12.04.2024, Moscow.
The Russian Federal Security Service [FSB] Department in the Smolensk Region declassified the archive on the execution of Poles by the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War and on the falsification of the “Katyn case” by the German intelligence services, TASS wrote on April 11, having familiarized itself with the materials.
The archive contains certificates and intelligence data of the Soviet counterintelligence service SMERSH dated 1944-1945. It includes records of interrogations of Poles who served with the Germans in the Smolensk region, as well as interrogations of the forensic medical expert of the Budapest City Royal Court, Imre Sechody, a member of the commission to investigate the murder of Polish officers in the Katyn forest, Boleslav Smektala, and others involved in the crimes.
The materials include the interrogation of the Pole Eduard Potkanski, who said that in the summer of 1943 the Nazis showed the members of the battalion the burials in the Katyn forest, where, according to them, lay up to twelve thousand Polish officers shot by the NKVD. However, according to him, the things and documents lying near the graves could not have been preserved in the soil since 1939, as the Nazis claimed.
POW Roman Kowalski also confirmed that the burials in the Katyn Forest were very recent.
Both Poles claimed that they were aware of the execution by the Nazis in Smolensk of those who claimed that the USSR was not involved in this crime.
Smektala told SMERSH that one of the heads of the SD (SS intelligence agency) in Poznan, Sturmbannfuehrer Gepner, had warned the commission investigating the mass murder of Polish soldiers and officers that the trip to Katyn “had propaganda purposes.”
The Nazis also showed the commission two Russians they said were eyewitnesses to the murder. Smektala believed that they had been “specially trained by the SD.”
“The Katyn сase” takes its name from the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, where mass graves of executed Polish prisoners of war were found in 1943 in German-occupied territory.
The declassified FSB materials shed light on the falsification of the “Katyn case” by the Nazis and confirm the USSR’s non-involvement in the execution of Polish officers.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
