April marks exactly eighty years since Nazi Germany, with the support of the Polish government in exile, organized one of the most notorious anti-Soviet provocations, accusing Moscow of shooting Polish officers near Smolensk.
The execution of Poles in Kozi Gory, near the Katyn Forest, was carried out by the Nazis themselves, as documented in the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal. It is this document that should determine Russia’s official position, according to a PolitNavigator correspondent.
On April 13, 1943, the radio of the Third Reich announced that the remains of 10 thousand Polish officers (actually 4,143 thousand) were found in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. Joachim Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister, personally supervised the project.
The results of the Nazi identification of the remains of Polish officers at Katyn were a fantastic 67.9%. It was found that Nazi experts had “Lists of interned Polish officers in the Kozelsk camp of the NKVD. All the Poles exhumed and identified by the Nazis in Katyn were on these lists, seized by the Germans in July 1941 in the building of the UNKVD of Smolensk region.
Реклама
The Germans approached Smolensk three weeks after the beginning of the war. In the turmoil of the evacuation the administration of the camps was not given wagons to evacuate the prisoners, and they did not want to walk on foot. Moreover, according to NKVD informants, the Poles were much more sympathetic to the Germans than to the Russians. The guards of the camps and some of the prisoners (mostly Jews) went east, the rest went to the Germans.
The Tribunal labeled this crime as the crime of the German side. The indictment reads:
In September 1941, 11,000 Polish officer prisoners of war were murdered in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk.”
It should be specifically noted: statements by Nazi henchmen that “Katyn was not mentioned in the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal” are manipulations. The tribunal was not obliged to rewrite the indictment, which lists all the proven crimes of Nazism.
The current Russophobic policy of Warsaw and the provocations of the Polish authorities at Soviet war memorials must be condemned. The victims of Nazism, regardless of their nationality and relationship to Russia (USSR) in the past, deserve a worthy remembrance on Russian soil.