According to the information of the special committee of N. N. Burdenko, ‘the mass shootings of the Polish war prisoners from the above mentioned camps took place in the Katyń forest in Autumn 1941… The forensic medical inquest established beyond doubt: a) time of shooting — Autumn 1941; b) during the shooting the [Fascist] butchers acted in their standard manner (pistol shot into the back of one’s head) which they resorted to in all mass executions of the Soviet citizens in Orel, Voronezh, Krasnodar and Smolensk… The conclusions from the evidence made by the witnesses and the results of forensic medical inquest on the shooting of the Polish prisoners of war is fully corroborated by material evidence and documents extracted from the Katyn graves’.

‘The condition of corpses allowed to establish that the murder of the Polish officers was committed in Autumn 1941. Letters and other material evidence were found in the clothes of the murdered. They pertained to the end of 1940 or the beginning of 1941: a letter sent from Warsaw on September 12, 1940 and received first in Moscow on September 28, 1940.

Many other documents were found on the corpses, including letters and receipts dated November 12, 1940, April 6, 1941, June 20, 1941. One should also take into account that the [Fascist] masters of fabrication did utmost in order to destroy a considerable part of the materials which contradicted their version of shooting the Polish officers in Spring 1940’.

But even before the Burdenko committee started to work the experts from the Polish Red Cross sent by Germans to Katyń established that the bullets which were used to kill the officers were made in Germany.

At the Nuremberg trial the assistant of the main prosecutor of the USSR L. N. Smirnov submitted a cable sent from Smolensk to Krakow on April 20, 1943 by an official of the General‐Government Heinrich to a senior counsellor Weirauch: ‘A group of the Polish Red Cross delegation has returned from Katyń yesterday. The employees of the Polish Red Cross brought with them cartridge‐cases, used during the shooting of the victims in Katyn. It turned out that they constitute German ammunition. Their calibre is 7.65, the producing firm is ‘Geko’. The details are in a letter which is being sent. Heinrich’.

It was an unpleasant surprise for Goebbels. On May 8, 1943 he wrote down in his diary: ‘Unfortunately German ammunition has been found in the graves of Katyń. The question of how it got there needs clarification’. It is evident that Goebbels immediately started to invent plausible explanations. This is why he wrote: ‘It must be either the ammunition sold by us during the period of our friendly arrangement with the Soviet Russians, or else the Soviets themselves threw it into graves’.

The absurdity of such explanations was evident. There was no ground to suppose that the Red Army used German ammunition for their rifles and pistols. One can’t imagine that the German cartridge‐cases were thrown into graves by the Soviet people on purpose in order to deceive the world public opinion.

In this case one should suppose that the Soviet authorities knew in Spring 1940 that Smolensk would be taken by [anticommunists] and they would find the graves with the bodies of the Polish officers. One should also suppose that as soon as the [anticommunists] would find the cartridge‐cases made in their country they would be embarrassed and kept silence about their findings.

The German ammunition used for shooting the Polish officers made a mockery of the whole Katyń propaganda. That is why Goebbels decided to conceal this most essential material evidence.

He wrote: ‘In any case it is essential that the incident remain a top secret’. (The fact that the order was fulfilled proved that Stalin was right in his suspicions that the representatives of the Polish Red Cross were not free in their action in the [Third Reich’s] sponsored farce of the ‘investigation’ of the Katyń murders.) At the same time Goebbels made a logically correct assumption: ‘If it were to come to the knowledge of the enemy the whole Katyń affair would have to be dropped’.

But years afterwards the six experts of Yeltsin régime decided to rescue Goebbels’ slanderous version. In their ‘conclusion’ they asserted that the Polish officers ‘were shot in a cellar, one by one from a German pistol “Walter”’. The experts did not dare to claim that all NKVD employees were armed with German pistols. But it means that thousands of Polish officers were shot by a single ‘Walter’, one by one. That mysterious ‘Walter’ was never found.

The desire of the six experts to save Goebbels’ lie is obvious. But they were misled by their habit of using anti‐Soviet stereotypes. From a mass of anti‐Soviet books they learned that the NKVD executions always took place in cellars. Therefore the experts did not even bother to read from the documents related to the case that the German cartridge‐cases were found in Katyń graves. It is clear that they dropped to the ground while the executions went on.

Otherwise one should suppose that the cartridge‐cases were swept from the floor of the cellar, carted to the Katyń forest and solemnly buried there with the bodies.

(Emphasis added.)

The decision to remember the conspiracy theory that the Soviets committed this atrocity is very much a political decision, not a logical one. It serves two purposes: anticommunism and Russophobia, both of which are still of use to the Western upper classes. That is why most anticommunists familiar with this atrocity are much less likely to be familiar with the fact that the Fascists exterminated millions of Poles in a settler‐colonial project inspired by earlier ones in North America and elsewhere.

For example, it was in the Pomeranian province that the Fascists exterminated at least 30,000 Polish civilians from October to November in 1939 alone, yet politically it is of very little use to the ruling class, so anticommunists choose to forget it. Tell me, how often, exactly, have you heard anybody discuss this slaughter? Can you name even one example…?

See also: A series of quotes corroborating the probability that the Fascists committed this massacre.