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The Jewish Nuremberg prosecutor and Katyn fraud
Lev R. Sheinin (sometimes: Shenin); Soviet-Jewish prosecutor at the main Nuremberg trial; member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee, and the man who wrote-up the second fraudulent narrative on Katyn that the Soviets presented to the tribunal.
The October 6, 1945, indictment of the main Nuremberg trial charges Herman Goering and several of the other defendants with having committed the Katyn massacre. On February 14, 1946, Soviet prosecutor Colonel Yury Pokrovsky read to the court brief excerpts from the January 1944 fraudulent Soviet report: "The Truth About Katyn: Report of Special Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating the Circumstances of the Shooting of Polish Officer Prisoners by the German-Fascist Invaders in the Katyn Forest," which states that the Poles were massacred by the Wehrmacht Staff 537, Engineer Construction Battalion, commanded by Oberleutnant Arnes (recte: Ahrens), and his colleagues Oberleutnant Rex and Lieutenant Hott. And that—as far as the Soviets were concerned—was the end of the matter; they had adequately proven that the Germans had committed the massacre to the standard of evidence required by the tribunal, which was: the court took judicial notice of any report submitted by the the U.S., U.S.S.R., Britain, or France under Article 21 of the tribunal's charter.
Unfortunately for the Soviets, Colonel Yury Pokrovsky's February 14, 1946, address to the Nuremberg trial was subsequently published in the Press and read by former members of the Wehrmacht's Army Group Centre; to which German Signal Regiment 537—not Engineer Construction Battalion 537 as the Soviet report had incorrectly called them—had been directly subordinate. On March 8, 1946, Herman Goering's defence counsel Dr. Otto Stahmer told the tribunal that men from Army Group Centre had come forward and that "[t]hese people stated that the evidence upon which the Prosecution have based the statement submitted (i.e. "The Truth About Katyn"), was not correct", and requested that he be allowed to submit evidence to the tribunal to prove this. After weeks of toing and throwing, the court agreed that the Stahmer and the Soviet prosecution could each call three witnesses, all of whom would eventually testify on July 1 or 2, 1946.
The beginning of the unravelling of the Soviet version of Katyn at Nuremberg by Dr. Otto Stahmer on March 8, evidently convinced the Soviets that they needed to concoct more lies to back up their fraudulent version of the massacre. In his 1996 study The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing), historian Michael Parrish writes of a meeting that took place on March 21, 1946, at which Andrey Vyshinsky (Deputy Foreign Minister and former Moscow show trial prosecutor), Viktor Abakumov (head of SMERSH), Vsevolod Merkulov (deputy-head of the NKVD), Konstantin Gorshenin (Prosecutor General of the USSR), and Nikolai Rychkov (Commissar of Justice) decided that they should:
- Find Professor Marko Antonov Markov, the Bulgarian pathologist who had been a member of the international team the Germans took to Katyn in 1943 (he would testify at Nuremberg, claiming he'd been forced by the Germans to state that the Soviets had killed the Poles, although the evidence made it clear that it could only have been a German war crime)
- Find three to five Soviet witnesses and two medical experts to support the Soviet version of Katyn
- Find Polish witnesses and a German witness to support the Soviet version
- Prepare "authentic" papers, documents, and autopsy reports which confirm the Poles were shot by the Germans
- Make a documentary
Parrish writes:
"The final version of the [Katyn] fabrication was prepared by L.R. Sheinin, Assistant Soviet Prosecutor at Nuremberg (and"a member of the Soviet Writers' Union and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee"); L.F. Raikhman; and one A.N. Tainin." (p.63)
This "final version" was the convoluted stories told to the Nuremberg tribunal by the the three Soviet witnesses: the aforementioned Professor Marko Antonov Markov; Professor Boris Bazilevsky, a Russian academic and supposed deputy-mayor of Smolensk under German-occupation; Professor Victor Prosorovski, Chief Medical Expert of the Ministry of Public Health of the Soviet Union.
Russian Jew Sheinin insisted that he had always wanted to be a writer, and did publish several critically acclaimed novels and plays, nevertheless, from 1923 to 1950 his day-job was as a criminal investigator and trial prosecutor for the Soviet Prosecutor's Office, where his talent with words was utilised, as Donald Rayfield put it, "writing up his investigations in the style of Sherlock Holmes stories." During Stalin's show trials of 1936-1938, Shenin had been the right hand man of the aforementioned Andrey Vyshinsky.
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