Posted on 08/06/2004 1:30:01 PM PDT by Lukasz
WARSAW - Russian prosecutors will not press criminal charges in connection with the 1940 Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia by the Soviet NKVD secret police in Russia's western Katyn forest, Polish PAP news agency reported Wednesday.
After 64 years, Russian justice officials regard the statute of limitations on the crime as having expired. Polish authorities, however, see the massacre as a crime against humanity and therefore not subject to any limits.
Russian authorities agree to release records of the investigation, Professor Leon Kieres, the head of Poland's Institute for National Remembrance War (IPN) crimes authority, told PAP.
Kieres and the IPN's chief war crimes prosecutor Witold Kulesza were in Moscow Wednesday for consultations with Russian military prosecutors investigating the Second World War Katyn crime.
Poland may begin its own criminal probe into Katyn after Russian prosecutors end theirs later this year, Kieres said.
Russian investigators have failed to specify how many Katyn suspects are still alive, he noted.
On Thursday the IPN officials are expected to meet with Russian presidential aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky to discuss efforts to petition Ukraine for the release of records detailing 1939-40 NKVD killings of ethnic Poles in territories now belonging to Ukraine.
On orders of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, NKVD agents shot dead 22,000 Polish prisoners of war including officers, doctors, professors and clergymen in Katyn, western Russian, and Charkov, northeastern Ukraine.
Under communism, Moscow blamed the Katyn crime on Nazi Germany.
The fact is it was the German Army that found the results of Katyn and begged for an investigation by the Red Cross. Stalin was the one that refused to allow such a thing.
It's always been my feeling that when it comes to crimes against humanity, the Evil Empire made the Third Reich look like pikers.
It's amazing that so few people really seem aware that Stalin was as bad as, if not worse than, Hitler. There are mass graves all over Russia, Poland, and Belarus that he is responsible for. May Stalin rot in hell for all eternity.
LQ
Thanks for posting news on this. My wife's Polish grandfather may be among those buried at Katyn, although they are not sure what happened to him after the Russians took him in 1939.
What a horrible injustice.
Specifically, Putin is covering for Stalin.
Very interesting.
In this level is hard to say „worse”, but in fact Stalin had much more victims, I heard that estimate at 50 millions and Hitler’s „only” 25 millions. Hitler almost didn’t murdered any Germans but Stalin’s victims were mostly Russians…
The worse thing is that polish side know the NAMES of many peoples responsible for that massacre, they are still alive and the Poles cannot do anything.
This comes as no surprise. If they haven't prosecuted anyone in over sixty years for this, they never will.
Amen. Stalin was pure evil. One of my favorite images from WWII is the video footage of German soldiers defacing and destroying the statues and posters of Stalin.
PING
ATROCITY AT GRUBEN
German women living in the Polish town of Gruben were subjected to one of the worst atrocities ever committed on Polish soil. During the occupation the SS had murdered around 500 Polish prisoners and buried them in a meadow near Lamsdorf (now Lambinowice). In an act of revenge, the deputy mayor (Czeslaw) who was Jewish, ordered all the German women of nearby Gruben to dig the bodies up. This the women were forced to do but started to suffer sickness and nausea as the badly decomposed bodies were brought up. Laid out in rows, the women were ordered to 'Lie down beside them!' 'Hug them!' 'Kiss them!' and with their weapons the perpetrators forced the backs of the women's heads deep into the slime of the dead Polish faces. Spitting, retching and vomiting, and smelling like nothing on earth, the poor women were marched back to Lamsdorf. As most of the corpses had typhus, sixty-four of the Gruben women soon died. In the interment camp at Lamsdorf a total of 8,064 German civilians were being held there prior to being transported back to Germany. Of the 8,064 internees, 6,488 (including 628 children) died of physical maltreatment, typhus and other diseases. As one German survivor said 'The methods used by the Nazis at Auschwitz were horrible, but the methods of the Poles were even more horrible'.
Or maybe this?
THE RADZILOW MASSACRE (July 7, 1941)
In 1941, in the impoverished village of Radzilow in eastern Poland, lived some 800 Jews, about half the towns population. When the German army occupied the village the non-Jewish citizens welcomed them with open arms and displaying a large sign which read 'Long live the German army which liberated us from the horrible grip of the Jewish community'. When the soldiers moved on, persecution of the Jews of Radzilow immediately followed. Ordered to bring out all holy books and Torahs from the synagogue, the Jews could do nothing else but obey. Once the pile of books was high enough, kerosene was poured over them and set alight. While the pile was burning, the defenceless Jews were forced to sing and dance around it while being jeered, taunted, stabbed with pointed stakes and beaten mercilessly until they they fell bloodied and unconscious. Those still alive were then locked in a barn in Piekno Street and burned or shot to death. There were only eight surviving Jews of this massacre. Catholic Polish citizens of Radzilow were the main tormentors in this bestial atrocity.
THE JEDWABNE MASSACRE (July 10, 1941)
The 200 year old farming village in the Bialystock region of northeastern Poland, nine miles south of Radzilow, was the scene of one of the most horrendous massacre of Jews just days after the Nazi troops supplanted the previous Soviet occupiers. Approximately 1,600 Jewish residents were herded into the town's square where they were stoned, beaten and mutilated with clubs and axes. Those left alive were then marched outside the village to a large barn where they were locked inside and the barn set alight burning to death all those inside. Only seven of Jedwabne's Jews survived. A stone monument erected by communist officials in the village has a plaque which reads '' Site of a massacre of Jews. Gestapo and Nazi soldiers burned 1,600 people''. The wording on the plaque belies the awful truth, the Jews were murdered not by the the Nazis, but by their fellow Poles. About forty non-Jewish citizens of Jedwabne turned on their Jewish neighbours in a fit of anger over their collaboration with the Soviet occupiers during 1939 and 1941. (In 1989, a new plaque was placed on the monument, it now reads "In memory of the Jews of Jedwabne and surrounding areas, men, women and children, fellow-dwellers of this land, murdered and burned alive at this site on 10 July, 1941) Strangely, no mention is made of the perpetrators!
Similar revenge killings took place in many other parts of Poland at this time. In the town of Vasosz, 1,185 Jews were put to death. In Stawiski, the same brutality was meted out to its Jews by their non-Jewish neighbours.
Is this genocide? Who is prosecuted? Sure some 70 year old still alive who take part in the lettings of blood here. In this one real brotherly love for survivors.
ATROCITY AT KIELCE
(JULY 4, 1946) In the later part of 1945, tens of thousands of Jewish concentration camp survivors made their way back to their homeland, Poland. Many found their former homes destroyed or inhabited by Polish or German families who had moved in after the previous owners were arrested. Their possessions were either sold, confiscated or lost. These survivors were shocked by the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated against them by their former neighbours. In their first year of freedom over 1,000 survivors had been murdered. In Kielce, an industrial city where during the war 27,000 Jews were deported to the Treblinka death camp and murdered, a group of 150 returned Jews were living in the Jewish Community building at No 7, Planty Street. Ordered to leave the building by the police they were set upon by a local mob of onlookers and 41 of them were killed (39 Jews and 2 Gentiles) As a result of these killings over 5,000 survivors made their way back to the Displaced Persons camps in the Allied occupation zones of Germany. There, stateless and penniless, they waited for the opportunity to emigrate. Their dream of a Jewish state in Palestine prompted thousands to sail in obsolete sailing vessels toward the land of their dreams, only to be confronted by British patrol vessels and turned back towards the island of Cyprus to again be incarcerated in a new type of camp, the Interment Camp. They were finally allowed entry into Palestine in 1948 after Israel became independent. By 1949, some 92,000 survivors had emigrated to the USA, Canada, South America and Australia, all eager to get as far away from Europe as possible.
Read my post, Poles have many grave yards in their past too...yet no prosecutions or anything...I love Western double standards...so refreshingly clear.
I think 200 years of Mongol rule bred a gene into Russian people that desensitized them to slaughter and genocide, allowing it to happen and making it easy to disregard it.
Tell that to the 20 million Ukrainians Stalin starved.
The difference between Poland and the Nazis and Communists were that the acts by Poles were isolated incidents perpetrated by a few bad apples whereas the Nazi and Soviet atrocities were sanctioned by the government.
I see that you used double mentality, when Jews are maltreated then they are Jews and if they are oppressors then they are no Jews but Poles, maybe you should clarify this case. We have our problems solved, our president apologized Israel/Jews, NOT like RUSSIA. Also peoples who did it were punished long time ago, NOT like in RUSSIA. But this cases it is initiative of few local peoples and in Russia it is NKVD and planned action, big national organization. Only blind man cannot see the difference. I remind you that not Poland but Soviet Union was responsible for expelled Germans, and with BIG advantage SOVIETS and not Poles did it. As for Kielce case, again SOVIETS set there Polish settlers expelled from eastern Poland. Your source is also doubtful as for precision. I repeat that RUSSIA did NOTHING to punish own criminals!
And Poland ISN'T Western as well as isn’t Eastern!
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