Did the Soviets forge Katyn documents? Yes

[fireofice]

The Nuremberg trial judgement was absolutely of a general nature with some specifics thrown in here and there. They obviously did not list every specific crime. Pointing to a long judgement does not demonstrate otherwise. And even when specifics were gone into, that's not them saying the Nazis were innocent of everything else. Now I do think they didn't mention Katyn partly because of the controversy that surrounded it, that definitely played some role. But they also didn't find them not guilty either.

From the Axis Forum:

Are you seriously saying that if the judgement did not explicitly mention a particular warcrime that was listed in the indictment, then none of the defendants was found guilty of that particular warcrime?

As I have pointed out, there were several warcrimes listed individually in the the part of the indictment relating to crimes against POWs that were not mentioned in the part of the judgement relating to those crimes.

If your argument is correct, then the defendants were not found guilty of the other warcrimes listed in the indictment that were not mentioned in the judgement.

Do you claim that the defendants were found not guilty of exterminating POWs at Orel by starvation, shooting, exposure, and poisoning? It is not mentioned in the judgement.

Do you claim that the defendants were found not guilty of torturing and murdering tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war at the "Gross Lazaret" at Slavuta? That place is not mentioned in the judgement.

Do you claim that the defendants were found not guilty of handing over to the Vichy Government for "proceedings" Frenchmen captured fighting with the Soviet Army? It is not mentioned in the judgement.

Do you claim that the defendants were found not guilty of the shooting of prisoners of war in Yugoslavia ordered by the German Command and the occupying authorities in the person of the chief officials of the Police, the SS troops (Police Lieutenant General Rosener) and the Divisional Group Command (General Kubler and others) in the period 1941-43? It is not mentioned in the judgement.

If you believe that the general finding of guilt against many of the defendants for warcrimes committed against POWs covered the above specific instances of such warcrimes listed in the indictment that were not mentioned in the judgement, then there is no logical reason for believing that it did not also cover the killings of Polish POWs at Katyn, which was listed in the indictment but also not mentioned in the judgement.

If the judgement had listed all the specific instances of warcrimes against POWs that were listed in the indictment, and had omitted only the reference to Katyn, then there might be a reasonable case for the claim that it was the intention of the court to acquit all the German defendants of that particular charge.

But that was not the case; the only instance listed in the indictment that was also mentioned in the judgement was the killing of the POPWs who had escaped from Sagan.

The only reasonable conclusion is that the judges intended their finding of guilt in relation to warcrimes against POWs to cover all the instances listed in the indictment, including the killing of the Polish POWs at Katyn.

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic ... 80#p403480

[Archie]

The documents I had in mind were German government documents, the kind that exist in copious quantity - and which revisionists think are in large part faked - for mass shooting events like Babi Yar.

This is classic bombsaway.

BA: There were no documents forged at Katyn.
Me: There were multiple forged documents.
BA: Those don't count because those documents do not fit additional post hoc criteria I made up just now to avoid ever admitting to being wrong.

We are again seeing the stubbornness I remarked on in another recent thread.

What I have noticed with bombs is that he will start some line of argument with some erroneous notion. A little ways in, he realizes it's wrong, but rather than just abandoning the argument he will always double-down but by modifying his argument and trying to save it, usually by added arbitrary qualifications, or making a tortured analogy/"evidence ratio" comparison with other historical events. With his Katyn argument, he was trying to argue that because the Soviets didn't forge documents or elicit false testimonies at Katyn that their Holocaust-related reports could not be false. But that was a false premise, so the argument just doesn't work.

We might refer to these arguments bombs is so fond of as arguments of historiographical analogy or comparison. For example, he might say that Katyn is a smaller scale than the Holocaust, ergo ... the Holocaust can't be false. He tries to disguise it, but that's basically all he's saying and I think it's pretty clearly incorrect. At best you could suggest a heuristic that most major historical events probably aren't hoaxes which I would agree with. But we cannot preclude at the outset the possibility that any "major" might be false.

There are times when it is useful to cite historical examples or precedents in a historical argument. For instance, if your argument relies on a premise or principle, prior examples that demonstrate this principle can be used to support that premise. For example, if a revisionist is arguing that the Hoess confession is false, it may be useful to cite some examples establishing the phenomenon of false confession. Usually this is not a main argument. It is more for context. Such examples can used to establish the possibility of false confession. But beyond that preliminary stage, examples of other events are not likely to settle anything.

See here for some actual useful case studies.
https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=874

In the case of Katyn, the main relevance to the H debate is that it utterly demolishes Soviet credibility, and the H history depends on Soviet and Communist sources and investigations to prove the Holocaust. Their Katyn investigation was an outright hoax, and their Majdanek and Sachsenhausen reports are also quite bad, even from an orthodox perspective. To any reasonable person, this should tell us that Soviet claims are generally unreliable and should be automatically suspect, including their investigations of Auschwitz and Treblinka. To bombsaway, the Soviet Katyn hoax is evidence for the Holocaust. Because reasons.

[Stubble]

The US helped...

Newly released army documents prove that two American POWs wrote encoded messages to Army intelligence after their 1943 visit to Katyn, pointing to Soviet guilt for the 1940 massacre

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article- ... icers.html

[bombsaway]

The documents I had in mind were German government documents, the kind that exist in copious quantity - and which revisionists think are in large part faked - for mass shooting events like Babi Yar.

This is classic bombsaway.

BA: There were no documents forged at Katyn.
Me: There were multiple forged documents.
BA: Those don't count because those documents do not fit additional post hoc criteria I made up just now to avoid ever admitting to being wrong.

Well I think government documents by the alleged perpetrators describing or stating crimes is just much much stronger evidence. Orders of magnitude stronger. You don't agree?

[bombsaway]

The Nuremberg trial judgement was absolutely of a general nature with some specifics thrown in here and there. They obviously did not list every specific crime. Pointing to a long judgement does not demonstrate otherwise. And even when specifics were gone into, that's not them saying the Nazis were innocent of everything else. Now I do think they didn't mention Katyn partly because of the controversy that surrounded it, that definitely played some role. But they also didn't find them not guilty either.

They spent 2 full days on the subject in the main trial, with the defense and prosecution being able to call witness. So it was given plenty of attention.

the judgement definitely gets into specifics.

According to AI - for the POW section which I thought most relevant to Katyn killings there is mention of:

the October 18, 1942 Commando Order and Keitel's role in circulating it;

an American mission of about 12–15 uniformed men captured in the Balkans and shot at Mauthausen;

the March 1944 “Bullet Decree” concerning recaptured POWs;

the 50 RAF officers murdered after the escape from Stalag Luft III at Sagan;

the July 17, 1941 Gestapo order for selecting and killing Soviet POWs;

executions of Soviet POWs at Gross Rosen on October 22, 1941;

an actual July 20, 1942 order prescribing exactly how Soviet POWs were to be branded;

bacteriological experiments on Soviet POWs beginning in July 1943.

I think this is a fair statement you can make about the handling of Katyn by the IMT:

“The Nuremberg judgment was deliberately selective and general, so its failure to mention Katyn cannot be treated as a formal acquittal. But neither can the general Count III convictions be treated as a finding that Katyn was proved. The Tribunal simply made no finding on Katyn, very likely because the allegation had become highly controversial.”