Did the Soviets forge Katyn documents? Yes

[fireofice]

The Nuremberg trial judgement was absolutely of a general nature with some specifics thrown in here and there. They obviously did not list every specific crime. Pointing to a long judgement does not demonstrate otherwise. And even when specifics were gone into, that's not them saying the Nazis were innocent of everything else. Now I do think they didn't mention Katyn partly because of the controversy that surrounded it, that definitely played some role. But they also didn't find them not guilty either.

From the Axis Forum:

Are you seriously saying that if the judgement did not explicitly mention a particular warcrime that was listed in the indictment, then none of the defendants was found guilty of that particular warcrime?

As I have pointed out, there were several warcrimes listed individually in the the part of the indictment relating to crimes against POWs that were not mentioned in the part of the judgement relating to those crimes.

If your argument is correct, then the defendants were not found guilty of the other warcrimes listed in the indictment that were not mentioned in the judgement.

Do you claim that the defendants were found not guilty of exterminating POWs at Orel by starvation, shooting, exposure, and poisoning? It is not mentioned in the judgement.

Do you claim that the defendants were found not guilty of torturing and murdering tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war at the "Gross Lazaret" at Slavuta? That place is not mentioned in the judgement.

Do you claim that the defendants were found not guilty of handing over to the Vichy Government for "proceedings" Frenchmen captured fighting with the Soviet Army? It is not mentioned in the judgement.

Do you claim that the defendants were found not guilty of the shooting of prisoners of war in Yugoslavia ordered by the German Command and the occupying authorities in the person of the chief officials of the Police, the SS troops (Police Lieutenant General Rosener) and the Divisional Group Command (General Kubler and others) in the period 1941-43? It is not mentioned in the judgement.

If you believe that the general finding of guilt against many of the defendants for warcrimes committed against POWs covered the above specific instances of such warcrimes listed in the indictment that were not mentioned in the judgement, then there is no logical reason for believing that it did not also cover the killings of Polish POWs at Katyn, which was listed in the indictment but also not mentioned in the judgement.

If the judgement had listed all the specific instances of warcrimes against POWs that were listed in the indictment, and had omitted only the reference to Katyn, then there might be a reasonable case for the claim that it was the intention of the court to acquit all the German defendants of that particular charge.

But that was not the case; the only instance listed in the indictment that was also mentioned in the judgement was the killing of the POPWs who had escaped from Sagan.

The only reasonable conclusion is that the judges intended their finding of guilt in relation to warcrimes against POWs to cover all the instances listed in the indictment, including the killing of the Polish POWs at Katyn.

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic ... 80#p403480

[Archie]

The documents I had in mind were German government documents, the kind that exist in copious quantity - and which revisionists think are in large part faked - for mass shooting events like Babi Yar.

This is classic bombsaway.

BA: There were no documents forged at Katyn.
Me: There were multiple forged documents.
BA: Those don't count because those documents do not fit additional post hoc criteria I made up just now to avoid ever admitting to being wrong.

We are again seeing the stubbornness I remarked on in another recent thread.

What I have noticed with bombs is that he will start some line of argument with some erroneous notion. A little ways in, he realizes it's wrong, but rather than just abandoning the argument he will always double-down but by modifying his argument and trying to save it, usually by added arbitrary qualifications, or making a tortured analogy/"evidence ratio" comparison with other historical events. With his Katyn argument, he was trying to argue that because the Soviets didn't forge documents or elicit false testimonies at Katyn that their Holocaust-related reports could not be false. But that was a false premise, so the argument just doesn't work.

We might refer to these arguments bombs is so fond of as arguments of historiographical analogy or comparison. For example, he might say that Katyn is a smaller scale than the Holocaust, ergo ... the Holocaust can't be false. He tries to disguise it, but that's basically all he's saying and I think it's pretty clearly incorrect. At best you could suggest a heuristic that most major historical events probably aren't hoaxes which I would agree with. But we cannot preclude at the outset the possibility that any "major" might be false.

There are times when it is useful to cite historical examples or precedents in a historical argument. For instance, if your argument relies on a premise or principle, prior examples that demonstrate this principle can be used to support that premise. For example, if a revisionist is arguing that the Hoess confession is false, it may be useful to cite some examples establishing the phenomenon of false confession. Usually this is not a main argument. It is more for context. Such examples can used to establish the possibility of false confession. But beyond that preliminary stage, examples of other events are not likely to settle anything.

See here for some actual useful case studies.
https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=874

In the case of Katyn, the main relevance to the H debate is that it utterly demolishes Soviet credibility, and the H history depends on Soviet and Communist sources and investigations to prove the Holocaust. Their Katyn investigation was an outright hoax, and their Majdanek and Sachsenhausen reports are also quite bad, even from an orthodox perspective. To any reasonable person, this should tell us that Soviet claims are generally unreliable and should be automatically suspect, including their investigations of Auschwitz and Treblinka. To bombsaway, the Soviet Katyn hoax is evidence for the Holocaust. Because reasons.

[Stubble]

The US helped...

Newly released army documents prove that two American POWs wrote encoded messages to Army intelligence after their 1943 visit to Katyn, pointing to Soviet guilt for the 1940 massacre

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article- ... icers.html

[bombsaway]

The documents I had in mind were German government documents, the kind that exist in copious quantity - and which revisionists think are in large part faked - for mass shooting events like Babi Yar.

This is classic bombsaway.

BA: There were no documents forged at Katyn.
Me: There were multiple forged documents.
BA: Those don't count because those documents do not fit additional post hoc criteria I made up just now to avoid ever admitting to being wrong.

Well I think government documents by the alleged perpetrators describing or stating actions is just much much stronger evidence. Orders of magnitude stronger. You don't agree?

[bombsaway]

The Nuremberg trial judgement was absolutely of a general nature with some specifics thrown in here and there. They obviously did not list every specific crime. Pointing to a long judgement does not demonstrate otherwise. And even when specifics were gone into, that's not them saying the Nazis were innocent of everything else. Now I do think they didn't mention Katyn partly because of the controversy that surrounded it, that definitely played some role. But they also didn't find them not guilty either.

They spent 2 full days on the subject in the main trial, with the defense and prosecution being able to call witness. So it was given plenty of attention.

the judgement definitely gets into specifics.

According to AI - for the POW section which I thought most relevant to Katyn killings there is mention of:

the October 18, 1942 Commando Order and Keitel's role in circulating it;

an American mission of about 12–15 uniformed men captured in the Balkans and shot at Mauthausen;

the March 1944 “Bullet Decree” concerning recaptured POWs;

the 50 RAF officers murdered after the escape from Stalag Luft III at Sagan;

the July 17, 1941 Gestapo order for selecting and killing Soviet POWs;

executions of Soviet POWs at Gross Rosen on October 22, 1941;

an actual July 20, 1942 order prescribing exactly how Soviet POWs were to be branded;

bacteriological experiments on Soviet POWs beginning in July 1943.

I think this is a fair statement about the IMT judgement

“The Nuremberg judgment was deliberately selective and general, so its failure to mention Katyn cannot be treated as a formal acquittal. But neither can the general Count III convictions be treated as a finding that Katyn was proved. The Tribunal simply made no finding on Katyn, very likely because the allegation had become highly controversial.”

[Eye of Zyclone]

The US helped...

Newly released army documents prove that two American POWs wrote encoded messages to Army intelligence after their 1943 visit to Katyn, pointing to Soviet guilt for the 1940 massacre

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article- ... icers.html

Declassified documents prove U.S. DID help cover up 1940 Katyn massacre
where Soviets slaughtered 22,000 Polish officers

• Newly released army documents prove that two American POWs wrote encoded messages to Army intelligence after their 1943 visit to Katyn, pointing to Soviet guilt for the 1940 massacre

• Government cover up began during WWII when the U.S. needed the Soviets to defeat Germany and Japan

• After decades of denial, Soviets confessed to the massacre in 1990

Newly declassified U.S. army documents reveal that two American POWs sent secret coded messages to Army intelligence after their 1943 visit to Katyn, pointing to Soviet guilt for the 1940 massacre.

After witnessing rows of corpses in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, the American POWs told Washington they believed the Nazi claims that Soviets had carried out the killings of 22,000 Polish officers.

The documents shed further light on decades of suppression of Soviet guilt within the U.S. government which began during WWII when the blame for the massacre was being pointed at Nazi Germany. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan.

The evidence is among about 1,000 pages of newly declassified documents that the United States National Archives is releasing Monday and putting online.

Documents released Monday lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.

It's an important revelation because it shows the Roosevelt administration was getting information early on from credible U.S. sources of Soviet guilt — yet still ignored it for the sake of the alliance with Stalin.

One shows a head of Army intelligence, Gen. Clayton Bissell, confirming that some months after the 1943 visit to Katyn by the U.S. officers, a coded request by MIS-X, a unit of military intelligence, was sent to Van Vliet requesting him 'to state his opinion of Katyn.' Bissell's note said that 'it is also understood Col. Van Vliet & Capt. Stewart replied.'

MIS-X was devoted to helping POWs held behind German lines escape; it also used the prisoners to gather intelligence.

A statement from Stewart dated 1950 confirms he received and sent coded messages to Washington during the war, including one on Katyn: 'Content of my report was aprx (approximately): German claims regarding Katyn substantially correct in opinion of Van Vliet and myself.'

The newly uncovered documents also show Stewart was ordered in 1950 — soon before the Congressional committee began its work — never to speak about a secret message on Katyn.

Another Katyn expert aware of the documents, Allen Paul, author of 'Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Triumph of Truth,' said the find is 'potentially explosive.' He said the material does not appear in the record of the Congressional hearings in 1951-52, and appears to have also been suppressed.

The historical record carries other evidence Roosevelt knew in 1943 of Soviet guilt. One of the most important messages that landed on FDR's desk was an extensive and detailed report British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent him. Written by the British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile in London, Owen O'Malley, it pointed to Soviet guilt at Katyn.

Also explains why the most Jew-loving statesmen ever seen (i.e. Churchill and Roosevelt), the Vatican (which had the best intelligence network in Catholic Poland), the Red Cross and the non-Zionist Jewish leaders themselves acted the way they did during the war. Shows why Churchill and Roosevelt didn't bomb the nonexistent Nazi murder factories at Auschwitz and other places during the war (despite the fact that they bombed the Auschwitz synthetic oil refinery and rubber plant several times) as noisily requested by Zionist propagandists of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (Bergson Group) and why they didn't even open the gates of Palestine as theatrically requested by Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann in 1943. They knew that the Holohoax was just atrocity propaganda. Actions speak louder than words...








(Oswiecim = Auschwitz)

[Stubble]

EoZ, how are you always so well armed Sir? You always have the big guns at your disposal. Your clippings are always perfect and pertinent, your perspective revealing and your presentation perfect. It's kind of amazing.

[Eye of Zyclone]

EoZ, how are you always so well armed Sir? You always have the big guns at your disposal. Your clippings are always perfect and pertinent, your perspective revealing and your presentation perfect. It's kind of amazing.

Thank you, Stub. That's probably because I have done my homework thoroughly, as the idiom goes, and I'm pretty good at summarizing things. Many of my clippings are original material from my own research. Glad you like it. Appreciation much appreciated.

[Archie]

Patrick left me two replies on X. Let's see what he says.





And ... he's doubling-down. I'm a bit disappointed in him, in strange way. I was hoping we might find a sparring partner who might want to engage with us with a modicum of sincere intellectual curiosity. This confirms for me that he has no interest in any honest investigation of these topics. He's approaching this in a purely propagandistic/apologetic mode. If he needed to argue the other side of this, he would never bend over backwards like this to defend this point in such a desperate and ridiculous fashion.

He makes a big deal about the distinction between German and non-German documents. (I'll discuss that more later in the post). I don't know if Patrick was aware of the forgeries or not, but imo if he was aware of them and was using this talking point on X without informing people of the Polish forgeries, that to me is extremely dishonest because his comments would lead people to think there was no forgery of Katyn documents and the strength of the argument relies on the audience being ignorant of crucial information. If that information is withheld deliberately, that's dishonest. If he had said "they only forged Polish documents, not German ones!" that obviously would have been an ineffective talking point. The "no forged (German) documents" talking point is only effective to the extent that it misleads people into believing there was no forgery of documents at all.

I would be willing to give Patrick the benefit of the doubt here and assume he was not aware of these forgeries. If he had never read USSR-54 carefully, it's something that could easily be missed. But I do not think there is any way of interpretating his replies here as anything other than deliberate prevarication and spin doctoring.

In his reply, he attempts to introduce levels of forgery to avoid admitting he was wrong. He says the documents were "barely forged." Er ... and what does "barely forged" mean? The correct term is simply "forged."

Similarly, he tries to minimize the Kuczinska "sunbeam" postcard, saying that this was merely "falsely attributed" and "arguably wasn't even forged," i.e., he seems to want to assume the postcard was "real," they just lied about it being recovered from one of the Katyn victims. As if that's much of a defense.

Regarding the Menshagin notebook, he says that this merely had an "altered Katyn-related entry." And what's the common word in English for fraudulently "altered" documents, Patrick?

There's a 1993 report on Katyn in Russian that was published under the following title: Заключение комиссии экспертов ГВП

This is what they say on page 31 regarding the Kuczinska/Kuchinsky postcard.

Большинство документов (квитанции о приеме золотых вещей и денег, почтовые отправления из Польши с позднейшими датами — сентября 1940 г., бумажная иконка с датой «апрель 1941 г.») не могут служить доказательствами. Неотправленная почтовая открытка ротмистра С. Кучинского с датой 20 июня 1941 г. — явная подделка. Станислав Кучинский не содержался в Козельском лагере, а из Старобельского лагеря выбыл в декабре 1939 г.

https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D ... 3)2.pdf/31

Machine translation

Most of the documents (receipts for gold items and money, postal items from Poland bearing later dates—September 1940, a paper icon dated "April 1941") cannot serve as evidence. An unsent postcard from Rittmeister S. Kuchinsky dated June 20, 1941, is an obvious forgery. Stanislav Kuchinsky was not held at the Kozelsk camp, and he had left the Starobelsk camp in December 1939.

They call it an "obvious forgery."

Patrick's very strict definition of forgery seems to be
1) it must be produced completely from scratch
2) it must purport to be from a German government office
3) it must be complicated

This is of course nonsense. Any deliberate falsification of a document with intent to deceive is forgery. If a document is totally unmodified but the provenance, authorship, or dating are falsified, that could perhaps be distinguished as planted or falsified evidence rather than forgery per se, but it either way it would amount to deliberate falsification of evidence.

Forging German vs Polish or other non-German Documents

First of all, we should recall the context of the Soviet Katyn investigation. The Katyn report (USSR-54) was originally published on January 24, 1944 and the newspaper accounts of the tour are dated a few days after that. That's pretty early. Most German documents were captured later than that. What could they have credibly claimed to have discovered in Smolensk in January 1944? Oh, we found an execution order signed by Hitler? Come on. Not believable.

I would argue further that the falsified Menshagin notebook would fit a broad definition of "German" document in that Menshagin, although not ethnically German, was a German collaborator and was part of the German administrative apparatus.

Could the Soviets have claimed to have discovered more (fake) "German" documents in 1945-1946? I guess. They didn't (as far as I know). Is that strange? Not really. They'd already published their investigation. They submitted the same one at Nuremberg.

In my mind, the key point in all this is the question of Soviet credibility and the quality of their investigations. If they forged Polish documents, that shows a willingness to deceive and to go to great lengths to do it. Perjured testimony, fake documents, false forensics. This whole "but why didn't they fake it harder" argument I find totally baffling.

Another point Patrick (and bombsaway) seem to be making is that forging an official government document would be a task of nearly impossible complexity, far more complex than something like "my little sunbeam." I would disagree. Again, they seem to envisioning a scenario in which documents are fabricated from scratch and they fail to consider the possibility of alteration or modification which would be quite easy. Some likely forgeries like the Just document on gas vans for example appear to be modeled on real documents with some reworking. That's hardly genius level forgery. Genius level forgery is someone like Mark Hofmann who was able to fool the FBI into authenticating purported 19th century documents. What's even funnier about this argument is that the NKVD and their successor organization the KGB were notorious forgers, including sophisticated ones (and that goes for the CIA as well, to be fair). The idea that this would be beyond their technical ability is laughable, especially considering that the original documents are rarely if ever available for inspection.

There is an additional, implicit assumption in this argument as well, and that's the idea that there are "thousands" of documents proving the holocaust that would have to be forgeries if the Holocaust were false. This is of course nonsense. The number of documents explicitly referencing gas chambers etc are few and far between. And many could be classified as being out-of-context, mistranslations, they could be "authentic" but not true, etc.

[bombsaway]

Archie, of the German 20 documents here, how many are forgeries?

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... 29-30.html

I think you probably have to call a huge portion of the shooting documents faked, because of the nuh mass graves thing. There are thousands of shooting documents though. I think revisionists don't understand how much is really out there.

[Archie]

Archie, of the German 20 documents here, how many are forgeries?

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... 29-30.html

I think you probably have to call a huge portion of the shooting documents faked, because of the nuh mass graves thing. There are thousands of shooting documents though. I think revisionists don't understand how much is really out there.

Discussed here:
viewtopic.php?t=342

Please continue your derail there, tia.