Bombers 2003 said:
NO,'muppet' you are the ignorant one,read 'Road to Berlin'by John Ericson,p88.
This Erickson?
A decade ago Professor Erickson and the Russian investigators had concluded that his death could have been suicide prompted by a violent confrontation between himself and a group of British prisoners of war. The new evidence, however, now firmly blames the Katyn massacre. "It is clearly genuine and is the result of arduous investigations involving thousands of documents and transcripts," the Professor said. "For many years there have been arguments and rumours about it. Now, finally, we know the truth.
"It is clear that Yakov, who had become close friends with the Poles and had made two abortive escape attempts with them, was so distraught when goaded with the news of his father's massacre of the Polish officers, which was revealed in German newspapers in 1943, that he took his life. Driven to despair by the horrific conditions in the camp - he was emaciated and on the point of starvation - and the strain of the propaganda campaign the Germans had involved him in, the news that his father had sanctioned the Poles' murder was the final straw."
Although the German newspapers reports blamed the Russians for the Katyn atrocity, until 1993 the Soviet propaganda lie that it was a Nazi act was widely believed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow finally admitted its guilt. Though the official SS report at the time indicated that Dzhugashvili died after he was shot by a guard as he ran towards the wire, it is now known this was a fictional account compiled to impress Heinrich Himmler. "The guard certainly shot Yakov four times," Professor Erickson, who has viewed the evidence, confirms, "but it is now known that he fired the bullets into Yakov's already dead body."
The new evidence also reveals that, far from abandoning his son and holding him up to ridicule, as had been thought, Josef Stalin ordered Soviet Military Intelligence to make two rescue attempts in 1942. "This evidence does go some way to exonerating the British officers whose taunts were believed to have pushed Yakov to breaking point," Erickson says, "but it also highlights the devastating effect the Katyn massacre had on Yakov. He could not live, I believe, with the accounts he was given of the massacre ordered by his father.
"Though the Poles were killed at Katyn in 1940, their bodies were not discovered by the Germans until March 1943. When a camp guard showed Yakov the newspaper reports of the discovery, taunting him with the words, 'Look what you bastards did to these men. What kind of people are you?' Yakov was devastated. He was at the end of his tether. A month later, on April 15 1943, unable to live with the shame, he took his life."
by Bruce Kennedy
CNN Interactive Writer
In 1943, German soldiers discovered a mass grave in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia. The grave held the bodies of between 4,000 and 5,000 Polish army officers. Hoping to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its Western allies, Nazi officials publicized the grave and accused the Soviets of the massacre. Moscow denied the charge and claimed the Germans were attempting to cover up their own atrocity.
Despite evidence that the Kremlin was indeed behind the massacre, Britain and the United States chose to look the other way. London's wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, opposed a call by the Polish government-in-exile for an investigation by the International Red Cross into the incident.
Following the war, at the Nuremberg war crime tribunals, the issue of Katyn was originally included on the list of crimes attributed to the Nazis. But it was later dropped, apparently out of concern that any revelations about the massacre would embarrass the Soviets.
It wasn't until 1990 that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev admitted Soviet involvement in the Katyn forest massacre. Two years later, the Russian government handed over to Polish President Lech Walesa previously secret documents showing that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had directly ordered the killing of the Polish army officers.
Most of the victims in Katyn forest were Polish army reservists -- lawyers, doctors, scientists and businessmen -- who were called up to active service following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. But instead of fighting the Germans, about 15,000 Polish officers found themselves prisoners of the Red Army, which had occupied eastern Poland under the terms of a secret Moscow-Berlin treaty.