Soviet responsibilities

However, the historian of today must note that Katyn was introduced, during the summer of 1945, into the charges preferred against the German leaders accused of war crimes before the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, and that this was done at the request of the Soviet prosecutor. Furthermore, after long discussions, all the zeal of Colonels Pokrovsky and Smirnov could not establish conclusive proof, and the charge of the murder of 11,000 Polish officers was not even mentioned in the Tribunal’s verdict on the condemned men.

And so it is valid to conclude that the Soviet accusation did not risk trying to contradict the report which had been signed by 12 forensic experts on April 30,

1943. These latter had been invited to Berlin to visit the charnel-house at Katyn and had been authorised to conduct postmortems freely on whichever bodies they chose. With the exception of Professor Naville of the University of Geneva, they all belonged to occupied or German satellite countries. Yet, with the exception of a Bulgarian, later acquitted after a pitiful self-accusation before a Sofia court, and a Czech, none of the 12 signatories' agreed to go back on the declaration he had made in 1943.

In spite of the accusations made against him by a Communist deputy from Geneva, Professor Naville confirmed his evidence in September 1946, and was completely exonerated by the cantonal authorities of the suspicions that Moscow had tried to throw on his scientific reputation and professional probity. In 1952, Dr. Milo-savic, once Director of the Institute of

Criminology and Forensic Medicine of Zagreb, Professor Palmieri of the University of Naples, and Dr. Tramsen, Head of Medical Services of the Royal Danish Navy, deported for acts of resistance by the Gestapo in 1944, maintained their statements before the American Committee of Enquiry, as did Professor Orsos, of the University of Budapest.

After having examined the bodies, their clothing and the documents found on ithem, they came to the unanimous conclusion that the crime of Katyn could not be dated later than the beginning of spring 1940. The Russians, on the other hand, claim that the massacre had been perpetrated during August 1941, that is just after the battle in which the Germans ' overran the entire Smolensk region.