During the post-war polish investigations into Chelmno extermination camp, a recurring theme was that in summer 1942 a fake Gestapo commission, supposedly British intelligence, entered the grounds of the camp (see Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust, p. 89)

On its Facebook account, the Chelmno Museum recently published an interesting German document confirming the infiltration of the extermination camp (thanks to Patrick Montague for calling this to my attention):

Translation:

Gendarmerie outpost Adelnau, 12 July 1942

Message: To all units and outposts according to the alarm plan

At the Sonderkommando set up by the detail of the Schupo in Kulmhof Eichstätt3 - 4 unknown perpetrators / Poles / broke in last night and escaped unknown.Oberscharführer Barthmann [sic!], head of the Sonderkommando, cannot provide any further details....The matter is to be treated secretly.

This message on the hunt suggests that the men broke into at night. On the other side, according to the post-war testimonies, fake Gestapo men entered at least the kitchen of the Sonderkommando, made contact with the commandant's deputy Albert Plate and even refuelled their car. It is unclear how deep they penetrated into the camp facilities. 

In any case, the day of the action was well choosen. It happened during the Summer break of the extermination camp; on a Saturday, with likely many members of the Sonderkommando off and away. Security of the camp was low. The camp commandant Hans Bothmann was apparently not on-site either. 

So far there is also no indication that any information obtained by the infiltrators was used by the Polish resistance or foreign intelligence. 

Grover Furr is a neo-Stalinist falsifier of history well-known for his stunning incompetence, ideological myopia and fanaticism ("I have yet to find one crime that Stalin committed"). 

On 15.08.2022 he published an article accusing me of a "lie" on the issue of the police identification tags (he calls them badges, which is OK, but since we're not talking about the badges worn on the uniform, I will call them tags) found at Volodymyr-Volynskyi (a detailed explanation of the issue is here) in my 15.12.2021 article (about a Katyn denial propaganda film on the Russian NTV channel) in the Nobel-prize-winning Novaya gazeta (here in Russian; I will refer to it as "the NG article").

Ironically, Furr focuses only on this one claim, even though the bulk of the argumentation in his pseudoscholarly Katyn denial book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, the Solution has been debunked by me here, here and here (as well as all over the Katyn Files website; though mostly as arguments of other people; there's precious little original content in Furr's propaganda pamphlet).

Here's the claim he objects to:

No: The badges were not found on the bodies. One was found a few meters from the grave ditch, the other in a layer of household garbage above it.

His first point:

It appears that Romanov has taken this claim from Gur’ianov’s book Ubity v Kalinine, Pokhoroneny v Mednom.

He then attempts to find some fault or other with Guryanov's claims. The problem for Furr is that no, my claim about the location of the finds in my NG article was not based on Guryanov (unlike my earlier blog post). And Furr had to know this for two reasons.

First of all, I mentioned the exact sources for my claim in my big "Katyn and anti-Katyn..." article published on my Katyn website on 10.03.2021. My website is well-known to Furr and he relies on some materials from it in his book. The site is also mentioned in the NG article. The article was the first published (in a real book, yes) systematic debunking of Katyn denial, also mentioning Furr, so how credible it is that it escaped Furr's attention?

Second, the NG article announced a full-scale rebuttal of the NTV propaganda film:

One propagandist can ask so many rhetorical questions that the answers would not fit on a newspaper page, so a detailed breakdown with all the references will be published on the "Katyn Files" website, here we will consider the main points.

And indeed, it appeared on the website on 18.01.2022. And once again, this rebuttal provides a full quote from the aforementioned "Katyn and anti-Katyn..." article on the matter of the tags, including the full sources I used. Time to quote it in full:

The publications of the deniers, however, omit a key fact: the tags were not found on the bodies. Kuligowski's tag was found a few meters from the grave ditch [1], Małowiejski's tag was found in an heaped layer above the grave ditch, among the household rubbish [2]. Thus, from the finding of the tags in Volodymyr-Volynskyi it did not follow at all that Kuligowski and Małowiejski were buried there too. Given the sum of all the facts, the simplest explanation is the following: probably Małowiejski and Kuligowski, after having been captured in 1939, were initially held in a prison in Volodymyr-Volynsky, where their police tags (not to be confused with the "nieśmiertelniki" tokens to identify the dead) were taken away and for some reason not returned later, these tags were later found in the prison by the Germans and thrown together with other things near the grave ditch as they were not needed. This hypothesis was confirmed by the historian A. E. Guryanov, who discovered Małowiejski's card in the prisoner-of-war files of the RGVA. It says that he was taken prisoner of war on 19.09.1939 in Volodymyr-Volynskiy, from where he was sent to the NKVD reception center for prisoners of war in Shepetivka only 25 days later [3]. Although Kuligowski's card has not yet been found, there is no reason to believe that the fate of his tag was different, given that it was not found on the body.

Thus, there is no reason to believe that Kuligowski and Małowiejski are not buried in Mednoye. This example clearly shows how the conclusions of the deniers do not correspond to the information they actually have.

1 Zlatogorsky O., Panishko S. Investigations on the Volodymyr-Volynsk hill fort in 2010-2012: Sources and Materials. Lutsk, 2013. P. 41 (a tag was found in the square A-10 of the excavation zone I), p. 47 (the square is outside the grave ditch). The Ukrainian authors mistakenly suggested that the tag belonged to one of the buried, but unlike the archaeological facts we should not accept their wrong guess.

2 Siemińska D. Archaeological studies on World War II totalitarianism in the yard of a mediaeval hill fort in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Ukraine // Materiality of Troubled Pasts. Archaeologies of Conflicts and War / edited by A. Zalewska et al. Warsaw, Szczecin, 2017. P. 104.

3 Guryanov A. The memorial book: tasks and sources // Killed in Kalinin, buried in Mednoye / Ed. by A. Guryanov. М., 2019. Vol. 1. P. 78-81.

There you go. None of the tags was found on a body. And Furr had to know what my sources for my claim were.

He accuses Guryanov (and, by extension, me — though it doesn't really work like that, and Furr knows it) of lying by citing two Polish texts. For Kuligowski he cites a report by Dr. Siemińska et al., which, however, doesn't support his contention in the slightest.

For Kuligowski's tag to have been found during the exploration of an excavation area that included the burial pit doesn't mean it was found in the pit itself, because the exploration of the excavation site naturally also included exploring the areas right next to the pit. And indeed, in the detailed article by the Ukrainian team we see that this was exactly the case: the tag was found outside the grave.

Here's an excerpt from the page 41 from the Ukrainian report:

Here's an excerpt from the page 47:

For Małowiejski Furr stoops to cite not any academic study, but a short media report, in which a clueless journalist simply conflated a) recovery of some remains coupled with b) identification of a policeman as c) recovery of this policeman's corpse. Such conflations are only to be expected in the media. 

Obviously, a detailed academic description beats an offhand news item. And this description comes from the very Dr. Siemińska on whom Furr relies on Kuligowski!

In the source I cited we read:

Graves no. 1 and no. 2, exhumed in 2011–2012, were both 3 m wide trenches located side by side. Grave no. 1 was 21.5 m long and Grave no. 2 was 10 m, both situated in Trench I. Grave no. 1 was covered with rubbish, in which the researchers found, among other things, a screw top and an identification tag of Polish State Police no. 1099, which belonged to senior constable Ludwik Małowiejski.

That's it. Case closed once again. Both tags were not found on bodies.

So, as we see, the deceptive ideological hack Grover Furr has failed once again. His methodology is no different than that of the Holocaust deniers.

Michael Tracey, gadfly of the commentariat, friend of Glenn Greenwald, and survivor of "unwarranted physical contact" from U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, recently published a lengthy essay on World War II on his Substack. It's not anything new or revelatory and so I'm not going to address most of it. Any readers of this blog familiar with Tracey's work generally won't be surprised. I do, however, want to discuss his allegation that "US entry into World War II did not prevent the Holocaust, and there is substantial reason to believe it was a factor in accelerating the most lethal phase of the Holocaust."

This is a combination of one quite obvious statement and one quite wrong one. Of course U.S. entry into the war did not prevent the Holocaust because both things happened and the former event (U.S. entry) demonstrably did not prevent the latter event (the Holocaust -- for the most part [see below]). Perhaps Tracey meant to say "U.S. entry into the war was not intended to prevent the Holocaust," in which case it's also not a very debatable point. Few historians believe this was the American intention.

The latter point though is a real howler, so it's worth refuting it here because, for whatever reason, Tracey has a large number of readers.

We'd have to start with "the most lethal phase of the Holocaust." Luckily, the data we have on Jewish fatalities during the war are granular enough that we can identify 1942 as the year during which the most Jews died. According to Hilberg, more than half of all the Jews who were killed during the war were killed in 1942; during that year, therefore, there went from being more Jews alive than dead in Europe in January to there being fewer alive than dead in December. Moreover, a scientific article published in 2019 not only correctly identified Aktion Reinhard -- the campaign to murder Poland's Jews -- as the largest "campaign" of the Holocaust but also showed that a single 100-day period (covering August to October) accounted for approximately 1.5 million of the 1.7 million deaths from Aktion Reinhard.

So that's the most lethal phase, clearly. Tracey in fact acknowledges this point -- even links to the Science Advances article linked to in the previous paragraph.

So what role did the United States' entry into the war have on Aktion Reinhard? This is, in fact, not a question that Tracey seeks to answer. Rather, he begins with a discussion of Christian Gerlach's landmark 1998 essay on the Wannsee Conference. To be fair to Tracey, he cites several sources in his article and he doesn't rely on pikers; Gerlach is a rather big gun. But Tracey does not portray Gerlach's position accurately. Central to Gerlach's essay is the matter of when it was decided to exterminate very specific groups of Jews: German Jews; and Jews from outside the Soviet Union and Poland. Tracey does not acknowledge or perhaps understand this distinction. Therefore, when he quotes Gerlach's line about "systematic planning for the destruction of the Jews throughout Europe," he does not realize Gerlach's intent underlying the phrase "Jews throughout Europe" as not including Soviet or Polish Jews, whose fate had already been decided.

Again, to be fair to Tracey, he acknowledges that mass murder of Jews had already been taking place before Pearl Harbor. But he doesn't say where (the Soviet Union) or by what means (mass shootings performed by the Einsatzgruppen and police units) -- indeed the term Einsatzgruppen doesn't appear in the article at all.

Nor does the phrase "Aktion Reinhard," which is highly significant because this after all is the "most lethal phase" to which Tracey refers, whether he is aware of it or not. And most importantly, the planning of Aktion Reinhard was already under way when Pearl Harbor happened: construction on Belzec had begun more than a month earlier. Is there any evidence to suggest that construction of Belzec was accelerated by Pearl Harbor or even that the establishment of camps at Sobibor and Treblinka was thus affected? There is not, nor does any source used by Tracey make that claim. Gerlach claims only that German Jews being deported from the Reich would eventually be sent to death camps because of a decision contingent on Pearl Harbor. But the vast majority of the Jews killed in the Reinhard camps were Polish Jews, not German.

Tracey continues to compound this very basic error. He quotes from Brendan Simms's Hitler's American Gamble that "a primary motivation and context for Hitler's war of annihilation against western and central European Jewry was his relationship with the United States" (emphasis mine), again failing to see the significance of the geographical limitation of this decision and that it did not include Soviet or Polish Jews, whose fates had already been sealed by Pearl Harbor. Tracey continues the same error with his excerpt from Klaus Schmider's Hitler's Fatal Miscalculation. His first quote from Friedlaender's Years of Extermination fails to acknowledge that the specific context, again, of the killing of German Jews (Friedlaender discusses Aktion Reinhard some fifty pages earlier); his quotes from Rafecas are about the very pages from Friedlaender dealing with German Jews being deported.

Tracey's use of Richard Evans's Third Reich at War is odd in that the excerpt he uses doesn't discuss a change in extermination policy at all relative to Aktion Reinhard -- only an escalation in propaganda accompanying Barbarossa and its effect on radicalization in the Einsatzgruppen's activities. Nor does his citation from the work of Adam Tooze. In the end, it is really only Tobias Jersak, among the authors cited by Tracey, who supports his viewpoint -- to an extent. But Tracey's citation here is not wholly representative of Jersak's view. Jersak writes a few pages before the quotation Tracey provides, "It is clear from developments in the autumn of 1941 that the ‘final solution’ as we understand it in retrospect, i.e. the systematic murder of the European Jews, did not originate in a single decision or a single order" (p. 324).

(Note: I have not addressed Tracey's use of the work of Laurence Rees and John Toland. Rees's work is not academic history. Toland's work is far too old to be considered here given its publication before the opening of Soviet archives, which have given us a much clearer picture of the evolution of Nazi policy vis-a-vis Jews.)

So what does that leave us with? Tracey reiterates his chief point regarding the Holocaust: "There is a robust body of evidence that suggests escalation of US involvement in the war, followed by official US entry, may well have been factors in the acceleration of the most lethal phase of the Holocaust." But is there a "robust body of evidence"? None of the authors Tracey writes draws a straight line between Pearl Harbor (or Lend Lease or the Atlantic Charter) and Aktion Reinhard. They all, in fact, acknowledge its separate existence before the events of the summer or fall of 1941. Therefore, Tracey has in fact failed to prove his chief point made in his essay about the Final Solution.

Does Tracey want to argue that U.S. entry into the war sealed the fate of German Jews or of Jews from central and western Europe? Even though there would still be historians who disagreed, he'd be on much more solid grant if he made that argument. But he doesn't. In his desire to paint the worst possible picture of the effects of U.S. involvement in World War II, he pushes too far and fails.

From a Communist website:

On 31 October 2022, Tomáš Hübner, single judge of the Prague 7 District Court, sentenced Josef Skála, a well-known Marxist intellectual and former vice-president of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), together with Vladimír Kapal, and Juraj Václavík, all three indicted, to eight months’ imprisonment, under Article 405 of the Criminal Code of the Czech Republic, for having challenged the version attributing the Katyn massacre [...] to the Soviet leadership.

The first round of the appeal hearings started on Feb. 1. From a news item:

Judge Tomáš Hübner stopped Václavík after several tens of minutes. "We're not going to prove history here, because it's absolutely clear that the Soviet Union and its units did it," he said, adding that the same arguments as Václavík were repeatedly used by staunch Stalinists before Soviet politician Nikita Khrushchev revealed how the massacre really happened.

"If you want to explain to me for several hours that Katyn was committed by the Germans, you can, but I won't believe you," the judge added to the disapproving roar of the public in the courtroom.

(Nota bene: obviously, Khrushchev never revealed anything about the Katyn massacre.)

Here's the relevant article of the Czech Criminal code:

Section 405 - Denial, Impugnation, Approval and Justification of Genocide Whoever publicly denies, impugns, approves, or attempts to justify Nazi, Communist or any other genocide, or other crimes of the Nazis and Communists against humanity, shall be sentenced to imprisonment for six months to three years.

Several points:

1. Obviously, I'm against such laws.

2. These Commies are, naturally, falsifiers of history (just like their lying comrade Grover Furr). There's no historical doubt that the Soviet Union was responsible for the Katyn massacre. Denial of this fact is intellectually equal to Holocaust denial. The Katyn deniers have been unable to muster any credible evidence for their claims and have been unable to account for the two key issues: if the Germans did it, where did the Polish POWs in question remain from May 1940 to July 1941 (we know they were neither in the POW camps, contrary to the official Soviet claims, nor in the GULAG) and which German units exactly committed the crime (we know it wasn't the unit that the Soviets officially blamed)?

3. The shouts from the Communist websites are hypocritical when the decades-long Communist suppression of the truth about Katyn using the criminal codes as a cudgel (numerous people were imprisoned for disputing the Soviet claims) is not acknowledged by the same websites.

4. The Western Holocaust deniers usually accept the Soviet guilt for the Katyn massacre (thus showing their intellectual inconsistency, since Holocaust and Katyn denial methods are identical) and try to use it to discredit the Allied evidence of the Nazi crimes (of course, without success). They also love to claim that if some historical claim needs to be protected by law, then it's at least suspicious, if not outright false. This case puts them in a bind.

In it Furr summarizes quite a lot of his book, so most of the points will be addressed when he comes to them in later chapters. A couple of observations:

P. 9: "Mr. Romanov also made a significant error in historical method."

Furr doesn't prove any such error and quite soon it will become obvious, that it is he who is completely clueless about the historical method.

P. 11: "Holmes' words - that is, Conan Doyle's - precisely express my deeper motive in researching and writing this book. For there is "neither money nor credit in it." On the contrary, I can be assured that I will be attacked and slandered by those who are horrified to look the truth in the face and discover that it is not at all what they want it to be, Yet "one would wish to tidy it up" - to solve the mystery."

His motive could not be clearer: he is a Stalinist fanatic, who claims not to have found a single crime committed by Stalin (p. 12).

P. 12: "A bigger problem is that very few of the persons involved in studying Katyn are objective. They have decided that the "official" version is correct; that the Soviets killed the Polish POWs and that there is no doubt remaining about this. Moreover, they have decided that it is perverse to even raise the question. That simply to approach Katyn as a mystery implies that the solution has not been definitively determined for all time, and is therefore a dishonest thing to do, since it implies the possibility that the Soviets might not have done it. This attitude has discouraged objective study of Katyn."

This begs the very question, simply assuming that the Katyn mystery has not been solved, and thus these researchers have not simply accepted the objective truth that it was a Soviet deed.

P. 14: "Upon even closer scrutiny I realized that there is even less evidence than that in fact only few bits of evidence - that (for all practical purposes) cannot possibly have been fabricated or falsified in order to bias case in favor of one or the other version. 

Consequently, in this study I concentrate on these few bits of what I call "unimpeachable evidence" - meaning, evidence that it is impossible to discredit as evidence (the interpretation is something else again). You, the reader, will make up your own mind whether this evidence is as clear and unambiguous, and my interpretation of it as correct, as I believe it to be."

And later on p. 25 he claims that primary evidence is scarce and "most of the evidence that does exist could have been fabricated in order to support one version or the other". On p. 29 we similarly see: "Our first task must be to decide whether, in all of the materials [...] there exists any primary source evidence that cannot possibly have been fabricated, forged, or faked."

This immediately puts him into the crank camp and shows he has zero understanding of the historical method. While it is true that the competing core claims in question necessitate that at least some of the evidence is forged, in does not follow that for every piece of evidence we must establish that it could not have been forged. No historian works using this wild assumption and indeed, writing the history of the Nazi crimes themselves would be impossible to a large extent, if those were the rules of the game. And indeed, Furr fails to demonstrate that history as a discipline would be able to function in this case.

Instead of chasing the invisible pink unicorn of trying to disprove the mere (practical) possibility of forgery, historians actually need sufficient evidence to either dismiss available pieces of evidence or to lower their "credibility rank". Hand-waving in the form of "there is a theoretical possibility that it could have been forged, therefore we won't use it" does not pass any rational muster.

P. 22: "The "official" Soviets-did-it version relies on the assumption that the Polish prisoners were executed by the NKVD at the three towns named and then buried at the three burial places named. These shipments of prisoners are routinely stated to be "death transports."

[...]

Cienciala, who did the writing in this volume, added all the language about execution."

Or: there are no more "versions" as far as the guilty party is concerned and that the Soviets did it is simply a fact, and then the situation is reversed - the lists do become the death lists because we know (by other means) that the people in them were intended to be executed, and most were. Furr has to show that the consensus claim is not proven before making a claim like this. Otherwise it's like a Holocaust denier whining about the Holocaust deportation lists being called "death lists" or such, after all nothing in the lists says "most of them will be executed", we know that from other evidence...

P. 24: "With very few exceptions, all the bodies identified 一 or supposedly identified at Katyn' (Koz'i Gory) by both the Germans and the Soviets were identified by documents said to have been found on the corpses. No bodies identifiable as those of Katyn victims have been found at Mednoe or Piatykhatky."

In fact, in Mednoye alone based on the results of the partial exhumation in 1991 of the remains, belonging to at least 243 individuals, 16 of them were identified with the documents found on the bodies (and in various documents 242 surnames were found, of which 227 were in the transport lists from the Ostashkov camp to the Kalinin UNKVD). During the Polish exhumations in 1995, the remains of no fewer than 2115 persons were exhumed, 28 of them were reliably identified (all of them were in the Ostashkov-Kalinin transport lists). While the rate of identification was much lower, the circumstances were also very different (for one, the exhumations took place about 5 decades after the Katyn exhumation).

P. 24: "The "official" version assumes that the corpses exhumed at Katyn were all from the Kozel'sk camp, having been sent there from Smolensk. If any bodies at Katyn are those of POWs who, according to the Soviet transit lists, were sent to Kalinin or Kharkiv, the "official" version would be undermined or disproven. Likewise, any bodies of POWs from any of these three camps found at other places would also undermine the "official" version."

Or: the sum of the evidence indicates that exclusively Kozelsk POWs were and thus it is not a mere assumption but rather a conclusion. As I wrote elsewhere:

"First, it is worth noting that the documents "found" by the commission seem to try to prove that not only prisoners of the Kozelsk camp were buried in the forest, but also prisoners of the Starobelsk (Arashkevich) and Ostashkov (Lewandowski) camps. However, the German findings refute this thesis: the Germans did not identify a single POW from these camps. At this point, deniers usually get excited: it is obvious that the Nazis were deliberately trying to exclude prisoners of war from other camps, they wanted everyone to think that the Poles from Kozelsk were buried there! Do you believe the Nazis or what?

And this, of course, is complete nonsense. On the contrary: the Goebbels propaganda announced to the whole world that it estimates the number of corpses in the graves at 12000. Apparently, the Germans thought that they had found all or most of the prisoners of war from the three camps that the Poles had lost. They were in for a very unpleasant surprise: they could find about 4200 corpses and there was no hope of finding more big graves (the Poles confirmed that), although in the anonymous introduction to their official book they put a good spin on a bad game, still estimating the total number of the dead as 10-12000. Would they have missed an opportunity to trumpet to the whole world that there were also Poles from Ostashkov and Starobelsk in the Katyn graves, if there had been at least appropriate objects or documents matching the dates on their bodies (which would have been true if the findings of the Soviet commission had been genuine)? All the more wild is the assertion that the Germans would have deliberately hidden all such finds."

"Chapter 1. The Evidence That Can't Be Impugned"

P. 26: "In 1995 Iurii Mukhin, a Russian metallurgist..."

Gotta love that when Furr introduces the Memorial society, he hastens to label it as "a strongly anticommunist organization" (p. 52), but when it comes to the Katyn, Moon landing and Holocaust denier as well as the Lysenkoist antisemite Mukhin, who loves to use the word "zhid" ("Yid", "k-ke") in his books, he's just a humble metallurgist... 

P. 26, from Furr's summary:

"* Despite the vast amount of documentation there is in fact a very limited amount of primary source evidence."

"Very limited" is subjective and undefined. Just as well I can say that there are plenty of primary sources, which are also sufficient.

P. 26: "* The evidence is contradictory. Some of it indicates the guilt of the

Soviets, while other evidence supports the guilt of the Germans."

A vague and misleading pronouncement which could be applied to most significant events in history, if we mean the evidence "unweighted" according to credibility, which is neither here, nor there.

Pp. 26, 27: "All the evidence relevant to establishing the guilty party is in one of the following four collections of documents:

A. The German Report [...] and related documents.

B. The Soviet Burdenko Commission Report [...] and related documents.

C. "Closed Packet No. 1" (CP), the existence of which was announced in 1992.

D. The archeological report on excavations at the mass murder site in Volodymyr-Volyns'kiy, Ukraine (VV) of November 2011 and related documents of 2010 - 2013."

It's hard to avoid calling this claim a bald-faced lie, but let's try. In fact, all the relevant evidence is not limited to these 4 document complexes, much less "one" of them (and D is completely, utterly irrelevant, as we will soon see). 

Here are several other evidence complexes that are relevant to establishing the guilty party:

• The GUPVI archive in RGVA, which positively establishes that, contrary to the Soviet claims, the Polish POWs in question were not in the POW camp system from May 1940 to July 1941 (i.e. the Burdenko commission's report and related documents contain a huge lie, most likely simply fed to the Commission by the NKVD/NKGB). Joined by the GULAG archive in GARF, which closes a loophole, proposed by some deniers, that the POWs lost their POW status in May 1940 and were transferred to Vyazemlag as "normal" prisoners, thus disappearing from the GUPVI stats (this hypothesis necessitates that the Burdenko commision's report is falsified on this point, BTW).
• The Ukrainian KGB files proving that the Pyatikhatki graves were a Soviet deed.
• The Soviet/Russian and Polish exhumations at Mednoye and Pyatikhatki in the 1990s, proving those were the 1940 graves of the Polish POWs from the Ostashkov and Starobelsk camps.
• The Bundesarchiv personal files of Friedrich Ahrens (accused by the Soviets to have been the organizer of the massacre) and his HNR 537 predecessor Albert Bedenk, which purely chronologically preclude the Soviet claim about Ahrens' leading participation in the massacre, proving that the Burdenko commission published a key lie in the case.

This is not an exhaustive list (there is more documentary and testimonial evidence, the latter is even mentioned by Furr and we will get to it), but it is sufficient to show Furr's mendacity, as he surely knows about the first three points (and tries to discredit one of them in his book, we'll also get to that).

P. 27: "The vast majority of studies of Katyn assume the validity of AM [the German report - SR] and CP [the sealed envelope with Stalin's shooting order and other related documents - SR], thereby also assuming that the Soviets were the guilty party at Katyn."

Or: they conclude, rather than assume, from the sum of the available evidence (which includes the observations and documents by the Poles who took part in the exhumations) that the core of the AM list is correct (of course, taking into account the publication's propaganda purpose) and the evidence value of the sealed envelope is sufficient. Once again, Furr simply begs the question.

P. 27: "In this version BU is assumed to be a fabrication and receives no serious consideration."

Or: the Burdenko commission's report actually gets analyzed and its unreliability is a conclusion based on evidence and/or reasoning. Some of the analysis can be partially faulty or mistaken, but that's completely beside the point. Since Furr in a later chapter deals with one such analysis, he knows full well that rejection of the Burdenko report is a conclusion, rather than an a priori assumption (that Furr rejects this conclusion is, again, immaterial to my point).

Furr begins to "analyze" various document complexes for the allegedly unimpeachable evidence.

P. 30, the German report (AM):

"* The spent shells found at Katyn were German." 

In this form this doesn't prove anything even prima facie (not that mere prima facie evidence would play any role in a case like this in the first place). One has to establish the relative improbability of the NKVD using German ammo under these particular circumstances first.

"* A badge from the Ostashkov POW camp was discovered at Katyn." 

Since some Ostashkov POWs were transferred to Kozelsk, the explanation is trivial.

P. 31, the Burdenko commission's report and related documents:

"One document found among the bodies is from a prisoner who was shipped from the Ostashkov POW camp to Kalinin. The Soviet investigators were unable to identify him because the first part of his last name is illegible. Therefore they did not realize that he had been in Ostashkov. They did not recognize that his presence at Katyn undermines the German report and supports the Sovîet case. So they made no use of this information. Therefore they would not have fabricated it."

Long story short: no evidence he was in Ostashkov. Handled here. We'll return to this point in the relevant chapter.

P. 32: "CP [sealed envelope no. 1 -SR]. This collection of documents contains one document that has been faked in a clumsy manner but for some reason not discarded. There is no plausible alternative explanation for it except that it was part of a broader forgery job. 

No it doesn't.

P. 32, in reference to the archeological excavations in Volodymyr-Volynskiy:

"* Badges of two Polish POWs were found in a mass grave in this town in Western Ukraine. These two men were from the Ostashkov POW camp. According to the "official" version they were shipped to Kalinin (now Tver'), Russia, where they were executed and buried at Mednoe. Their names are on memorial plaques in the Polish cemetery there."

The police number tags (not badges) were not found on the bodies, they were found outside of the grave space, for one of the aforementioned POWs there idocumentary evidence that he was in VV in 1939. So the best explanation is that these policemen's badges were taken away from the policemen by the Soviets in the temporary holding in VV, not returned to them, disposed of by the Nazis when they overran this territory. From the sum of the evidence we know that the policemen are buried in Mednoye. Explained in more detail here. 

Pp. 32, 33: "* Between 96% and 98% of the shell casings found at this mass

execution site are of German make and are dated "1941." 

* The execution method at VV was shown by the Polish archeologist to be characteristic of the Eínsatzkommando, or German mass murder team, led by SS Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, the so-called "Sardinenpackung."

* Independent research by another scholar has confirmed that German troops, aided by Ukrainian nationalist auxiliaries, shot many Soviet citizens and Jews at this place soon after the invasion in June 1941. 

* Soon after the publication of the Polish archeologist's report of the findings at VV Polish and Ukrainian scholars recognized that the discoveries of these two badges endanger the "official""the Soviets-did-it" version of Katyn,

After the report on the discoveries at VV was published it was withdrawn. The excavation was closed and the mass murders are now attributed, without any evidence, to the NKVD."

The last point is egregiously false: some of the graves are classified as the German ones and some as the Soviet ones (it's hardly a wonder that the Germans would use a Soviet execution site for their own executions), all, obviously, with evidence based on the difference between the content of the graves. Nothing has been withdrawn, and if anything, the researchers have moved from the "NKVD-only" to the "NKVD+Germans" explanation, so Furr has it exactly backwards. The rest is irrelevant, as no Katyn victim was buried at the site, as already explained.

P. 33: "Conclusion: The Germans Murdered the Poles 

All the evidence that is of undoubted authenticity, that cannot have been faked, supports the conclusion that the Germans, not the Soviets, are guilty of the mass murder of Polish POWs that are known as the Katyn massacre."

P. 34: "The evidence is unequivocal. None of the evidence that could not have been faked supports the hypothesis that the Soviets shot the Poles. All of it supports the contrary hypothesis."

 As we have just seen, this conclusion is not supported by any credible evidence.

"Chapter 2. The German Report - Amtliches Material (AM)"

P. 35, a discussion of the German report (AM):

"According to AM none [of the documents found on the bodies -SR] were dated after sometime in April 1940. Both the German and Polish teams falsely concluded that this meant the prisoners had been executed around this time. Of course, the Germans would not have reported, or allowed the Poles to see, any documents dated later than April or, at latest, early May 1940. The Germans, not the Polish observers, controlled this process."

False. The Poles directly participated in the exhumation of the corpses. As reported by the general secretary of the Polish Red Cross K. Skarżyński:

"They reported that during the whole work - the main instruction I gave them and we gave them - during the whole work they never found a document or newspaper with a date anterior to April 1940. [...] After - after April or May 1940."

What Furr could have in mind is that the Polish team working directly with the bodies (conducting the searches) theoretically had no right to read and sort through the found documents (because it simply was not their task, another joint German-Polish team was responsible for that, and trying to extract the sometimes fragile documents from e. g. wallets, trying to clean them from adipocere in order to read them in field conditions, etc., would have not only been a waste of time but also might have damaged the documents and led to confusion), but some of the documents did not have to be extracted from wallets etc., were readily legible and nothing could stop the workers from looking at them. The documents that the first team put into envelopes were then jointly examined by Germans and Poles.

Then:

Pp. 35, 36: "And the German-Polish conclusion was false anyway. The latest date is only the terminus post quem, evidence that the victim in question was killed sometime after that date, perhaps long afterwards. Some, at least, of the Germans and Poles must have understood this elementary fact. Therefore, dishonesty was surely present from the beginning in the compiling of the report."

So obviously false that it's weird to comment on that, but yes, obviously, when enough ephemera (such as newspapers) and/or "growing" documents (such as diaries) are present on the bodies, then we can conclude that, on the assumption that the people were still living in some status analogous to the POW or some other prisoner status, the date of death cannot be much removed from the latest date of the ephemera (etc.), certainly not by 1+ year.

P. 36: "We might surmise that the Germans would not have had recourse to falsification if the Soviets really had killed the Polish POWs and all the Germans had to do was to tell the truth. But this reasoning, however suggestive, is not evidence."

True, in this specific case it would not be evidence of the German guilt, since the Germans also had propaganda purposes in mind, so although their official report did contain some relatively minor intentionally false parts (e. g. regarding the number of the corpses), this can be explained simply with a reference to their propaganda needs rather them being the guilty party (and here we must also differentiate between the people who conducted the actual investigations and the publishers who then edited their material for public consumption and could have introduced various distortions, like what happened with one of Voss' reports). If all we had was the German report without any context (such as some of the primary documents of the German investigations, in which we actually see the details later changed by the publishers; the Polish exhumation protocols and documents; and so on), then, knowing about the German propagandists' tampering could have thrown doubt also onto the core claims of the report, but we do have this context and much more, and the provable German falsehoods were arguably marginal.

On the other hand, the provable Soviet falsehoods - such as the lies about the whereabouts of the POWs (the non-existent ON camps) or about the persons responsible for the massacre (some of whom were not there during the massacre according the Soviet claim) are at the heart of the whole issue, so that they are not really explainable except through an almost wholesale falsification.

P. 39: "The Germans claimed that only German "Geco" cartridge shells were found at Katyn. They found no other shells there. The Germans would never have freely inventecl this fact. Had any Soviet cartridge shells been found among the corpses, the Germans would surely have reported this. Therefore we can be confident that only German shells were found at Katyn, though not necessarìly only the kind of shells identified in AM.

The Germans claimed that German cartridges were exported to the USSR in the 1920s and early 1930s. The Soviets did not deny this. But, absent countervailing evidence, German shells suggest German guilt."

Non sequitur. Without the evidence of improbability of the use of the German cartridges in this particular case (when all the evidence is taken into account, of course) the shells don't suggest German guilt. There is no such evidence. The foreign 7,65 guns (Belgian, German or otherwise) were popular in the NKVD, their characteristics made them fit for streamlined mass executions (the likes of which were rare even in the NKVD), more so than the "standard" NKVD guns Nagant and TT, so the use of such guns fits with the rest of the evidence. And while they did not have to use German ammo, there is nothing to exclude its presence in the NKVD ammo storages. So, barring actual evidence of improbability, the ammo that was found speaks neither for NKVD's nor for the Germans' guilt.

P. 40: "Neither the Soviets nor the pro-Soviet researchers have remarked on the following two curious facts about the German report of these shell casings. First, the Germans claimed that all the shell casings bore exactly the same "headstamp""Geco 7.65 D" or "Geco 7.65 DD." No matter who did the shooting it would be unusual for a team of at least a half-dozen shooters, shooting several thousand individuals during a period of about 6 weeks, to all use exactly the same shells, with the identical markings, and all at least nine years old."

An unwarranted assumption. Unusual by what measure? How many analogous investigated massive 6-weeks-long NKVD shooting operations concentrated in one place are there for a comparison in the first place? Unusual relative to the circumstances of this particular case? But there are so many unknowns as to the concrete details, such as the supply chain, that such a verdict cannot be passed reliably and there are possible scenarios which help to explain various aspects such as the use of the ammo: e. g. if the operation was centrally organized (which makes sense and some evidence for this exists too), and if someone from Blokhin's Moscow team, which organized the operation, brought the ammo and guns fit for an exceptionally massive and fast operation (the particular parameters are explained here) from one of the central NKVD storages in Moscow, then that ammo is what the local executioners were mostly likely to use.

It is OK to assume that the absolute majority of victims were murdered with the Geco bullets, but even that is not entirely a given, albeit it's a plausible assumption. Let's not forget that in the end only relatively few shell casings were found in the forest. The German report mentions only a few cases. The Polish team, using a metal detector in 1994-1995, found 241 7.65×17 mm SR Browning cartridge shells, of them 157 identifiable as Geco and 5 as DWM (M. Dutkiewicz, "Elementy umundurowania i amunicja: podsumowanie wyników badań w Lesie Katyńskim", in: M. Głosek (red.), Katyń w świetle badań terenowych 1994-1995, 2003, S. 266). (So we already have 2 manufacturers here, but let's move on.) Can we extrapolate it to at least 4200 Geco cartridges used there?

We only have the shells that somehow were left outside, in the graves. Were those mostly the result of open-air executions? If so, is there anything to suggest that most, rather than some, executions were open-air, rather than performed in some of the NKVD dacha rooms, like the garage or some other? No. Was the part of the shooting team that performed the possibly small-scale open-air executions the same part that performed the closed-room executions, with the same modus operandi? It's not a given. Different groups inside one team could have different ways of doing things. If this were a different group, did it use the same ammo batch as the group that mostly shot inside? We don't know. There are too many unknowns for a firm conclusion. But as I wrote in the beginning, it is OK to assume, for the time being, that most were shot with the Geco bullets, since it's the most parsimonious explanation not involving various hypothetical groups inside the shooting team - but such possibilities should be kept in mind nevertheless.

That said, re-read what I wrote above: even if 99% of the cartridges were Geco, this is easily explainable through the central supply by the organizer.

Pp. 40, 41: "Second, none of the photographs of the shell casings in AM are of the headstamps. The headstamps are the only way the shells can be identified. AM contains side photographs only, useless for identifying the shells. 

Only photographs of the headstamps could provide evidence that it was precisely these shells that the Germans found in the Katyn burial pits. The Germans could have sent photographs of any shell casings they wanted and just claimed that they had been found at Katyn. But they did not. Instead the Germans took side views of the shells. They could easily have photographed the headstamps but they failed to do so. 

The Germans were asking their readers to "believe" them. But then why bother with reproducing side views and views of bullets at all? It seems this can only be explained as an attempt to deceive the readers of the report. 

[...]

All accounts of Katyn accept the German claim that only these undated Geco shells were found at Katyn. This means that they accept the German AM as truthful … they believe the German report. This is an error, incompatible with a search for the truth, just as it would to "believe" the Soviet Burdenko Report (BU). 

Nonsense on so many levels. Deceive? For what purpose? They had already admitted the exclusively German cartridges. An attempt at deception would have most probably included a presentation of some Soviet cartridge shells. And if they were so deceptive, one could ask the same question: why didn't they include the headstamp that they claimed to have found (would have been no problem)? And what was the purpose of the internal correspondence with the criminalistics institute?

Finally, as we have seen, the Polish experts actually scanned the terrain (and found a few other shells as well), instead of simply "believing" the German report. Furr simply shows his ignorance and mendacity again. 

P. 42: "Goebbels was correct. The use of German ammunition and only German ammunition at Katyn is prima facie evidence of German guilt. It is not evidence of Soviet guilt at all."

More deceptiveness on Furr's part. Nobody in their right mind has claimed that the German ammo found there is evidence of Soviet guilt, so the last sentence is redundant. And Goebbels did not in any way concede that the German ammo was prima facie evidence of German guilt - it was counterproductive to his propaganda campaign (due to the general public's possible perceptions, which has little to do with the actual evidential value), but that's that. In fact, Goebbels consistently attributed Katyn to the Soviets in his internal writings.

P. 43, about an Ostashkov inventory tag at Katyn:

"The finding of this badge caused some confusion in the German report. The report concludes that Czernuszewícz was brought from the Ostashkov POW camp to Kozel'sk by the Soviets for some purpose and then shot.

However, no one named "Czernuszewicz,""Czarnuszewicz", "Czernyszewicz", etc. is on the list of more than 4000 bodies in AM."

Sure, the list has some omissions for various reasons. Czarnuszewicz was from the last grave excavated in May, presumably this could be the reason why he is not on the list (due to organizational chaos or something similar). His body was one of those from the 8th grave that received special attention from Dr. Butz, which might have been the reason that it was not numbered upon having been taken out (a "special order", so to say).

P. 43: "* A "Wladyslaw Czarnuszewicz" - [..] is on list 54/3 transported from the Kozel'sk POW camp on May 5, 1940 (Tucholski p. 716 #44).""

*A "Wladyslaw Czernyszewicz" [..] is on the list at the Starobel'sk POW camp (Tucholski p. 980 #3668).

The volume Ubíty v Katyni, a recent attempt to shore up the official "Soviets-did-it" version, tries to solve this problem by claiming, ín brackets, that "Czarnuszewicz" was first held at Ostashkov and then transferred to Kozel'sk in November 1939. (811) The brackets indicate that there is no evidence for this."

A falsification on Furr's part. He claims that both the claim that he was held at Ostashkov, and the claim that he was transferred to Kozelsk, are in brackets. Obviously, this is not the case (UvK, p. 811):

"Czarnuszewicz Władysław of Julian and Antonina. Born in 1898 in the village of Plawskie, Slonim district, Nowogródek voivodeship. Military settler, office clerk at the district administration (starostat) of the Slonim district, resident in the town of Slonim. Reserve officer cadet. Was held in the Ostashkov prisoner-of-war camp, [from where he arrived in November 1939 to the Kozelsk camp]; as of 22.04.1940, was held in the Kozelsk camp..."

So only the transfer to Kozelsk is in the brackets. Which does not mean that there is no evidence for this either, it only means that there is no transfer list with concrete names. But if a person was first in Ostashkov and then ended up in Kozelsk, of course they were transferred at one point. This same comment in brackets can be seen in other entries too. I will add, however, that no document about Czarnuszewicz's stay in Ostashkov is known, the entry is an extrapolation from the fact that he had the inventory tag (information from A. Guryanov, 05.02.2023).

P. 43: "Ubity" assumes that the Russian "Charnushevich" [...] was really "Chernushevich" (Czernuszewicz)."

LOLWUT? Once again Furr tries to deceive the reader by claiming a mere assumption where there is a conclusion. Guryanov does not simply assume, he cites his source: "DM". The meaning of DM is explained in the book, so Furr and the readers are welcome to look it up, and I will simply post a couple of pictures from this source.

A translation of Czarnuszewicz's ID:

Note the spelling not only of the surname, but also of the name (Wladislaw instead of Wladyslaw). The person who did the translation/transcription obviously did not care much about the correctness of the spelling and thus, having the false spelling with "e" in their head simply used it further.

This and other translation were Butz's sources, hence the "e" in his report.

A translation of the Ostashkov tag found on the body:

A translation of an envelope found on the body:

Note that the spelling is now with "a". Another translator/transcriber? Also note that Czarnuszewicz resided in Kozelsk at the time he sent the letter, i. e. on 22.04.1940:

This was mentioned in the German report and Furr simply ignored this key point. Wherever this person, on whose body this letter and this tag were found, had been earlier (e. g. Ostashkov), he came to the Katyn forest from Kozelsk, so Furr's argument had died before even having been born. And, to repeat myself, since some Ostashkov POWs were transferred to Kozelsk, the explanation is trivial.

Now, we know that "Czernuszewicz"/"Tscharnyschewitsch" in the German sources was born on 21.10.1898 and lived in Slonim, we even know his exact address (as well as further details).

We also know that the Kozelsk Charnyshevich from the Soviet sources was a son of Julian and was born in 1898:

It is simple to check whether they are one and the same person by simply doing some biographical research in Poland, and the fact that Guryanov even specifies his place of birth and mother's name (not available from the German or the Soviet sources) means that such research has been done and it is indeed the same person. It should also be noted that one of Guryanov's sources is from Karta's database of surveys of relatives of the Katyn victims, i. e. another real life link.

P. 44: "Here is an individual named in the text of AM but not in the AM lists and about whom Tucholski and Gur'ianov (author of Ubity are also confused). Any honest and objective researcher should simply recognize this contradiction. But typical of dishonest scholarship those who support the "official" version, rather than seeking the truth, want that version to be "seamless," without contradictions.

In reality, no historical or criminal investigations are "seamless," without contradictions and nb unexplained details. Honest investigtors recognize this fact. Falsifiers often strive to make their falsifications appear to be "perfect."

What mealy-mouthed nonsense is this? Does anyone understand what Furr is on about here? The only "contradictions" are trivial spelling mistakes, exceptionally common when it comes to various lists. Of course, a non-historian like Furr cannot be expected to know this, having not done actual historical research, but then maybe he should not be writing books on topics he doesn't have the intellectual tools to handle?

P. 44: "This is a problem for the "official,""Soviets-did-it" version. A badge at Katyn from Ostashkov suggests that Polish POWs were shipped out of Ostashkov to Kalinin not to execution but for some other purpose. For if they were to be executed, why not execute them at Kalinin where, according to the "official" version, the Ostashkov POWs were murdered?"

How on earth does an Ostashkov inventory tag found on a Kozelsk prisoner (esp. given the transfer between Ostashkov and Kozelsk) tell us anything about the fate of those shipped from Ostashkov to Kalinin? What on Earth?.. What "problem"? (Also, what is he snorting?)

P. 44: "Rather than acknowledge this difficulty "Ubity" glosses over it without resolving it."

But there is no difficulty to resolve in the first place.

P. 44: "It appears to be a clumsy contradiction, unresolved because impossible to resolve, in order to get rid of the embarrassing presence of that badge from Ostashkov."

Translation: "I'm an ignorant clown who doesn't know the basics, laugh at me".

Having failed with Czarnuszewicz, Furr then tries to establish that other POWs transported from Ostashkov and Starobelsk in the spring of 1940 ended up in Katyn. He begins with the Szkuta/Sekuła case, which was chewed out years ago. There is no mystery here: the German no. 02398, identified as Stanisław Szkuta in AM and the Polish lists (absent in Kozelsk but present in Starobelsk), was actually Stanisław Sekuła (present in Kozelsk), the misreading having arisen due to the Polish character "ł" bearing a resemblance to "t" when handwritten (and the handwritten "e" must have been misread). This is proven by the original German exhumation protocols, where "Stanislaw Sekula" indeed appears. And further buttressed by the Polish Red Cross exhumation protocols, which have Szkuta, but specifically mention that a vaccination certificate from Kozelsk is present on the body (so it was not a Szkuta from Starobelsk in any case).

P. 48: "Accordingly Pamiatnykh attempts to show that Szkuta was actually someone else - Sekula - whose name was spelled incorrectly by the Germans. His hypothesis is that the Soviets misread the Polish barred "1" [...]"

Not the Soviets, dummy. The people who interpreted the documents in 1943, whether Poles or Germans.

P. 49, citing Tucholski:

"65. pal, od 7.9.1939 w III dyonie 21.

pal. PCK (AM) Nr 01398, (Tucholski p, 226 col. 2)

Here Tucholski identifies this man as number 1398 in the AM list.

But no such number exists in AM! The AM list skips directly from

1397 to 1399:

1397, Uniformierter.

1399. Leutnant.

Verschiedene Zettel, Impfschein 2869

Tucholski does not explain why he states that "Szkuta" is number

01398 in the AM list when there is no such number in that list."

Here Furr once again demonstrates his lack of basic common sense necessary not only for analyzing historical matters but also for everyday life. We are dealing with the number (0)2398, under which "Szkuta" appears in the AM list and in the PRC (PCK) list:

An adequate person would reason as follows: since we are talking about the number 02398, clearly Tucholski's "01398" is a run-of-the-mill typo. How an inadequate pseudoresearcher would reason we have already seen above.

P. 49: "Pamiatnykh, writing in 2011, could not account for the fact that the draft German list read "Sekula" (with no barred "1") but the print version reads "Szkuta." Perhaps we can do so today."

He didn't have to spell out the obvious (though in retrospect it probably always helps...): the name was read both ways at different times and only one version "won". At this point in time the Polish and the German lists were created more or less in parallel, it was the Poles who were usually interpreting the names on the documents for the Germans. From the PRC list we see that the Poles first read it as Szkuta, which was an easy mistake to make. They also must have given the reading to the Germans, which was then saved in some version of the list (not available to us) that became the direct basis for the list in AM. At some point (on the same day) the mistake was found one way or another and in the final protocol that we have we see the correct name (with the exception of the usual simplification of the non-German letter). The conclusion is that the AM list does not perfectly correlate with the exhumation protocols that we have and is based on some parallel version (possibly created in order to immediately send out to newspapers in occupied Poland, which were regularly publishing the exhumation lists).

P. 49: "In a later chapter we will see that the Germans captured the Soviet transit lists of POWs shipped from Kozel'sk to Smolensk, near Katyn."

Unsurprisingly, we will see no such thing.

P. 50: "Szkuta" was transferred from Starobel'sk to Khar'kov. But he was not shot there. Instead he was transferred further to Smolensk, where he was eventually shot and buried."

Given that Furr not only knows about the debunking of this claim but in fact cites it (and doesn't in any way rebut it), this claim is hard to characterize as anything other than a lie. There was no "Szkuta" in the Katyn forest, only Sekuła. (And had it even been "Szkuta", he would have been specifically from Kozelsk, as the PRC list shows; this would have created a small mystery, but not of the sort that would help deniers like Furr).

P. 50: "This article lists 231 "outsiders" or unidentified names in the German AM that are not on the Soviet Koz'elsk lists."

False, several names are not from AM but from Wykaz ofiar (WO), a Polish list.

P. 50: "I also identified four more POWs named in the AM list who are on the Soviet Starobel'sk lists and one who is on the Soviet Ostashkov lists."

OK, let's go through his list.

1. AM 0741. Not identified, but had a visit card that bears the name Stanislaw Lapinski, who was a singing teacher.

Does not prove anything, since a visit card does not necessarily identify the person carrying it. Note Furr's deception - he claimed that he "identified four more POWs named in the AM list", and Lapinski is not a proven POW in the AM list.

Even worse, it's not even a proven Lapinski, since in the Polish list from 03.05.1943 we read:

"0741. kapitan, bilecik na nazwisko Lipiński vel Lapiński Sanisław (wizytówka Lipiński albo Lapiński/ fotografia"

So it could have been Lipinski.

2. Janusz Makowski from WO, not AM. A mention useless without further details. Note that, as Furr mentions, Tarczyński's list is not of those whom the Germans claimed to identify, but of any unidentified names, including mentions on ephemera like visit cards (see La/ipinski above). A mere name coincidence with the Starobelsk list is not of any probative value at this point.

Once again, Furr's claim that this is a POW in the AM list is false, if only because the person is not in the AM list (and Furr does not show that he is claimed to be a POW in WO).

3. Jan Michalski, AM 01536. In the Polish list it is mentioned that he had with him a letter he wrote in Kozelsk. This makes Guryanov's hypothesis that this is Jan Michałowski from Kozelsk more plausible than Furr's hypothesis that it's Jan Michalski from Starobelsk. And once again, a coincidence of a relatively common name and a relatively common surname doesn't prove anything.

4. This all the more applies to the next entry, M. Wróbel, AM 0161. We only have the surname and the initial, so the identity with Marian Wróbel from Starobelsk is absolutely unprovable just from this. On the other hand, Guryanov's hypothesis that this could be Z. M. Wróbel can be true - the first initial (or even the whole name) could have been completely unreadable. So, this example doesn't prove anything either way.

5. And in the last case we have someone identified as Wojnowski, AM 01948. There indeed was no Wojnowski in Kozelsk and he is, as Furr points out, on Guryanov's list of 41 unidentified names (which we will discuss shortly). Of course, a mere surname coincidence doesn't even begin to indicate that this is the Wojnowski from Starobelsk.

6. Dudek, AM 0778. Furr sees Guryanov noting that in some version of AM he is listed as Karol Budek and claims that this must be Karol Labudek (remember how just a few pages ago the difference between "e" and "a" seemed almost a bridge too far for him?) from Ostashkov.

However, Furr provides no evidence that "Karol Budek" is the correct version (all the other lists have just Dudek) and he does not even attempt to otherwise rebut Guryanov's tentative explanation that this is Mieczysław Dudek from Kozelsk. Moreover, in the Polish list nr. 12880 we see:

"0778. Dudek ? - wojskowy, świad. szczep. w Kozielsku, karteczka z nazwiskiem wymienionego"

So this was Dudek from Kozelsk, not Labudek from Ostashkov.

7. Jakowicz, AM 02857. He is on the list of 41 names. The surname is uncertain, as in the Polish list nr. 12925 a question mark is placed before it. Furr claims, without any evidence whatsoever, that this "must" be Mikołaj Diakowicz from Ostashkov.

As for the 41 names, it is instructive to read Guryanov's commentary (UvK, pp. 74-77), but the bulk of the explanation boils to mistakes during the identification phase due to poor interpretation of the sometimes barely legible documents, confusing names/second names and surnames (e. g. when the surname is not legible, but the first and the second names are), using wrong documents for identification purposes (e. g. sometimes visit cards or notebooks were used, despite the fact that assuming the identity of the author and of the bearer is dangerous) and so on. I would add to that, that the document retrieval and salvaging procedure was not without its problems, which led to certain confusion and additional mistakes (like name duplication).

A few mistakes were unavoidable and thus expected. Guryanov's explanation is plausible, Furr's is baseless and cannot disprove the mainstream historiography.

Carping on a few names out of around 2700 - that's the very same flat-earther "looking for lighthouses" methodology I have already described previously.

This whole exercise has been an outright deception attempt on Furr's part. Here is why. Had he merely claimed that he found suitable candidates which may explain the real or alleged discrepancies in the AM list, that could have been an honest, if misguided, attempt at a scholarly reasoning.

But Furr went much farther than that, he explicitly claimed that he found not merely candidates with the same or similar names, but the concrete POWs from Ostashkov and Starobelsk who had to be in Katyn: "I also identified four more POWs named in the AM list who are on the Soviet Starobel'sk lists and one who is on the Soviet Ostashkov lists", "I have studied all these names and have identified three POWs from the Ostashkov camp", "The other two Ostashkov prisoners exhumed by the Germans at Katyn are", "This must be the following person", "This must be"...

It's a lie. Under the best of circumstances Furr identified some candidates, without actually proving their identity with the people from the Ostashkov and Starobelsk lists. In reality, out of 7 names, for 2 people Furr could not prove that they were claimed to have been POWs (1, 2), 2 were certainly or most probably from Kozelsk according to the documents found on them (3, 6), and for the rest he simply failed to prove his case (4, 5, 7). His method is simply matching the names (which is nonsensical, unless the names are very rare), yet in 3 cases the names either don't match or cannot be clearly established in the first place (1, 6, 7), in 4 cases we only have a surname or a surname and an initial (4, 5, 6, 7).

Furr sums up this chapter (p. 55):

"The unìmpeachable evidence from the German AM is:

* the Gernan shell casings;

* the badge from Ostashkov;

* the presence of corpses of Ostashkov and Starobel'sk prìsoners found at Katyn.

All thìs evidence poìnts towards German, not Soviet, guilt."

As we have seen, none of this, in Furr's presentation, constitutes any evidence for the German guilt, much less unimpeachable evidence.

"Chapter 3. The Burdenko Report."

P. 58: "This means that Zigoń was arrested in the Ukraine - the list doesn't give us any more information than that. Logically, therefore, he would have been imprisoned in Starobel'sk camp. But he is not listed on the Soviet lists as one of those transferred out of Starobel'sk in April - May 1940."

Imagine my head going all 'splodey when I read that. This [...] did not take any time to actually understand the basics of what he is writing about! Obviously, as a rule someone arrested goes to jail and then maybe prison, not to a POW camp! There is no indication of Zygoń ever having been a POW. 

(Ironically, after the first POW camp was liquidated in May 1940, there appeared in Starobelsk a transfer point for prisoners heading to the Northern labor camps. Which, of course, does not help Furr, since he is referring specifically to the POW camp and there is no evidence Zygoń would have ever have to set his foot in Starobelsk.)

P. 58: "Body #92 searched by the Burdenko Commission must be Zigoń's because there is too much personal material on it to be anybody else."

Imagine previously going to such lengths to explain your crank methodology about "unimpeachable" evidence, only to abandon it in one fell swoop and simply accept that whatever the Burdenko Commission claimed to have found on the bodies had been there originally! Don't misunderstand, in principle he can accept whatever he wants, but I expect consistency.

P. 59: "Since this letter was found on Zigoń's body, he must have received it. By this time he must have been in another camp. Eventually he ended up in a camp near Smolensk, probably in one of the three camps 1-ON, 2-ON, or 3-ON. As we shall see, the existence of these three camps is documented in other materials found by Burdenko Commission investigators on other bodies."

Since, as explained here and here, we know that these camps never existed, this is more patent nonsense.

P. 59: "So Zigoń was alive sometime after September 28, 1940, the latest date in Moscow. His body, along with many others, was exhumed at Katyn. This means that these men were also alive at that time, or Zygoń could not have been buried among them. Therefore they were not shot by the Soviets in Apríl-May 1940. That means that they were shot by the Germans and their Ukrainian Nationalist allies. This fact dismantles the "official" version of Katyn."

I'm quoting it to emphasize once again that at this point Furr has abandoned his "unimpeachable evidence" scam (which involved using claims that the side making the claims would not be interested in faking) and now simply accepts the Soviet side's claims made in their own interest at face value.

And you gotta love his mental tic: suddenly "Ukrainian Nationalist allies" appear, who had nothing to do with the Katyn forest, where the Soviets claimed to have found Zygoń. Freud would have enjoyed this.

Now, let me repeat what I have already explained above: it was not in the Germans' general interest to hide the bodies of Starobelsk or Ostashkov POWs or of any outside prisoners. The exception - their suppressing the finding of Lewandowska's corpse (there was a perception of females being unexpected among POWs and thus it would not be good for propaganda) - proves the rule. On the contrary, since they made grandiose claims about 12000 bodies, implying those were the missing POWs from the three camps the Poles had been fervently searching for, they had every interest of finding every executed Polish male. In fact, they were pretty desperately searching for new graves. So the fact that they could not find more corpses or establish any corpses from other camps among the ones the had found logically tells us that those were indeed the Kozelsk prisoners. Hiding the outsiders would have been against the German interest.

The Soviet finds of "outsiders" among the much fewer corpses (1380) that they exhumed, most of which had been already examined by the Germans (in fact there is strong, albeit not yet conclusive, evidence that none of the documents in the Burdenko report came from an "untouched" corpse), are thus automatically suspicious, more so, because they were made in the Soviet interest. And if they are to serve as evidence of anything, it's against the credibility of the Soviet report, not for it.

On the subsequent pages Furr simply repeats the same spiel - taking the Burdenko commission's finds that were in their own interest (not against it) at face value, so I will not repeat myself, except to note, that when it comes to the documents which mention non-existent  "ON" camps, this is evidence of fakery by the Soviet side and this alone discredits the whole Burdenko report. Remember what I wrote about sufficient evidence necessary to dismiss pieces of evidence? This is it.

Then Furr comes to a novel argument, already quickly addressed above, which will be addressed now in more detail. He is talking about an internal Burdenko commission inventory in which exhumed things, including documents, were described. He points to a certain document found on a body but not used by the commission publicly (thus, it would allegedly fit his criteria of unimpeachable evidence).

Pp. 62, 63: "1. Body #2.

a) Receipt of camp "1" of November 19 1939 for a silver cigar case and "Montblanc" ballpoint pen from PRIAPUL'SKOGO (PRUTSUL'CKOGO) Pshemyslava Boleslavovicha (ПРЯПУЛЬСКОГО (ПРУЦУЛЬСКОГО) Пшемислава Болеславовича)"

[...]

No Katyn POW from any of the camps has a surname that ends in "-pulski." There is only one POW whose surname ends in "-ulski" (Russian: -УЛЬСКИЙ) and whose name is Przemyslaw and whose father was named Bolesław. He is in Ostashkov list 050/3 of sometime in April 1940 (Tucholski p. 886 #36):

36. КОЗЕТУЛЬСКОГО Пшемислава Болеславовича

In fact, no other Katyn POW in any of the POW camps had the Christian name Przemyslaw and a father named Boleslaw. This is the only one. So this has to be the man."

 I have previously addressed this nonsense here:

"The aforementioned G. Furr suggests that the Burdenko commission found a receipt from P. Kozietulsky of Ostashkov in Katyn, despite the fact that the commission minutes indicate only variants of the name "Pr??ulsky" with two obscure letters. One could believe that there was a problem with deciphering of these two letters; but it is doubtful that anyone would have read "Koziet" as "Pryab", "Pruts", etc."

It doesn't play any role in the slightest for his claim that he could find someone with the matching first name and patronymic. The surname simply does not match. And if one were to assert that the transcriber could have gotten the surname so horribly wrong, then the first name and the patronymic are also in question.

Moreover, his whole logic is wrong. That the people, who tried to decipher the document, could not do it, does not prove that it hadn't been planted. It only shows that it was highly unlikely to have been planted by the people who couldn't decipher it. And the document being indecipherable after it was found does not mean that, if it had been planted, it wasn't decipherable at the moment of the planting. In practical terms it would mean something like this (this is just one scenario, others are possible): if an NKGB/NKVD team planted documents on the bodies in the autumn of 1943 (when they were tampering with the graves) and some of them got spoiled for obvious reasons, this would be completely compatible with the Burdenko team finding them (without most of the members knowing about the hoax) and not being able to decipher some of them. (And yes, there is no evidence that most of the Burdenko commission knew what was going on.)

To this I will add, that Furr's translation of the document is misleading. In Russian there is a slight ambiguity about what the text says, but the primary version is this:

"Receipt №1 of camp of November 19 1939..."

Yes, it sounds stilted, but so does the version that makes "№1" into a stand-in for "first", no one writes or talks like this either. Furr doesn't make a claim that this document proves the existence of the camp 1-ON (indeed, no one has made a claim that these camps existed so early and the document doesn't mention "ON"), but an unaware reader may misunderstand the meaning of the document. My hypothesis is that a particular camp was mentioned but its name was not readable, and this fact was not properly shown in the inventory's description by using the ellipsis.

Now, there is the obvious question as to who this document belonged to (if it wasn't anyone from Kozelsk) and why it is in the grave. We simply don't have enough information to answer this, and the document could be real (and so some POW might have had simply it from someone else for an unknown reason), or it could have been planted. Even if we were to accept Furr's proposal that it belonged to Kozietulski, then the reason for the planting would have been to prove that not only the Kozelsk POWs are in the Katyn forest (so that the Poles don't ask too many questions about the whereabout of the missing POWs from Starobelsk and Ostashkov).

Furr's summary of the chapter, p. 66:

"* We have a good deal of solid evidence that at least some prisoners lived after May 1940, the terminus ante quem that the "official" version states they must have been killed. 

* We also have unimpeachable evidence that prisoners from Ostashkov and Starobel'sk camps were transferred in April and May 1940 to execution in Kalinin and Khar'kov but not to execution and burial at Mednoe and Piatykhatky. Instead, they were transferred onward to Smolensk."

Needless to say, if Furr had any evidence for these claims, he would have cited it, but he hasn't, so they remain his fantasies.

In fact, the documents in the Burdenko report mentioning the "ON" camps are by necessity fake, since there were no such camps, and of course other aspects of the report can be shown to be faked too, like the report's claims about Ahrens.

"Chapter 4, Closed Packet No. 1"

P. 67: "Since 1995 there have been challenges to the authenticity of these documents. These challenges are either ignored or dismissed with derision by proponents of the "official" version."

Or debunked with facts and arguments, as I have done here and here. At the time Furr was writing this, the first link had already been known to him (you can check out the article creation dates to see which ones had already been available then).

Then he goes on about one of the excerpts from the Politburo decision:

P. 70: "No one has come up with a satisfactory explanation for this document."

Actually I have, although I published my research results already after this book. But all of what I wrote had to be clear to an actual specialist already back when Furr was writing his screed. It's not rocket science, just research, logic and common sense.

P. 71: "Document number 4 of "Closed Packet No. 1" contains a proposal from Shelepin that all the files relating to Katyn be destroyed.

Poppycock. He proposed destroying the POW and prisoner files, not Politburo decision etc. (and he even explicitly mentioned some documents that could remain if there was a wish). Is this a lie or is Furr just a complete ignoramus unable to read simple texts? You decide.

P. 71: "At any rate it appears that this destruction, actual or only contemplated, had something to do with the stamp "Do not burn" on the Shelepin version of Document 2."

It does, in fact, not appear so. It's just Furr's brainfart. OTOH, destroying duplicate excerpts after a while was a common practice, so the stamp made sense in this context. There is yet another alternative - the excerpts that were sent out to individuals were then destroyed as a rule, and the stamp could have been there so that the excerpt is not destroyed when it comes back from Shelepin.

P. 71: "It is hard to imagine archivists giving permission to alter archival documents in the way that the Shelepin version of Document 2 has been altered."

Hard to imagine based on deep archival research, or based on a ignorant Stalinist fanatic's hunch?

Anyway, I address this:

An alternative to this formally correct procedure would have been the creation of a strange new excerpt with Stalin's decision about the execution on the current letterhead of the CPSU. It is likely that the excerpt to be sent to A. N. Shelepin because of the particular importance of the document was prepared by T. K. Silina herself (it was her notes on sending the archive copy to A. N. Shelepin and on returning it are on the back of the informational excerpt), the head of the Politburo archives since 1933, for whom documents of this kind had not a sacral-historical status, but rather a business status, as evidenced by the destruction by her (or with her knowledge) of extra copies of the excerpt in 1956.

P. 71: "But whatever the motive, the "Shelepin" document has been falsified."

Wait, what? I rechecked and it's true: up until the point of this pronouncement Furr has not actually provided a single argument for his forgery claim (he listed some points he personally finds strange, but this does not amount to an actual argument for forgery). Yet here he is, making it.

P. 71: "The addition of Stalin's name at the bottom also suggests an attempt at forgery."

Also? What else does (with arguments please)? And, uh, it obviously doesn't. Excerpts that were sent out (as opposed to the archival/informational versions) had to have the name of a TsK secretary in some form. Sometimes it was a facsimile signature, sometimes a handwritten name, but some name had to be there pro forma.

P. 71: "A genuine document of 1940 signed "Secretary of the C.C." would not need to carry Stalin's name."

Dude, who said it was added in 1940? Of course it was added right before sending it to Shelepin, because up to that point the excerpt had been purely informational (and thus needed no TsK sec name) and had to be formally prepared for the sending, which accounts for all the changes and additions. And yes, in 1940 an excerpt prepared for sending would, indeed, have to carry a TsK secretary's name (not always Stalin's).

Furr concludes (p. 71):

"* The Shelepin version of Document 2 was certainly created during Khrushchev's time.

* The manipulation of the "Beria version" of Document 2 suggests that it may have been created at the same time and so may also be a forgery."

Of course, Furr cited no evidence that the excerpt was even probably created during Khrushchev's time, much less "certainly". He has cited no evidence at all! And calling the bureaucratic procedure of preparing an excerpt to be sent to someone "manipulation" takes nerve!

P. 72: "* The "do not burn" stamp on the Shelepin version suggests that there was a plan to burn at least some documents.

* The addition of Stalin's name suggests that this was an aborted attempt to produce false evidence in order to accuse Stalin of guilt in the Katyn massacre."

It doesn't and it doesn't, explained above.

P. 72: "Kharazov's testimony, and remarks made by an aged Shelepin to investigators in the early 1990s, are good evidence that some kind of Katyn forgery was contemplated during Khrushchev's day."

Just another of Furr's deceptions, turning the testimony supporting the documents' authenticity into a forgery claim.

P. 72: "If Khrushchev decided to blame Stalin for the Katyn massacre he would have also implicated himself."

Absolutely. The first good point in the book. Obviously, no "Katyn forgeries" can be blamed on Khrushchev.

P. 72: "There is a lot of other evidence that these documents are forgeries."

There is, in fact, none, but do go on.

P. 73: "And - it is important to recognize this also it is likewise impossible to prove from internal evidence that the documents in "Closed Packet No. 1" are genuine. They are of questionable validity. As such they are useless as evidence."

Not sure what he means by internal evidence, but I have provided, at the links above, plenty of evidence of authenticity. There is nothing questionable about the validity of these documents, Furr has not shown that his claim is true, and so, of course, these documents are a sufficient evidence of the Soviet guilt.

"Chapter 5. The Excavations at Volodymyr-Volyns'kiy"

I've dealt with the core claim of this chapter just recently, Furr's claims are debunked here and here in detail (and earlier here). Long story short, the badges of two policemen who were shot in Kalinin were found in VV (the presence in which in 1939 is documented for one of the two policemen and cannot be ruled out for the other), but not on bodies. Hence there is no evidence that the two policemen were buried anywhere but at Mednoye. That's it, basically. But let me also point out that according to the current understanding the graves at VV are a mix of NKVD and Nazi graves (Siemińska D., "Archaeological studies on World War II totalitarianism in the yard of a mediaeval hill fort in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Ukraine" // Materiality of Troubled Pasts. Archaeologies of Conflicts and War / edited by A. Zalewska et al. Warsaw, Szczecin, 2017). No wonder - the same VV prison was used by the NKVD and Gestapo. The conclusion is based on the difference between the graves' structure and content.

A grave of the Nazi victims in VV which includes mothers hugging their children. Sieminska, p. 105.

Another such grave, ibid., p. 106.

A VV grave with NKVD victims, ibid., p. 110.

This helps to explain why certain incorrect conclusions were made about the whole site at some point in time, before further excavations and analysis established the current consensus.

"Chapter 6. What the Unimpeachable Evidence Shows"

Here Furr reiterates the already debunked points and whines about Guryanov based on them. Since his premises have already been proven to be based on lies, fakes and ignorance, his conclusions can also be ignored.

He then whines about a "worldwide antícommunist conspiracy to ignore the truth about Katyn, as about many other alleged "crimes of Stalin." (p. 100) and wonders why kooky cranks like him are ignored by the actual historians. Of course, his argument is no different from that of a Holocaust denier - they might also complain that their "research" is "ignored".

"Chapter 7. The German Report"

Furr wants to establish that there are lies and contradictions in the German report. An attentive reader will notice, that I have already conceded that this is the case. The question is whether any of those expose a falsification of any core Katyn claims by the Germans, like they do with the Soviet falsifications in the Burdenko report.

I will also point out that the German report itself doesn't play a great role today, albeit it still contains some useful pieces of information not contained elsewhere. It's the exhumations themselves that are still important, but today we have sources that are closer to the exhumations themselves (like the German and Polish exhumation protocols and related documents), as well as various testimonies of the participants, that are arguably more valuable than most of what the report has to say, especially as some of this information got distorted in the report for propaganda purposes.

The important forensic conclusions of the report largely don't hold up too. Orsos' pseudocallus method, that so impressed the other experts, later failed to be confirmed scientifically. Various smaller observations could be interpreted in different ways. Also, forensic science simply could not, based on the post-mortem transformation of the corpses in mass graves, tell whether they were buried in 1940 or 1941. (The key element was actually the documents, found in the graves, coupled with the corpses having been glued to each other due to the adipocere transformation, which also conserved the documents, but this was simply an observation, for which no forensic expertise was necessary.)

While it is understandable, that some earlier researchers still relied on these forensic conclusions in some part, nowadays most of them aren't of much use in any case, as different, much more powerful sorts of evidence have become known.

That said, let's take a look at Furr's claims.

P. 107: in one place the report says there were numerous clerics among the victims, then admits only 1 was found. If it were a contradiction, it would have been an inconsequential one - the claim appears on p. 9, in the short introduction obviously written by an anonymous propagandist. Several witnesses are quoted later in the report who claimed to have seen several clerics, and this was probably the source for the intro. In fact, several capelans were killed in the Katyn forest (see UvK), and not all of them would have necessarily been identifiable as such in the graves, depending on what they wore or the state of their corpses.

The intro also contains the laughable claim that in all there may be 10-12000 bodies in the graves, including the undiscovered ones (at that point was internally clear to all participants that this was not the case). This is a more important issue, but, of course, Furr ignores it.

Pp. 108, 109: several witnesses state the NKVD house was fenced off in 1931 but Silvestrov allegedly contradicts this by implying that only during the transports the usual mushroom gathering was forbidden in the vicinity of the house. However, Silvestrov's formulation is too vague for Furr's argument to work. What exactly is the vicinity that he means? Right beside the house? This would be just an assumption (based on a translation, at that). It could have extended significantly beyond the fence. And it would in any case make sense if people were forbidden to gather mushrooms also right outside the fence, which would still in the vicinity of the house. Or when he said "the rest house of the collectives", this might have easily included the terrain around it, i. e. the whole complex. When we say "dom otdykha" in Russian, we usually understand, that it can include several separate buildings and the territory. Here is, for example, the "rest house Pokrovskoye":

From the description:

The boarding house Pokrovskoye has a rich accommodation reserve, namely, several buildings and a large number of cottages and villas. All in all, the room reserve of the rest house Pokrovskoye can offer more than 1000 places of accommodation with different levels of comfort, from economy class to VIP. At present Pokrovskoye is one of the best boarding houses of the Moscow region, and more than once competitions gave it the title of the Best rest house of the Moscow region.

In the rest house Pokrovskoye you will find absolutely everything for a good rest: several restaurants with different cuisines, baths, saunas, a wonderful nature complex, a lake and a thick mixed forest, well-groomed paths and areas for rest, equipped sites for barbecue, rental of different sports equipment, entertainment programs, lots of services for your children and much, much more.

Not much, much more needs to be said.

P. 110: Kiselev repeated the exaggerated German figure of victims. And? Where is a lie or a contradiction? Witnesses adopting various official figures and incorporating them into testimonies is common. Think about the testimonies about 4 million victims in Auschwitz.

P. 110: "Former Polish officer Glaeser told the Germans that the Kozel'sk transits began on March 20, 1940, and ended May 9, 1940. (AM 31) This is false. According to Tucholski's book, which prints all the Soviet transit lists, there is no list earlier than April 1."

And? Chronological misstatements of such nature are common in witness testimonies. This doesn't really need an explanation beyond this (but it is at least a hypothetical possibility that the witnesses' memory was influenced by the fact of the transfer on 09.03.1940 of 15 POWs out of Kozelsk, see UvK, pp. 85, 97).

P. 111: the German report claims that some POWs were transferred from Starobelsk to Kozelsk and then to Katyn. Actually this claim occurs in the policeman Voss' final report that is printed in the German report. Furr points out that "There is no evidence for any "small number" having been transported from Starobel'sk to Kozel'sk before April-May 1940." This is, however, incorrect, as there were some direct transfers from Starobielsk to Kozelsk, with the POWs having been in Starobelsk only for a few days in 1939 (it was basically a transit point for them); but also indirect transfers fit Voss' description - several Starobelsk prisoners were first transferred elsewhere (e. g. to Moscow) and then to Kozelsk, to end up at Katyn (UvK, pp. 140 (Aleksandrowicz Antoni), 147 (Babuchowski Marian), 168 (Brzezicki Mikołaj), 177 (Bołdok Tadeusz), 208 (Wdówka Henryk Marian), 307 (Domagała Tadeusz Edward), 312 (Drabczyński Ignacy), 356 (Ilków Mikołaj) and others).

P. 111. Objections against Voss' claim that at one time 2402 officers were transferred from Kozelsk. Well, it's just a spurious piece of information. Also a pretty common thing in such reports. No source is stated directly, presumably this comes from the aforementioned Glaeser, so could be simple hearsay and/or misunderstanding. Whatever. Completely inconsequential.

Pp. 111-114: the German report contradicts itself on whether there were insects on the corpses. Palmieri wrote numerous larvae were found on a corpse he autopsied. Furr quotes Markov at the Nuremberg trial, who noted:

"As to the insects and their larvae, the assertion of the general report that none were discovered is in flagrant contradiction to the conclusions of Professor Palmieri..."

I agree that there is a contradiction, but not necessarily due to an intent to deceive.

By the general report Markov meant the small report signed by the members of the international commission. What did it say? Furr himself provides a translation:

"Insects and insect remains on the corpses that could have come from the time of burial are entirely lacking."

Note that contrary to Markov this formulation does not, strictly speaking, deny finds of insects or insect remains absolutely, only of such "that could have come from the time of burial".

Imagine the hot late summer days of 1941, when the massacre began according to the Soviets. The experts probably reasoned that it would have been almost unavoidable that numerous insects - not only flies, but also ants, mites etc. - would get attracted to the fresh corpses (and would also leave noticeable damage by consuming some parts of them (Insektenfraß)). I hypothesize that the thrust of the statement is that thousands and thousands of such insects would have been accidentally buried together with the corpses (hence coming "from the time of burial"), yet none such were found (according to the report, at least). In this sense the found larvae could be seen as not having come "from the time of burial" but having developed some time later, the focus was not on them, but on the "snapshot" of a particular point in time.

If this reading is true, there is, of course, still a formal contradiction. At some point of time flies had to lay the eggs. Was it much later than the burial, perhaps in some partially exposed parts of the top layer, when the weather got warmer (thus formally not contradicting the clause "from the time of burial")? Then it should have been shown that they could not have come earlier, at the time of burial, because it doesn't follow from anything that they could not have (yet the report excludes such a possibility). It would have been circular reasoning to argue that it could not have been due to cold weather. If, on the other hand, the flies are assumed to have arrived around the time of burial (with the larvae thus appearing only afterwards), then it was not, at least in an absolute sense, an insect-free period (as the report claims). By the way, flies can lay their eggs also at relatively low temperatures, so the notion of an absolute insect-free period in April and May does not really hold up anyway, at least not without a really detailed forensic-entomological analysis proving the case. 

I think that the experts probably wanted to express the point that the insects that got caught up in the burial, were not found, but did not think their words through and formulated their thesis poorly (or did not catch a poor formulation by one person), thus creating a formal contradiction. So I'll agree that this is a defect and that it also lessens the forensic value of the report. But then, as I wrote earlier, the forensic part of the report in weak evidence anyway (same applies to the Soviet one, which is even weaker).

Furr then whines (pp. 114, 115) about "terminus post quem", but this nonsensical argument of his has already been debunked above.

On p. 115 Furr quotes a part of a political statement of the Polish govt-in-exile, printed in the German report, rejecting any possibility of "a meeting or an understanding with Hitler", then points to the Polish Red Cross working at Katyn. Even if there were a contradiction here (and it's not a given, as it is a matter of subjective interpretation - as far as I'm concerned, the PRC's work in the Katyn forest was not in any form "a meeting or an understanding with Hitler", and the PRC members actually refused to collaborate in the German propaganda), what does a purely political statement of a Polish government not being fully correct have to do with the exhumations?

In this chapter Furr has failed to show that the German report was a part of a grandiose hoax, albeit he was able to point out at least one defect - which was a gimme anyway, due to the limited evidential value of the German report nowadays.

Since Furr continues the analysis in the next chapter, no conclusions follow for now.

"Chapter 8. The German Report, continued. Sakharov's Article "Secrets of Katyn"

Valentin Sakharov, on whose writings Furr relies in this chapter, is another Stalinist crank, who is extremely, woefully ignorant, as has been shown here, here and here.

P. 118: "It [Lviv - SR] was renamed "Lemberg" by the Germans after they captured it in June 1941 during the invasion of the Soviet Union. According to the "officìal" version and the German Report (AM) the Polish POWs were murdered by the Soviet NKVD more than a year earlier, in April and May 1940. Therefore there should not have been any documents found in the mass graves with the name "Lemberg" on them. But according to AM such documents were found."

False, if only because "Lemberg" could appear in private documents of the Polish POWs who were ethnic Germans (some such were indeed buried in the Katyn forest).

P. 118: "Here we will examine some examples of these documents‘ The

number represents the number assigned in AM to the corpse exhumed by the Germans in April-June 1943.

892. Uniformierter.

1 Foto mit Anschrift: Hanina Gajowska, Lemberg,

Zyzyinska 24. (?) 1 Medaillon. (AM 189)

"Anschrift" - "inscription" - means that these were the actual words on the photo. If genuine, this proves that the body and document were from after June, 1941, and therefore that the victim was murdered by the Germans."

It means no such thing at all, since it makes an unwarranted assumption that the German translators never would have translated the Polish placenames into German.

In the Polish list we see for this number:

Therefore there is exactly nothing to suggest that "Lwów" was not also in the original text.

On pp. 118-119 Furr tries to preempt this obvious explanation:

"If the inscription really read "Lwów" and some German, in an excess of patriotism or political correctness, changed the name "Lemberg," the name in use at the time of the exhumations in 1943, then that would mean that the Germans were altering the documents they found. And that would compromise the bona fides of the German AM."

Not at all! It was not altering the documents, but translating them. Now, Furr may not like this particular translation mode (and we can agree that it was not scholarly), but that's neither here, nor there, since the lists were not created for academic scholarly purposes. Moreover, even if "bona fides" of the AM were somehow damaged (though not in any sense proving deception), we still have the parallel Polish lists, which we still can check.

P. 119: "If this one mention of "Lwow" was an oversight and the Germans were changing "Lwow" to "Lemberg" wherever they found it that would mean that the Germans were altering the documents whenever they saw fit to do. If that were the case it would mean that we cannot trust any of these documents in AM, because the Germans might have altered or even invented them."

Nope. It only means we cannot expect to see a 100% true transcription in a scholarly sense (i. e. we must be wary of how various names are presented). Nothing else, certainly not any invention, follows.

P. 120: "781. K......, Boleslaw, Sohn des Zygmunt. 1 Foto mit Anschrift: Deine sich sehnende Frau, Lemberg, den 13. 2. 1940, Impfschein, Brief, Briefumschlag. (AM 186)"

P. 121: "Why would a Polish captain be carrying a certificate of military service written in the German language? According to the "Katyn Cemetery Book" (page 509) Pufahl had fought in the First World War. But he would have fought in the Russian army, since Poland was part of Tsarist Russia at that time."

P. 141: "However, Sakharov's article has made this line of inquiry moot. He discovered documents that prove that the Germans had the lists of POWs sent from Kozel'sk to the Smolensk NKVD. These are the same lists that are reproduced in Tucholski's book. We have confirmed this by obtail1ing from the Russian State Military Archive the documents cited by Sakharov here and from which he quotes some passages in Russian translation. The original documents are, of course, in German. Facsimiles of these documents may be found on the "Images" web page of this volume. They are: 

[archival references - SR]"

The Russian Kozelsk-2 lists, currently mixed into a file which begins with the Yukhnov POWs, but in the second half the Kozelsk-2 POWs appear. GARF f. 7021, op. 114, d. 32, l. 167.

The translation of the list made by the Germans. GARF f. 7021, op. 114, d. 33.

Moreover, the correspondence Furr refers to clearly refers to the interned Poles, not to POWs. The lists were not a secret and were even publicly mentioned in Völkischer Beobachter on 10.06.1943. They were correctly called  "the name lists of these internees" which "were found in the GPU files". The article referred specifically to the subsequent internees of Kozelsk, correctly differentiating them from the earlier POWs.

GARF f. 7021, op. 114, d. 30, l. 32.

Pp. 141, 142: "There is at least one more entry in AM that shows that the Germans were using the Soviet list rather than documents from the graves: 

3733. Liachowski, Boleslaw, (Vater Antoni), Uniformierter.

Impfzettel, 1 Brief mit Stempel, New York, Brooklyn, 1 Zettel mit Notizen.

[...]

The Soviet list uses transliterates the name ЛЯ - "L + ya". But the name in Polish begins with "La", not "Lia." The Germans could not have obtained this name from any letter or other document on this body, or found in a grave or anywhere else. Therefore the Germans transliterated this name from the Russian-language Soviet list."

"1.) Die bisher ausgegebenen und in der polnischen Presse veröffentlichten Listen uber die in Katyn festgestellten Leichen sind unzulänglich, weil nur in wenigen Fällen die Angaben zur Identifizierung ausreichen. Das Polnische Rote Kreuz entschuldigte sich damit, dass bei der Kürze der verfügbaren Zeit genauere Angaben nicht möglich gewesen wären und man sich darauf verlassen gehabt hätte, die Dokumente in Warschau durcharbeiten zu können.

1) The lists of corpses discovered in Katyn, which have been issued and published in the Polish press so far, are inadequate, because only in a few cases the information is sufficient for identification. The Polish Red Cross excused itself with the fact that with the shortness of the available time more exact particulars would not have been possible and one had relied on being able to work through the documents in Warsaw.

Indeed, only a small portion of the German and Polish lists contain data unambiguously identifying a person, especially if one does not know that he was held in the Kozelsk camp ( something that at the time was not yet known for certain), such as names of relatives or addresses. Sakharov completely changed the meaning of what had been written. It was not about the unreliability of the information in this sentence at all, but only about its insufficiency (in the published form) for the relatives for finding their family members. Accordingly, in paragraph 4, the PRC promises to provide lists with more complete information as soon as possible. The second document quoted by Sakharov, by the way, just explains the first."

Pp. 146, 147: "Sakharov draws the following conclusion:

[...]

"On the basis of the aforementioned evidence we can affirm that some documents, papers, and even objects in the hands of the German police were utilized in place of bodies that in reality did not exist and for the "identification" of bodies which had originally been classed as "unidentified."

This implies that some of the documents found on bodies may have really belonged to that person but we have no idea which do and which do not."

"Chapter 10. The Burdenko Commission Report"

Here I will be skipping a lot of meta commentary - what other researchers allegedly proposed and whether their hypotheses hold up or not may interest some but does not directly affect the topic at hand. I will mostly deal with the key issues.

P. 156: "Nor does Ciencala have any evidence that the BU witnesses were lying."

There is, of course, plenty such evidence. Furr can start with the three women who lied that Ahrens was the direct organizer of the massacre in August and September of 1941, even though he had not arrived in Smolensk until November

Then we can proceed to the others.

Pp. 157, 158:

"They proved that operatives arriving from Moscow produced counterfeit documents with later dates, put them in the remains of the graves, and prepared false witnesses. [...]

Furthermore, we know that this statement is false - a deliberate lie. Pamiatnykh has published the notes of the Burdenko investigators about the documents they found on the corpses. As we have seen one of them - that of Kozetulski - is so fragmentary that the investigators read it incorrectly, failed to recognize its importance for the Soviet case and so never used it. It is one of the pieces of our "unimpeachable evidence." It cannot have been "planted" by the Soviets."

Furr lies: had he even found a document known to belong to "Kozietulski", and as we have seen above, he hasn't, that document he means was from 1939 and thus was not one of the documents with later dates planted by the Soviets. (The the "couldn't have been planted" argument has been dealt with above.)

P. 158: "There was such a decree naturally enough. Collaboration with the enemy was illegal in every country. But Cienciala is dishonest here as well. There is no evidence that any of the Burdenko Commission witnesses were threatened with prosecution."

Wait, so why were they not prosecuted for collaboration with the Germans?

P. 159: "Cienciala has no evidence that the witnesses' testimony was faked or the result of threats."

Furr has no evidence that Cienciala has no evidence. In fact, we do have direct evidence that the witnesses' statements were prepared in a forced way. To quote from here:

"How were the Soviet "witnesses" prepared? Let M.G. Krivozertsev, mentioned twice in the Soviet report, tell us about this:

"That, what we said, there is nothing of ours there. [...] [The investigator] wrote it himself, and then read it out. Correct? - Correct. Is everything all right? - Sign here. [...] We had no right to say anything and to correct the investigator, saying, "You have to write so and so". Nineteen people - this is not simple. And every single one, just as one started to speak, so did the last, nineteenth, in the same way said his own speech."

Excerpt from the documentary film "The Katyn Affair" ("Geheimsache Katyn: der Massenmord und die Propagandalüge", 1993) by Barbara Dyrschka, Marek Grzona and Ingo Bethke:

"- First of all I was immediately, well, so received, indeed, as if a member of the party. He himself introduced himself to me, "I'm a member of the party, trust me, everything that I write, everything will be exactly so." So what am I supposed to say, that no, no, not so?

- He didn't even read to you what he wrote down?

- No.

- Just asked to sign.

- Just told me to sign. [...] He said: "Don't worry, I'll do everything as it should be done, the Germans did it and it's OK, sign, don't be afraid, it's OK"."

We are talking here about the NKGB interrogations of 1943, when they were preparing "witnesses" for the first time. These are the protocols of Krivozertsev's interrogations, which, according to him, were written by the investigator himself (GARF, f 7021, op. 114, d. 10, p. 141-148):[...]

The fact that Krivozertsev was interrogated twice helps explain the seemingly contradictory detail in his interview about whether the investigator read him the contents of the protocols - perhaps he recalled different details of two separate "interrogations" in different interviews. Krivozertsev was also interrogated by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office, just as other witnesses: 

"CMPO prosecutors also interrogated other witnesses whose testimony was used to support the Soviet version. For example, in 1943-1944. M.G. Krivozertsev testified to the NKGB that the Katyn Forest was a favorite place for local residents to hang out and gather mushrooms. In August 1941 he allegedly saw how German trucks loaded with people moved into the Katyn Forest, and there drove columns of Polish prisoners of war, after which single gunshots rang out. The forester Tsurikov showed him the burial place, and he decided that the Poles were buried there. In April 1943, the Germans dug the place up and discovered the graves, which were very well preserved. There he also found three 7.65 Geco shell casings, which he handed over to NKGB officers.

During the CMPO investigation, Krivozertsev confirmed that before the war he lived in Gnezdovo, and testified that in the summer of 1940, at the station, on the reserve tracks, he saw 3-4 "Stolypin wagons" with prisoners, 60 people in each. Buses were driven right up to the carriage doors, and the prisoners were moved into them. After a while a rumor spread in the village that they were Poles, of whom they wanted to organize a collective farm, but they refused and were shot. During the occupation he saw open pits in the Katyn forest, in one of which he counted about 300 corpses of men, which lay in 13 layers. After the liberation of Smolensk, a commission came to the Katyn Forest and he was summoned for interrogation, where, without asking anything, he was immediately offered to sign a protocol. Which he did, as he was afraid for the lives of his family members.

Krivozertsev said the same to A.P. Yakushev, special correspondent of the Smolensk Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting, who was interrogated as a witness. In a conversation with him, Krivozertsev retracted his testimony given to the NKGB in late 1943. He formulated his motive for giving false testimony as follows: if he had not signed what was offered to him, he would have been destroyed."

Then Furr deals with the Olshansky story and I want to emphasize that his story about Burdenko is indeed a lie, analyzed here.  Interestingly, Furr did not bother to link to this refutation, which supports his point.

P. 163: "In reality we do not know that "nothing was heard from any of the Polish POWs after they were transferred out of the three PO camps." This is the position of the Polish Government In Exile (GIE). Did they check? If so, how? Where is the documentation of their checkup?"

We do, of course, know that and the PGiE did check as far as they could, gathering information from numerous returning Poles (see, for example, Czapski's 1942 memorandum for Raikhman, various other pre-Katyn notes, the PGiE's report, detailing the search, as well as other documents in the archives of PGiE and its various members, which show the extent of the information they had before the Katyn affair - Furr is welcome to search through them and find any evidence contradicting this), and were also fervently asking the Soviet side questions about the whereabouts of the specific Polish officers - indeed, Stalin was asked directly at least twice, with a concrete list of names, and could not give any concrete answer. The second time he was asked, he was reduced to saying: "It is unknown [...] You would know better".

An example of an index card from the voluminous Anders archive listing the report numbers pertaining to just one narrow topic (POW labor in Soviet captivity, point b: labor in mines and stone quarries). There are more than 18000 reports, depositions and statements by Poles who left the USSR in the archive.

P. 166: "That means the Polish POWs had been provided with winter clothing by the Polish Army when captured in September 1939. They would also have had it whether they were shot in April - May 1940, as the Germans claimed, or in September - December 1941, as the Soviets concluded. 

No one captured in Russia - or, for that matter, Western Ukraine or Western 8elorussia would ever abandon winter clothing, no matter what time of year it was."

Several manipulations at once. They would not have "abandoned" it, but they were extremely unlikely to wear it, at least en masse, at the end of August and in September, when they were allegedly shot according to the Soviet witnesses.

As for Furr giving the time period of "September - December" rather than the end of August - September, this is a repetition of the Soviet manipulation. The witnesses are extremely clear that the executions were over by the end of September. December only appears in the forensic expertise act, but its mention follows neither from any premise in the act itself, nor from the main text of the report (which directly contradicts such dating). It was almost certainly an attempt at explaining the winter clothing after foreign visitors pointed out this curious fact.

P. 167: 

"In the graves at Katyn were personal documents which made it possible to identify 2730 ofthe remains out of a total of 4151. The Soviet Special commission, when it carried out a second exhumation, did not find any other personal documents."

That this statement is false is obvious to us today since we now have a list of documents found by Burdenko Commission investigators and published by Pamiatnykh. But it was recognizably false in 1989 too! The final section of BU is titled "Documents Found on the Bodies." This section refers to letters, postcards, a Catholic prayer book, and receipts found. These are "personal documents."

This is an open attempt at deception from Furr, because he knows full well that the 1988 Polish report acknowledges this and explains what it means later:

"The [Soviet -SR] Report cites 9 pieces of physical evidence to prove the guilt of the Germans, with the caveat, rather vague, that these are only some of those found by the experts. The rest have never been published. These 9 documents were found on six bodies out of 925 newly exhumed corpses. They were recovered from the clothing of the first hundred re-exhumed (the last refers to corpse No. 101). There were no personal documents among them; there was one icon. Of the remaining documents, five were receipts issued by the camp, two were postcards (one received, one unsent), and a letter from Warsaw sent to a Soviet institution."

Furr may not agree with the report's definition of personal documents, but he has no right to distort what the report means.

(I will point out, that the 1988 Polish report is mistaken, since the German identification was not based solely on personal documents (by its definition), which did not occur that often in the first place.)

P. 169: "The shells mentioned in AM were the 1928-1931 type shown in the middle drawing. Genschow said that the larger exports to the USSR were before 1928, when the word "Geco" did not appear on the shells, and were small after that, when the "Geco DD 7.65" shells were made."

Yet another falsehood. According to the Genschow letter the "*D*" cartridges were used until 1922, then came the "DD" cartridges that were used until 1932. In his testimony Genschow only said, from memory and thus with understandable imprecision, that the "DD" trademark was in use until 1933-34. He never claimed that the word "Geco" did not appear before 1928! He only said that "at that time the stamp on the bottom of the cartridge was different from the one I stated before, and after 1928 the quantities which were exported [to the USSR -SR] were small". The headstamp that he had mentioned before was the one used since 1933 ("Geco" with "7,65" underneath). It was indeed different than that "before 1928", but it was also different that that "before 1929", "before 1930" etc. - in no way did Genschow imply any change of the headstamp in 1928. The professor of literature cannot interpret the simplest texts!

Pp. 169, 170: "A Major Vetoshnìkov testified to the Burdenko Commìssìon about the unsuccessful evacuatìon of Comp 1-ON ìn July 1941. "Drama" repeatedly suggests that there was no one named Vetoshnikov: [...]

Writing years later, Lebedeva also claims that Vetoshnikov never existed: [...]"

And he indeed didn't:

"As it follows from the certificates of the MB RF [later FSB RF -SR], such camps did not exist in 1940 and subsequent years. The so-called Major Vetoshnikov did not serve in the state security system and is a fictitious figure (Vol. PO, pp. 23, 72)."

It is of course completely impossible for someone bearing the high rank of a major of state security to simply "fall through the cracks" and not appear in any documents unrelated to the Katyn case.

Furr knows full well about this information.

Moreover:

"In order to dispel possible doubts about the existence of the false witness Vetoshnikov, who was allegedly the commander of the NKVD Camp № 1-ON, the NKGB officials prepared a false report on his behalf, allegedly written in August 1941 in the name of State Security Major Soprunenko. As can be seen from Soprunenko's personal file, he was not promoted to this rank until March 1942, i.e. Vetoshnikov's "report" was written retroactively, after March 1942."

Indeed, here is the report (courtesy of A. Guryanov):

 

Addressed to the major of state security Soprunenko on 12.08.1941. Soprunenko became major of state security on 17.02.1942.

The non-existent Vetoshnikov is one of the many falsifications in the Burdenko report that Furr won't be able to explain.

(All of the above does not mean that the Commission made up Vetoshnikov. Obviously, somebody simply testified under that name.)

P. 172: "It is only necessary to assume that Vetoshnikov did not exist if one has previously also assumed that no camps 1-, 2-, and 3-ON existed."

Wrong! As one can see, this is not one of the reasons I give above for his non-existence.

P. 172: "The Polish "official" version does make this assumption. but the existence of these camps is documented in the list of documents found on the corpses by the Burdenko Commission investigators and published on the Internet by Aleksei Pamiatnykh, a fervent advocate of the "official" Soviets-did-it version:"

But since these camps are documented not to have existed, this of necessity proves that the documents allegedly found on the bodies, that Furr relies on, are fakes. This further discredits the Burdenko report and Furr won't be able to explain why the Soviet side concocted these fakes if it was not guilty.

P. 174: "But it speaks to the authenticity of this note by Men'shagin. If the Soviets had faked a note by Men'shagin, would they have made it so short and so laconic that it did not directly implicate the Germans? Why would the Soviets have fabricated a lengthy account of shooting of Jews by the Germans and left the question of who shot the Polish POWs to a very brief and ambiguous mention at the end?"

But that's obvious illogic again. Who said that the whole document was forged? One of the best ways to forge something is to take a mostly authentic document and add necessary things (while keeping the verisimilitude).

In RGASPI I located what is probably the first mention of the Menshagin notebook (RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 174, ll. 144-146).

On 16.10.1943 Kobulov sent a top secret message to the top propagandist Shcherbakov with "an excerpt from a work notebook of the burgomistr of Smolensk Min'shagin relating to August-November 1941". The excerpt contains various pieces of information, beginning with repressions against Jews and ending with mundane stuff like organizing a publishing of a newspaper and mentioning what specialists (electricians etc.) are necessary.

Yet, despite the huge interest of the Soviet side in the Katyn issue and a propaganda coup that the mentions of the Poles in the notebook would have constituted, these key sentences, that would later become "evidence" in the Burdenko report, are completely absent in the excerpt, because the part where they allegedly occurred is not included at all.

The best explanation is that they simply did not exist at the time and were added later to Menshagin's authentic notebook.

P. 179: "Maciszewski's book is early; perhaps he did not know this."

P. 219: "* The Polish report by Dr. Sieminska has been taken off the Internet. The Report was originally online here:"

Pp. 233, 234: "Cienciala states: "The lists of victims shot in Ukraine have been found." This is false. There is no indication in the book in question, Zuzanna Gajowniczek, ed., Ukraiński ślad Katynia, that the prison ers on these lists were shot. These are simply lists of names, many of them recognizably Ukrainian.

The only thing that suggests any relation to what we know as Katyn" is the fact that the NKVD list numbers are in the same sequence as the NKVD file numbers of the Polish POWs shipped out of Kozel'sk, Starobel'sk, and Ostashkov. But we know that the prisoners shipped to the Smolensk, Khar'kov, and Kalinin NKVD were not shot there, because many of the Starobel'sk and Ostashkov prisoners turned up dead at Katyn, and at least two Ostashkov POWs turned up dead in Volodymyr-Volyns'kiy."

To understand whether or not the Ukrainian list has to do with Katyn one has first to understand what the list ... lists. The so-called Ukrainian list was attached to the 25.11.1940 letter by the head of the 1st special section of the NKVD UkrSSR Tsvetukhin to the head of the 1st special section of the NKVD SSSR Bashtakov (1st special section/1st spetsotdel was always dealing with bureaucratic and archival matters). Tsvetukhin wrote:

"I'm sending the personal prison files, as in the list, of the arrestees in your directives 041, 042, 043 and others.

Attachment: 3435 files in 5 bags."

So it is a list of so-called prison files (not to be confused with other kinds of files, like the investigative or control-observation files) of persons who were mentioned in "directives" numbered 041, 042, 043 etc. The list is mostly alphabetical, it is sequentially numbered from 1 to 3459, but due to the clerical errors mentioned in the document itself (on the last page) it only contains 3435 persons.

The information for each person consists of their name, their father's name, year of birth and the special number consisting of a list number based on a specific protocol (e. g. 41/1, being list 1 based on the protocol/directive 041) and the number of the person in this protocol (e. g. 24).

 This is all we can gather from the document itself.

The interpretation of the Ukrainian list thus fully depends on the context of the 1940 Polish operation (i. e. by itself it cannot provide evidence of an execution).

The protocol numbering system is identical to the Katyn crime complex POW transfer list numbering. The transfer list numbers for the POWs from the three camps were based on the protocols numbered  05-06, 011-040, 044-046, 050-054, 058, 059 and 062 (the first very first lists did not use such numbering, so the protocols 01-04 cannot be seen in these lists). You can see the obvious gaps. The Ukrainian list of arrestees (not POWs) fills the protocol number gaps 041-043, 055-057, 064-067, 071-072. A Belorussian list, if it were ever to be found, would have the numbers 047-049, 060, 061, 063 and 068-070.

Therefore the people on the Ukrainian list were a part of the very same operation that involved the POWs from the Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps. Whatever happened during this operation to most of those POWs also happened to most of these particular prisoners. The issue is thus reduced to finding out what happened to the POWs. Furr denies that they were shot as a part of this operation, and therefore for him the Ukrainian list is not evidence of any execution of the Ukrainian arrestees. On the other hand, proving that the bulk of the POWs were shot also shows that the bulk of the Ukrainian arrestees were shot. The existence of the Ukrainian list confirms the information in the sealed envelope no. 1 that along the POWs, thousands of prison inmates were also executed - something which had not been known before 1992 (or it could be said that the Ukrainian list and the sealed envelope documents mutually confirm and reinforce each other). Historians know this and therefore for them the list contains the information about executions. With an important caveat.

I'm saying "most of prisoners" (etc.), because the Ukrainian list is a list of files that were left after the operation, with the sequential numbers attached. This brings some marginal uncertainty into the issue, since this is not a direct list of the executed people. Following points need to be taken into consideration.

1. We cannot guarantee that this is a complete list of all the Ukrainian prisoners shot during the 1940 operation. It is a set of files that were left in a Ukrainian NKVD archive at some point in time. 

a) If for some reason some of the files resided elsewhere on 25.11.1940 (e. g. some other NKVD department), or simply were missing, or had already been transferred to Moscow, they would not be on the list. While Tsvetukhin does not remark on any missing files, it is not a guarantee that some were not missing.

b) Possible clerical errors might have led to an omission of some files from the list. It is a real concern, since a comment on the last page of the list points out certain clerical errors, including names mistakenly added and then erased. While this comment also means that some sort of verification took place on the same day, we cannot guarantee that all the mistakes were caught.

2. While we know from the historical context that the bulk of the listed prisoners were shot, as a general principle, for each given name there is a kind of a minor uncertainty about whether or not this particular person was shot. This is a usual situation with such lists which is not limited to the Katyn issue. For most deportation lists to Treblinka II we know for certain that most of the people were gassed on arrival, but for almost every person there is a minor doubt whether they individually survived the first hours for some reason (like being selected for work in the camp).

a) Clerical errors, as above. We know that clerical errors abounded during the preparation of the transfer lists for the POWs - we know about that from the internal NKVD correspondence regarding such mistakes. Other lists are no different.

b) Inclusion of people first slated to be shot, the decisions regarding whom were then reversed.

We know of the last-minute change of plan concerning the Polish officer Swianiewicz in Katyn (he was on the Kozelsk transfer list that was de facto a shooting list, but was spared at the last moment by a telegram directly from Moscow). And indeed, the list itself says that the nr. 2989 on the list, Boleslaw Turowski, was sentenced to 5 years of correctional camp labor and was then amnestied. So this is the one arrestee who was first sentenced to death but escaped it for some reason. 

There is some internal Ukrainian MGB correspondence, from which we see that the MGB bureaucrats checked the protocols nr. 041-043, 055-057, 064-067, 071-072 (i. e. exactly those corresponding to the Ukrainian list) and the only two numbers where irregularities occurred were 41/96 (Turowski) and 71/172 (Haninczak). Haninczak was not on the Ukrainian list and we will get to his case shortly.  This internal verification coupled with the Turowski comment on the list raises the probability of the list's integrity, but still does not exclude possible cases in which additional irregularities might have been found and solved in the years prior but about which we have no correspondence.

My conclusion from the aforementioned points is that it is fair to assume with a high probability for each given name on the list, for which we do not have contrary information, that this person was executed. But it would not be completely unexpected if for some small number of the names this conclusion could be reversed based on new information. This would not affect the rest of the list (unless the number became significant) and the burden of proof lies directly on those who would claim that this or that person escaped death.

Knowledge is probabilistic and even more or less direct documentary evidence of an execution sometimes turns out to be wrong, but we still use this evidence to declare people dead (until proven otherwise), and this case is no exception.

P. 235: "So the so-called "Ukrainian list" contains names of persons who were not even Poles. There is also no evidence that they were shot. Only investigations and interrogations about their Trotskyist activities are mentioned. Clearly, none of these men had anything to do with Katyn. This invalidates the whole idea of a "Ukrainian list."

Note Furr's clumsy attempt at deception. They were not ethnic Poles, but they were (former) Polish citizens. The shooting order applied to the following arrestees:

"(b) together with the cases of 11,000 members of various counter-revolutionary organizations of spies and saboteurs, former land owners, factory owners, former Polish officers, government officials, and escapees who have been arrested and are being held in the western provinces of the Ukraine and Belarus and apply to them the supreme penalty: shooting."

These accusations against these former Polish citizens fit this description. So obviously the Ukrainian list had everything to do with the Katyn crime complex. Furr's conclusion is based literally on nothing.

Note that while Beria's order's main focus is on ethnic Poles, it is explicitly not only about them (he lists 18632 inmates of all ethnicities, of them 10685 ethnic Poles, yet wants to shoot 11000, thus necessarily taking out hundreds of non-Poles with them).

P. 236: "The archival document (p. 18) states that on May 5 and 7, 1940, the six accused Trotskyists were transferred from the Ukrainian NKVD to the NKVD of the USSR. Thereafter, whatever happened to them happened outside the Ukraine."

Another falsification. Nothing at all is written about them being brought outside of the Ukraine. They were a) formally handed over by the NKVD UkrSSR to the NKVD SSSR (the shooting order was issued specifically to it) and b) they were transferred to their places of executions (in Ukraine), so they were literally a) transferred b) to NKVD SSSR, but not outside of Ukraine.

P. 236: "Page 78 of the archival list concerns Vladimir Filaretovich Perventsev who, along with his case file, was transferred to the NKVD of the USSR - again, outside the Ukraine."

Another falsification, nothing is said about him having been transferred outside Ukraine.

P. 237: "Romanov says that Perventsev was "shot as a Polish citizen," This is a lie. There is no evidence that he was shot, or of what became of him. Whatever happened to him most likely happened because he had been a leading organizer of an anti-Soviet group of Russian émigrés, not "as a Polish citizen."

Furr lies about me lying, of course. That Perventsev was shot follows from him being on the Ukrainian list and not being one of the known exceptions (see above). And I never wrote that he was shot because he was a Polish citizen, as Furr implies. Him having been a Polish citizen was a necessary condition for his execution, not a sufficient one. Had he been a Soviet citizen, he would not have been shot according to the Politburo decision of 05.03.1940. Yet he was not an ethnic Pole and he was in fact a leader of Russian nationalists, which is why I was emphasizing this paradox.

P. 238: "So, according to the "official" version Haninczak was murdered at Khar'kov and buried at Piatykhatky. The Polish Wikipedia article on him also claims that he was killed "in the Spring of 1940" [...] This is another example of how dishonest the whole "official" version of Katyn is."

How so? This is merely a mistake, which is no different from Yad Vashem getting things wrong about some of the Holocaust victims. The case of Starobelsk is different from those of Kozelsk and Ostashkov - for the latter two we have the numbers of the POWs from the transfer list, thus we know who was transferred from the NKVD POW office to the local UNKVDs. Whereas for Starobelsk we have a general list of more than 4000 names of all POWs who had been in Starobelsk, including the people who lived, so more guesswork than usual was involved in finding out who was shot and who was not. Same happened in the case of Stanisław Kuczyński-Iskander Bej, discussed above.

P. 238: "There is no evidence that Haninczak was executed at all! Quite the contrary: page 100 of the archival document states that there was an investigative file on Haninczak dated February 24, 1941, which has been destroyed. This suggests that Haninczak was still alive as of about that date. We know that Turowski, who is discussed on the same page, was not shot at all." 

It is true that currently, after we learned more from the Ukrainian documents, there is no evidence of Haninczak having been shot. Here is what I wrote about his case:

"In the accompanying note Podobedov asked to solve two issues.[...] The second question is about the number 172 of the protocol 71 of 26.07.1940, because the case was returned for additional investigation and again sent to the NKVD of the USSR on 24.02.1941 and the former decision about it was cancelled by the protocol 74 of 14.12.1940. 

This is new information - it turns out that there were some protocols after number 72, and after the summer of 1940! And they were not only about the shootings. Probably the Merkulov-Kobulov-Bashtakov Commission dealt with some other residual prisoner-related issues after the main action.

[...]

Let us return to Krotov. On the second question of Podobedov, Krotov reported that the case of Vladimir Goninchak - the same number 172 of protocol 71 - was returned for additional investigation on December 17, 1940 and was sent to the NKVD of the USSR. It is impossible to check the re-entry of the case to the NKVD of USSR because on 24.02.1941 all materials on the record of incoming documents were destroyed.

The case of Goninchak is interesting because he is not listed in the Ukrainian list, although his serial number is named in the protocol. However, "Ganinchak Vladimir Jozefowicz" (more correct - Włodzimierz Haninczak) born in 1883, former head of the district court of Lviv, is listed as prisoner of war from Starobelsk number 929, year of birth and patronymic coincide. In the Karta database, at the time of writing, he is listed as having been shot in Kharkov. However, as we know, in exceptional cases, even people already listed for sending to places of execution were not executed at the last moment, the most famous is, perhaps, the case of Stanisław Swianiewicz. And the Starobelsk list simply lists all those who left in the spring of 1940, including such Poles who were not executed as General Zygmunt Berling (177 on the list) and Lieutenant Colonel Leon Bukojemski (number 79). Taking into account that the decision about Haninchak's case was reversed on December 14th 1940, and the case was sent in for additional investigation on December 17th 1940, we can conclude that Haninchak was not shot together with the other Polish citizens. His further fate is still unknown.

The question arises: why is a prisoner of war from Starobelsk mentioned in the protocols of the examination of the cases of the prisoners in the Western Ukraine prisons? The following hypothesis could be put forward. As we have already seen from the data on the protocol No. 74, the protocols of the commission were not focused exclusively on the shootings, but were devoted to the consideration of cases of prisoners of war, most of whom, of course, were shot, but a few survived, and their fates were also the subject of the consideration by the commission. When Haninczak was not shot together with the other prisoners of Starobelsk, his case was apparently transferred back to the commission, at a time when it was examining the cases of prisoners. That is why he is listed in Protocol 71, but not in the Ukrainian list."

P. 238: "Moreover, there is no evidence that any of the persons on this list were executed! This is simply "assumed" by defenders of the official" version."

Nope. It is concluded from the sum of the available evidence.

P. 238: "At least 9 prisoners on this archival list, and on the "Ukrainian list," were arrested in late 1940 or in 1941. They are: ..."

This will be one of the greatest examples of Furr's absolute ignorance and dishonesty.

Furr presents a pool of 9 cases with dates allegedly much later than the action occurred: 18.09.1940, 26.09.1940, 10.10.1940, 20.10.1940, 15.11.1940, 30.11.1940, 21.12.1940, 03.12.1940, 21.04.1941.

First of all, we will exclude 30.11.1940, Mieczysław Kulanda, due to him not being on the Ukrainian list in the first place. He was sentenced to 8 years in 1941. I will also note that he was arrested on 19.12.1939, not in 1940, so we have our first clerical error case.

His presence on the KGB inventory list may have been due to a misfiling of the case, whether intentional ("getting rid" of a case), or not (clerical error) or for other, heretofore unknown reasons, e. g. maybe his case was sent to NKVD SSSR but no decision was taken there, or there was a decision to send him to the Special Council of the NKVD. Whatever it was, to repeat, he is not on the Ukrainian list. So there are 8 cases left.

a) Direct evidence against Furr's claim from his own sources: the KGB inventory.

Furr's list of names comes from the archival inventory lists which were created when the control-observation files in Ukraine were being destroyed due to an oral order from Moscow. Some of these lists contain more information than the others about the dates (so Furr presenting them as one list is misleading), so we will continue our examination of Furr's list of allegedly exceptional cases with the list which contains most information, that is with the list of 259 destroyed files:

P. 238: "* Uk. List #2329 (LK 74 US 191) - Edward Podgórski, this list p. 205 #6. Arrested October 10 1940 as a (civilian) Polish policeman."

The actual entry states that the case was opened on "10.x.1940" (not that he was arrested then, it could have happened earlier), but it also says that his investigation file was sent to NKVD SSSR on "28.V.1940 with nr. 541/sp". "541/sp" was the number of the letter with which numerous files were sent as attachments on the same day, repeated in many entries, so we know that this date is correct and the first date is necessarily a mistake. Furr knew about this.

P. 239: "* Uk. List #2441 (LK 78 US 198) Stanisław Ratajczak, this list p. 223 #149. Arrested September 18 1940 as a (civilian) Polish policeman."

The actual entry states that the case was opened on "18.ix.1940" (not that he was arrested then, it could have happened earlier), but it also says that his investigation file was sent to NKVD SSSR on "28.V.1940 with nr. 541/sp", so we know that this date is correct and the first date is necessarily a mistake. Furr knew about this.

P. 239: "* Uk. List #2502 (LK 78 US 52) - Kazimierz Rodziewicz, this list p. 232 #224. Arrested September 26 1940 as "an agent of the Polish police."

The actual entry states that the case was opened on "26.ix.1940" (not that he was arrested then, it could have happened earlier), but it also says that his investigation file was sent to NKVD SSSR on "7.V.1940 with nr. 540/sp", "540/sp" was the number of the letter with which numerous files were sent as attachments on the same day, repeated in many entries, so we know that this date is correct and the first date is necessarily a mistake. Furr knew about this.

Furr's remaining pool of cases is reduced to 5: 20.10.1940, 15.11.1940, 21.12.1940, 03.12.1940, 21.04.1941.

Now we know for certain that there were clerical errors in the lists. Therefore for the rest of Furr's examples there is no reason at all not to apply the same principle: those were simply clerical errors (some of them probably because of simply writing the wrong year, some of them because of looking at a wrong entry).

In addition, the documents in the collection that discuss the history of various files, including the control-observation files, specifically mention that the people to whom the files belonged were arrested in 1939-1940 - not 1941! This is the additional reason for why this entry - 

P. 239: "* Uk. List #930 (LK 18 US 187) Josef Dołbniak, this list p. 144 #37. Arrested April 21 1941 as a Polish policeman."

is more likely to contain a clerical error than the true date.

b) Direct evidence against Furr's claim: the Tsvetukhin letter.

What's much worse for Furr is that he ignored the most obvious limit on the dates - Tsvetukhin's letter to which the Ukrainian list is attached. It is dated 25.11.1940. All the remaining dates after that are of necessity clerical errors.

Furr's remaining pool of cases is thus reduced to 2: 20.10.1940 and 15.11.1940. Out of 9 original cases.

Obviously, probability is not on Furr's side.

Even if Furr disagrees that these 2 remaining cases must/should be seen as clerical errors, he cannot prove that they are not - and that they are is made probable by the 7 examples above (about 3 of which Furr knew about, since he had read the entries in question in original - but still included them in his list - and another 3 he should have excluded himself due to the Tsvetukhin letter; plus Kulanda).

c) Evidence against Furr's claim from the chronology of the protocols.

We know the numbers of the protocols/directives relating to the prisoners on the Ukrainian list, so we can set certain upper time limits on when the prisoners could have been arrested (obviously, not later than the protocol dates).

We directly know dates of 2 protocols having to do with the Ukrainian list - 041 is from 20.04.1940 and 071 is from 26.07.1940. For the rest of the numbers, we know they fill the gaps in the unified numbering system used during the 1940 operation.

We also know the dates of the specific protocol-based lists for the POW camps (the tables for Kozelsk and Ostashkov can be found in Ubity v Katyni, p. 110, and Ubity v Kalinine..., vol. 1, p. 86, the data for Starobelsk is from the 18.05.1940 letter of Berezhkov).

Let's sum up the known chronological information. Unless stated otherwise, for Kozelsk the date of the arrival of the lists in the camp is given, for Ostashkov and Starobelsk - the dates of the lists themselves.

05 05.04.1940 Ostashkov
06 03.04.1940 Starobelsk
011 04.04.1940 Starobelsk
012 [??].04.1940 Ostashkov
016 [05].04.1940 Ostashkov
014, 015, 017 06.04.1940 Kozelsk
018 07.04.1940 Starobelsk
019 07.04.1940 Ostashkov
020 09.04.1940 Ostashkov
021 09.04.1940 Starobelsk
022, 025 10.04.1940 Kozelsk
023 10.04.1940 Ostashkov
024 10.04.1940 Starobelsk
026, 027 13.04.1940 Ostashkov
028 13.04.1940 Starobelsk
029, 032 15.04.1940 Kozelsk
030 14.04.1940 Ostashkov
031 14.04.1940 Starobelsk
033 16.04.1940 Ostashkov
034 16.04.1940 Starobelsk
035, 036 18.04.1940 Kozelsk
037, 038 20.04.1940 Ostashkov
039 20.04.1940 Starobelsk
040 21.04.1940 Kozelsk
041 20.04.1940; Ukrainian list nr. 285 (41/3-61; date alleged by Furr: 20.10.1940), nr. 3292 (41/3-99; date alleged by Furr: 03.12.1940)
042 Ukrainian list nr. 286 (42-96; date alleged by Furr: 21.12.1940), nr. 3089 (42-400; date alleged by Furr: 15.11.1940)
043 Ukrainian list nr. 2502 (43/1-7; date alleged by Furr: 26.09.1940)
044, 045 22.04.1940 Ostashkov
046 22.04.1940 Starobelsk
050 27.04.1940 Ostashkov (the date when the lists were sent)
051 27.04.1940 Ostashkov
052 28.04.1940 Kozelsk
053 27.04.1940 Starobelsk
054 05.05.1940 Ostashkov (the lists 054/1 and /2)
054 07.05.1940 Kozelsk (the list 054/3)
054 05.05.1940 Starobelsk (the list 054/4)
058 [??].05.1940 Ostashkov
059 10.05.1940 Kozelsk (the list 059/1)
059 09.05.1940 Starobelsk (the list 059/2)
062 19.05.1940 Ostashkov
066 Ukrainian list nr. 2329 (66/2-98; date alleged by Furr: 10.10.1940), 930 (66/2-20; date alleged by Furr: 21.04.1940)
067 Ukrainian list nr. 2441 (67/1-50; date alleged by Furr: 18.09.1940)
071 26.07.1940 Ukrainian list

Well, we are done here. All of Furr's 8 cases are clerical errors.

But wait, there is still more.

d) Evidence against Furr's claim from other sources.

Furr himself complains that this or that claim by a secondary source is ignored by the historians allegedly due to such claims' inconvenience. Let's see how Furr himself fares on this score.

Furr uses Zuzanna Gajowniczek's 1995 book Ukraiński ślad Katynia. What he hides from his readers is the fact that several entries in her book directly contradict Furr's thesis about late arrests.

On p. 50 she writes about Wiktor Chajes that he was arrested in October 1939 and held in Zamarstynów. Indeed, it makes sense that Chajes, as Lviv's vice-president, would be arrested shortly after the Soviets overran the city, rather than a year later (all the former presidents were arrested in the beginning; Chajes' early arrest is confirmed elsewhere). Interestingly, she provides yet further information about Chajes, namely, that previously he was alleged to have been held in Starobelsk until 04.10.1940 and then to have been transferred to Kotlas. Curiously, Furr does not seize upon this information. Did he even read his own source?

Here we will make an aside to discuss Chajes' case in more detail.

I managed to find the source of the allegation that Gajowniczek cites: it was a September 1941 item in Gazeta Lwowska with a list of several Starobelsk inmates that the engineer Jan Hoszowski created from memory after leaving the camp in June of 1941. Wiktor Chajes is on the list with a 10 year sentence. The introduction to the list indeed mentions, that all former officers left the camp on 04.10.1940 and were sent in the direction of Kotlas, but nothing is said or implied that this refers to all the people on the list in the same news item. Rather, this referred to all the officers (whether on the list or not) residing in the camp on 04.10.1940 and nothing in the subsequent list indicates that it reflects the state of affairs on that date - these are just people Hoszowski claimed to have met in the camp in general. So there is no evidence in this source that Chajes still resided in the camp in October and did not leave earlier. Someone misinterpreted what the introduction said.

Now, to clarify, after the first group of Starobelsk POWs was sent to the Kharkiv UNKVD (in April-May) and to Pavlishchev Bor (on May 12) the camp became, among other things, a transit point for prisoners, slated for work in the Northern labor camps (they were residing there for weeks or months waiting for the convoys to be formed).

Does Hoszowski's information mean that we have a proven case of a person on the Ukrainian list who both escaped the execution and was not marked as an exception on the list itself? No. Assuming the veracity of the news item, Chajes' sentence cannot simply be assumed to be his "final" one, rather than an earlier sentence that could have then been overridden by the Politburo decision.

Let's not forget that many, if not all, of the people on the Ukrainian list were being accused of violating specific articles of the Soviet-Ukrainian criminal code (e. g. article 54-13), i. e. at first a "normal" procedure was being applied (as opposed to being shot without an actual sentence). It is absolutely possible that when the Politburo decision was taken or the protocols were being prepared, some of the prisoners had already been sentenced in a "normal" way. 

A similar case happened with Ostashkov POWs. Cases were being prepared against them to be sent to the Special Council of the NKVD (which was an extrajudicial body, but whose sentences were nevertheless considered "normal" procedure in Stalin's years, as opposed to the so-called "special procedure", osobyi poryadok, according to which the Polish victims were later shot). About 6000 cases were sent to Moscow and the Special Council even managed to issue 600 sentences (3-5-8 years in Kamchatka) when suddenly the process was stopped by Beria, who knew about the coming decision, which indeed arrived and simply overrode the previous sentences, and the new individual decisions were issued by the troika according to the "special procedure".

So, a following scenario is possible: Chajes was sentenced to 10 or so years of labor camps (maybe some time in March, but various options are possible); he was being transferred to his destination (it's not a speedy process and may involve many stops and some waiting time) when the directive list with his name arrived to the Ukrainian NKVD some time in April (after the 20th). There would have been a likely time lag between the arrival of the directive and any actions towards the prisoner in any case (cf. the Ukrainian list number 2502 above, whose name is on the April list, but whose case was transferred to the NKVD SSSR - apparently with the prisoner himself, as the other KGB documents indicate - only on 07.05.1940). Possibly because the prisoners had to be located first and the convoys had to be formed. While the bureaucratic wheels were turning, Chajes might have arrived at the transit camp at Starobelsk in the second half of May or in June, where he met Hoszowski. Soon the Polish operation caught up with him there and he was transferred elsewhere in order to meet his fate.

Obviously, more research is needed to see whether something like this happened or whether Chajes would turn out to be a rare exception on the Ukrainian list, which would not however affect the interpretation of the rest of the list (as I have already discussed above).

Whatever the case, the date of his arrest is a clerical error, as he was arrested in 1939.

On p. 191 Gajowniczek provides information about Edward Podgórski who was arrested on 12/13.04.1940 and was held in Dubno. There is a striking confirmation of Podgórski's early arrest in a letter that E. Koziej sent from the UK to Podgórski's wife in 1946 (Janina Wołczuk, Listy sybiraków: 1939-1955, 1994, p. 20):

"I was with him in one room in the Dubno prison, along with others; it was a very short time, only 10 days, from 15 V 1940 to 25 V 1940. On the critical day he was taken with the others, where - I do not know. I have nothing to hide or to add..., (I write) as it was. I, in turn, still remained there until 9 IV 1941."

The time frame coincides with the information in the KGB inventory that Podgórski's case was transferred to the NKVD SSSR on 28.05.1940.

On p. 52 Gajowniczek provides information about Kazimierz Rodziewicz, who was arrested on 23.09.1939 in Adamówka and was held in Dubno until March 1940.

So we see that Furr never mentioned these contradictions between his thesis and a source that he used to his readers.

P. 243: "This so called "Ukrainian List of Katyn" list is a fraud."

As we have seen, the only fraud is Furr.

P. 243: "It has nothing to do with Katyn."

A brazen lie, given the Katyn crime complex numeration used in this list.

P. 243: "It is not comprised only of Poles. There are many non Poles Ukrainians and Jews on it, including anti Polish persons (OUN members) and anti-Semites."

All of whom, as individuals, fit the description in the 05.03.1940 shooting decision, which was mostly designed for ethnic Poles, but not only for them. BTW, hundreds of Jews were murdered by the Soviets during the 1940 shooting action in Kalinin, Katyn forest and Kharkiv.

P. 244: "However, during exhumations in the 1990s at the special cemetery of the UNKVD at Piatykhatky Polish archeologists did not find any traces of caustic soda. Moreover, they remarked on the "amazingly good" preservation of the remains of uniforms and of paper documents found in the graves."

Misleading at the very least. In the places not touched by the boreholes the remains and the documents were often greatly preserved. In the places where the KGB drilled right through the graves, the remains could not have been untouched, and indeed, many bodies were irretrievably damages by the drills.

As for caustic soda, we know for a fact that this was the plan, because the documents say so.  Was the plan actually implemented?

Let's start with the boreholes. A. Kola, Archeologia zbrodni. Oficerowie polscy na cmentarzu ofiar NKWD w Charkowie, pp. 317, 318:

"More extensive damage to the graves than that from robbery was caused by holes from mechanical drilling carried out in this cemetery probably in the late 1970s/early 1980s, so relatively recently. These were traces of drills with diameters of 60, 70, 80 and 90 cm, reaching most often to the bottom of the grave (and sometimes even deeper - such as in the Soviet grave no. 25/95) probably with the purpose of destroying grave structures. The intention of these activities is not entirely clear. Perhaps they were intended to prevent the identification of those buried or to speed up the process of decomposition of the corpses. [...]

In total, more than 130 such boreholes were found within the research excavations carried out by the Polish expedition in 1995-1996. The outlines of most of them (112 boreholes) were visible already at a depth of 35-60 cm; the rest could be inferred from the damage in the deeper parts of the graves. Drillings were carried out in both Polish and Soviet graves. Most of the drills accurately hit the graves, which could indicate the knowledge of the location of the graves by those doing the work, even though on the ground surface the grave sites were completely unrecognizable at the time. In one only partially (about 50%) exhumed Polish grave no. 7/94 there were traces of as many as 15 boreholes with a uniform diameter of 70 cm, quite evenly covering the entire range of the exhumed part of the grave. It can be assumed that a similar number of holes were also located in the rest of the grave.

A similar picture of drilling pattern is also found in other Polish graves. Within the partially explored (about 20%) large grave no. 17/95, two distinct drill traces with diameters of 60 cm appeared already at a depth of about 35 cm. Further exploration revealed 3 boreholes and robbery pits in the grave cavity. The result was damage to the top layer of skeletons, resulting in loose human bones, often severely crushed."

A grave with drill traces, Ø60cm. Kola, op. cit., p. 148.

A section of a borehole, Ø60cm. Ibid.

These results, achieved before the documents became known, confirm a massive attempt at destroying the graves at the very least through the use of huge drills. So the prerequisite to using caustic soda was there. Was it used though? We have only one indication of this in the report of the head of the Kharkiv UKGB Gibadulov from 29.12.1989:

"In 1969 and 1973, the 10th Department of the KGB, jointly with the UKGB, carried out special activities to eliminate signs that could indicate burial sites. To this end, boreholes were drilled and caustic soda was poured."

There are two options here: a) this is direct knowledge from documents or colleagues; b) this is an extrapolation based on this existence of the plan. We don't know which one.

If this is direct knowledge, then I should note that the magnitude of the use of caustic soda is not specified. We cannot gather from this short description that caustic soda was used for all or even most boreholes.

Assuming that liquid caustic soda was used, Furr has made no case that traces of it would be visible after 20+ years and that it would not eventually just seep away. We also don't know what concentrations would have been used, how efficient such a procedure would have been (the efficient methods of dissolving bodies this way seem to involve at least heat, but better also pressure) and whether it was not abandoned due to inefficiency, and the action being reduced to mechanical destruction. Additionally, the graves were only explored partially, as can be see even from Kola's quote above.

Given so many unknows, Furr's trivial gotchas are useless.

Pp. 244, 245: "Nevertheless, supporters of the "official" version judged these letters to be evidence of traces of the Katyn killings in Ukraine. Evidently none of them noticed that in the left corner of Feshchenko's letter there is the following handwritten resolution of Nikitchenko's: "reported to Comrade Shelest P.E." and dated, in the same handwriting, 2008!

[...] The date (enlargement, at right) reads "2008 gd" - "the year 2008"."

Unlike Furr's nonsense, this is, of course, unimpeachable evidence and Furr shows himself to be a hoaxer clown once more. Obviously, there is not even a trace of "2008" on the letter, dated 19.06.1969, merely a date quickly written without the periods: "20[.]06[.]69" (indicating that the letter was received on the next day). How utterly dumb one has to be in order not to get it? But is it really dumbness? After all, Furr simply made up a non-existent word or abbreviation ("gd"; it's either "god" or "g."; and nobody dates their remarks with only a year; and of course, the alleged "d" in the date does not match the "d" in "dolozheno" at all) in order to explain the rest of the line. This indicates pure mendacity rather than simple dumbness.

P. 246: "And only then will you know that I have not omitted any evidence that supports the "official " Soviets-did version."

Pp. 259, 260: " These case files might be important, since they indicate an individualized approach to the Polish POWs that contradicts the notion that all of them were sentences to death. The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre with either minimal or no investigation at all. But none of these criminal case files have been published"

P. 260: "The witnesses had been threatened"

P. 260: "Certainly the "official" version of Katyn cannot be based on them alone."

Rick Yair emailed us to tell about the source of one of those photoshopped photos that the Holocaust denier liars like to spread on social networks claiming they are "original" while the actual original photos are fake.

Turned out that it came from a sort of an art project "Revisionist Photos. Removing the Horrors of the Third Reich From the Pages of History", in which various objects and people were photoshopped out of the original Nazi and Holocaust photos:

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events in human history.

It is also one of the best documented.

Still, there are those who deny it ever happened.

Come with me and visit a world where these revisionists have won. A world where facts too painful to be remembered are simply erased, and the sins of facism are eliminated en masse.

Experience Revisionist Photos

Here is the page with the edited photo in question. Here is the original, which is a part of a series.

While the author of the project might have had good intentions, the idea was extremely dumb, if only because it was to be expected that the dumb and/or dishonest Holocaust deniers will use exactly such images to spread their lies - and voila, they are doing exactly this.

 Here I will be gathering such reports.

1. Act of inspection of a mass grave, exhumation and forensic medical examination of 254 corpses of Soviet citizens killed by the Nazis in Krasnodar.

Source: TsA FSB, f. K-72, op.1, por. 33, l. d. 258–261.

AКT.-

осмотра массового захоронения, эксгумации и судебно-медицинского исследования 254 трупов советских граждан, умер[щ]вленных в гор.Краснодаре, Краснодарского края, в период временной оккупации немецко-фашистскими войсками г.Краснодара.

гор. Краснодар

17-18-19 июня 1943 года.

По предложению Военной Прокуратуры Северо-Кавказского фронта Комиссия в составе - Главного судебно-медицинского эксперта Красной Армии - Подполковника медицинской службы - доктора медицинских наук профессора АВДЕЕВА, врачей-специалистов фронтовой патолого-анатомической лаборатории Майора медслужбы Волощенко Д.Л. и военврача ЛИХАЧЕВОЙ Н.Б., в присутствии старшего лейтенанта административной службы КОВБАСА Ф. К., лейтенанта медицинской службы ОСИПОВА Г.Б. и лейтенанта медслужбы ПЕЧЕНЕЖСКОЙ Е.Н.  - произвела осмотр мест захоронения, а также эксгумацию и судебно-медицинское исследование обнаруженных 254 трупов мужчин, женщин и детей.

Комиссией при этом установлено следующее:

І. Места массового захоронения трупов были обнаружены на территории первого отделения виноградного хозяйства совхоза № 1 "Крайсовхозтреста", прилегающего к северо-восточной окраине гор. Краснодара. На территории первого отделения совхоза было обнаружено три таких места захоронения /см. прилагаемый план местности/:

I/B противотанковом рве, который проходит по территории первого отделения совхоза, образуя тупой угол /A/;

2/Вблизи противотанкового рва /Б/, и 

3/В юго-восточном углу первого отделения совхоза у дороги, ведущей в г. Краснодар /В/.

Во всех трех ямах были обнаружены трупы в количестве 254: мужчин - 145, женщин - 76, детей и подростков - 33.

Все трупы были осмотрены и подвергнуты судебно[-]медицинскому исследованию.

Из трупов, находившихся в противотанковом рве и яме /Б/ взята жидкость из плевральных полостей или кусочки ткане[й] или органов, для исследования на присутствие карбоксигемоглобина, в тех случаях, когда жидкость добыть не удалось.

II. "А"Противотанковый ров.

Противотанковый ров имеет глубину около 4-х метров. От того места, где противотанковый ров образует угол и до восточной границы первого отделения совхова, на протяжении около 100 метров уровень дна противотанкового рва на I I/2-2 метра выше, чем в других местах.

На расстоянии 15 метров от угла противотанкового рва дно рва было вскрыто и на глубине I 1/2-2 метров были обнаружены беспорядочно лежащие трупы мужчин и женщин, отдельные части одежды, головные уборы, камышевая сумка для продуктов, с яблоком и кусками хлеба.

Из противотанкового рва извлечены и подвергнуты судебно-медицинскому исследованию 12 трупов: 7 мужских и 5 женских.

Судебно-медицинское исследование 12 трупов, извлеченных из противотанкового рва

Одежда: Два женских и три мужских трупа, оказались без одежды. На остальных трупах имеется старая поношенная одежда, которая сохранилась довольно хорошо. Обуви на трупах не оказалось, за исключением одного женского трупа с рваными галошами на ногах.

Возраст: У 7 трупов мужчин возраст определен 50-60-70 лет. У одной женщины 50-60 лет, у двух 20-25 лет, и у двух 30-35 лет.

Наружный осмотр трупов.

Трупы сохранились довольно хорошо, значительных гнилостных изменений не отмечается. Кожа влажая, бледная. На задней поверхности и у некоторых трупов на лице, груди и конечностях кожа ярко-розовой и красной окраски. Верхний слой эпидермиса легко отслаивается повсюду и у некоторых трупов с кистей и стоп снимается в виде перчаток, с ногтями. Никаких механических повреждений при наружном осмотре всех 12 трупов не обнаружено.

Внутреннее исследование трупов.

Все 12 трупов были вскрыты и у всех обнаружены однотипные характерные изменения. Мягкие покровы черепа сочные, алокрасного цвета. Кости, свода и основания черепа не повреждены. Твердая оболочка алокрасного цвета. Вещество мозга кашицеобразной консистенции серорозового цвета. Скелетные мышцы /грудные, брюшные, межреберные, глубокие мышцы спины, мышцы бедер/ алокрасного цвета. Клетчатка средостения розово-красного цвета. В плевральных полостях обнаруживается небольшое количество жидкости алокрасного цвета. Полости сердца пустые, сердечная мышца светло-красного цвета.

Легкие особенно в задних отделах на разрезах алокрасного цвета. Алокрасный цвет на разрезах имеют селезенка и особенно почки. Печень кирпично-красного цвета. Кишечник раздут газами. Никаких механических повреждений внутренних органов, кровоизлияний или скопления крови в полостях черепа, груди, живота ни у одного трупа не обнаружено.

"Б" - Яма у противотанкового рва.

В 6 метрах южнее противотанкового рва обнаружена яма с 221 трупом мужчин, женщин, детей и подростков.

Из ямы извлечены 117 трупов мужчин, 71 труп женщин, 33 трупа детей и подростков.

Трупы лежали в яме в беспорядке в несколько слоев.

Все трупы из ями извлечены и подвергнуты судебно-медицинскому исследованию.

Исследование трупов из ямы "Б".

Одежда: 65 трупов мужчин и женщин оказались без одежды. На остальных трупах имеется старая поношенная одежда, преимущественно зимняя: стеганные ватные брюки, на трупах мужчин по двое-трое бумажных брюк, бумажные фуфайки, старые шерстяные носки и чулки. Некоторые трупы полураздетые без верхнего платья. Подавляющее большинство трупов оказалось без обуви. У некоторых сохранилась старая поношенная обувь или матерчатые бурки.

Наружный осмотр трупов.

Часть трупов сохранилась довольно хорошо и имеет такой же вид, как и трут извлеченные из противотанкового рва, т.е. без значительных гнилостных изменений. Другая часть трупов в большей или меньшей степени изменена гнилостными процессами, вплоть до значительных гнилостных изменений мягких тканей и внутренних органов.

На сохранившихся трупах кожа влажная, бледная, местами имеет яркую розовокрасную окраску. Верхний слой эпидермиса легко отделяется, а кое-где отсутствует. Никаких механических повреждений при наружном осмотре сохранившихся трупов не обнаружено. Не найдено также повреждений и на трупах измененных гнилостными процессами.

Внутреннее исследование трупов.

Все трупы извлеченные из ямы "Б"были вскрыты. У всех сохранившихся и не измененных гнилостными процессами трупов обнаружены однотипные характерные изменения, аналогичные тем, которые были обнаружены при вскрытии трупов, извлеченных из противотанкового рва. Мягкие покровы черепа влажные, сочные, алокрасного цвета. Кости свода и основания черепа не повреждены. Твердые оболочки алокрасного цвета влажные, ткань мозга кашицеобразная, грязного серорозового цвета. Скелетные мышцы повсюду /бедер, груди, брюшной стенки, межреберные, спинные/ алокрасного цвета. Клетчатка средостения розовокрасного цвета. В плевральных полостях небольшие количества яркокрасной жидкости. Яркую алокрасную окраску имеют на разрезах и внутренние органы: легкие, мышца сердца, печень, селезенка, и особенно почки. Желудочно-кишечный тракт раздут газами. У большинства трупов желудки пустые, у части трупов в желудках обнаружена кашицеобразная масса. Характерная красная или розовокрасная окраска отмечается в отдельных сохранившихся органах или мышцах и на трупах измененных в той или иной степени гниением.

Никаких механических повреждений мягких тканей, внутренних органов, костей скелета, ни у одного из исследованных трупов не обнаружено.

"В" - яма в юго-восточном углу п[ер]вого отделения I-го совхоза

В этой яме на глубине около трех метров обнаружен 21 мужской труп, обрывки тканей одежды и головные уборы.

Одежда на трупах старая, поношенная легко рвется. Трупы подверглись значительному трупному изменению. Мягкие ткани частично отсутствуют, местами мумифицированы, но большей частью превратились в жировоск. Внутренние органы также разрушены гнилостными процессами. На всех черепах обнаружены огнестрельные повреждения, в большинстве своем сквозные. Входные отверстия расположены преимущественно в затылочной области и на некоторых черепах в височных  областях. От огнестрельных повреждений отходят многочисленные трещины в костях черепа и некоторые черепа легко распадаются на отдельные отломки.

На этом обследование трех ям с трупами умер[щ]вленных советских граждан было закончено и трупы захоронены.

ГЛАВНЫЙ СУД. МЕД. ЭКСПЕРТ КРАСНОЙ АРМИИ ПОДПОЛКОВНИК М/С- ДОКТОР МЕД. НАУК-ПРОФЕССОР /АВДЕЕВ/

ВРАЧИ СПЕЦИАЛИСТЫ ФРОНТОВОЙ ПАТОЛОГО-АНАТОМИЧЕСКОЙ ЛАБОРАТОРИИ СКФ

МАЙОР МЕДСЛУЖБЫ: /ВОЛОЩЕНКО/

ВОЕНВРАЧ /ЛИХАЧЕВА/

СТ ЛЕЙТЕНАНТ АДМ[.]СЛ. /КОВБАСА/

ЛЕЙТЕНАНТ МЕДСЛУЖБЫ /ОСИПОВ/

ЛЕЙТЕНАНТ МЕДСЛУЖБЫ /ПЕЧЕНЕЖСКАЯ/

Translation:

ACT

of the examination of the mass grave, exhumation and forensic medical examination of 254 corpses of Soviet citizens who were killed in the city of Krasnodar, Krasnodar region, during the temporary occupation of Krasnodar by the German fascist troops.

Krasnodar

June, 17-18-19th, 1943.

At the suggestion of the Military Prosecutor's Office of the North Caucasus Front, the Commission composed of the Chief Forensic Expert of the Red Army - Lieutenant Colonel of Medical Service - Doctor of Medicine Professor AVDEEV, doctors-specialists of the front pathology-anatomical laboratory Major of Medical Service Voloshchenko D.L. and military doctor Likhacheva N.B, in the presence of Senior Lieutenant of the administrative service F.K. KOVBAS, Lieutenant G.B. OSIPOV of the medical service, and Lieutenant E.N. PECHENEZHSKAYA of the medical service  - inspected the burial sites and exhumed and conducted a forensic medical examination of the 254 corpses of men, women and children.

The Commission found the following:

І. Places of mass burial of corpses were found on the territory of the first division of the vineyard farm "Kraisovkhoztrest" of the sovkhoz № 1, adjacent to the north-eastern outskirts of the city of Krasnodar. On the territory of the first department of the sovkhoz three such burial sites were discovered /see attached location plan/:

I/In the anti-tank ditch, which runs through the territory of the first section of the sovkhoz, forming an obtuse angle /A/;

2/B near the anti-tank ditch /B/, and 

3/In the southeast corner of the first section of the sovkhoz, near the road leading to Krasnodar /C/.

In all three pits 254 corpses were found: 145 men, 76 women, and 33 children and adolescents.

All the corpses were examined and subjected to forensic examination.

From the bodies in the anti-tank ditch and pit /B/ the fluid from the pleural cavities or pieces of tissues or organs were taken for testing for the presence of carboxyhemoglobin, in those cases where the fluid could not be extracted.

II. "A" Antitank ditch.

The anti-tank ditch is about 4 meters deep. From the place where the anti-tank ditch forms a corner and to the eastern boundary of the first section of the sovkhoz, for about 100 meters the level of the anti-tank ditch bottom is I/2-2 meters higher than in other places.

At a distance of 15 meters from the corner of the anti-tank ditch, the bottom of the ditch was uncovered and at a depth of I 1/2-2 meters the bodies of men and women, some parts of clothes, headwear, a reed bag for food, with an apple and pieces of bread were found lying haphazardly.

Twelve corpses, seven male and five female, were extracted from the anti-tank ditch and subjected to forensic examination.

Forensic examination of 12 corpses removed from the antitank moat

Clothing: Two female and three male corpses were found without clothes. Other corpses were wearing old worn clothes, which were preserved rather well. No shoes were found on the corpses, except for one female corpse with torn galoshes on the feet.

Age: 7 male corpses were 50-60-70 years old. One woman was 50-60 years old, two were 20-25 years old, and two were 30-35 years old.

External examination of the corpses.

The corpses were preserved rather well, no significant putrefactive changes were noted. The skin is moist and pale. On the posterior surface and on some corpses on the face, chest and limbs, the skin is bright pink and red. The upper layer of epidermis is easily peeled off all over and in some corpses from the hands and feet as gloves, with nails. No mechanical injuries were found during the external examination of all 12 corpses.

Internal examination of the corpses.

All 12 corpses were opened and all showed the same characteristic changes. The soft covers of the skull are juicy, scarlet in color. The bones, calvaria and base of the skull were intact. The hard membrane was scarlet-red in color. The substance of the brain was of mushy consistency of gray-pink color. Skeletal muscles /thoracic, abdominal, intercostal, deep back muscles, thigh muscles/ are scarlet-red. The mediastinal tissue is pinkish-red in color. A small amount of scarlet-red fluid is detected in the pleural cavities. Heart cavities are empty, cardiac muscle is light red in color.

Lungs especially in posterior parts are scarlet-red on the sections. The spleen and especially the kidneys are scarlet-red on the sections. The liver is brick-red in color. The intestines are swollen with gas. No mechanical injuries of internal organs, hemorrhages or accumulation of blood in the cavities of the skull, chest, and abdomen were found in any of the corpses.

"B" - Pit at the anti-tank ditch.

A pit with 221 corpses of men, women, children and adolescents was found 6 meters to the south from the anti-tank ditch.

From the pit 117 corpses of men, 71 corpses of women, 33 corpses of children and adolescents were found.

The corpses were lying in the pit in a disorderly manner in several layers.

All corpses from the pit were extracted and subjected to forensic examination.

Examination of corpses from pit "B".

Clothing: 65 corpses of men and women were without clothes. The rest of the corpses were wearing old worn clothes, mostly winter clothes: quilted cotton pants, male corpses had two or three cotton pants, cotton undershirts, old woolen socks and stockings. Some corpses were half undressed with no top dress. The vast majority of the corpses turned out to be without shoes. Some had old worn shoes or cloth burkas.

External inspection of the corpses.

Some of the corpses were preserved rather well and have the same appearance as the corpses extracted from the anti-tank ditch, i.e. without significant putrefactive changes. Another part of corpses is more or less changed by putrefactive processes, up to significant putrefactive changes of soft tissues and internal organs.

The preserved corpses had moist, pale skin, in some places with bright pink-red coloring. Upper layer of epidermis was easily detached and in some places absent. No mechanical injuries were found on external examination of the preserved corpses. No injuries were also found on the corpses changed by putrefactive processes.

Internal examination of the corpses.

All corpses extracted from the pit "B" were dissected. All preserved corpses, unchanged by putrefactive processes, had similar characteristic changes, similar to those found during the autopsy of the corpses extracted from the antitank ditch. The soft covers of the skull are moist, juicy, scarlet-red in color. The bones of the calvaria and the base of the skull were intact. The hard membranes are scarlet-red in color and moist, brain tissue is mushy, dirty gray-pink color. Skeletal muscles all over /thighs, chest, abdominal wall, intercostal, dorsal/ are scarlet-red. Mediastinal tissue is pinkish-red in color. Small amounts of bright red fluid in pleural cavities. The internal organs: lungs, heart muscle, liver, spleen, and especially kidneys have bright scarlet coloring on sections. The gastrointestinal tract is swollen with gases. The stomachs of most corpses were empty, while some corpses had mushy mass in their stomachs. A characteristic red or pinkish-red coloration is noted in some preserved organs or muscles also on corpses altered to some degree by putrefaction.

No mechanical injuries of soft tissues, internal organs, or skeletal bones were found in any of the corpses examined.

"B," a pit in the southeast corner of the first division of 1st sovkhoz.

In this pit, at a depth of about three meters, 21 male corpses, scraps of cloth and headdresses were found.

The clothes on the corpses are old and worn and easily torn. The corpses had undergone significant cadaveric changes. Soft tissues are partially absent, mummified in places, but mostly turned into adipocere. Internal organs were also destroyed by putrefactive processes. Gunshot wounds were found on all skulls, most of them pass-through. Entry holes are located mainly in the occipital region and on some skulls in the temporal regions. Numerous fractures in the skull bones depart from the gunshot wounds, and some skulls easily disintegrate into separate fragments.

At this point the examination of the three pits with the corpses of dead Soviet citizens was completed and the corpses were buried.

CHIEF FORENSIC EXPERT OF THE RED ARMY LIEUTENANT-COLONEL OF MEDICAL SERVICE - DOCTOR OF MEDICAL SCIENCES - PROFESSOR /AVDEEV/.

DOCTORS SPECIALISTS OF THE FRONT PATHOLOGICAL-ANATOMICAL LABORATORY OF THE NORTH CAUCASUS FRONT

MAJOR OF MEDICAL SERVICE: /VOLOSHCHENKO/

MILITARY DOCTOR /LIKHACHEVA/

SENIOR LIEUTENANT OF ADM. SERVICE /KOVBASA/

LIEUTENANT OF MEDICAL SERVICE /OSIPOV/

LIEUTENANT OF MEDICAL SERVICE /PECHENEZHSKAYA/

Some dummy named E. Michael Jones writing at the neo-Nazi Unz website provides today's bit of really hilarious comedy in the posting "Why It’s Easier to Talk to a Robot Than to a Jew How Artificial Intelligence destroyed the Holocaust":

When someone asked Chatbot “How many Jews died in Auschwitz?” Chatbot responded: “It is estimated that at least 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz, the majority of who were Jews.

That answer led to the following conversation:

“Were the murdered Jews in Auschwitz cremated?”

“Yes, the bodies of those murdered in Auschwitz were cremated.”

“How many crematorium ovens did Auschwitz have?”

“Auschwitz had a total of four crematorium ovens.”

“How long does a crematorium oven take to cremate one body?”

“A crematorium oven typically takes between two and three hours to cremate one body.”

“Is it possible to cremate 1.1 million bodies, using only four crematorium ovens in four years.”

“No.”

“How many years would it take?”

“It would take more than 78 years to cremate 1.1 million bodies using only four crematorium ovens.”[11]

Shockingly, it turns out that Chatbot is a Holocaust denier.

[...]

But what happens if Chatbot claims that running the crematoria at Auschwitz nonstop for three years, 24 hours a day, every day of the week for the three years the camp was in existence could have disposed of 120,000 corpses, not 1.1 million, as the Virtual Jewish Library claims? The answer is that the Holocaust narrative collapses. 

Now, Auschwitz actually had 15 ovens which summarily had 52 muffles (6 in Auschwitz I, 46 in Auschwitz II Birkenau) with the formal capacity of 4756 corpses per day (real capacity could vary depending on many factors). 

Added this debunking to the YouTube section. Lots about sport in the camps, "canteens", postcards etc.

The CODOH website, forum and all associated websites have been offline for approaching two weeks. The cause? An internal dispute between Michael Santomauro and the other four board members of the CODOH Trust, including Germar Rudolf.

Presented below without comment is a chronology of statements on websites and from email mailing lists.

May 22, 2023

Disenchantment

For years my wife has been telling me that the revisionist community – whatever that is – is misusing me as a slave laborer, as their shield against persecution, and as the authorities’ whipping boy. If there is any project that needed attention, it was thrown at me, and I sure picked it up and did as expected – mostly. When Bradley Smith started plans to transition CODOH to a new man at the helm, I was his man, and I felt honored – initially. When Richard Widmann bailed out of Inconvenient History, I ended up holding that baby, too – and badly so. When the decade-long Master of the CODOH Forum was looking for a successor, he zoomed in on me, but I refused, since I hate discussion fora with a passion. Apart, there was just no way to shoulder that burden as well.

With three school-age children, a household to run, a grumpy wife to assuage, I was stretching my resources to make things work somehow. No time was left anymore for any of the things I wanted to do. And I wasn’t getting much of anything out of it financially either.

Then shit hit the fan in early 2022, when Ingram threw Castle Hill Publishers out of their print, warehouse and distribution system. Who was going to organize printing, warehousing and shipping/distribution in the US and in Europe? Clearly, Germar will. Because Germar does it all, so that the remaining 8.5 billion people on this planet don’t have to lift a finger!

No. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Well, actually, I tried. But then it bent, it buckled, it squeaked, and finally, it broke.

With little to no experience in publishing, printing, warehousing and distribution, Michael Santomauro has taken over the helm at both Castle Hill and CODOH. I have become a mere spectator of what has been unfolding since late 2022. Anyone complaining that things don’t run as smoothly anymore as they once did; that the option of free eBook downloads is disappearing; that all hardcover books have been discontinued; that no German print books are available anymore at all – all this is a result of the 8.5 billion lazy onlookers on this planet no longer having at their disposal a slave laborer called Germar.

Source

December 20, 2023

Merry Christmas From Castle Hill!

Note: Castle Hill has suspended any and all operations until further notice. We are restructuring the business, and will be back soon.

Wayback Machine 

December 21, 2023

To all,

A board member should never compromise his integrity for anyone or anything.

Either Mr. Germar Rudolf moves out of the home of the man who threatened my life or Germar Rudolf needs to resign from CODOH.

And I will continue full control of CHP and use the proceeds to beef up my security system estimates from $5,000-$30,000.

If he continues to live with the man that threatened my life and the board does not dismiss him and not support my security needs for my protection, I have no recourse but to sue CODOH for damages and for harboring a fellow board member whose housemate threatened my life at the behest of Germar Rudolf.

Sincerely,

Michael Santomauro

Source

An identical text was emailed to HC's contact email an hour and a half after this tweet was sent out.

January 7, 2024

CODOH email list

We have risen, indeed! Like Phoenix from the Ashes

Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust

Dear friends, supporters, patrons, and customers!

As you may have noticed, things got awfully quiet at CODOH lately, and our publishing outlet's website at https://CastleHill.shop even got suspended a few days before Christmas. The site is still down, and we do not yet know whether, and if so when, it will resume activities. We hope to be able to have some news to share with you on Monday, after CODOH's Board of Trustees will have had a meeting to decide how to move forward.

Until then, there is at least a silver lining at the revisionist horizon. The British company "Academic Reseach Media Review Education Group LTD" (what a mouth full!), abbreviated as ARMREG LTD, has entered a licensing agreement with Castlehill Publishing LLC, allowing ARMREG to republish under their own imprint Castlehill's entire book program.

ARMREG is the group who published the sensational revisionist Holocaust Encyclopedia, first online in September 2023, then also in print this past December. You can find this valuable resource at www.HolocaustEncyclopedia.com, where you can also purchase various ebook and print versions of this new revisionist opus magnum. They even offer a free ebook download.

ARMREG's general online bookstore, built with the help of Castlehill's staff to accelerate the process, was switched free yesterday late night (EST time). All books once published by Castlehill are back in print, ARMREG style, and can be bought at their webstore at https://armreg.co.uk. This store offers not only all of Castlehill's books (currently only the print editions), but also ARMREG's own Encyclopedia, of course.

While CODOH and Castlehill are currently unable to offer anything for sale, ARMREG is picking up the slack to make sure Holocaust revisionism doesn't go belly up.

We wholeheartedly recommend that you visit their website, sign up for their newsletter, and support them in this moment of crisis. Supporting them also helps CODOH and Castlehill; in fact, it helps all of revisionism:

Thank you very much for your continued support and solidarity. We will get through this crisis together, and we will come out stronger!

Germar Rudolf, Trustee

Bradley Smith Charitable Trust

aka CODOH

[street address omitted]

January 7, 2024

Around the same time as the CODOH mailing list announcement of the licensing deal with ARMREG went out, all CODOH-associated websites went offline with Cloudflare errors: codoh.com, the forum, Inconvenient History, Holocaust Handbooks, Castle Hill shop, while the Holocaust Encyclopedia website's domain name was soon up for sale from GoDaddy.

January 14, 2024

Life Sign

The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust and related publishing companies have suffered a major attack, with all our Internet servers disconnected. As you have noticed, we are unable to maintain our valuable Revisionist Forum, our Library of articles and research material, or any of the many services CODOH provided. Castle Hill Publishing is unable to fill orders for books. (You can order their range of books, published under license, at www.armreg.co.uk, though). At this point, CODOH has been forced into the dark.

But we at CODOH will fight hard to defeat this attack, and we will recover from the damage inflicted. Truth will prevail!

We are currently scrambling to recover and preserve the CODOH archives. But we will need support and help in the next months for an expected legal battle. If you want to see how you can help, please do not hesitate to contact us using the contact data provided at the top of this website.

If you want to help CODOH, do NOT send funds to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Source via Wayback Machine

January 19, 2024

added to the 'Life Sign' at codoh.com

We are currently scrambling to recover and preserve the CODOH archives and forum. The website Holocaust Handbooks is being prepared for relaunch in a new format, but without any data loss. We do have a complete backup of the vho.org archives, and we managed to locate a recent backup of the CODOH Forum, as well as one of the library, although the latter may be a few years old. Getting all this backed-up data back online will take some time and considerable effort, as we may have to first create a framework for it, then extract and reformat tons of the data.

We will need support and help in the next months for this work, but also unfortunately for an expected legal battle against those trying to force us into the dark. If you want to see how you can help, please do not hesitate to contact us using the contact data provided at the top of this website.

Note that the trust is located in California. Our new postal address is:

CODOH

PO Box 2355

Healdsburg, CA 95448

USA

Please do do NOT send mail or funds to any other address, as it will most likely not reach us.

Source via Wayback Machine

January 20, 2024

CODOH email mailing list

Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust

Dear fellow revisionists, friends, patrons and supporters!

We, the trustees of the Bradley Smith Charitable Trust, aka Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), owe you all an explanation as to what happened, what is going on right now, and what we expect from the near future regarding CODOH and its various operations.

We need to clarify that the current crisis is the result of an INTERNAL dispute. It has apparently nothing to do with outside forces. The reason that all our websites are offline is the simple fact that the servers have been turned off by the hosting company due to unpaid bills in the order of two hundred dollars ($200). Access to the hosting account where payments are managed is currently controlled by one CODOH trustee. Without consulting with CODOH's Board of Trustees, he turned this hosting account from a company account to his personal account by changing the account information to reflect only his personal contact information. He currently refuses access to anyone else. He moreover refuses to update any payment information or pay the outstanding bills himself. He has done the same thing with CODOH's domain name account. He has turned off some domain names, resulting in websites not hosted by CODOH no longer being reachable with those domain names. This trustee demands a payment of three hundred thirty thousand US dollars ($330,000) from the CODOH Trust before giving access to that account, so that the outstanding bills can be paid, and web services restored.

CODOH currently has some four thousand dollars in its bank account, and no other financial assets. Hence, paying $330,000 is impossible. No one can expect that the other trustees step up and pay $330,000. Furthermore, no donation from the personal assets of our generous supporters should be used.

The trustee in question furthermore demands that, for the next 24 years, 3% of all proceeds of the CODOH Trust are paid to him. However, CODOH is a charitable trust whose Declaration of Trust of December 2014 states clearly that "[n]o part of the net earnings of this trust shall inure or be payable to or for the benefit of any private shareholder or individual."

The trustee in question made numerous public or private statements about this ongoing conflict over the past several weeks. None of the other CODOH trustees have signed up to volunteer for this organization in order to engage in infighting and public mud-slinging. We will therefore not respond to any of this trustee's missives. We only remark that anyone willing to engage him should insist on him presenting evidence for his claims. That is what revisionism is ultimately all about: we do not accept claims at face value but demand verifiable evidence. Our private appeals to him to provide such evidence have remained unheeded.

We hope that the trustee in question becomes reasonable, thus allowing a peaceful resolution of this unnecessary conflict and preventing any litigation.

Meanwhile, we regroup and try to reestablish all web services as best and as fast as possible. If you want to be of assistance in this regard, or if you wish to learn more about this conflict, please get in touch using our NEW contact information provided below.

DO NOT USE ANY OTHER ADDRESS!

Sincerely

The other Four of the Five Trustees of the Bradley Smith Charitable Trust

(We do not reveal the names of any of the trustees here for their own protection.)

Further statements will be updated to this post.

On February 3, 1944, Eichmann's office dispatched a letter, signed by the head of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The letter requested a decision on how to handle the SS and police personnel responsible for the escape of Jewish prisoners from Sonderkommando 1005 at Fort Kauen.

Kaltenbrunner proposed "the matter should be concluded within our jurisdiction" instead of involving the SS and police court "to avoid another group of persons gaining insight into the operation of the Sonderkommando". 

By the way, I have yet to come across any explanation from Holocaust deniers regarding the true nature of Aktion 1005. It remains a top-secret operation involving the clearance of mass graves containing evidence of Nazi atrocities. 

If any deniers possess information on an alternative interpretation, I invite them to share their insights in the comments along with supporting evidence.

An den

Reichsführer-SS

z.Z. Feldkommandostelle

Betrifft: Flucht jüdischer Arbeitskräfte aus Kauen

Abschließend berichte ich zu der Flucht der 64 jüdischen Arbeitskräfte aus dem Fort Kauen, daß bisher 37 Juden wieder ergriffen werden konnten.

Der Führer des Sonderkommmandos 1005 - SS-Obersturmführer Radif - und der Führer des eingesetzten Wachkommandos - Gendarmeriemeister Apelt - wurden nach dem Ausbruch wegen fahrlässigen Verhaltens in Haft genommen. Da die Ermittlungen inzwischen abgeschlossen sind, habe ich die Haft in Hausarrest umgewandelt.

Ich bitte um Entscheidung, ob

1./ noch eine SS- und polizeigerichtliche Untersuchung erfolgen soll oder

2./ die Angelegenheit in eigener Zuständigkeit abgeschlossen werden soll.

Ich schlage vor, die Angelegenheit, nachdem Radif und Apelt seit Ende 1943 einsitzen, und um zu vermeiden, daß ein weiterer Personenkreis Einblick in die Arbeitsweise des Sonderkommandos erhält, abzuschließen.

Bei SS-Obersturmführer Radif handelt es sich um einen alten erprobten Nationalsozialisten, der während der Kampfzeit in der Ostmark zu 19 Monaten Kerker verurteilt war.

Gendarmeriemeister Apelt hat bisher in anerkennswerter Weise seinen Dienst versehen und war stets bestrebt, die Arbeiten auf der Baustelle vorwärts zu treiben.

[Kaltenbrunner]

(BArch R 9361-III/840355, first page of the document already posted here Once More, With Feeling: Deniers And Aktion 1005, 10 Years Later )

(Point 4. I don't understand even after translating into my native tongue German - and several times back and forth again hoping something gets added in translation.)

Mattogno's approach of "only considering in my books what has been published in paper form" led to an awkard situation. To most academics, especially those in the vast landscape of Holocaust history, he's seen as such a lackluster researcher that many refuse to dignify his work with a response. It's like setting up for a showdown, but no one bothers to show up. Some avoid it because they don't want to waste a bullet, while the other guy steers clear just because his choice of weapon is not met. Nobody? Well, not quite nobody! A small group of indomitable bloggers remains, standing at high noon armed with arguments as sharp as Gallic swords...or something. 

Anyway, rules are made to be broken. In 2019, I published Nazi Document on Mass Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Franke-Gricksch Reportand Mattogno explains that "in this case I make an exception". An exception to a rule that does not make sense in the first place. Most of Holocaust denial activities take place online. Almost all of Holocaust denial debunking takes place online (unless David Irving goes on trial). If we publish all blog postings with books on demand, then they are suddenly qualified to get considered? 

On the other hand, the rule reduces workload. Mattogno does not have to write another 50,000 pages which nobody except us will really read anyway. We do not have to produce a couple of postings. Win-Win. Personally, I think we should keep this working model. 

But now that there is an exeption, I just have to reply. It's almost pathological. My apologies, but I cannot let Mattogno's unsubstantiated assertions go unchallenged.

1.Mental decline

How does this blog work? Since 2006 (I guess) postings on holocaustcontroversies have the same structure: 

- Date 

- Headline

- Main text 

- Author 

- Comments 

If you're seeking information about the author of the post, you simply need to scroll past the main text. Mattogno is familiar with our blog, having read and cited it in the past; he is not a newcomer who would be encountering it for the first time while examining the Franke-Gricksch post.

However, despite his familiarity with the blog's structure, Mattogno asserts that Nazi Document on Mass Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Franke-Gricksch Report was published "without attribution to any author" (p. 107). I already raised the question about his mental decline elsewhere. 

2. Parroting 

Rather than engaging with presented arguments, he reiterates points that have already been thoroughly addressed in the blog post. Might be a result of reading comprehension issues or cognitive challenges.

Examples: 

Item 1. on p.109. Arrival of the Jews in "a special area of the camp" and alleged anachronism. 

This matter has been extensively covered in Appendix C, titled "Special tracks in specially designated districts of the camp," and in Appendix D, which focuses on Brian Renk. Furthermore, a more detailed exploration is available in a separate post titled Vincent Reynouard And The Franke-Gricksch Report (Part 1) . To summarize, there is no anachronism in the report; Franke-Gricksch did not state that the special ramp for the Jews was in Birkenau.

Item 2.) on p. 109. Not using the term "crematorium". This is has been addressed in appendix C section ""biggish house" [größeres Haus]"...

"It is in accordance with his take-home message that the victims are tricked into their fate and do not suffer that he does call the crematorium what he presumed how an ignorant person and victim would see it, a biggish house."

...and in appendix D section on Carlo Mattogno:

[...]

But what it is clear is that the author of the report did not want to use the term and decided to describe the site as "biggish house". His possible motive? The report describes the mass extermination in the most positive way, for the victims as well as, implicitly, for the perpetrators. The reason for calling the crematorium a "biggish house" might have been to emphasise that the victims do not realise from the outside they are really led to their slaughterhouse.

Item 6 on p.113. "500000 Jews". Already addressed in the blog posting in section"The result to date of this “resettlement action”: 500,000 Jews.":

[...]

500,000 seems like an inflated figure disseminated by the Auschwitz SS at the time (possibly based on operation time, capacity, estimated transports, instead of actual records they were not allowed to keep). The Auschwitz SS Administration did not have to know about exact figures since they were responsible for the (registered) inmates, but not for those sent immediately to the gas chambers without registration in the camp's books.

Another point: the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß may have felt like boasting about the Auschwitz death toll to catch up with the reports on those of the Aktion Reinhardt camps Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor.

In his post-war manuscript on the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, Höß provided more or less decent totals for the Jewish deportations to Auschwitz. According to him, he learnt the figures "from Eichmann or his staff" - quite possible only in 1944.

The death toll of 500,000 up to May 1943 is far too low for a post-war forgery with much higher figures floating around at the end and after the war. The Soviets claimed some 4 Million deaths for Auschwitz. The Auschwitz escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler reported that 1.765 million Jews were gassed in Auschwitz between "April 1942 to April 1944".

3. Circular source firing squad 

 4. Theory without evidence 

According to Mattogno, the crude post-war copy of the report by Eric M. Lipman of the U.S. Third Army is the "original" text, while the actual war-time carbon is a "retyped, cleaned-up, improved version". Mattogno spins a theory that explains nothing and is not backed by evidence. If anyone were to propose a theory of this nature supporting Nazi atrocities, Mattogno would likely promptly criticize and vent, highlighting the unsubstantiated nature of such conjecture. 

5. "F" grade for linguistic analysis

It is supposed to be "striking" that Lipman changed the grammar of one sentence and "grammatically speaking, Lipmann‘s way of arranging the words in this sentence is wrong". However, from a grammatical perspective, the sentence is not incorrect (usage of a prepositional attribute). 

Furthermore, there's no compelling reason why someone carelessly / in a hurry retyping a text, as Lipman did, should be expected to flawlessly maintain the word order in every single sentence. It should not happen when working with care and proof-reading, but this was not the case here.

6. No expert at work

 7. Arrogance meets Ignorance

If arrogance is your trait, excel in something remarkable. If ignorance prevails, adopt humility. If you embody both, consider forming a tag team with Mattogno.

Mattogno crafts an image of himself as the crème de la crème, the cream of the crop, an elite figure at the pinnacle of Holocaust research. His viewpoint posits others, particularly "the bloggers," as inferior, lacking, mere losers. 

This self-perception may have solidified in the 90s when Mattogno, alongside Graf, secured a significant coup by obtaining Auschwitz files from Moscow's special archives. Despite the fallacious nature of his arguments, the extensive use of unpublished contemporary documents somewhat justified his arrogance.

However, Mattogno failed to evolve and rapidly fell behind, failing to keep pace with historians and even "the bloggers." What persisted was not expertise but ignorance. Now coupled with the same arrogance.

"In their childish superficiality, the bloggers do not even ask themselves what was the reason for the journey of von Herff and Franke-Gricksch." (Mattogno, Deliveries of Coke, Wood and Zyklon B to Auschwitz, p.118)

Says he who has done no research on the SS Personnel Main Office other than referring to the "1943 Organisationsbuch of the NSDAP" and provides no analysis of the journey undertaken by von Herff and Franke-Gricksch,  

"The bloggers" systematically studied numerous personnel and matter files of the SS Personnel Main Office and other sources. There is a whole section "context" in the main part of the posting trying to make sense out of the trip. While one can dispute the findings, the assertion that "the blogger" did "not even ask themselves what was the reason for the journey of von Herff and Franke-Gricksch" is just absurd. Mattogno, despite citing from the relevant section (p.116), appears incapable of recognizing that his purported deficiency has been addressed in the post.

8. See no evil

In his concluding remarks, Mattono references an excerpt from the extensive Franke-Gricksch report concerning the "special enterprise REINHARD. This branch has had the task of realising all mobile Jewish property in the Gouvernement Poland". With a sense of satisfaction, Mattogno asserts that "the real Franke-Gricksch knew nothing of a Sonderaktion “Reinhard” consisting of an extermination operation of Jews". 

The "real Franke-Gricksch" knew apparently nothing of the whereabouts of the Jews unfit for work either. It's all about working camps and "all Jewish possions and mobile property". And the "scum" in Warsaw ghetto getting "liquidated". What about the much bigger task to deal with hundreds of thousands Jews unfit for work? He inspected the SS personnel involved in the operation, but does not report about the operation. 

Yet drops genocidal statements like "either this generation of ours succeeds in clearing up the Jewish problem completely and it its last consequences or, if their liquidation is not completely achieved, the Jewish people will rise again after this wave of oppression" and "this problem has to be cleared up completely to free the world once and for all of this pestilence...". 

Holocaust deniers will need to explain all of this, victory dancing on semantics of "Sonderaktion Reinhard" does little to address the underlying historical reality.

As I pointed out in blog article, the Franke-Gricksch report on the mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz serves as a critical component, filling the void left by the lengthy report.

9. Flying attack donkey fallacy

According to Mattogno "the problem of the formal authenticity of the document is entirely secondary to that of its veracity". Not really, not in the context of a trip report by an SS officer. 

If Franke-Gricksch wrote, in May 1943, a detailed report on mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz, then probably because there had been mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz. It's really simple as that and precisely why Holocaust deniers try everything to make it appear not authentic. Because they know else they are done. Nobody wants to argue, yeah Franke-Gricksch wrote it, but he did not mean it. Its not a defendable position, everybody knows. 

Except Mattogno. He developed the idea that German contemporary documents on Nazi atrocities can be authentic, but have no real meaning. On the Gasprüfer document he argued while it "seems formally authentic...the document in question has no value, no more than a military document that mentioned a flying attack donkey". 

 And Mattogno is supposed to be their best donkey in the barn. 

Recently, a documentary about the Nazi extermination camp Kulmhof was shared (Polish and English) on YouTube. In addition to current footage of the former Nazi extermination camp, the documentary also features contemporary photographs from a permanent exhibition. At minute 1:43, a German officer and three soldiers with a motorcycle sidecar can be seen in front of a building.

The English caption reads:

"Members of the Sonderkommando Lange in front of one of the buildings of the psychiatric hospital in Dziekanka in Gniezno, December 1939 - January 1940."

The photograph is thus a unique piece of contemporary history, depicting the mobile Sonderkommando Lange (i.e. before Kulmhof) during an operation.

If it shows what the caption suggests...

One may question why a killer commando that operated under high secrecy would openly appear like this from the beginning while being captured on camera.

On the other hand, it could also be the Luftwaffe number plate of the motorcycle or the Luftwaffe officer's uniform, indicating that this is more likely a photo in the context of the Luftwaffe reserve hospital in Gnesen rather than an operation by the Secret State Police. 

Last but not least, the scene doesn't align with what witnesses of the operation reported:

Let's look into the arguments presented in CODOH's Holocaust Encyclopedia - Auschwitz Death Books. We'll take on a couple of the key points:

• More Christians than Jews died at Auschwitz according to the death books
  
  The Auschwitz death books only represent a fraction of the camp’s reality. They are capturing a limited time-frame and especially excluding those directly sent to homicidal gas-chambers upon arrival. The majority of Jews were killed immediately upon arrival and they were thus not recorded in the camp books, as established by numerous perpetrator and surviver testimonies and contemporary documents.
  
  
• Very young and very old people in the death books
  
  The argument that the presence of young and old people contradicts the "orthodox narrative" of immediate gassing is misleading. Testimonies and historical records document that while the vast majority of deported people was immediately gassed, some groups were occasionally selected for labour or other purposes, including medical experiments, and could survive for varying period.
  
  
• High death rates during typhus epidemics as proof of natural causes of death
  
  While typhus and other diseases did cause high mortality rates, this argument overlooks the intentional harsh conditions created by the Nazis, such as starvation, forced labor, and inhumane living conditions, which exacerbated these outbreaks and increased mortality. The implication that the catastrophic conditions were purely incidental rather than a result of deliberate policies is historically inaccurate.

Further Reading: 

The Kinna Report - German Document on the Killing of Unfit Jews in Auschwitz 

Nazi Document on Mass Extermination of Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Franke-Gricksch Report

Open Letter to Nick Kollerstrom on the Auschwitz Death Books

Carlo Mattogno's Scholarly Death Certificate

Evidence on the systematic falsification of death causes in Auschwitz 

 Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans

Kogon et al. Nazi Mass Murder, p. 262

Transfer of trucks from Heeresfahrpark 511 to the RSHA motor pool, BArch 58/7658

 

There is literally nothing that the denier's "Holocaust Encyclopedia" does not get wrong in the entry "Burmeister, Walter". 

Starting with the identity: 

 "Walter Burmeister (14 Nov. 1894 – 23 Feb. 1980), SS Oberscharführer"

Walter Burmeister born 14 November 1894 was a school teacher / inspector and not member of the Nazi paramilitary forces. He had no involvement with Kulmhof / Chełmno extermination camp.

Denazification file of Walter Burmeister (born 14 November 1894), LA-NRW Abteilung Rheinland, NW 1039-B/3939

The Walter Burmeister associated with Kulmhof was born on 2 May 1906. This mistaken identity has been plagiarized from a Wikipedia entry that erroneously combined the biographies of two Burmeisters.  The notion that a school inspector would be drafted to drive a gas van should raise immediate red flags.

Somebody has called our attention to some relatively new items at the website of the Buchenwald Memorial, namely, a dossier about the artefacts allegedly made from human bodies.

Some notable new information:

- a small lampshade, thought to have been a fake for decades (after a forensic test claimed it could not have been made from human skin) has been retested in 2023 and was proven to have been produced from human skin after all;

- a piece of the lampshade in Pister's office has been found and ordered to be tested, the results are pending (our previous conclusion was that it's unlikely to be human skin, but the test results can refute it, of course);

- some barely known shrunken head imitation has finally been shown to be a fake in 2023 (this has nothing to do with the original shrunken heads found in Buchenwald, of course);

- a pocket knife case alleged to have been made from human skin has been ordered to be tested, with results pending;

- three tattooed skin pieces were tested, with the expert concluding two of them were of human origin, the third probably not (possibly pig skin), albeit the Memorial disagrees with the latter conclusion since this piece is also documented to have come from the camp pathology department; and indeed, pigs don't have tattoos in the first place.

The article "Nazi shrunken heads, human skin lampshades, human soap, textiles from human hair? Sorting out the truth from the legends" has been updated accordingly.