MASSACRE AT KALYN

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 69, Issue 74, 7 January 1949, Page 2

MASSACRE AT KALYN

CHARGE AGAINST SOVIET POLICE DENIED (P.A.) WELLINGTON, Jan. 6. deferring to a cabled report of charges in a book by Mr Stanislaw Mikolajczkv, a former Prime Minister of the Polish Government-in-exile, that Eussian secret ijolice massacred Polish officers and other ranks and buried the bodies in a wood at Katyn, the Legation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has drawn attention to the report of a special Soviet commission dated Smolensk, January 24, 1944, Giving its conclusions, the commission said that in the Katyn forest in autumn, 1941, the German occupation authorities carried out mass shootings of Polish war prisoners. “The German occupation authorities, with provocational aims, took steps to ascribe their own crimes to the organs of the Soviet power, calculating on setting Russians and Poles at loggerheads.” The commission, held that it had been established beyond doubt from the evidence of medico-legal experts that the time of the shooting had been autumn, 1941, and that the Germans had applied the same method of pistol shots in the back of the head as they had applied in the mass execution, of Soviet citizens in other towns. 'ln shooting Polish war prisoners, the Germans had consistently carried out, a policy of physical extermination of the Slav peoples.