Sneaksie, Germans did not needed to shift world’s attention from Warsaw Ghetto, simply because world’s attention did not existed.
The only way of learning about Ghetto were reports from Polish Home Army radioed to London and passed to British Government.
(Off topic only for Russians and Poles - Stirlitz failed to report anything…)
Either Brits and Americans were sceptical and usually commented that Poles are exaggerating.
News about Warsaw Ghetto were of small importance in comparison to News from Eastern Front, North Africa and Pacific.
Do not extrapolate todays information ways to 1943.
There was no CNN this time. lol
Also do not see history as black and white chessboard. Germans, whatever you can say about their atrocities towards Jews and Slavs treated Western allies in quite a civilised way. They also expected the same adherence to Geneva and Haque Conventions from Allies.
Lists of POWs were regularly exchanged, Red Cross parcels delivered, sometimes even releases of POWs on health ground occured.
It is true that german gestapo shot a few POWs in revange but majority survived war. Among them were Polish POWs taken by Germans in 1939.
Only 2.5% of them died in captivity mainly because ill health or advanced age.
It is quite amazing that POWs taken by RKKA in the same time ended in various places of USSR with 7.65mm holes in their heads.
And another thing. Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians citizens had clearly seen what NKVD did to various prisons.
Best sample, Lvov. Hundreds of murdered prisoners, some shot, some killed by handgrenades thrown to cellars and prison cells.
What about Riga? Excavations started almost right after 22-of June 1941.
For people in the east NKVD behavior was well known.
Findings like in Katyn and Vinnitsa were almost normal and accepted.
They tried only to find members of their families and bury them honourable.
In Grodno Poles started to dig to find hundreds of city defenders in September 1939 shot by RKKA and NKVD.
There are books, memoirs, historians wrote many volumes about these events.
Mr Muhin and his supporters deny everything.
Richard Overy (Russia’s War, pages 296 and following) wrote: […]Katyn was not the only Soviet atrocity blamed on the German invader. In the Kuropaty forest in Belorussia road workers excavating a new highway in 1957 uncovered human remains. ‘An ancient cemetery’, was the explanation given. In 1987 two schoolboys stumbled across a mass grave. What they had discovered was one of an estimated 500 mass burial sites in the forest areas around Minsk, all of them filled with the victims of NKVD terror. They contained, according to the estimates of those who investigated them, between 150,000 and 200,000 bodies. The official position of the Belorussian Government, which authorized a commission of inquiry, was to blame the Germans, and this position was maintained beyond the collapse of the Soviet Communist system, which had kept the lies alive. The evidence from the exhumations damned the NKVD. The bullets were those used in the official-issue Nagan revolver; death was the usual shot through the back of the skull, exactly as at Katyn. There were witnesses who watched the relentless cycle of killing behind the fenced-off area of forest; who saw the forest roads flattened by the constant traffic of trucks coming in full and returning empty; who recalled the timetables of execution: dawn, two o’clock in the afternoon, dusk. To blame the German invader for Katyn was easy in the 1940s, given the unambiguous evidence of German crimes throughout the occupied Soviet area. To sustain the falsehoods for fifty years and to heap on more when the evidence quite literally surfaced in the 1980s is harder to explain. The image of Soviet righteousness, sustained by propaganda after the German invasion, allowed Stalin, and then the entire Soviet system, to erect a curtain of forgetfulness between the pre-war and the post-war world. The post-Stalinist state had no more interest in owning up to atrocities than had Stalin himself.
Don’t you think that when other facts emerge from Moscow, like say
re-erection of Felix Dzherzynsky statue in Lubianka courtyard, world is becoming nervous?
I recommend for you and all readers this satyrical article:
http://exile.ru/152/152030033.html
If Russians are dusting off Iron Felix “Red Handed” statue, why they not build memorial for their another famous murderer?
It is exactly the same.
It is total stupidity.
By accident I saw on one Polish site comment - “Felix Dzherzynsky - renegade Polish noble, was one of the greatest murderers and criminals of XX century, but perhaps we should erect his statue as well - just compare how many Russians Pilsudski killed and how many Dzherzynski!
Pilsudski is a kid in comparison!”
Stupid isn’t it? Total irresponsible stupidity… Criminal stupidity.
Forum like this is to prevent such stupidities to spread. I still have hope that
intelligent Russians will come to their senses and also come to discuss things.
We may not love each other nor even like but we have to be able to talk responsibly without going into revisionists alley.
I will write about Miednoye later.
Lancer44
