Katyn-Massacre

[Dullum]

Ok guys, let's settle this once and for all:

Was it the sovjets or the nazis who commited the massacre at Katyn in WW2?? I've heard recent theories who states that Boris Jeltsin forged the "evidence" that made Stalin guilty. Do you know anymore about this?

[A Marxist Historian]

Ok guys, let's settle this once and for all:

Was it the sovjets or the nazis who commited the massacre at Katyn in WW2?? I've heard recent theories who states that Boris Jeltsin forged the "evidence" that made Stalin guilty. Do you know anymore about this?

It was the Soviets, this is thoroughly established. One of your best researched atrocities around, which lots of scholars have studied.

Since it was after all a brutal massacre of military officers of a ruthless right wing military dictatorship liike Pinochet's in Chile, it is far from the worst atrocity Stalin ever committed. Still it deserves condemnation.

Some at least of those officers had joined the Polish army to defend the country against the Nazis. A few of them were even Jewish, as the desperate Polish colonels were briefly welcoming everybody into the army, despite their extreme and murderous anti-Semitism.

-M.H.-

[Omsk]

For starters,for a first post,this is flame-baiting,and i am pretty sure you are a provocateur.

If any serious discussion comes out from this thread (i doubt it will) i will post my opinion and some information,but for now,i just think this is flame-baiting.

[Zostrianos]

The Katyn massacre was just one of hundreds of massacres committed by either the Nazis or the Soviets in the region. During their joint occupation of Poland (1939-1941), they killed about 200,000 Poles, and shortly after the invasion in 1939, the Gestapo and NKVD held meetings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo-NKVD_Conferences) to coordinate their destruction of Poland's educated and intellectual classes and their joint reign of terror.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_crimes_in_Poland

[Zostrianos]

Part of the reason Stalin blamed the Katyn massacre on the Nazis is that the Soviets were very self conscious of their public image; they committed atrocities but wanted them kept secret to preserve their reputation. This was the main difference between Nazi and Soviet terror in occupied lands: the Nazis publicly executed people on a daily basis in public, exterminated entire towns and villages, using openly savage and brutal terror as a way to force their subjects into submission. The soviets were much more discreet, they would arrest people, drive them out to a forest somewhere and kill them in secret most of the time.

[#FF0000]

yeah it's kinda weird how the soviets have a worse rep than the nazis when it comes to brutality in war. I guess people like to see the Red Army as some big ol' human wave while the Nazis were supposed to be some well oiled war machine, but goddamn, atrocities on the part of the Nazis were flagrant as all hell. Massacres, rapes, looting.

Of course the soviet had their share of that but the Nazis were far worse -- but people wouldn't really think that.

But yeah.

Katyn was the soviets.

[Zostrianos]

As bad as Stalin and the NKVD were, the Nazis managed to surpass them in brutality. A good example was in the treatment of POW's; most German soldiers captured by the Russians were sent to the Gulag for a few years and eventually released. Most Russian POW's captured by the Nazis were immediately shot or herded into open air camps where they starved or froze to death, or were used for target practice by Nazi soldiers:

Some of the most infamous prisoner-of-war camps were in occupied Soviet Belarus, where by late November 1941 death rates had reached two percent per day. At Stalag 352 near Minsk, which one survivor remembered as “pure hell,” prisoners were packed together so tightly by barbed wire that they could scarcely move. They had to urinate and defecate where they stood. Some 109,500 people died there. At Dulag 185, Dulag 127, and Stalag 341, in the east Belarusian city Mahileu, witnesses saw mountains of unburied corpses outside the barbed wire. Some thirty to forty thousand prisoners died in these camps. At Dulag 131 at Bobruisk, the camp headquarters caught fire. Thousands of prisoners burned to death, and another 1,700 were gunned down as they tried to escape. All in all at least thirty thousand people died at Bobruisk. At Dulags 220 and 121 in Homel, as many as half of the prisoners had shelter in abandoned stables. The others had no shelter at all. In December 1941 death rates at these camps climbed from two hundred to four hundred to seven hundred a day. At Dulag 342 at Molodechno, conditions were so awful that prisoners submitted written petitions asking to be shot.
The camps in occupied Soviet Ukraine were similar. At Stalag 306 at Kirovohrad, German guards reported that prisoners ate the bodies of comrades who had been shot, sometimes before the victims were dead....The Germans shot, on a conservative estimate, half a million Soviet prisoners of war. By way of starvation or mistreatment during transit, they killed about 2.6 million more. All in all, perhaps 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war were killed....As knowledge of German policies spread, Soviet citizens began to think that Soviet power was perhaps the preferable alternative. (T. Snyder, Bloodlands)

Hitler managed to kill as many (or more) people in his 12 years in power as Stalin had in 20-something years.
Another example of Nazi brutality were the "anti partisan" operations (which took place all over Europe, including France, Greece and some northern countries). As a response to anti-Nazi resistance and freedom fighters, the Nazis would exterminate entire villages and towns as revenge. If there was even an indication of resistance activities in a certain area, the local SS commanders would head to the nearest town and shoot everyone - sometimes they'd shoot the men and then herd the women and children into barns and set fire to them. In one incident they killed 100 civilians simply because the local SS chief heard a shot - turns out that shot had actually been fired by a German soldier. If I recall in Poland they made a law that called for 100 Poles to be executed for every German who was killed....

[Omsk]

Another example of Nazi brutality were the "anti partisan" operations (which took place all over Europe, including France, Greece and some northern countries). As a response to anti-Nazi resistance and freedom fighters, the Nazis would exterminate entire villages and towns as revenge. If there was even an indication of resistance activities in a certain area, the local SS commanders would head to the nearest town and shoot everyone - sometimes they'd shoot the men and then herd the women and children into barns and set fire to them. In one incident they killed 100 civilians simply because the local SS chief heard a shot - turns out that shot had actually been fired by a German soldier. If I recall in Poland they made a law that called for 100 Poles to be executed for every German who was killed....


The worst anti partisan activities happened in the Soviet Union,Yugoslavia and Poland.In the other occupied countries the anti-partisan campaignes were on a much-much smaller scale,and cant be compared to the ones i mentioned first.

The 100 for 1 rule was brought by the SS in Yugoslavia,and you had cases where the Germans burned entire villages just because of a couple of wounded Germans.What is worse,the royalists sometimes killed Germans and blamed it on the partisans,large scale slaughter would comence after.

[Susurrus]

Goebbel's diaries on the subject:
14 April 1943

We are now using the discovery of 12,000 Polish officers, murdered by the GPU, for anti-Bolshevik propaganda on a grand style. We sent neutral journalists and Polish intellectuals to the spot where they were found. Their reports now reaching us from ahead are gruesome. The Führer has also given permission for us to hand out a drastic news item to the German press. I gave instructions to make the widest possible use of the propaganda material. We shall be able to live on it for a couple weeks.
September 29, 1943

Unfortunately we have had to give up Katyn. The Bolsheviks undoubtedly will soon 'find' that we shot 12,000 Polish officers. That episode is one that is going to cause us quite a little trouble in the future. The Soviets are undoubtedly going to make it their business to discover as many mass graves as possible and then blame it on us.

[Zostrianos]

THe Nazis and Soviets constantly used propaganda against each other during the war. THe NKVD used German pistols to commit the Katyn massacre, and the Nazis often forced Jews to dress up as Russian soldiers at gunpoint, and then filmed them so they could then whip up local hatred against Jews by associating them with the Soviets and thus confirm their "Judeo-Bolshevik" fantasies.