Will Putin follow Stalin's Katyn strategy on the airline shoot-down?

Published by carolyn on Mon, 2014-07-21 00:18

REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

In dealing with the tragedy of the downed Malaysian airliner MH17, the leader of the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin is behaving more and more like a throwback to Josef Stalin and his cover-up of the Katyn massacre. It was Stalin who approved the murder of thousands of Polish nationals in 1940, including military officers, dumping their bodies in mass graves hidden from view in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia.

If the Wehrmacht had not invaded Russia in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, the evidence of this massacre would never have been found. Here is a recount of how the crime was discovered, taken from Wikipedia:

The government of National-Socialist Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943. When the London-based  Polish government-in-exile asked for an investigation by the International Red Cross, Stalin immediately severed diplomatic relations with it. The Soviet Union claimed the victims had been murdered by the Nazis, and continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the perpetration of the killings by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.

*     *      *

In early 1943, Rudolf von Gersdorff, a German officer serving as the intelligence liaison between the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center and Abwehr, received reports about mass graves of Polish military officers. These reports stated the graves were in the forest of Goat Hill near Katyn. He passed the reports to his superiors (sources vary on when exactly the Germans became aware of the graves — from "late 1942" to January–February 1943, and when the German top decision makers in Berlin received those reports [as early as 1 March or as late as 4 April]). 

On 13 April, Berlin Radio broadcast to the world that German military forces in the Katyn forest near Smolensk had uncovered a ditch that was "28 metres long and 16 metres wide [92 ft by 52 ft], in which the bodies of 3,000 Polish officers were piled up in 12 layers." The broadcast went on to charge the Soviets with carrying out the massacre in 1940.

The Germans brought in a European Red Cross committee called the Katyn Commission consisting of twelve forensic experts and their staff from Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Croatia, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, and Hungary.

*     *      *

The Soviet government immediately denied the German charges and claimed that the Polish prisoners of war had been engaged in construction work west of Smolensk and consequently were captured and executed by invading German units in August 1941. The Soviet response on 15 April to the initial German broadcast of 13 April, prepared by the Soviet Information Bureau, stated that "Polish prisoners-of-war who in 1941 were engaged in construction work west of Smolensk and who...fell into the hands of the German-Fascist hangmen."

*    *    *

In April 1943 the Polish government-in-exile [in the UK] insisted on bringing the matter to the negotiation table with the Soviets and on opening an investigation by the International Red Cross. Stalin, in response, accused the Polish government of collaborating with Nazi Germany, broke off diplomatic relations with it, and started a campaign to get the Western Allies to recognize the alternative Polish pro-Soviet government in Moscow led by Wanda Wasilewska. Wladyslaw Sikorski, PM of Polish govt.-in-exile, died in an air crash in July—an event that was convenient for the Allied leaders.

Mass murderer Joseph Stalin - looking cool, calm and collected - is being rehabilitated in today's Russia as the leader who did whatever was necessary to save his country from the fascists.

Category 

News, Germany, World War II

Comments

It is interesting that the Polish exile government in London got accused of collaborating with the fascists (the Russians refrain from saying National Socialist or Nazi for they want to own the term Socialism). There are documents in German that Marcel Reich-Ranicki sent those London Poles to Poland after 1945 to be tortured in formerly German concentration camps. Reich-Ranicki later became a literature critic and was celebrated as "literature pope" in West-Germany. 

A better comparisson I think would be the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash which took out 18 members of the Polish parliament, who ironically were on their way to attend an event marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre in Russia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_Tu-154_crash
As for the Malaysian plane, I doubt Russia had anything to do with it. It's far more likely that flight MH17 was brought down by Kiev in order for the Western elites to ramp up their anti-Russian rhetoric and justify nato expansion into Ukraine, but there has been no compelling evidence that implicates any party in this event in my (admittedly limited) trawling through the blogsphere, though of course there are the usual array of red herrings and distractions.
I think it is worth trying to look for alterior motives, however.
On the surface the main global geostrategic conflict appears to be a simple case of BRICS vs US, yet some believe this is controlled tension, (Jews playing one side against another), and thus Putin is acting out a script.
It is clear that Russia and China are on the rise, but if this is part of a script, then to what avail? I cannot help but think it is setting the stage for a foreign invasion into Europe and other western (white) regions.
In more recent events, some have criticised Putin's handling of Ukraine, for not intervining. There are now an awful lot of displaced Ukrainians. A certain more cynically minded blogger has speculated that a depopulation agenda in Ukraine may have been pre-arranged and that Russia is secretly on board with this.
Then there is Russia's anti-US/anti-West rhetoric, which while admittedly may be justified given  the Western elite's hyper hostilitie attitude towards Russia (which in itself seems to be deliberately staged), may also be subtly anti-European/anti-White.
Someone who might be worth studying on Putin, albeit with whom I have a couple of issues with is Christopher Jon Bjerknes. While I certainly do not wholeheartedly endorse him, Bjerknes does make some interesting anti-Putin arguments that may well be close to the mark, but they are more of a geostrategic nature than a WW2/Holocaust sort of critique.
 

Christopher Jon Bjerknes -- a jew.

I don't need to read what other people say, even jews, even you, to know how it looks to me. I'm only writing about the plane incident and how it's been handled ... by denying responsibility and blaming the other guy ... this is why it compares to Katyn, despite the difference in scale, and not to the plane crash in 2010.

what the Russian leadership always does, right?

Putin does not have a storng motive to do this. He can only lose, there is nothing for him to gain....The rebels might have accidentally shot the plane down and Putin might have to cover-up, but I dont think the rebles did it either. 
The Ukrainian -Israeli Ihor kolomiskyi had a motive and had the means to shoot the plane down. (His private army seems to have been controlling  the general area from which the Buk missile was fired).  I dont think the Donetsk rebles- in retreat at the time-  had the wherewithal to set the three required radar and related trucks up, lock in and fire thinking they were aiming at a cargo plane when at that height they should ahve known better. They only had 5 minutes to prepare.
 
As soon as this happened, the usual neo-con Zionist gang members iimmediately  declared Putin culpable.

As I brought out in my radio program of 7-21, the whole question of motive is irrelevant. NO ONE had a motive for shooting down a passenger plane. Clearly the plane was ASSUMED to be a Ukranian military jet, not a commercial airliner. It's not possible to identify a flying object at that height, so it was an 'assumption' that turned out wrong ... and opened up a can of worms.

People need to open their eyes wide and set aside their predjudices.