Left, Text original Vol. 39, page 330 from IMT Trial in Nuremberg

Abschrift, english

From all the material available to the special commission, namely – the statements of the 100 witnesses interviewed by the commission, the facts examined by the forensic experts, the documents and material evidence taken from the graves in the Katyn forest are the following with irrefutable clarity to draw conclusions:
1. The Polish prisoners of war, who were in three camps west of Smolensk and who were busy with road construction work until the beginning of the war, remained there even after the German conquerors invaded Smolensk up to and including September 1943;
2. In the autumn of 1941, the German occupying forces carried out mass shootings of Polish prisoners of war from the above-mentioned camps in the Katyn forest;
3. The mass shootings of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn forest were carried out by the German Wehrmacht under the code name „Team 537 des Streetwork-Bataillon“, led by Oberleutnant Arnes and his staff Oberleutnant Reckst and Leutnant Hott. As a result of the deterioration of the general wartime situation for Germany in early 1943, the German occupying power took provocative measures to foist on the Soviet power’s own crimes with a view to inciting hostility between Russians and Poles;
5) For this purpose, a) the German-fascist invaders tried by persuasion, threats and barbaric torture among the Soviet citizens to „find witnesses from whom they blackmailed false statements that the Poles who were prisoners of war were shot by the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940 would have been …