In 1942, a group of railway workers worked in the Katyn Forest west of the Smolensk region when they found the remains of a large number of people and reported it. However, in wartime when there were dead people everywhere, the news did not attract attention.
On April 13, 1943, the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union found a large number of corpses dressed in Polish officer uniforms in the Katyn Forest, each with a bullet hole in the back of their head. Seeing this as an excellent opportunity to attack the Soviet Union and alienate the Allied camp, Goebbels immediately instructed German radio to broadcast the news to the whole world, accusing it of a crime committed by the Soviet Union, which the Soviets immediately and firmly denied, claiming that it was a "dirty imagination, a shameless fabrication" by the Nazis, and that it was the German fascists who killed these Polish officers and blamed the Soviet Union.
Germany, on the other hand, set up a commission of inquiry composed of 12 experts from Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Italy, Croatia and other countries to investigate the Katyn massacre and intimidate people: "If the Soviet Union wins the war ... Katyn will be everywhere! ”
However, neither Germany nor the Soviet Union could produce definitive evidence at the time to prove that the other party was the perpetrator of this tragedy. But the Poles were convinced that the Soviet Union had done it, and the Polish government-in-exile's alliance with the Soviet Union broke down. At that time, the war was tense, Britain and the United States were unwilling to offend the Important Ally of the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany, as the public enemy of mankind, naturally carried this black cauldron.
Before the Germans withdrew from Katyn, Goebbels knew clearly that his Soviet counterparts would lay the blood debt on the germans, lamenting in his diary of 29 September 1943: "Unfortunately we have to abandon Katyn. No doubt the Bolsheviks would soon 'discover' that we had shot more than 12,000 Polish officers. This little episode will bring us a lot of trouble in the future. The Soviet Union will no doubt discover one cemetery after another as it wishes, and then blame us for it. ”
The reason why the Germans could not get rid of the crime in the following decades was because the Nazis had done too much evil, fell into the Tacitus trap, and could not climb up.
The so-called Tacitus Trap" comes from a passage by the ancient Roman historian Tacitus: "Once the emperor became the object of hatred, the good and bad things he did would also arouse people's disgust for him." "In layman's terms, some people do too many bad things and lose credibility, and as long as bad things happen, people are willing to believe that they did it." As far as Nazi Germany was concerned, they not only massacred Jews on a large scale in Poland, but also carried out systematic massacres against the Polish elite, and since they were so brutal, people naturally wanted to believe that the ghosts in the Katyn Forest were also created by them.
Before invading Poland, the Nazis carefully planned to eliminate the Polish elite and drew up a list of more than 60,000 massacres. Hitler declared at the internal meeting of the Nazi Party that the harsh national struggle would not be subject to any law, that the means we would take would contradict our principles... To prevent Polish intellectuals from becoming the leading group ... The Jews, Poles, and other rabble-rousers in the old and new territories must be purged! ”
After the German occupation of Poland, Heydrich, head of the Imperial SS Security Department, revealed in a July 1940 letter to Darugger, deputy commander-in-chief of the SS and German police chief, that before the Polish campaign, he had received a "very important order ... Purging the various factions in the Polish leadership, the number of people killed can be in the thousands".
Heydrich himself vigorously pursued the plan of destruction of the Polish elite, stressing: "They must be made harmless, even if they are only three percent left!" ”
There is an impression that these homicidal tasks were done by the SS, that the Wehrmacht was disciplined, that it was only responsible for fighting and never harming innocent civilians, but in fact the Wehrmacht was also involved in the systematic massacre of the Polish elite.
The Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, General Keitel, wrote in a letter to Admiral Canaris, director of the Military Intelligence Bureau:
"The matter has been decided by the Fuehrer, and the Commander of the Army has been informed. If the Wehrmacht refuses to participate, they will be under pressure from the SS and the Gestapo. Thus, civilian commanders need to be appointed in every military region while assuming responsibility for the implementation of genocide. "What Keitel is referring to is the massacre of the Polish elite, against Polish military officers, doctors, teachers, writers, journalists, clergy, entrepreneurs and other highly educated intellectuals.
In keeping with Hitler's will, the first mass murder was carried out in secret immediately after the German invasion of Poland. According to the list of Poles to be exterminated provided by the Gestapo, the SS arrested 14,000 people, including many children, from October 1939 to the spring of 1940, in Pianicha, Wejhairovo, Pomeranian Province.
The massacre was carried out by the 36th Grenadier Division of the SS, which specialized in genocide. Their methods were extremely cruel, and the victims were tortured before they were executed, and they were transported by truck to pre-selected secret execution sites. The SS ordered them to undress first and then dig the grave where they were buried. The SS then drove everyone to the grave and shot them to death. Unlike Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs officers who fired a shot in the back of each Polish officer's head, the Germans shot indiscriminately and then examined them one by one, and those who were not killed were smashed to death with the butt of their guns, while children were directly smashed in the head by the SS with the butt of their guns, and many of the remains later excavated were skulls broken.
Witnesses have reported in post-war testimony that the Nazis executed about 150 people a day in Pjanica at the time, but some of the arrested SS confessed that they had slaughtered about 314 people on November 11, 1939 alone, so it is likely that the Nazis actually killed far more Poles than are known today.
The SS and the Gestapo, after filling the pits, planted trees on them and made the site a restricted area, not allowing nearby residents to enter. After 1940, however, residents around Pianica continued to find wild dogs devouring human remains of unknown origin. Fearing that their atrocities would be exposed, the Gestapo hunted the local wild dogs on a massive scale until there were no traces of dogs.
At the end of World War II, Germany's defeat was inevitable, the Nazis knew that the Soviet army was about to occupy Pianişa, in order to destroy the evidence of the Holocaust, they began to mobilize local German civilians to dig out the remains in the grave and burn them, in order to speed up the progress, they also pulled thirty-six prisoners from the concentration camp to dig up the graves, and these prisoners were killed and destroyed afterwards.
The Nazis thought they had erased the traces of the Holocaust, but a photograph taken by a local member of the German Hitler Youth, a man named Gelwaldma, who had participated in the SS massacre, had left behind a series of photographs he had taken at the scene of the massacre because he had opened a local photo studio. After the war, investigators found the photographs, revealing the truth.
The German massacre in Pianica was no less bloody and ferocious than the Soviet massacre in the Katyn Forest, with no women or children among the victims of Katyn, and the Nazis slaughtering the Polish elite in Pianica without sparing even the children of their families.
Why did the Soviet Union and Germany both slaughter the Polish elite after invading Poland? In fact, their purpose is the same, that is, to break the backbone of this nation, so that they can never stand up again against the oppression of foreign powers, so as to completely destroy their independent status and achieve long-term rule over Poland.
Some say that the Soviets' massacre of Polish officers was retaliation for the polish abuse of Soviet prisoners of war during the Soviet-Polish War. In terms of the retribution of the fighting people, this was indeed one of the reasons for the massacre, but the Soviet motives did not stop there.
Like Germany, the Soviet Union premeditated the elimination of the Polish elite before the war, and during the "Great Purge" of 1937-1938, the Soviet Union took the opportunity to persecute the Polish community in the country by cruel means. More than 70,000 Poles with Soviet citizenship were killed, and one in every ten Victims of the Great Purge was arrested or executed for their connection to Poland.
After the Soviet Union entered Poland, it captured 250,000 Polish soldiers, and because of the Polish conscription system, all university graduates must perform military service and become reserve officers and receive relevant training, so these people are in the army, which allows the Soviet Union to exhaust the Polish intellectuals in its control areas, how can the Soviet Union, which has obtained this excellent opportunity, let them go?
On 5 March 1940, Beria wrote a report to Stalin detailing the number, rank, profession and political position of the captured Polish officers, accusing them of being "spies, gendarmes, saboteurs, landlords, capitalists, priests and reactionary officials", calling them "enemies of the Soviets", and therefore recommending that they all be executed according to "special procedures". On the same day, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Communist Party (Brazzaville) made a resolution agreeing to Beria's proposal and ordering the Internal People's Committee to execute the 25,700 people listed in the report.
Death penalty documents
Gong Zizhen, a scholar of the Qing Dynasty in China, pointed out: "If you want to destroy your country, you must first destroy its history; if you want to destroy your clan, you must first destroy its culture!" "The aggressors of ancient and modern China and abroad, in order to truly destroy a country and a nation, do not rely only on conquest on the battlefield, but completely destroy their culture and history.
Since ancient times, the intellectual group has been the carrier of a nation's culture and history, the inheritor and innovator of ideas, and if this group is eliminated, a nation loses its leader and the ability to think, thus becoming a mass of gangsters and will be controlled and enslaved by the invaders. It was for this reason that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, after invading Poland, invariably carried out exterminating massacres of the Polish intellectual elite.
It is touching that shortly after the massacre, the United States and Britain and other international powers soon learned the truth of the massacre, and in the post-war Nuremberg trial, there were many testimonies that the Soviet Union was the real culprit of the Katyn massacre, but the US government high-level suppressed these testimonies to help the Soviet Union cover up its crimes. Because they needed to rely on the Soviet Union to defeat the two enemies of Germany and Japan in wartime, they were unwilling to exacerbate the Cold War atmosphere after the war. In 1952, a report submitted by the U.S. Congressional Special Committee investigating the Katyn incident explicitly declared the Soviet Union to be the perpetrator of the Katyn massacre and called the massacre "the most barbaric crime in the history of the world." It was also recommended that the United States Government bring proceedings before the International Tribunal, but the United States Government ignored them. Until 1990, when Russia publicly acknowledged the Katyn affair as "one of the grave crimes of Stalinism," the United States insisted on the Soviet Union's "innocence."
In World War II, Germany and the Soviet Union, two wolf-and-wolf nations, committed the same atrocities in the massacre of the Polish elite, and after the war, the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union covered up the same atrocities. This is the essence of international politics when international powers can fight to the death for their own interests, but they are unwilling to speak out for the weak who have been slaughtered, nor are they willing to pay a small cost for the sake of justice and conscience.
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