Oh no, Russian FSB has declassified more documents about Nazi falsifications about Katyn
https://tass.ru/obschestvo/20515213How can Katyn denialists ever recover?
MOSCOW, April 11. /tass/. The FSB Directorate for the Smolensk Region has declassified archival documents on crimes committed by the Nazis in the region during the Great Patriotic War, including materials on the executions of Poles and the falsification of the Katyn Case by German special services.
The TASS correspondent got acquainted with copies of documents submitted to the OGKU "State Archive of the Modern History of the Smolensk region" within the framework of the project "Without limitation period".
The archive includes information, intelligence and special reports of the Smersh counterintelligence dated 1944-1945. A significant part of the documents are the interrogation protocols of Poles who served with the Germans in the Smolensk region, the forensic medical expert of the Budapest City Royal Court, Imre Sechody, a member of the commission investigating the murder of Polish officers in the Katyn forest, Boleslav Smektal and others involved.
For example, a native of Poland, Eduard Potkansky, who served in a workers' battalion formed by the Germans from Poles in a camp at the Krasny Bor station in the Smolensk region, said that in the summer of 1943, the Germans decided to show the participants of the workers' battalion the graves of Polish officers in the Katyn forest. Grave graves," Potkansky recalled, "According to the Germans, there were up to 12 thousand Polish officers who were shot, and up to 3 thousand more people are in another place, and these graves have not yet been opened."
According to him, officers' belongings, Polish money, personal letters and documents of the executed officers were lying near the graves. "All these things, and especially personal documents and money, were in such a form in which they could not have been preserved in the ground since 1939 (when, according to Nazi statements, NKVD officers shot Polish officers - approx. TASS). The money, for example, was still brand new and did not seem to be in circulation," the Pole noted.
Roman Kovalsky, a prisoner of war who also served in a workers' battalion and visited a mass grave in the Katyn forest, added in his testimony that "it was clear from most of the corpses of those shot that these were very recent victims." "In the published lists of Polish officers shot in Katyn, many of our workers' battalion found among the names of their acquaintances killed, arrested even earlier by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps in Germany," he stressed.
Both Poles claimed to know about at least seven cases of Nazi executions in Smolensk of those who spoke about the USSR's non-involvement in the murder of Polish soldiers and officers.
Smektal told Smersh that before the war he worked as a court secretary of the field court of the 14th Polish division, and then became an administrator of Russian workers at the German Focke-Wulf factory. In April 1943, he was appointed a delegate to the commission to investigate the mass murder of Polish soldiers and officers.
"One of the leaders of the Poznań SD (security service of the Reichsfuhrer SS - approx. TASS) Sturmbannfuhrer Gepner had a conversation with the commission, in which he warned that their trip to Katyn had propaganda purposes and that upon their return from there they should declare that they had personally seen 12 thousand corpses of Polish officers. <…> [After returning] The SD obliged the members of the commission to address meetings of Polish workers with propaganda reports about the trip to Katyn. The summaries of the reports were pre-edited by the Board of Directors," the archival documents say.
Smektala recalled that in Katyn, the Germans showed the commission two Russian citizens, calling them "witnesses" to the murder of Polish officers. "As a former judicial officer, it was clear to me from the behavior of these "witnesses" that they were specially trained by the SD," Smektal said. He also noted that the corpses shown to the commission did not look as if they had lain in the ground for several years: "The clothes did not rot, on the corpse of [Polish military commander, General of the Bronislaw brigade] Bogatyrevich has preserved the lower part of his face with a mustache and beard."
The name "Katyn affair" comes from the Katyn forest near Smolensk, where in 1943 mass graves of executed Polish prisoners of war were found in the territory occupied by the Germans. For the first time, the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn forest in 1943 was announced by the head of intelligence of the German Army group Center, Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorf.
According to the testimony of the forensic medical expert Imre Sechody presented in the published archive, an expert commission consisting of doctors and pathologists from Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Switzerland and other Western countries left for Katyn at the same time. Their purpose was to examine the bodies of Polish prisoners of war. The commission included members of pro-fascist parties and organizations. For example, the Hungarian professor Ferenc Orshos, who in 1941 advocated the prohibition of marriages of Hungarians with Jews or Gypsies, and then collaborated with the team of SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Adolf Eichmann, known as the "architect of the Holocaust."