Posted on 02/06/2008 11:41:02 AM PST by lizol
Nazis responsible for Katyn massacre, says Russian daily
04.02.2008 19:20
The Russian Nezavisimaya Gazieta daily claims that the Soviet NKVD secret police could not possibly have been responsible for the mass murder of over 20,000 Polish officers in 1940.
The author of the article Aleksandr Shirokorad claims that the massacre could not have possibly been the doing of the NKVD since the ropes used for tying the victims' wrists and bullets were not those used by the NKVD.
He also claims that the shooting technique used was apparently alien to the NKVD.
Contrary to most historians opinions, the murders, claims Shirokorad, must have been the work of the Nazis.
There has already been a series of four articles in the Russian press questioning the truth about Katyn events recently, the last one being inspired by the Oscar nomination for Andrzej Wajda's film Katyn.
Moscow has refused to define the murders in Russia and Ukraine as ‘genocide’ or regard them as war crimes.
“It wasn’t a genocide. It was a war crime. The goal wasn’t to eradicate the Poles as a people — that would have been genocide. The goal was to eliminate military officers, the intelligentsia, all the obvious candidates to lead Poland”
OK, then how would you call what Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia - killing more than 2 millions of their compatriots within 3 years.
Cambodians were killing other Cambodians. Then was that an act of genocide, or not?
If not - what was that?
Are you saying that the group of officers murdered by the Soviets in Katyn contained most of Poland's inteligencia? They were definitely an important part of it, but to say they were most of it is a bit insulting to the Polish nation.
Anyway how clever of those Nazis, first they sneak 14,000 polish prisoners out of soviet prisoner of war camps then kill and bury them on land controlled at the time by soviet forces, amazing! On land I might add that was the site of a KGB “rest house”.
Oh yes, I agree, the Russian claims are absurd. Of course the Soviets did it. No honest person would deny that. Why Putin would go to such lengths to deny obvious reality is really beyond me. I mean, seriously, what does he think this denial will accomplish? All it does is make him look stupid.
I don't think it would be technically correct to classify it as a genocide. To make it a genocide there would have to be an attempt to completely wipe out some defineable ethnic or tribal group. I don't believe that was what was going on.
Stalin's manufactured famines in the Ukraine could be fairly classified as genocides, however.
If not - what was that?
Mass murder. Not all mass murders are genocides. That doesn't make them any better, though. IMHO, all willful mass killings of the innocent are equally bad; the only objective manner of comparison ought to be in the number murdered.
I don't buy the argument that some forms of willful killing of the innocent are morally worse than others. There is no moral distrinction, in my book, between someone who kills 3 million because he's trying to wipe out some ethnic group or he because they refuse to accept his ideology. Both are equally bad.
This is interesting. All this re-writing of history seems to be going on in other places as well ;o) I still say the 1965 edition of World Book Encyclopedia is a good investment. ;o)
I'd call it mass murder on an epic scale, and a crime against humanity -- a charge recognized in international law since Nuremberg.
Genocide has a specific definition -- the attempt to completely wipe out an identifiable group, either in a specific area or worldwide. "Identifiable group" can mean an ethnicity, a culture, a religion, or even a language; I'd be inclined to define it broadly.
I am not aware that the Cambodians slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge belonged to an identifiable group other than suspected political opponents. Please note that this is a narrow semantic point -- I do not mean to diminish the magnitude of the crime.
I wouldn't cal it a genocide in itself, but if the goal was to take out the leadership and then "ethnically cleanse" Poland, it might have been preparation for one.
My understanding -- and it's been a while since I've read much about it -- is that the Soviets' intention was to clear their most credible opponents out of the way to make it easier to install a puppet government they had in waiting. That would fit the pattern of the rest of Eastern Europe, North Korea and Southeast Asia when the Japanese left, and in various former colonies around the world. They had trained cadres ready to move into any power vacuum.
The Germans filled plenty of mass graves in Russia. Most of them would probably have been killed if they were captured by the Germans too. That being said, it was Stalin who was responsible, not the Germans.
Legal definition of genocide from the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is:
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Since Soviets goal was to eliminate the Polish officers corps and the intelligentsia, I think it does qualify as a genocide.
I know this because there were members of my family in the intelligencia in Poland in the 1940s. Those who stood up to the Soviets were persecuted, those who stayed out of politics weren't.
As to the officer corps, it does not constitute an ethnic, racial, or religious group. So yes, the Soviets tried to eliminate the Polish officer corps, but this does not constitute a genocide.
Let me just make perfectly clear, I'm in no way defending the Soviets. They were some of the worst people in the history of the world. They were, IMHO, worse than the Nazis since they murdered orders of magnitude more people. However, I do think we need to keep the facts straight, and that is all that I'm doing here. The fact is the Soviets did not perpetrate a genocide in Poland, though what they did was morally just as bad, IMHO.
On the other hand, I think what they did in the Ukraine could be classified as an attempted genocide.
I watched the Kaytn movie, no subtitles and I don’t speak Polish, but it didn’t mater, the movie was a strong commentary on the Soviets. I noted that in the movie the NKVD were using Walther P-38s on the Polish Officer PWs. Whether that was the case or not I can’t comment on it. As great as the movie was, (in my opinion) I can see where the Hollywood crowd would shy away from giving it the publicity it deserves.
(And I believe the Director of the great movie Katyn has them on his WWW site)
Of course, to the liberals and RATS, the North Vietnamese were patriots.
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