Katyn massacre

The Katyn massacre (not to be confused with the Khatyn massacre) refers to the mass executions of thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians in Eastern Europe which, while in reality were perpetrated by Nazi Germany sometime between 1941 and 1943, have been misattributed to the Soviet Union by anti-communist governments and historians, who claim that the massacres were carried out by the Soviet NKVD in 1940. The massacres are collectively named after the Katyn forest near Smolensk as the graves were first discovered there. However, many of the victims of the so-called "Katyn" massacre were actually murdered and buried in the Kharkiv and Tver Oblasts.

On 13 April 1943, German authorities announced that they had found thousands of bodies of Polish POWs near Katyn, which at the time was under German occupation. In an official report in the summer/autumn of 1943, Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn, the Germans claimed the Soviets had shot the Poles. The Polish government-in-exile in London accepted the German account and held the Soviets to be responsible. The Soviet government responded with their own report in 1944 by the Burdenko Commission which blamed the Germans.

Although the Soviet government under Mikhail Gorbachev and later the Russian government under Vladimir Putin both acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the massacre, there is substantial material evidence that the massacre was perpetrated by Nazi Germany.

In 2012, the Polish government announced that no more excavations could take place at the sites of the massacres after the badges of two purported victims of Katyn were found at the site of a different massacre near Volodymyr, Ukraine, that one attributed to the Nazis and committed no earlier than 1941.

Evidence of Nazi involvement

Map of the German invasion of the USSR, showing how in 1941, when the killings took place, Nazi Germany had already captured regions past the Katyn forest.

Nazi Germany conquered Poland in 1939 and committed many massacres that looked very similar in nature to Katyn's in the following years. It was their modus operandi across Europe to shoot civilians (including children) from the back in front of a mass grave, both of which were unheard of from the Soviet Union. In 1943, as the Nazis were being pushed back from the USSR by the Red Army, they discovered the site and alerted the public. In Joseph Goebbels' diaries from May 1943, he mentions that German munitions were found lodged in the bodies, but was initially unaware of German involvement. Goebbels launched an extensive campaign to publicize the massacre and attribute it to the Soviets. He likely hoped to drive a wedge between the Allied forces to buy some time from an imminent defeat. The Nazis claimed that the massacre had been committed in 1940, which would have been before their arrival, but most of the bullets found inside the graves were of German manufacture produced no earlier than 1941.

Additionally, it was impossible for the USSR to use German ammunition with their weapons. The Red Army used the 7.62mm calibre while the SS and Wehrmacht used the 7.92mm calibre; thus the bullets would not be compatible with typical Red Army weapons that could chamber up to 7.82mm calibre.^{[citation needed]} For that contradiction to happen, the Red Army would have first needed access to German weapons and ammunition and, secondly, a reason to use them. The USSR had no reason to use German weapons and ammunition to pin the massacre on the Nazis as they were not the ones who publicized the massacre. Moreover, since Yeltsin later provided documents "signed" by Stalin and Beria to prove Soviet responsibility, the Red Army could not have had any intention of denying their involvement in the massacre, making it very unlikely that they would have opted to use German weapons for this execution specifically.

Historical revisionism against the Soviets

After Germany "discovered" the site in 1943 and attributed it to the Soviets, the story was picked up by bourgeois states that fed it to their war-time media. In 1990, the dying Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev and soon Boris Yeltsin "admitted" that the Soviets were responsible for the massacre and, after the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union, under the Yeltsin government, produced documents signed by Stalin and Beria that "proved" Soviet responsibility.

Anti-communist historians claim that the NKVD, for example, moved prisoners of war from the Kozel‘sk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov POW camps to various sites, including Katyn, to be executed. The language about execution however was forged by historians Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski. The original documents, procured by Grover Furr who translated them himself, refer to prisoner transport and never mention executions.

The power of attributing the massacre to the Soviets in bourgeois history lies in anti-communist arguments that equate the USSR (and thus communism) to Nazi Germany. This narrative also erases a war crime potentially committed by the Nazis – unsurprising once one learns the extent to which Nazi officers were rehabilitated, their past erased, to be used in the United States and German governments, as well as NATO. There is one simple question to ask, what would the Soviets gain from this massacre? Only bourgeois historians, feeding on their anti-communist delusions about Stalin, would find an answer: that the Soviets wanted to keep control of Poland and thus executed subversive elements. Principled Marxist-Leninists that have studied the Soviet Union themselves however know these delusions to be lies, and so this massacre would be the only one the USSR had ever committed; it would be completely out of place and was far more in line with the modus operandi of Nazi Germany. That is not to say however that the USSR did not have the death penalty and did not execute Nazi collaborators during war time.

Ties to Holocaust denial

One tactic that neo-Nazis use to diminish the scale of or outright deny Nazi atrocities is to blame them on the Allies. The Katyn massacre is a perfect example of this. Not only was the massacre itself carried out by the Nazis and then blamed on the Soviets, but many of them like to argue that since the Germans were supposedly framed for Katyn, there is a precedent of Allied leaders blaming their own atrocities on the Nazis, and that other Nazi atrocities (e.g. the extermination of six million Jews) may have also been carried out by the Allies or were the consequence of Allied actions during World War II.

In the 1974 pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last, the British Holocaust denier Richard Verrall argues that the findings of the Nuremberg trials were illegitimate since, among other things, the judges and prosecutors (many of whom were Soviet) "assumed guilt from the outset". He presents the "fact" that the chief Soviet prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, was "attempting to blame the Katyn massacre on the Germans" as "evidence" for this claim. The publisher of Verrall's pamphlet, the much more infamous Ernst Zündel, also mentioned Katyn in some of his advertisements.