The RIA Novosti agency published the “declassified FSB” testimonies of the “fighter of the German “special purpose” battalion” Arnaud Duret, which allegedly testify that the Nazis, and not the NKVD, shot Polish officers in Katyn in 1941 – after all, he personally dug holes where the SS men threw the bodies of the executed Poles.
Arno Dure – German soldier, one of the defendants in the so-called Leningrad trial of the Nazis, which took place in 1945-1947. in different cities of the USSR. He, like other defendants, was accused of executions committed in the Leningrad region in the winter of 1943-1944. At the same time, the theme of Katyn surfaced in his testimony. Here is how his words were conveyed by the special correspondent of Pravda, Pavel Luknitsky, who was present at the trial:
“In a military prison, in Torgau, where until November 1941, when he was the commandant of the Remlinger prison, the arrested Dure was, he was brought up like that, teaching ruthlessness. "Practical exercises" during this training took place in the Katyn Forest in September 1941. Together with others like him, Dure, brought to this forest, dug huge grave ditches at night. The SS men dumped into these ditches the corpses of people brought by motor vehicles – tens of thousands of corpses of Polish officers, Russian people, Jews, and Dyure participated in their burial.
— Can you estimate approximately how many executed were thrown into these graves?
“Fifteen to twenty thousand people!” – Dure calmly answers and adds that he saw a picture of one of these graves in German newspapers, under the picture there was a caption: "The Russians did it."
At the same time, historians from different countries consider Dure’s testimony to be absolutely false, since for them he received hard labor instead of the death penalty (most of the accused at the trial were eventually hanged), and then, after repatriation to Germany in 1954, he renounced his testimony about Katyn and stated that the investigators forced him to say so.
Dure's words seemed unconvincing even to the Soviet authorities. It was planned that his speech at the Leningrad trial would become a kind of rehearsal before Nuremberg, but in the end the German soldier was not brought there, as he openly mocked the court. Here is what Dmitry Astashkin, senior researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of Science and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences, says:
“Soviet propaganda conveyed the essence of Dure’s answers, but did not publish absurd details: Dure explained to the prosecutor that the Katyn forest was in Poland, that the huge depth of the ditch was 15–20 meters, that he strengthened the walls of the ditch with tree branches for strength, etc. <…>
According to the diary of P. N. Luknitsky, Dure laughed during interrogation (“when it came to the execution of women by him, he nods his head in the affirmative and … smiles, laughs! ..”), during the verdict (“Only Dure laughs crookedly … ”), during the last word (“Dure gets up, laying his hands back. Laughing! The audience is waiting. Dure continues to laugh and through laughter says: “I don’t want to say anything!”)”.
And although foreign media (including Reuters and the New York Times) published the German’s statements, “as a result, the topic of Dure’s testimony was not developed either in Soviet or in foreign media materials.” Indeed, Soviet propaganda preferred the report of Academician Nikolai Burdenko, which, by the way, was later recognized as a falsification – including by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation .
The Russian authorities have repeatedly recognized the responsibility of the USSR for the execution in Katyn. By order of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Polish President Lech Walesa was given the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on March 5, 1940, at which it was decided to invite the NKVD to consider the cases of Polish officers and shoot them. This information is available in all open sources – even in RIA Novosti . And in 2010, already under Vladimir Putin, the State Duma of the Russian Federation recognized the Katyn massacre as a "crime of the Stalinist regime." The head of the international committee of the State Duma (and now deputy chairman of the Federation Council) Konstantin Kosachev then called for “getting out of the way the lies that cause rejection in Poland and cause significant harm to bilateral relations.”