Memorial falsifies
In recent years, Russia has been trying to deprive it of its place in the world. storiesby putting "in the corner" for the so-called "historical crimes". In this regard, Poland is especially zealous, which has compiled a whole list of Russian “crimes” against the Poles, beginning in the 16th and 20th centuries. The central place in the anti-Russian Polish martyrology is the Katyn crime, whose victims in Poland are 21.857 Polish citizens who allegedly died in 1940 from the hands of the NKVD of the USSR.The Polish authorities were able to present this tragedy as something more terrible than the Nazi atrocities, the victims of which were the millions of Poles tortured to death in German concentration camps. Although most of the Katyn victims are missing.
17 September 2015 in Poland celebrated the 76 anniversary of the “treacherous” attack of the USSR in 1939. On this day, in the presence of Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Eva Kopach, the Katyn Museum was opened in the Warsaw Citadel. Speaking at the opening, Polish Defense Minister Tomash Semonyak said: “There are things sacred to the Poles. They transcend the boundaries of ordinary history, and our national memory is built on them. These include Katyn. ”
Somewhat later, the Polish president laid flowers at the monument to the "Killed and killed in the east" - in memory of 21 to a thousand Polish prisoners who were allegedly shot by the NKVD in 1940. Speaking at the monument, A. Duda returned to the topic of genocide. The new Polish president stated that the Katyn crime, the purpose of which was to destroy the Polish people, should be called genocide.
Questionable Book of Memory
Do not lag behind the Polish Russophobes Russian "liberals". September of this year's 17 The Memorial Human Rights Center gave a presentation in Moscow of the 930-page book Memory Killed in Katyn. It contains a list of names and biographical references ("biograms") of 4.415 Polish officers, who are considered to be buried in the Polish Katyn Memorial near Smolensk.
The Memory Book was presented as a new page in the assessment of the Katyn crime, although it only repeats the book “Katyn. Ksiega Cmentarna Polskiego Cmentarza Wojennego ", published in Warsaw in 2000
The perpetuation of the memory of the dead has always been considered a noble and necessary thing, if it did not pursue goals that were far from being proclaimed.
Unfortunately, the Katyn Memory Book presented by the Memorial can be regarded as an ideological sabotage against Russia, which gives a new impetus to the battered Katyn theme in the world anti-Russian campaign.
In this regard, I will speak on the name of the book of Memory. It sounds "KILLED IN KATYNI. The memory book of Polish prisoners of war of prisoners of the Kozel camp of the NKVD, who were shot by decision of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) of 5 in March of 1940. ” Such a wording of the name contradicts the official legal version of the Katyn events set forth in the Memoranda of the Russian Ministry of Justice, submitted to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 2010 and 2012.
And the multi-page preface to the Book of Memory defiantly ignores the results of Soviet and Russian research in Katyn, since it is mainly based on the results of 1943 exhumations faked by German Nazis. It is generously seasoned with photographs from the Official Materials on the Katyn massacres (“Amtliches Material zummememusm von Katyn ”), published in Berlin in 1943
The second substantive core of the book of Memory, published by Memorial, as mentioned above, are the 4.415 biograms of the Katyn victims. Of these, 2.815 victims, or 63,8%, were identified by the Nazis in 1943. In fact, this is propaganda of the Nazi version of the Katyn case and the rehabilitation of Nazi crimes.
In the post-war period, the Polish side, voluntarily developing Nazi approaches to identification, managed to bring the list of “reliably identified” Katyn victims to 4.071. I note that identification in Polish consists in finding the name of a Polish officer in the NKVD prescription lists.
If someone is listed on the shipment from the Kozelsky camp of the NKVD to the Smolensk UNKVD, he, in the opinion of the Polish "identifiers", was certainly shot in the Katyn forest. As a result, these so-called “identified” were perpetuated by the Polish side with personal tablets placed in the Katyn memorial complex.
In the book of Memory, 4.415 already appears in this way of the “identified” Katyn victims. The question arises. How legitimate is this identification and how does it relate to the Russian official legal version of the Katyn events? More on this later.
The Book of Memory also ignores the decision of the Nuremberg Tribunal 1946 in terms of the responsibility of the Nazi leaders for the Katyn crime. It is known that the Katyn episode at the Nuremberg trial, according to the file stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, was personally incriminated to two defendants - Nazi No. 2, Hermann Göring, and head of the operational command of the Wehrmacht High Command Alfred Jodl.
In the reasoning part of the Tribunal’s Verdict on the charges against G. Goering and A. Jodl, it is noted that there are no extenuating circumstances in relation to them. That is the responsibility for the Katyn episode of the Nuremberg Tribunal laid on the Nazi leaders.
This is an irrefutable fact. By the way, the Grand Chamber of the ECHR was forced to agree with this fact, which in its Resolution on 21.10.2013 in the case of Janowiec and Others against Russia did not repeat the Resolution of the Fifth Section from 16.04.2012, in terms of asserting that the Nuremberg Tribunal allegedly rejected the Soviet accusation the Nazis in the Katyn crime.
What is the book of memory waiting for Russia?
In addition to the above, a number of questions arise. For whom and for what has Memorial published the Katyn memory book in Russia? The objectives of the book say that it must ensure the recognition of Polish prisoners of war shot by victims of political repression. However, it is clear that the photographs of the victims and their brief biographies will not solve this problem. They will only allow book compilers to receive the next Polish state awards and new grants. No more.
Another major task of the book was to provide the Russians with the personalities of those killed in Katyn. Noble. But it’s very similar to the propaganda in Russia of the myth that the NKVD in 1940 destroyed 21 a thousand representatives of the Polish elite, although it is known that in 1939, thousands of Poles were taken prisoner in the Soviet Union who were somewhat prominent in polish society. And a lot of them survived.
Further. Why did Russia need to publish in Russian a book of biographies of Polish citizens killed or missing during the Second World War? After all, this is of interest mainly to Polish relatives of the victims. And such a book in Polish, as stated, has already been published in Poland.
At the same time, Memorial is not interested in the fate of 80 of thousands of Red Army prisoners of war tortured in Polish camps in 1919-1921.
Convincing evidence confirming the deliberate and deliberate policy of the then Polish authorities to create unbearable conditions in the camps aimed at exterminating the Red Army men is set out in the 900-page Russian-Polish collection of documents “Red Army men in Polish captivity 1919-1922,” published in 2004.
By the way, this collection did not dare to publish in Polish. Thus, the Polish side protects from disclosing the myth that no more than 16-18 of thousands of Red Army prisoners allegedly died in the Polish camps. Memorial could eliminate this “white spot” in the relationship between Russians and Poles. Moreover, the Polish side diligently destroys the memory of this story.
But Memorial, in principle, does not want to deal with the fate of the captured "Bolsheviks", as the Red Armymen called it in bourgeois Poland. Well, in that case, why not perpetuate the memory of Russian soldiers and officers who tragically died in the French captivity in 1812?
It is known that in October 1812 the Poles of the Ponyatovsky corps, retreating with Napoleon’s army, were escorted by two thousand Russian prisoners of war. On the approaches to Gzhatsk (now Gagarin), the Polish escorts beat them all with rifle butts.
In his memoirs, General Philip-Paul de Ségur, personal adjutant of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, wrote about this crime of the Poles with indignation in his memoirs.
De Segura was shocked by the fact that "every prisoner had a head in exactly the same manner and that the bloodied brain was splashed right there." (See F.-P. de Ségur "Hike to Russia. Notes of the adjutant of Emperor Napoleon I." Smolensk, "Rusich", 2003). This tragedy is silent in Russia and, especially, in Poland. Unknown names and names of the dead. They remained nameless.
However, this story does not interest the "Russian" memorials. Put the "Russian" in quotes is not accidental. 21 July 2014. By order of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation No. 1246-r, the Interregional Public Organization Memorial Human Rights Center was recognized as an organization acting as a foreign agent. However, Memorial did not bother it and it continues to successfully perform these functions.
Russian legal version of the Katyn events
The Russian legal version of the Katyn events is set out in the Memorandums of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, sent to the ECHR in the framework of the case “Janovets and Others v. Russia”. This was the actual consideration of the Katyn case in Strasbourg. The memoranda were based on the results of the 14-year investigation by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation about the circumstances of the Katyn criminal case No. 159, launched in March 1990 and terminated in September 2004.
Case number XXUMX is so called. "On the execution of Polish prisoners of war from the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky special camps of the NKVD in April-May 159." In this title there is the name of the crime “execution” and the time of its implementation “April-May 1940”, which assumed only one perpetrator - the Stalinist leadership of the USSR. Nevertheless, the Russian prosecutors tried to approach the investigation of the Katyn case as objectively as possible.
Brief results of the investigation of criminal case No. XXUMX were officially announced at a press conference of the Chief Military Prosecutor of the Russian Federation A. Savenkov 159 and in a letter to Major General of Justice of the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation V. Kondratov to the Chairman of the Board of the Memorial Society A. Roginsky from 11.03.2005 g No. 24.03.2005-5-6818. According to these results, “the death as a result of the execution of the“ three ”90 decisions of Polish prisoners of war was established, the identity of the 1803 of them was established”.
Some more details about the investigation in case No. 159 were mentioned in the Memorandum of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation from 19.03.2010. There, in paragraph 25, the following investigative measures are listed: a study of archival documents related to the “Katyn” events (interrogation of numerous witnesses, partial exhumation) burials, conducting forensic examinations of various types, sending requests to the relevant organizations.
In addition, the 61 paragraph of the same Memorandum reported: “... During the investigation, it was found that certain officials from the leadership of the NKVD of the USSR had exceeded the authority granted to this institution, with the result that the so-called“ troika ”made extrajudicial decisions regarding some Polish prisoners of war.
The actions of these officials were qualified as crimes provided for by paragraph “b” of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR ... ”. I will clarify that clause “b” of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR provided for liability to the highest measure for abuse of official position under particularly aggravating circumstances.
From the foregoing it follows that at the legal level it is a question of responsibility for making extrajudicial decisions on the execution of Polish prisoners of war not by the Stalinist Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b), but by the then leadership of the NKVD of the USSR.
Accordingly, the title of the Book of Memory, in which the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B.) Is responsible for shooting at Katyn, is not just incorrect, but unlawful in legal terms.
At the same time, I note that in paragraph 60 of the Memorandum from 19.03.2010, it is stated that “the Russian authorities would like to clarify that they did not investigate the circumstances of the death of the applicants' relatives”.
This was due to the name of the criminal case No. XXUMX, which limited the investigation’s activities to a tight time frame, April-May 159. From this it follows that Russia did not conduct an investigation into the circumstances of the death or disappearance of 1940 Polish citizens during the Second World War.
Therefore, the statements of some Russian historians regarding the perpetrators of the death or disappearance of 21, thousands of Polish citizens on the territory of the USSR during the Second World War, are their personal opinions and cannot be replicated as the final version of the Katyn tragedy, which Memorial has been trying to do for a number of years. The circumstances of the death or disappearance of 21.857 Polish citizens have yet to be investigated.
Nazi falsification at Katyn
It is of interest how the Russian investigation reacted to the results of the Nazi exhumation and identification of 1943. Paragraph 45 of the Memorandum from 19.03.2010 was given its assessment. “With regard to the exhumations of 1943 in the Katyn forest, according to archival documents, the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross and the International Commission did not identify the extracted remains in accordance with the requirements of the criminal procedure legislation.”
In paragraph 46 continued this assessment. “The list of persons allegedly identified in 1943 was published in the book Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn, published by the German authorities in the same year. This list is not evidence in criminal case No. 159. ”
However, it is known that the Nazi list of 2815 Polish officers, allegedly identified in Katyn 1943, formed the basis of the list, according to which, as stated, the Polish side made a personal plate for the Katyn memorial to 4071.
On this occasion, in paragraph 9 of the Memorandum from 13.10.2010, it was stated that the plates with the surnames of Polish officers at the Katyn memorial complex cannot serve as evidence of any facts, including the death of Polish citizens, since the Polish side did not appeal to Russia for obtaining or confirming the list of Katyn victims.
It also does not interfere to recall the letter of the Presidium of the Polish Red Cross (PPKK) sent by 12 in October 1943 to the International Committee of the Red Cross. It noted that: “... even if the PAC had all the results of the exhumation and identification work, including documents and memories, she would not be able to officially and definitively testify that these officers were killed in Katyn”.
An irrefutable conclusion about the falsified nature of the Nazi-Polish exhumation and identification at Katyn was made by a professor at the Moscow State University. Lomonosov, doctor of historical sciences Valentin Sakharov.
He investigated the documents of the German secret police that controlled the exhumation process at Katyn, as well as the correspondence of the German Red Cross (SCC), the Polish Red Cross (PAC) and the administration of the Polish General Government regarding the exhumation of Katyn graves in 1943.
Professor Sakharov also revealed the fact that the Nazi exhumations had a “List of interned people in the Kozel camp of the NKVD” captured by the Nazis in July 1941 in the UNKD building in the Smolensk region. This was confirmed by a letter from the Ministry of Propaganda of Germany to the GKK Presidium of 23 on June 1943, in which it was reported that the GKK sent lists of captured Polish officers "discovered in the GPU of Smolensk". They were needed to reconcile them with the German list of exhumed and identified Katyn victims.
Based on these lists, the Nazis were able to provide in Katyn an incredible and unrepeatable result of the identification of human remains - 67,9%. The main conclusion of Professor Sakharov was as follows. In Katyn, the “pimping of unknown corpses with happily acquired documents” was widely practiced, that is, large-scale falsification was carried out.
Naturally, the lists of “identified” Katyn victims, which the Polish side and the Russian Memorial society are trying to operate on, are counterfeit. Therefore, it is not surprising that neither Poland nor Memorial are interested in the message about 9, an unknown Polish burial site, found outside the memorial complex in the Katyn Forest. It could not be the work of the Chekists, because it is literally 50 meters from the place where the NKVD rest home stood in 1940.
About this burial 12 April 2000 g. And. about. Russian President Vladimir Putin in a telephone conversation informed the then Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski. Mrs. Yolanta Kwasniewska, the wife of the President of Poland, who arrived at Katyn the next day, laid flowers on this grave ... According to preliminary estimates, the total number of corpses in the grave ranges from three hundred to one thousand.
However, during the 15 years, the Polish authorities did not attempt to clarify the situation with the “Polish grave No. XXUMX” in the Goat Mountains. Memorial has a similar position. What is the matter?
Apparently, according to the Nazi-Polish version, all Polish officers from the Kozel camp, who were shot at Katyn, have already been found, identified and buried on the territory of the Polish memorial. Among them, there is no place for the “new” Katyn victims. The emergence of hundreds of "new" Polish corpses "bring down" the above version.
Dubious Katyn Kremlin documents
Well, what about the most important argument of the "memorials" and Polish so-called historians - the "closed package No. 1" with the Katyn documents allegedly found in 1992 in the former archive of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU? Among these documents was a note from USSR People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Lavrenti Beria to Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B.) Joseph Stalin No.794 / B dated March 9 1940 with a proposal to shoot Polish citizens 25.700, as well as a note from the Chairman of the USSR KGB A. Shelepin to the First Secretary CPSU N. Khrushchev that the NKVD officers in 1940, had shot 21.857 Polish citizens.
However, despite these extremely serious documents, the 62 paragraph of the Memorandum from 19.03.2010 is noted in paragraph. "During the investigation, it was impossible ... to obtain information regarding the implementation of the decision to shoot specific individuals, since all the records were destroyed and it was impossible to restore them."
The foregoing suggests that Russian military prosecutors and experts questioned the credibility of the entire set of Katyn documents from the “closed package No. 1” from the archives of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, to which proponents of the Nazi-Polish version of the Katyn crime so fond. And it is not by chance
In March 2009, the E.Lokokov forensic laboratory established that the first three pages of a note by People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Lavrenti Beri to Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) Joseph Stalin No.794 / B dated March "1940" with a proposal to execute 25.700 Polish citizens were typed on one typewriter, and the last fourth page was on another.
Moreover, it was found that the font of the fourth page is found on the pages of a number of genuine NKVD letters 1939-40, and the font of the first three pages is not found in any of the genuine NKVD letters of that period identified so far.
This is obvious evidence of the falsification of the first three pages of Beria’s note.
I will add that the circumstances of the actual discovery of the “closed package No. XXUMX” with the Katyn documents also allow us to assume about the possible falsification of the Katyn documents. The myth that a certain commission accidentally discovered 1 in September in the archives of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, dispelled the lawyer and State Duma deputy Andrei Makarov.
Speaking at 15 in October 2009 at the round table “Falsifying history and historical myths as an instrument of modern politics,” he said that President Boris Yeltsin handed him and S. Shahrai “private package No. 1” from his personal safe. The authenticity of this version is confirmed by the fact that it was A. Makarov, together with S. Shahrai 14 of October 1992, who submitted the Katyn documents from the “closed package No. 1” to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.
This version was confirmed in May of 2010. Then the applicant, known to the deputy for the Soviet period, appeared to State Duma deputy Viktor Ilyukhin. He said that at the beginning of 90-s he was attracted to work in a group of high-ranking specialists in the falsification of archival documents relating to important events of the Soviet period, including the Katyn case. This group worked in the structure of the security service of the Russian President B. Yeltsin.
To confirm his words, the applicant handed V. Ilyukhin a set of official pre-war forms, a lot of facsimiles, seals and stamps of the Soviet period, as well as drafts of the falsified pages of the already mentioned Beria note No. XXUMX / B.
Initially, according to these drafts, it was proposed to impute the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) to decide not to shoot 25.700 Polish citizens (14.700 in the camps + 11.000 in prisons), but 46.700 (24.700 in the camps + 22.000 in prisons). But, apparently, the head of the falsifiers brigade, realizing the absurdity of such a figure, decided to reduce it and made handwritten corrections to the digital part of the first version of falsification.
Unfortunately, the untimely death of V. Ilyukhin did not allow us to fully investigate this scandalous situation.
Katyn in Strasbourg
In 2012 and 2013 The Nazi-Polish version of the Katyn case received strong support in the form of Resolutions of the Fifth Section of the ECHR from 16.04.2012 and the Grand Chamber of the ECHR from 21.10.2013 in the case of Janowiec and Others v. Russia (Katyn case).
The ECHR ruling from 16.04.2012 deserves special attention. In it, the European Court, in violation of its jurisdiction (the ECtHR should only consider procedural violations of the provisions of the Convention on Human Rights regarding the applicants, but not identify the perpetrators of the crime), ignored the Russian legal version of the Katyn events set forth in the Memorandums The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation and the responsibility for the death of Polish citizens 21.857 laid on the Stalinist leadership of the USSR.
The key here is the 136 item. It categorically states: “The court notes that the applicants' relatives who were captured after the Soviet Red Army occupied Polish territory and who were kept in Soviet camps were shot by order of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU in April and May 1940.
The lists of prisoners to be shot were drawn up on the basis of the “shipment lists” of the NKVD, which mentioned, in particular, the names of the applicants' relatives ... In the absence of any other, even indirect, evidence that they could somehow avoid of the execution, it should be presumed that they died during the mass execution in 1940. ”
An analysis of the Resolution from 16.04.2012 showed that the ECHR took an extremely politicized position in the consideration of the case “Yanovovets and Others v. Russia”, and in the Resolution itself made so many inaccuracies and obvious errors that it casts doubt on its validity.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that the Grand Chamber of the ECHR after a year and a half by the Resolution of 21.10.2013 left the main provisions of the Resolution of the Fifth Section, however, excluding the assertion that the Nuremberg Tribunal 1946 allegedly rejected the Soviet Nazi accusation of the Katyn crime.
In the case of “Janovets and Others v. Russia”, the ECHR did not explicitly place on Russia formal legal responsibility for the Katyn massacre. After all, if we proceed from a false and unjustified decision of the ECtHR on the responsibility of the USSR for Katyn, then it is clear that in legal terms the Russian Federation, as the successor and law follower of the USSR, is the heir of legal responsibility for the Katyn crime.
All subsequent claims of the Polish side on the Katyn crime will be addressed to the Russian Federation. It should not be forgotten that the case that was considered by the ECHR was called “Janowitz and Others v. Russia”.
Strasbourg amateurs or russophobes
The content of the already mentioned ECHR Ordinance from 16.04.2012, as the main modern court decision in the Katyn case, deserves a special conversation. Much can be said about formal inaccuracies in this document. I will note only some of them.
The Resolution distorts the names of most of the positions of Soviet leaders and the names of political and executive bodies of the USSR. This testifies either to the amateurism of the experts of the Secretariat of the ECHR, or to their overt anti-Sovietism, multiplied by Russophobia.
For example, in paragraph 140 of the NKVD is called the "secret police of the Soviet Union." There is clearly a desire of the ECHR to identify the NKVD and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei - the secret state police). Paragraph 157 of the Resolution gives a derogatory assessment of the Soviet era as “the time of lies and the distortion of historical facts”.
Clause 18 states that “... in September 1943 of the year, the NKVD created a special commission chaired by Burdenko ...”. This is a primitive lie.
The documents show that the Burdenko Commission was created by a decision of the State Extraordinary Commission to establish and investigate the atrocities of the German fascist invaders and their associates 12 in January 1944. The initiative to create the Burdenko Commission came not from the NKVD of the USSR, but from the Office of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the CPSU (B) .
Goebbels Reanimators
It should be noted that in the ECHR Ordinance of 16.04.2012 there are fundamental errors that allow to rehabilitate the Nazi version of the Katyn crime, the ancestor of which was the well-known Nazi falsifier J. Goebbels.
Thus, in paragraph 17 of the Resolution, it is erroneously stated that in the Katyn forest "an international commission consisting of twelve forensic experts and their assistants ... conducted exhumation work from April to June of 1943."
It is reliably established that the experts of the international commission arrived in Katyn on April 28 1943 and on April 30 departed for Berlin. During the day, they were able to examine only 9 corpses specially prepared for them.
Exhumation work in the Katyn forest from April to June 1943 was carried out not by members of the International Medical Commission, but by German experts headed by Professor G. Butz and representatives of the Technical Committee of the PAC under the guidance of doctor M. Vodzinsky.
Point 57 of its ECHR Resolution actually rehabilitated the results of the German-Polish exhumation of 1943, noting that “it is generally known that as a result of exhumation in 1943, the remains of 4.243 people were identified, of which 2.730 was identified”, although in the final version German data compiled 4.143 detected and 2.815 identified corpses. But experts of the Secretariat of the ECHR do not care about the accuracy of the figures, when the task is to deal with Russia.
The above indicates that the political component in the work of the ECHR more and more prevails every year. Especially if the controversial cases concern Russia, which so far insufficiently takes into account this aspect of the behavior of the ECHR.
And it should, because the decisions of the ECHR contribute to the formation of the negative image of Russia in the world.
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