapid advance of the Germans, so the Poles were captured by the Nazis, who shot them. The Soviet side presented this version in February 1946 at the Nuremberg Tribunal. This version was the official Soviet point of view for many years.

But everything changed in the spring of 1990, when Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the Katyn tragedy was “one of the grave crimes of Stalinism.” Then it was stated that the death of Polish officers in Katyn was the work of the NKVD. Then in 1992, this was confirmed by the first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin.

Thus, the version that Polish prisoners of war were shot by the NKVD became the second official Russian state point of view on the Katyn tragedy. However, after this, the controversy surrounding the Katyn tragedy did not subside, as obvious contradictions and inconsistencies remained, and many questions were not answered.

Third version

However, it is quite possible that the Poles were shot by the Soviet and German sides. Moreover, the execution of Poles by the USSR and Germany could be carried out separately in different time, or they could do it together. And this very likely explains the presence of two mutually exclusive systems of evidence. Each side was simply looking for evidence that they were right. This is the so-called third version, which some researchers have recently adhered to.

There is nothing fantastic in this version. Historians have long known about the secret economic and military-technical cooperation between the USSR and Germany, which developed in the 20s and 30s and was approved by Lenin.

In August 1922, a cooperation pact was concluded between the Red Army and the German Reichswehr. The German side could create military bases for testing on the territory of the Soviet Republic newest types weapons and equipment prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, as well as for the education and training of military specialists. Soviet Russia not only had monetary compensation for the use of these bases by Germany, but also received access to all new German military technologies and testing of weapons and equipment.

Thus, joint Soviet-German aviation and tank factories, joint command schools, and joint production enterprises appeared on the territory of the USSR. chemical weapons. There are constant trips of delegations to exchange experience, training is organized at the academies of German and Soviet officers, joint field exercises and maneuvers are held, various chemical experiments are carried out and much more.

The German military leadership underwent academic training in Moscow even after Hitler came to power in 1933. Soviet command personnel also studied at German military academies and schools.

In Western historiography, there is an opinion that in August 1939, in addition to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement was also signed between the NKVD and the Gestapo. In our country, this document is considered a fake. But foreign researchers are confident that such an agreement between the Soviet and German intelligence services actually existed, and that this document was signed by Lavrentiy Beria and Heinrich Muller. And it was within the framework of this cooperation that the NKVD handed over to the Gestapo German communists who were imprisoned in Soviet prisons and camps. In addition, it is known that the NKVD and the Gestapo jointly held several conferences in Krakow and Zakopane in 1939–1940.

So the Soviet and German intelligence services could well have carried out joint secret actions. We also know about the punitive “Action AB” that the Nazis carried out against the Polish intelligentsia at the same time. Perhaps similar joint Soviet-German actions took place in Katyn? There is no answer to this question.

Another oddity: for some reason the German side is not involved in the Katyn debate at all. The Germans remain silent, although they could have stopped all the Polish-Russian Katyn disputes long ago. But they don't. Why? There is no answer to this question either...

"Special folder"

As already mentioned, in the spring of 1990, the first and only president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted that the Katyn tragedy was “one of the grave crimes of Stalinism,” and that the death of Polish officers in Katyn was the work of the NKVD. Then in 1992, this was confirmed by the first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. Both presidents made such serious conclusions based on the so-called “Package No. 1,” which was stored in the archives of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee and at that time contained only three (!) indirect documents about the Katyn massacre. There are still many questions about the contents of this “Special Folder”.

One of the documents in the folder is a handwritten memo to N. S. Khrushchev, which was written in 1959 by the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR A. N. Shelepin. He proposed destroying the personal files of Polish officers and other documents. The note said: “The entire operation to liquidate these individuals was carried out on the basis of the Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee of March 5, 1940. All of them were sentenced to capital punishment in accounting cases... All these cases are of neither operational interest nor historical value.”

Researchers have several questions about Shelepin’s note.

Why was it handwritten? Didn't the KGB chairman really have a typewriter? Why did she write in drawing font? To hide the real handwriting of the writer, since Shelepin’s usual handwriting is known? Why does Shelepin write about the Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee of March 5, 1940? Didn’t the KGB chairman know that in 1940 there was no CPSU yet? All these questions are unanswered...

In 2009, on the initiative of independent researcher Sergei Strygin, leading expert of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs Eduard Molokov conducted an examination of the font used to print Beria’s note to Stalin from the “Special Folder”. This note is still the main evidence in the case of the execution of Polish officers.

The examination revealed that three pages of Beria’s note were typed on one typewriter, and last page- another. Moreover, “the font of the first three pages is not found in any of the authentic NKVD letters of that period identified to date.” A suspicion arose: is Beria’s note genuine? There is no answer to this question.

State Duma deputy Viktor Ilyukhin also doubted the authenticity of the documents from the “Special Folder”. Previously, he was an investigator and criminologist, senior assistant to the USSR Prosecutor General.

In 2010, Ilyukhin made a sensational statement that the documents from the “Special Folder” were a well-made fake. One of the manufacturers of these forgeries personally told Ilyukhin about his participation in the 90s in a group of specialists in forging documents from the party archive.

“In the early 90s of the last century, a group of high-ranking specialists was created to forge archival documents relating to important events of the Soviet period. This group worked in the structure of the security service of Russian President B. Yeltsin,” Ilyukhin asserted based on the story former employee KGB.

The witness, who was not named for obvious reasons, presented Ilyukhin with blank forms of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the NKVD of the USSR and the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR, other party-Soviet organizations of the Stalin period, many fake seals, stamps and facsimiles, as well as some archival files marked “Top Secret”. Using these materials, it was possible to concoct any documents with the “signatures” of Stalin and Beria.

The witness also presented Ilyukhin with several forgeries of the main document of the “Special Folder” - a note from L.P. Beria to the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) dated March 5, 1940, which proposed shooting more than 20 thousand Polish prisoners of war.

Naturally, Ilyukhin wrote several letters and requests about these facts, where he asked many questions. His letters to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, the then President of the Russian Federation D. A. Medvedev, and the then Chairman of the State Duma of the Russian Federation B. V. Gryzlov are known. But, alas, there was no reaction to all his appeals.

After Ilyukhin’s death in 2011, documents about the falsification of the Katyn case disappeared from his safe. Therefore, all his questions remained unanswered...

Evidence from Professor Gaek

Valuable evidence about the Katyn affair is also contained in some brochures and books published immediately after the war.

F. Gaek

For example, there is a well-known report by the Czechoslovakian professor of forensic medicine Frantisek Hajek, who, as part of an international commission created by the Nazis, personally participated in the examination of corpses in the Katyn Forest in the spring of 1943. His professional analysis German exhumations was called "Katyn Evidence" and was published in Prague in 1945.

This is what the Czech professor Hajek wrote in this report: “All the corpses we examined had gunshot wounds in the back of the head, only one had a gunshot wound in the forehead. The shots were fired from a short distance with a short-barreled firearms caliber 7.65. The hands of a significant number of corpses were tied behind their backs with twine (which was not produced in the USSR at that time - D.T.)... A very important and interesting fact is that the Polish officers were executed with German-made cartridges...

Among the 4,143 corpses of executed officers, there were also 221 corpses of executed civilians. The official German report is silent about these corpses and does not even decide whether they were Russians or Poles.

The condition of the corpses suggests that they were there (in the ground - D.T.) for several months, or, taking into account the lower oxygen content from the air and the sluggish oxidation process, that they lay there for at most 1.5 years. Analysis of clothing, its metal parts and cigarettes also speaks against the idea that corpses could lie in the ground for 3 years...

No insects or their transitional forms, such as testicles, larvae, pupae, or even any of their remains, were found either in the corpses, or in the clothes or in the graves. The lack of transitional forms of insects occurs when the corpse is buried during a period of absence of insects, i.e. from late autumn to early spring, and when relatively little time had passed from burial to exhumation. This circumstance also suggests that the corpses were buried approximately in the fall of 1941.”

And again questions arise. Is this Professor Hajek's report genuine or is it a fake? If the report is real, then why are its conclusions ignored? There are no answers to these questions either...

Dead but alive

Interesting information about Katyn is given in the book “Strong in Spirit,” which was written in 1952 by the commander of the partisan detachment, Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Medvedev. In the book, he talks about a Polish uhlan who came to join their partisan detachment. For some reason, the Pole introduced himself to the partisans as Anton Gorbovsky. But him real name there was Gorbik. At the same time, Gorbik-Gorbovsky claimed that the Germans brought all his comrades to Katyn and shot them there.

It has been established that Anton Yanovich Gorbik was born in 1913. Lived and worked in the city of Bialystok. In 1939, Gorbik-Gorbovsky ended up in the Kozelsk camp for Polish prisoners, and met the war in a camp near Smolensk, where the Poles were captured by the Germans. The Nazis invited the captured Poles to swear an oath to Hitler and fight on the side of Germany. Most of the Poles refused to do this, and then the Germans decided to shoot them.

They were taken out for execution at night, and Gorbik, taking advantage of the fact that the headlights of the car were directed at the ditch where the corpses fell, climbed a tree and thereby escaped death. Then he moved to the Soviet partisans.

It later turned out that Anton Yanovich Gorbik in 1942-1944 commanded a national Polish partisan detachment stationed in the Rivne region and was part of a partisan association under the command of Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Medvedev. After the liberation of the Rivne region by units of the Red Army, Anton Gorbik was interned by the Soviet authorities, and in 1944-1945 he was tested in the Ostashkovsky testing and filtration camp of the NKVD of the USSR No. 41. In 1945, Gorbik was repatriated and returned to Poland.

Meanwhile, a memorial plaque in the Katyn memorial complex states that Polish second lieutenant Anton Gorbik was shot in Katyn in 1940.

By the way, in post-war Poland there were dozens of people like Gorbik who were allegedly “shot in Katyn”. But, for obvious reasons, no one remembers them. Similar stories There is also one in Medny near Tver. That is, in Katyn execution lists there are mistakes? How many more such “living corpses” are buried in Katyn? There are no answers to these questions...

Testimony of a former cadet

The rapid advance of German troops in the summer of 1941 created panic not only among our troops, but also among the party-Soviet bureaucracy, which, abandoning all its papers, was in a hurry to evacuate. At that time, library and archival collections, museum relics, and even the regional party archive were simply forgotten in Smolensk. There is evidence that the captured Poles were also forgotten. The Red Army was quickly retreating, and there was no time for Polish prisoners of war.

From a letter to the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation from retired colonel Ilya Ivanovich Krivoy, October 26, 2004:

“In 1939, I was recalled from the Kyiv Industrial Institute by the district military registration and enlistment office and sent to study in Smolensk at the Smolensk Rifle and Machine Gun School that was being formed there. This school was formed on the basis tank brigade, which departed for the western border of the USSR. The military camp of the tank brigade was located on the western outskirts of the city of Smolensk near Shklyana Gora on Moprovskaya Street.

The first time I saw Polish prisoners of war was in the early summer of 1940, then in 1941 I personally saw Polish prisoners several times during excavation work to repair the Vitebsk highway. Last time I saw them literally on the eve of the Great Patriotic War June 15-16, 1941, during the transportation of Polish prisoners of war in cars along the Vitebsk highway from Smolensk in the direction of Gnezdovo.

The evacuation of the school began on July 4–5, 1941. Before loading onto the train, the commander of our training company, Captain Safonov, went to the office of the military commandant of the Smolensk station. Arriving from there already in the dark, Captain Safonov told the cadets of our company (including me) that in the office of the military commandant of the station, he (Safonov) personally saw a man in the uniform of a state security lieutenant, who begged the commandant for a train to evacuate captured Poles from the camp, but the commandant did not give him any carriages.

Safonov told us about the commandant’s refusal to provide wagons for evacuating the Poles, apparently in order to once again emphasize the critical situation that had developed in the city. Besides me, the platoon commander Chibisov, the platoon commander Katerinich, the commander of my squad Dementyev, the commander of the neighboring squad Fedorovich Vasily Stakhovich (a former teacher from the village of Studena), cadet Vlasenko, cadet Dyadyun Ivan, and three or four more cadets were also present at this story.

Later, in conversations among themselves, the cadets said that if they were the commandant, they would have done exactly the same thing, and would also have evacuated their compatriots first, and not the Polish prisoners.

Therefore, I assert that the Polish prisoners of war officers were still alive on June 22, 1941, contrary to the statement of the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation that they were all allegedly shot in the Katyn Forest by the NKVD of the USSR in April-May 1940.”

Why is this testimony of a former military man not taken into account? There is no answer to this question.

Poles, Jews and Hitler's bunker

There is another interesting evidence related to the executed Poles, Jews and Hitler’s bunker, which was built by the Nazis near Katyn and the Goat Mountains.

Smolensk local historian and researcher Joseph Tsynman in his book “In Memory of the Victims of the Katyn Forest” wrote the following:

“During the war years in Smolensk, more than 2 thousand Jews, prisoners of the Warsaw ghetto, and about 200 Jews from the Smolensk ghetto built concrete above-ground and underground bunkers. Poles of Jewish origin and Jewish prisoners lived in Gnezdovo and Krasny Bor, where the Headquarters of the Commanders-in-Chief of the Soviet and then German troops were located.

All prisoners wore Polish military uniforms. Since nationality was not written on the faces of the prisoners, Smolensk residents believed at that time that these were Polish officers who, under the leadership of the Germans, built Hitler’s bunker and other military structures in Krasny Bor, Gnezdovo and other places. The construction sites were secret. After the construction was completed, all the prisoners, along with the Ukrainian, Polish and Czech guards, were shot by the Germans in Kozye Gory.”

It turns out that the Germans shot Jews dressed in Polish uniforms? But then whose corpses were exhumed by the Nazis in the spring of 1943? Polish or Jewish? There is no answer to these questions.

However, other researchers put forward the version that after the construction of Hitler’s bunker, Polish officers were shot.

In the autumn of 1941, construction began in Krasny Bor of a huge secret underground complex, to which the Germans gave the name “Berenhale” - “Bear’s Den”. Its dimensions and even its location are still unknown exactly. Hitler's bunker near Smolensk is one of the mysterious mysteries of the Second World War, which for some reason they are in no hurry to solve.

According to scattered information, the bunker was built by Soviet and Polish prisoners of war from concentration camps located on the outskirts of Smolensk. They were then shot in Goat Mountains, another version claims.

Why is this version not being explored? Why is Hitler's Smolensk bunker not being investigated? Is there a connection between the construction of the bunker and the execution of Poles in Katyn? There is no answer to these questions...

GRAVE No. 9

On March 31, 2000, in the Goat Mountains, next to the Katyn Memorial, workers were digging a trench with an excavator for a cable to a transformer substation building and accidentally caught the edge of a burial site that was previously unknown. At the edge of the grave, the remains of nine people in Polish military uniform were found and removed.

It is unknown how many corpses were there, but, apparently, the burial was large. The workers claimed that they had found in the grave spent cartridges from Belgian-made pistol cartridges, as well as the Pravda newspaper for 1939. This burial was called “Grave No. 9.”

After this, law enforcement agencies were invited. A pre-investigation check by the prosecutor's office began as a mass grave of people with signs of violent death was discovered. Unfortunately, for unknown reasons, no criminal case was initiated. Then “grave No. 9” was covered with a large layer of sand, paved with asphalt and fenced with a fence with barbed wire. Although earlier the wife of the then President of Poland, Jolanta Kwasniewska, laid flowers at her.

Some researchers believe that “Grave No. 9” is the key to solving the Katyn tragedy. Why has this burial not been investigated for 15 years? Why was “grave No. 9” filled up and paved over? There is no answer to these questions.

Instead of an epilogue

Unfortunately, the attitude towards the Katyn massacre is still determined not by facts, but by political preferences. Until now, there has not been a single truly independent examination. All studies were conducted by stakeholders.

For some reason, decisions on this crime are made by politicians and authorities state power, not investigators, not criminologists, not historians and not scientific experts. Therefore, it seems that the truth will only be established by the next generations of Russian and Polish researchers, who will be free from modern political engagement. Katyn is waiting for objectivity.

For now, one thing is clear - it’s too early to put an end to the Katyn affair...

Katyn: Chronicle of events

The term “Katyn crime” is a collective one; it refers to the execution in April–May 1940 of almost 22 thousand Polish citizens held in various camps and prisons of the NKVD of the USSR:

– 14,552 Polish officers and police captured by the Red Army in September 1939 and held in three NKVD prisoner of war camps, including –

– 4421 prisoners of the Kozelsky camp (shot and buried in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, 2 km from Gnezdovo station);

– 6311 prisoners of the Ostashkovsky camp (shot in Kalinin and buried in Medny);

– 3820 prisoners of the Starobelsky camp (shot and buried in Kharkov);

– 7,305 arrested, held in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSR (apparently shot in Kyiv, Kharkov, Kherson and Minsk, possibly in other unspecified places on the territory of the BSSR and Ukrainian SSR).

Katyn - just one of a number of execution sites - became a symbol of the execution of all of the above groups of Polish citizens, since it was in Katyn in 1943 that the burials of murdered Polish officers were first discovered. Over the next 47 years, Katyn remained the only reliably known burial site for the victims of this “operation.”

Background

On August 23, 1939, the USSR and Germany entered into a non-aggression pact - the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The pact included a secret protocol on the delimitation of spheres of interest, according to which, in particular, the eastern half of the territory of the pre-war Polish state was given to the Soviet Union. For Hitler, the pact meant the removal of the last obstacle before attacking Poland.

On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby starting World War II. September 17, 1939, in the midst of bloody battles of the Polish Army, desperately trying to stop the rapid advance German army deep into the country, in agreement with Germany, the Red Army invaded Poland - without a declaration of war by the Soviet Union and contrary to the existing non-aggression treaty between the USSR and Poland. Soviet propaganda declared the Red Army operation a “liberation campaign in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.”

The advance of the Red Army came as a complete surprise to the Poles. Some did not even rule out that the entry of Soviet troops was directed against German aggression. Realizing that Poland was doomed in a war on two fronts, the Polish commander-in-chief issued an order not to engage in battle with Soviet troops and to resist only when attempting to disarm Polish units. As a result, only a few Polish units resisted the Red Army. Until the end of September 1939, the Red Army captured 240–250 thousand Polish soldiers and officers, as well as border guards, police, gendarmerie, prison guards, etc. Unable to contain such a huge mass of prisoners, immediately after disarmament, half of the privates and non-commissioned officers were sent home, and the rest were transferred by the Red Army to a dozen specially created prisoner of war camps of the NKVD of the USSR.

However, these NKVD camps were also overloaded. Therefore, in October - November 1939, the majority of privates and non-commissioned officers left the prisoner of war camps: the inhabitants of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union were sent home, and the inhabitants of the territories occupied by the Germans were handed over to Germany under an agreement on the exchange of prisoners (Germany in return handed over to the Soviet Union those captured German troops of Polish military personnel - Ukrainians and Belarusians, residents of territories ceded to the USSR).

The exchange agreements also concerned civilian refugees who found themselves in territory occupied by the USSR. They could apply to the German commissions operating on the Soviet side in the spring of 1940 for permission to return to permanent places residence in Polish territories occupied by Germany.

About 25 thousand Polish privates and non-commissioned officers were left in Soviet captivity. In addition to them, army officers (about 8.5 thousand people), who were concentrated in two prisoner of war camps - Starobelsky in the Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk) region and Kozelsky in the Smolensk (now Kaluga) region, as well as border guards, were not subject to dissolution to their homes or transfer to Germany. police officers, gendarmes, prison guards, etc. (about 6.5 thousand people), who were gathered in the Ostashkovo prisoner of war camp in the Kalinin (now Tver) region.

Not only prisoners of war became prisoners of the NKVD. One of the main means of “Sovietization” of the occupied territories was a campaign of continuous mass arrests for political reasons, directed primarily against officials of the Polish state apparatus (including officers and police officers who escaped captivity), members of Polish political parties and public organizations, industrialists, large landowners, businessmen, border violators and other “enemies of Soviet power.” Before the verdict was passed, those arrested were kept for months in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR, formed in the occupied territories of the pre-war Polish state.

On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks) decided to shoot “14,700 Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siege guards and jailers in prisoner-of-war camps,” as well as 11,000 arrested and held in Western prisons. regions of Ukraine and Belarus "members of various counter-revolutionary espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish officers, officials and defectors."

The basis for the Politburo’s decision was a note from the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Beria to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to Stalin, in which the execution of the listed categories of Polish prisoners and prisoners was proposed “based on the fact that they are all inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power.” At the same time, as a solution, the final part of Beria’s note was reproduced verbatim in the minutes of the Politburo meeting.

Execution

The execution of Polish prisoners of war and prisoners belonging to the categories listed in the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March 5, 1940, was carried out in April and May of the same year.

All prisoners of the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky prisoner of war camps (except for 395 people) were sent in stages of approximately 100 people to the disposal of the NKVD Directorates for the Smolensk, Kalinin and Kharkov regions, respectively, which carried out executions as the stages arrived.

At the same time, executions of prisoners in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus took place.

395 prisoners of war, not included in the execution orders, were sent to the Yukhnovsky prisoner of war camp in Smolensk region. They were then transferred to the Gryazovets prisoner of war camp in the Vologda region, from which at the end of August 1941 they were transferred to form the Polish Army in the USSR.

On April 13, 1940, shortly after the start of executions of Polish prisoners of war and prison inmates, an NKVD operation was carried out to deport their families (as well as the families of other repressed persons) living in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR to settlement in Kazakhstan.

Subsequent events

On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the USSR. Soon, on July 30, an agreement was concluded between the Soviet government and the Polish government in exile (located in London) to invalidate the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 concerning “territorial changes in Poland”, to restore diplomatic relations between the USSR and Poland, to establish territory of the USSR of the Polish army to participate in the war against Germany and the liberation of all Polish citizens who were imprisoned in the USSR as prisoners of war, arrested or convicted, and also held in a special settlement.

This agreement was followed by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 on granting amnesty to Polish citizens who were imprisoned or in a special settlement (by that time there were about 390 thousand of them), and the Soviet-Polish military agreement of August 14, 1941 on the organization Polish army on the territory of the USSR. The army was planned to be formed from amnestied Polish prisoners and special settlers, primarily from former prisoners of war; General Vladislav Anders, who was urgently released from the internal NKVD prison at Lubyanka, was appointed its commander.

In the autumn of 1941 - spring of 1942, Polish officials repeatedly turned to the Soviet authorities with requests about the fate of thousands of captured officers who did not arrive at the places where Anders' army was formed. The Soviet side replied that there was no information about them. On December 3, 1941, in a personal meeting in the Kremlin with Polish Prime Minister General Wladislaw Sikorski and General Anders, Stalin suggested that these officers may have fled to Manchuria. (By the end of the summer of 1942, Anders’ army was evacuated from the USSR to Iran, and later it took part in Allied operations to liberate Italy from the Nazis.)

On April 13, 1943, German radio officially reported the discovery of burials of Polish officers executed by Soviet authorities in Katyn near Smolensk. By order of the German authorities, the identified names of those killed began to be read out over loudspeakers in the streets and squares of occupied Polish cities. On April 15, 1943, there was an official denial by the Sovinformburo, according to which Polish prisoners of war in the summer of 1941 were engaged in construction work west of Smolensk, fell into the hands of the Germans and were shot by them.

From the end of March to the beginning of June 1943, the German side, with the participation of the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross, carried out an exhumation in Katyn. The remains of 4,243 Polish officers were recovered, and the first and last names of 2,730 of them were established from personal documents discovered. The corpses were reburied in mass graves next to the original burials, and the results of the exhumation in the summer of the same year were published in Berlin in the book “Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn”. The Germans handed over the documents and objects found on the corpses to detailed study at the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminalistics in Krakow. (In the summer of 1944, all of these materials, except for a small part of them, secretly hidden by employees of the Krakow Institute, were taken by the Germans from Krakow to Germany, where, according to rumors, they were burned during one of the bombings.)

On September 25, 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Only on January 12, 1944, the Soviet “Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of Prisoners of War in the Katyn Forest” by the Nazi invaders was created, the chairman of which was appointed Academician N.N. Burdenko. Moreover, already from October 1943, specially seconded employees of the NKVD-NKGB of the USSR were preparing falsified “evidence” of the responsibility of the German authorities for the execution of Polish officers near Smolensk. According to the official report, the Soviet exhumation in Katyn was carried out from January 16 to 26, 1944, at the direction of the “Burdenko Commission”. From the secondary graves left after the German exhumation, and one primary grave, which the Germans did not have time to explore, the remains of 1,380 people were extracted; from the documents found, the commission established the personal data of 22 people. On January 26, 1944, the Izvestia newspaper published an official report from the “Burdenko Commission”, according to which Polish prisoners of war, who were in three camps west of Smolensk in the summer of 1941 and remained there after the invasion of German troops in Smolensk, were shot by the Germans in the fall of 1941.

To “legalize” this version on the world stage, the USSR tried to use the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried the main Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in 1945–1946. However, having heard the testimony of witnesses for the defense (represented by German lawyers) and prosecution (represented by the Soviet side) on July 1–3, 1946, due to the obvious unconvincingness of the Soviet version, the IMT decided not to include the Katyn massacre in its verdict as one of the crimes of Nazi Germany.

On March 3, 1959, Chairman of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR A.N. Shelepin sent to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee N.S. Khrushchev received a top secret note confirming that 14,552 prisoners - officers, gendarmes, policemen, etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland,” as well as 7,305 prisoners in prisons in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were shot in 1940 based on the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March 5, 1940 (including 4,421 people in the Katyn Forest). The note proposed to destroy all records of those executed.

At the same time, throughout all post-war years, until the 1980s, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeatedly made official demarches with the statement that the Nazis were established as responsible for the execution of Polish soldiers buried in the Katyn Forest.

But the “Katyn lie” is not only the USSR’s attempts to impose on the world community the Soviet version of the execution in the Katyn Forest. This is one of the elements domestic policy the communist leadership of Poland, brought to power by the Soviet Union after the liberation of the country. Another direction of this policy was large-scale persecution and attempts to denigrate members of the Home Army (AK) - a massive anti-Hitler armed underground subordinated during the war to the Polish "London" government in exile (with which the USSR broke off relations in April 1943, after it appealed to the International Red Cross with a request to investigate the murder of Polish officers whose remains were discovered in the Katyn Forest). A symbol of the slander campaign against AK after the war was the posting of posters on the streets of Polish cities with the mocking slogan “AK is a spit-stained dwarf of reaction.” At the same time, any statements or actions that directly or indirectly questioned the Soviet version of the death of captured Polish officers were punished, including attempts by relatives to install memorial plaques in cemeteries and churches indicating 1940 as the time of death of their loved ones. In order not to lose their jobs, in order to be able to study at the institute, relatives were forced to hide the fact that a member of their family died in Katyn. Polish state security agencies were looking for witnesses and participants in the German exhumation and forced them to make statements “exposing” the Germans as the perpetrators of the execution.
The Soviet Union admitted guilt only half a century after the execution of captured Polish officers - on April 13, 1990, an official TASS statement was published about “direct responsibility for the atrocities in the Katyn Forest of Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen,” and the atrocities themselves were qualified in it as “one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism." At the same time, USSR President M.S. Gorbachev handed over to the President of Poland W. Jaruzelski the lists of executed Polish prisoners of war (formally these were lists of orders to send convoys from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps to the NKVD in the Smolensk and Kalinin regions, as well as a list of records of former prisoners of war of the Starobelsky camp) and some other NKVD documents .

In the same year, the prosecutor's office of the Kharkov region opened criminal cases: on March 22 - on the discovery of burials in the forest park area of ​​​​Kharkov, and on August 20 - against Beria, Merkulov, Soprunenko (who was in 1939-1943 the head of the USSR NKVD Directorate for Prisoners of War and internees), Berezhkov (chief of the Starobelsky prisoner of war camp of the NKVD of the USSR) and other NKVD employees. On June 6, 1990, the prosecutor's office of the Kalinin region opened another case - about the fate of Polish prisoners of war who were held in the Ostashkov camp and disappeared without a trace in May 1940. These cases were transferred to the Main Military Prosecutor's Office (GVP) of the USSR and on September 27, 1990 they were combined and accepted for proceedings under No. 159. The GVP formed an investigation team headed by A.V. Tretetsky.

In 1991, the investigative group of the Main Prosecutor General's Office, together with Polish specialists, carried out partial exhumations in the 6th quarter of the forest park zone of Kharkov, on the territory of the dacha village of the KGB in the Tver region, 2 km from the village of Mednoye and in the Katyn forest. The main result of these exhumations was the final procedural establishment of the burial places of the executed Polish prisoners of the Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camps.

A year later, on October 14, 1992, by order of Russian President B.N. Yeltsin, documents were made public and transferred to Poland, exposing the leadership of the USSR in committing the “Katyn crime” - the above-mentioned decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940 on the execution of Polish prisoners, Beria’s “staged” note to this decision, addressed to Stalin (with handwritten signatures of Politburo members Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, as well as marks of voting “for” Kalinin and Kaganovich), a note from Shelepin to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959 and other documents from the Presidential Archives. Thus, documentary evidence became available to the public that the victims of the “Katyn crime” were executed for political reasons - as “inveterate, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime.” At the same time, it became known for the first time that not only prisoners of war were shot, but also prisoners in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR. The Politburo decision of March 5, 1940 ordered, as already mentioned, the execution of 14,700 prisoners of war and 11 thousand prisoners. From Shelepin’s note to Khrushchev it follows that approximately the same number of prisoners of war were shot, but fewer prisoners were shot - 7,305 people. The reason for the "underfulfillment" is unknown.

On August 25, 1993, Russian President B.N. Yeltsin, with the words “Forgive us...”, laid a wreath at the monument to the victims of Katyn at the Powązki memorial cemetery in Warsaw.

On May 5, 1994, the Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, General A. Khomich, handed over to the Deputy Prosecutor General of Poland S. Snezhko a named alphabetical list of 3,435 prisoners in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, indicating the numbers of orders, which, as has been known since 1990, meant being sent to death. The list, immediately published in Poland, became conventionally called the “Ukrainian list.”

The “Belarusian list” is still unknown. If the “Shelepinsky” number of executed prisoners is correct and if the published “Ukrainian list” is complete, then in “ Belarusian list» should be listed as 3870 people. Thus, to date we know the names of 17,987 victims of the “Katyn crime”, and 3,870 victims (prisoners of prisons in the western regions of the BSSR) remain nameless. The burial places are reliably known only for 14,552 executed prisoners of war.

On July 13, 1994, the head of the investigative group of the Main Prosecutor’s Office A.Yu. Yablokov (who replaced A.V. Tretetsky) issued a resolution to terminate the criminal case on the basis of paragraph 8 of Article 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR (due to the death of the perpetrators), and in the resolution Stalin, members of the Politburo Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich, Beria and other leaders and NKVD employees, as well as the perpetrators of the executions, were found guilty of committing crimes under paragraphs “a”, “b”, “c” of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity). It was precisely this qualification of the “Katyn affair” (but in relation to the Nazis) that was already given by the Soviet side in 1945–1946 when it was submitted to the IMT for consideration. Three days later, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation canceled Yablokov's decision, and further investigation was assigned to another prosecutor.

In 2000, Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Russian memorial complexes were opened at the burial sites of executed prisoners of war: June 17 in Kharkov, July 28 in Katyn, September 2 in Medny.

On September 21, 2004, the Main Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation terminated criminal case No. 159 on the basis of paragraph 4 of part 1 of Article 24 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation (due to the death of the perpetrators). Having informed the public about this only a few months later, the then Chief Military Prosecutor A.N. Savenkov, at his press conference on March 11, 2005, declared secret not only most of the investigation materials, but also the resolution itself to terminate the “Katyn case.” Thus, the personal composition of the perpetrators contained in the resolution was also classified.

From the response of the Main Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation to Memorial’s subsequent request, it is clear that “a number of specific high-ranking officials of the USSR” were found guilty, whose actions were qualified under paragraph “b” of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR in force in 1926–1958 (abuse of power by a person in command composition of the Red Army, which had serious consequences in the presence of particularly aggravating circumstances).

The GVP also reported that in 36 volumes of the criminal case there are documents classified as “secret” and “top secret,” and in 80 volumes there are documents classified “for official use.” On this basis, access to 116 of the 183 volumes is closed.

In the fall of 2005, Polish prosecutors were familiarized with the remaining 67 volumes, “not containing information constituting state secrets.”

In 2005–2006, the GVP of the Russian Federation refused to consider applications submitted by relatives and Memorial for the rehabilitation of a number of specific executed Polish prisoners of war as victims of political repression, and in 2007, the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow and the Moscow City Court confirmed these refusals by the GVP.
In the first half of the 1990s, our country took important steps towards recognizing the truth in the “Katyn case”. The Memorial Society believes that now we need to return to this path. It is necessary to resume and complete the investigation of the “Katyn crime”, give it an adequate legal assessment, make public the names of all those responsible (from decision-makers to ordinary executors), declassify and make public all investigation materials, establish the names and burial places of all executed Polish citizens, recognize executed by victims of political repression and rehabilitate them in accordance with Russian Law“On the rehabilitation of victims of political repression.”

The information was prepared by the International Society "Memorial".

Information from the brochure “Katyn”, released for the presentation of the film of the same name by Andrzej Wajda in Moscow in 2007.
Illustrations in the text: made during the German exhumation in 1943 in Katyn (published in books: Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. Berlin, 1943; Katyń: Zbrodnia i propaganda: niemieckie fotografie dokumentacyjne ze zbiorów Instytutu Za-chodniego. Poznań, 2003), photographs taken by Aleksey Pamyatnykh during the exhumation carried out by the GVP in 1991 in Medny.

In the application:

• Order No. 794/B dated March 5, 1940, signed by L. Beria, with a resolution by I. Stalin, K. Voroshilov, V. Molotov, A. Mikoyan;
• Note from A. Shelepin to N. Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959

What happened in Katyn
In the spring of 1940, in the forest near the village of Katyn, 18 km west of Smolensk, as well as in a number of prisons and camps throughout the country, thousands of captured Polish citizens, mostly officers, were shot by the Soviet NKVD over the course of several weeks. The executions, the decision on which was made by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in March 1940, took place not only near Katyn, but the term " Katyn massacre" applies to them in general, since the executions in the Smolensk region became known first of all.

In total, according to data declassified in the 1990s, NKVD officers shot 21,857 Polish prisoners in April-May 1940. According to the Russian Main Military Prosecutor's Office, released in 2004 in connection with the closure of the official investigation, the NKVD opened cases against 14,542 Poles, while the deaths of 1,803 people were documented.

The Poles, executed in the spring of 1940, were captured or arrested a year earlier among (according to various sources) from 125 to 250 thousand Polish military personnel and civilians, whom the Soviet authorities, after the occupation of the eastern territories of Poland in the fall of 1939, considered “unreliable” and were moved to 8 specially created camps on the territory of the USSR. Most of them were soon either released home, or sent to the Gulag or to settlement in Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan, or (in the case of residents of the western regions of Poland) transferred to Germany.

However, thousands of "former officers of the Polish army, former employees Polish police and intelligence agencies, members of Polish nationalist counter-revolutionary parties, participants in uncovered counter-revolutionary insurgent organizations, defectors, etc.”, the head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria proposed to be considered “inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power” and to apply the highest penalty to them - execution.

Polish prisoners were executed in many prisons throughout the USSR. According to the KGB of the USSR, 4,421 people were shot in the Katyn Forest, in the Starobelsky camp near Kharkov - 3,820, in the Ostashkovsky camp (Kalinin, now Tver region) - 6,311 people, in other camps and prisons in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus - 7 305 people.

Investigations
The name of the village near Smolensk became a symbol of the crimes of the Stalinist regime against the Poles also because it was from Katyn that the investigation into the executions began. The fact that the German field police were the first to present evidence of the guilt of the NKVD in 1943 predetermined the attitude towards this investigation in the USSR. Moscow decided that it would be most plausible to blame the fascists themselves for the execution, especially since during the execution the NKVD officers used Walthers and other weapons that fired German-made cartridges.

After the liberation of the Smolensk region by Soviet troops, a special commission conducted an investigation, which established that the captured Poles were shot by the Germans in 1941. This version became official in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries until 1990. The Soviet side also brought charges regarding Katyn after the end of the war as part of the Nuremberg trials, but it was not possible to provide convincing evidence of the Germans’ guilt; as a result, this episode was not included in the indictment.

Confessions and apologies
In April 1990, Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski came to Moscow on an official visit. In connection with the discovery of new archival documents indirectly proving the guilt of the NKVD, the Soviet leadership decided to change its position and admit that the Poles were shot by Soviet state security officers. On April 13, 1990, TASS published a statement that, in part, read: “The identified archival materials taken together allow us to conclude that Beria and Merkulov were directly responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest ( Vsevolod Merkulov, who in 1940 headed the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD - Vesti.Ru) and their henchmen. The Soviet side, expressing deep regret in connection with the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the grave crimes of Stalinism."

Mikhail Gorbachev gave Jaruzelski lists of officers sent to the stage - in fact, to the place of execution, from the camps in Kozelsk. Ostashkov and Starobelsk, and the Soviet Prosecutor General's Office soon began an official investigation. In the early 90s, during a visit to Warsaw, Russian President Boris Yeltsin apologized to the Poles. Representatives Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that they share the grief of the Polish people for those killed in Katyn.

In 2000, a memorial to the victims of repression was opened in Katyn, common not only to the Poles, but also to Soviet citizens who were shot by the NKVD in the same Katyn forest.

At the end of 2004, the investigation opened in 1990 was terminated by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation on the basis of clause 4 of part 1 of Art. 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation - in connection with the death of suspects or accused. Moreover, out of 183 volumes of the case, 67 were transferred to the Polish side, since the remaining 116, according to the military prosecutor, contain state secrets. Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in 2009.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in an article published in the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza on the eve of a working visit in August 2009: “Shadows of the past can no longer darken today, and especially tomorrow, cooperation. Our duty to the departed, to history itself, is to do everything “In order to rid Russian-Polish relations of the burden of mistrust and prejudice that we inherited, turn the page and start writing a new one.”

According to Putin, “the people of Russia, whose fate was distorted by the totalitarian regime, clearly understand the heightened feelings of the Poles associated with Katyn, where thousands of Polish military personnel are buried.” “We must together preserve the memory of the victims of this crime,” the Russian Prime Minister urged. The head of the Russian government is confident that “the Katyn and Mednoe memorials, as well as the tragic fate of Russian soldiers taken captive by Poland during the 1920 war, should become symbols of common grief and mutual forgiveness.”

In February 2010, Vladimir Putin visited his Polish colleague Donald Tusk on April 7, where memorial events dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre will be held. Tusk accepted the invitation, and Lech Walesa, the first prime minister of post-communist Poland Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as well as family members of the victims of NKVD executions will come to Russia with him.

It is noteworthy that on the eve of the meeting of the prime ministers of Russia and Poland in Katyn channel "Russia Culture" showed a film that and.

Rehabilitation requirements
Poland demands that the Poles executed in 1940 in Russia be recognized as victims of political repression. In addition, many there would like to hear from Russian officials an apology and recognition of the Katyn massacre as an act of genocide, and not references to the fact that the current authorities are not responsible for the crimes of the Stalinist regime. The termination of the case, and especially the fact that the resolution to terminate it, along with other documents, was considered secret and was not made public, only added fuel to the fire.

After the decision of the GVP, Poland began its own prosecutorial investigation into the “mass murder of Polish citizens committed in the Soviet Union in March 1940.” The investigation is headed by Professor Leon Keres, head of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Poles still want to find out who gave the order for the execution, the names of the executioners, and also give a legal assessment of the actions of the Stalinist regime.

Relatives of some officers who died in the Katyn Forest appealed to the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation in 2008 with a demand to consider the possibility of rehabilitating those executed. The GVP refused, and later the Khamovnichesky Court rejected the complaint against its actions. Now the demands of the Poles are being considered by the European Court of Human Rights.

In my opinion, the falsifiers who fabricated the investigation into the execution of Polish officers by the NKVD troops faced, in my opinion, two delicate problems at the final stage:

1. How to eliminate the discrepancy between the statement of the Nazis, who announced in 1943 that about 12 thousand Polish officers were shot in Katyn, and the current Russian-Polish “investigation”, which determined that 6 thousand Poles were “shot” near Medny, and 4 thousand near Kharkov and in Katyn - a little more than 4 thousand people.

2. Which state body of the USSR should be held responsible for the decision to shoot Polish officers, if all attempts to drag the Special Meeting under the NKVD into this turned out to be so untenable that only complete cretins and complete scoundrels can insist on them. (However, if Polish President Kwasniewski is satisfied with the “investigation” and radiates joy over its results, then we are dealing with both of them at the same time).

After the entry of Soviet troops into the territory of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine in September-October 1939 as internees, and after the emigrant government of Poland declared a state of war with the USSR in November 1939 - as prisoners of war - about 10 thousand officers of the former the Polish army and about the same number of gendarmes, police officers, intelligence officers, prison workers - in total about 20 thousand people (not counting privates and non-commissioned officers). By the spring of 1940 they were divided into three categories.

The first category is dangerous criminals, exposed in the murders of communists on the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, in sabotage, espionage and other serious crimes against the USSR. After their arrest by the judicial authorities of the USSR, they were sentenced - some to imprisonment with serving their sentences in forced labor camps, and some to execution. Taking into account the data that, due to various kinds of slips and slips, the Russian-Polish Goebbelsites tell us, the total number of people sentenced to death was about one thousand people. It is impossible to give an exact figure due to the fact that Russian falsifiers destroyed the files on all Polish criminals in the archives they inherited, so that it would be easier for them, together with their Polish accomplices, to build a version of the shooting of Polish officers by the “Stalinist regime.”

The second category - persons from among the Polish officers, who for the world community were supposed to designate Polish prisoners of war - about 400 people in total. They were sent to the Gryazovets prison camp in the Vologda region. Most of them were released in 1941 and handed over to General Anders, who began forming a Polish army on the territory of the USSR. General Anders, with the consent of the Soviet leadership, who was convinced that the Andersites did not want to fight against the Nazis on the Eastern Front along with the Red Army, took this army, which consisted of several divisions, through Turkmenistan and Iran to the Anglo-Americans in 1942. By the way, the British, who had Anders’ units at their disposal, did not stand on ceremony with the arrogant Poles and in the spring of 1944 threw them under German machine guns into the mountainous neck of the Italian town of Montecasino, where they large quantities and died.

The third category consisted of the bulk of Polish army officers, gendarmes and police officers, who could not be released for two reasons. Firstly, they could join the ranks of the Home Army, which was subordinate to the Polish émigré government and launched semi-partisan military operations against the Red Army and Soviet power structures. Secondly, based on the inevitability of war with Nazi Germany, about which the Soviet leadership had no illusions, the normalization of relations with the Polish government in exile and the subsequent use of the Poles for a joint fight against fascism was not ruled out.

A painful and painful solution to the fate of the third, main part of the Polish prisoners of war was found in the fact that they were recognized as socially dangerous by a special meeting under the NKVD of the USSR, convicted and imprisoned in forced labor camps. They were sent from Kozelsky, Ostashsky and Starobelsky prisoner of war camps (prisoner of war camps and forced labor camps are completely different in nature, since the latter only house convicts) took place in April-May 1940. Convicted Poles were transported to special-purpose forced labor camps located west of Smolensk, of which there were three. The Poles held in these camps were used in the construction and repair of highways until the Nazi invasion of the USSR. The beginning of the war was extremely unfavorable for the Soviet Union. Already on July 16, 1941, German troops captured Smolensk, and they had camps with Polish prisoners of war even earlier. In an atmosphere of confusion and elements of panic, it was not possible to evacuate the Poles deep into Soviet territory by rail or road transport, and they refused to leave for the East on foot along with a small number of guards. Only a few of the Polish Jewish officers did this. In addition, the most decisive and courageous of the officers began to make their way to the West, thanks to which some of them managed to survive.

The Nazis ended up with the entire file on the Poles, which they kept in the forced labor camps. This allowed them to announce in 1943 that the number of those executed was about 12 thousand. Using the file data, they published the “Official Materials...” of their investigation, where they included various “documents” to support their slanderous version of the execution of Polish officers by the Soviets. But, despite the German pedantry, among the documents cited there were those that showed that their owners were alive as of October 1941. This is what, for example, V.N. wrote about the “Official Materials...” of the Germans. Pribytkov, who worked as director of the Central Special Archive of the USSR before it came under the control of the Yeltsinists: “...The decisive document given is a certificate of citizenship issued to Captain Stefan Alfred Kozlinsky in Warsaw on October 20, 1941. That is, this document contained in the official German publication and extracted from the Katyn grave, completely negates the Nazi version that the executions were carried out in the spring of 1940, and shows that the executions were carried out after October 20, 1941, that is, by the Germans." Available data convincingly indicate that the Germans began executing Poles in the Katyn Forest in September 1941 and completed the action by December of the same year. In the materials of the investigation conducted by the commission of Academician N.N. Burdenko, there is also evidence that the Germans, before demonstrating burials in the Katyn Forest in 1943 to various “semi-official” organizations and individuals, opened the graves and brought into them the corpses of Poles they had shot in other places. Soviet prisoners of war, involved in this work in the amount of 500 people, were destroyed. Next to the graves of Poles executed in the Katyn Forest there are mass graves of Russians. Dating mainly to 1941 and partly to 1942, they contain the ashes of 25 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and civilians. It’s hard to believe, but “academic experts” and would-be investigators suffering from Smerdyakovism syndrome, having produced mountains of papers over 14 years of “investigation,” do not even mention this!

In the story of Polish prisoners of war, the actions of the then political leadership led by Stalin do not look legally impeccable. Some rules were violated international law, namely the relevant provisions of the 1907 Hague and 1929 Geneva Conventions relative to the treatment of prisoners of war in general and officer prisoners of war in particular. There is no need to deny this, because denial is in this case plays into the hands of our enemies, who, with the help of the “Katyn affair,” want to finally rewrite the history of the Second World War. We must admit that the condemnation of Polish officers by a Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR and their sending to forced labor camps with a change in their status from prisoners of war to prisoners, although it can be justified from the standpoint of political and economic expediency, is in no way justified from the standpoint of international law . We must also recognize that sending Polish officers to camps near the western border of the USSR deprived us of the opportunity to provide them with adequate security in connection with the treacherous attack of Nazi Germany. And it becomes clear why Stalin and Beria in November-December 1941 could not say anything definite to Generals Sikorski, Anders and the Polish Ambassador Kot about the fate of the Polish officers captured by the Red Army in September-October 1939. They really did not know what happened to them after the Nazis occupied a significant part of the territory of the USSR. And to say that at the time of the German invasion the Poles were in forced labor camps west of Smolensk would mean an international scandal and would create difficulties in creating an anti-Hitler coalition. Meanwhile, the London Polish government already at the beginning of December 1941 received reliable information about the execution of Polish officers by the Germans near Katyn. But they did not bring this information to the Soviet leadership, but mockingly continued to “find out” where their compatriot officers had gone. Why? The first reason is that the Poles in 1941-1942 and even in 1943 were confident that Hitler would defeat the Soviet Union. The second reason, stemming from the first, is the desire to blackmail the Soviet leadership for subsequent refusal to participate in military operations against the Germans on the Soviet-German front.

Goebbels' falsification of the "Katyn Affair" was exposed during an investigation carried out between October 5, 1943 and January 10, 1944 by the Emergency State Commission chaired by Academician N.N. Burdenko. The main results of the work of the Commission N.N. Burdenko were included in the indictment of the Nuremberg Tribunal as “Document USSR-48”. During the investigation into the case of Polish officers, 95 witnesses were questioned, 17 statements were verified, the necessary examination was carried out, and the location of the Katyn graves was examined.

As indirect evidence of their version, all modern Goebbelsites cite the fact that the Nuremberg Tribunal excluded the Katyn episode from the list of crimes of the leaders of Nazi Germany. The conclusion of the Burdenko commission was presented as an accusation document, which, as an official document, according to Article 21 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, did not require additional evidence. After all, the leaders fascist Germany They were not accused of having personally shot someone or burned them alive in huts. They were accused of pursuing a policy that resulted in such massive crimes as have never been known to humanity. The prosecutors showed that the genocide against the Poles, which also manifested itself at Katyn, was the official policy of the Nazis. However, the judges of the Nuremberg Tribunal, without taking into account the conclusions of the Burdenko Commission, only imitated the judicial investigation into the execution of Polish officers near Katyn. After all, the embers of the Cold War were already smoldering! Several years later, in 1952, the American member of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Robert H. Jackson, admitted that his position on Katyn was determined by the corresponding instructions from the government of President G. Truman. In 1952, a US Congressional commission fabricated the version of the Katyn case they wanted and in its conclusion recommended that the US government transfer the case to the UN for investigation. However, as the Polish Goebbelsites complain, “...Washington did not consider it possible to do this.” Why? Yes, because the question of who killed the Poles has never been a secret for the Americans. And in 1952, Washington found itself in the position of the current Goebbelsites, who were afraid to take the case to court: it was beneficial for the US government to chew up this case in the press, but it could not allow it to be tried in court. The American government was smart enough not to bring fakes to the UN. But our stupid provincials, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, rushed to Warsaw to the Polish presidents with any fake. But this is not enough: Yeltsin ordered his guardsmen to lay out the forgeries before the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and, together with them, was caught in the forgery. Result: The Constitutional Court did not say a word about the Katyn tragedy, and according to the logic of the Russian-Polish Goebbelsites, this should be interpreted as an acquittal verdict for the Soviet Union and its leadership. One cannot but agree with Nobel, who once said: “Any democracy very quickly turns into a dictatorship of scum.” The current investigation of the Katyn case by two “big democracies” - Russian and Polish - confirms the truth of the words of the famous Swede.

Yuri Slobodkin,
Candidate of Legal Sciences, Associate Professor

The investigation into all the circumstances of the mass murder of Polish military personnel, which went down in history as the “Katyn massacre,” still causes heated discussions in both Russia and Poland. According to the “official” modern version, the murder of Polish officers was the work of the NKVD of the USSR. However, back in 1943-1944. a special commission headed by the chief surgeon of the Red Army N. Burdenko came to the conclusion that the Polish soldiers were killed by the Nazis. Despite the fact that the current Russian leadership agreed with the version of the “Soviet trace,” there are indeed a lot of contradictions and ambiguities in the case of the mass murder of Polish officers. To understand who could have shot Polish soldiers, it is necessary to take a closer look at the investigation process of the Katyn massacre itself.

In March 1942, residents of the village of Kozyi Gory, in the Smolensk region, informed the occupation authorities about the site of a mass grave of Polish soldiers. The Poles working in the construction platoon dug up several graves and reported this to the German command, but they initially reacted with complete indifference. The situation changed in 1943, when a turning point had already occurred at the front and Germany was interested in strengthening anti-Soviet propaganda. On February 18, 1943, German field police began excavations in the Katyn Forest. A special commission was formed, headed by Gerhardt Butz, a professor at the University of Breslau, a “luminary” of forensic medicine, who during the war years served with the rank of captain as the head of the forensic laboratory of Army Group Center. Already on April 13, 1943, German radio reported that the burial site of 10 thousand Polish officers had been found. In fact, German investigators “calculated” the number of Poles who died in the Katyn Forest very simply - they took the total number of officers of the Polish army before the start of the war, from which they subtracted the “living” - the soldiers of Anders’ army. All other Polish officers, according to the German side, were shot by the NKVD in the Katyn Forest. Naturally, there was also the inherent anti-Semitism of the Nazis - the German media immediately reported that Jews took part in the executions.

On April 16, 1943, the Soviet Union officially denied the “slanderous attacks” of Nazi Germany. On April 17, the Polish government in exile turned to the Soviet government for clarification. It is interesting that at that time the Polish leadership did not try to blame the Soviet Union for everything, but focused on the crimes of Nazi Germany against the Polish people. However, the USSR broke off relations with the Polish government in exile.

Joseph Goebbels, the “number one propagandist” of the Third Reich, managed to achieve even greater effect than he had originally imagined. The Katyn massacre was presented by German propaganda as a classic manifestation of the “atrocities of the Bolsheviks.” It is obvious that the Nazis, accusing the Soviet side of killing Polish prisoners of war, sought to discredit the Soviet Union in the eyes of Western countries. The brutal execution of Polish prisoners of war, allegedly carried out by Soviet security officers, should, in the opinion of the Nazis, push the USA, Great Britain and the Polish government in exile away from cooperation with Moscow. Goebbels succeeded in the latter - in Poland, many people accepted the version of the execution of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD. The fact is that back in 1940, correspondence with Polish prisoners of war who were on the territory of the Soviet Union ceased. Nothing more was known about the fate of the Polish officers. At the same time, representatives of the United States and Great Britain tried to “hush up” the Polish issue, because they did not want to irritate Stalin during such a crucial period, when Soviet troops were able to turn the tide at the front.

To ensure a larger propaganda effect, the Nazis even involved the Polish Red Cross (PKK), whose representatives were associated with the anti-fascist resistance, in the investigation. On the Polish side, the commission was headed by Marian Wodzinski, a physician from the University of Krakow, an authoritative person who participated in the activities of the Polish anti-fascist resistance. The Nazis even went so far as to allow representatives of the PKK to the site of the alleged execution, where graves were being excavated. The commission's conclusions were disappointing - the PKK confirmed the German version that the Polish officers were shot in April-May 1940, that is, even before the start of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union.

April 28-30, 1943 arrived in Katyn international commission. Of course, this was a very loud name - in fact, the commission was formed from representatives of states occupied by Nazi Germany or that maintained allied relations with it. As one would expect, the commission took Berlin's side and also confirmed that Polish officers were killed in the spring of 1940 by Soviet security officers. Further investigative actions by the German side, however, were stopped - in September 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Almost immediately after the liberation of the Smolensk region, the Soviet leadership decided on the need to conduct its own investigation - to expose Hitler's slander about the involvement of the Soviet Union in the massacres of Polish officers.

On October 5, 1943, a special commission of the NKVD and NKGB was created under the leadership of People's Commissar of State Security Vsevolod Merkulov and Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Sergei Kruglov. Unlike the German commission, the Soviet commission approached the matter in more detail, including organizing interrogations of witnesses. 95 people were interviewed. As a result, interesting details emerged. Even before the start of the war, three camps for Polish prisoners of war were located west of Smolensk. They housed officers and generals of the Polish Army, gendarmes, police officers, and officials captured on Polish territory. Most of the prisoners of war were used for road work of varying degrees of severity. When the war began, the Soviet authorities did not have time to evacuate Polish prisoners of war from the camps. So the Polish officers ended up in German captivity, and the Germans continued to use the labor of prisoners of war on road and construction work.

In August - September 1941, the German command decided to shoot all Polish prisoners of war held in Smolensk camps. The execution of the Polish officers was carried out directly by the headquarters of the 537th Construction Battalion under the leadership of Chief Lieutenant Arnes, Chief Lieutenant Rekst and Lieutenant Hott. The headquarters of this battalion was located in the village of Kozyi Gory. In the spring of 1943, when a provocation against the Soviet Union was already being prepared, the Nazis herded Soviet prisoners of war to excavate graves and, after the excavations, removed from the graves all documents dating back to later than spring 1940. This is how the date of the supposed execution of Polish prisoners of war was “adjusted”. The Soviet prisoners of war who carried out the excavations were shot by the Germans, and local residents were forced to give testimony favorable to the Germans.

On January 12, 1944, a Special Commission was formed to establish and investigate the circumstances of the execution of prisoners of war by Polish officers in the Katyn Forest (near Smolensk). This commission was headed by the chief surgeon of the Red Army, Lieutenant General of the Medical Service Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko, and included a number of prominent Soviet scientists. It is interesting that the commission included the writer Alexei Tolstoy and Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia Nikolai (Yarushevich). Although public opinion in the West by this time it was already quite biased, nevertheless, the episode with the execution of Polish officers in Katyn was included in the indictment of the Nuremberg Tribunal. That is, Hitler Germany’s responsibility for committing this crime was actually recognized.

For many decades the Katyn massacre was forgotten, however, when in the late 1980s. The systematic “shaking” of the Soviet state began, the history of the Katyn massacre was again “refreshed” by human rights activists and journalists, and then by the Polish leadership. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev actually admitted the responsibility of the Soviet Union for the Katyn massacre. From that time on, and for almost thirty years now, the version that Polish officers were shot by the NKVD of the USSR has become the dominant version. Even a “patriotic turn” Russian state in the 2000s did not change the situation. Russia continues to “repent” for the crime committed by the Nazis, and Poland is putting forward more and more strict requirements recognition of the Katyn massacre as genocide.

Meanwhile, many domestic historians and experts are expressing their point of view on the Katyn tragedy. Thus, Elena Prudnikova and Ivan Chigirin in the book “Katyn. A lie that became history” draws attention to very interesting nuances. For example, all the corpses found in burials in Katyn were dressed in Polish army uniforms with insignia. But until 1941, Soviet prisoner of war camps were not allowed to wear insignia. All prisoners were equal in status and could not wear cockades or shoulder straps. It turns out that Polish officers simply could not have worn insignia at the time of death if they had actually been shot in 1940. Since the Soviet Union for a long time did not sign the Geneva Convention, the detention of prisoners of war with the preservation of insignia in Soviet camps was not allowed. Apparently, the Nazis did not think through this interesting point and they themselves contributed to the exposure of their lies - Polish prisoners of war were shot after 1941, but then the Smolensk region was occupied by the Nazis. Anatoly Wasserman also points out this circumstance, referring to the work of Prudnikova and Chigirin, in one of his publications.

Private detective Ernest Aslanyan draws attention to a very interesting detail - Polish prisoners of war were killed with firearms manufactured in Germany. The NKVD of the USSR did not use such weapons. Even if the Soviet security officers had German weapons at their disposal, they were by no means in the same quantity as was used in Katyn. However, for some reason this circumstance is not considered by supporters of the version that the Polish officers were killed by the Soviet side. More precisely, this question, of course, was raised in the media, but the answers to it were given somewhat incomprehensible, notes Aslanyan.

The version about the use of German weapons in 1940 in order to “write off” the corpses of Polish officers as Nazis really seems very strange. The Soviet leadership hardly expected that Germany would not only start a war, but would also be able to reach Smolensk. Accordingly, there was no reason to “expose” the Germans by shooting Polish prisoners of war with German weapons. Another version seems more plausible - executions of Polish officers in the camps of the Smolensk region actually took place, but not at all on the scale that Hitler’s propaganda spoke of. There were many camps in the Soviet Union where Polish prisoners of war were kept, but nowhere else were mass executions carried out. What could force the Soviet command to arrange the execution of 12 thousand Polish prisoners of war in the Smolensk region? It is impossible to answer this question. Meanwhile, the Nazis themselves could well have destroyed Polish prisoners of war - they did not feel any reverence for the Poles, and were not distinguished by humanism towards prisoners of war, especially towards the Slavs. Killing several thousand Poles was no problem at all for Hitler’s executioners.

However, the version of the murder of Polish officers by Soviet security officers is very convenient in the modern situation. For the West, the use of Goebbels propaganda is a wonderful way to once again “prick” Russia and blame Moscow for war crimes. For Poland and the Baltic countries, this version is another tool of anti-Russian propaganda and a way to achieve more generous funding from the United States and the European Union. As for the Russian leadership, its agreement with the version of the execution of the Poles on the orders of the Soviet government is explained, apparently, by purely opportunistic considerations. As “our answer to Warsaw,” we could raise the topic of the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in Poland, of whom there were more than 40 thousand people in 1920. However, no one is addressing this issue.

A genuine, objective investigation into all the circumstances of the Katyn massacre is still waiting in the wings. We can only hope that it will completely expose the monstrous slander against Soviet country and confirm that the real executioners of Polish prisoners of war were the Nazis.