The book examines the records of the work of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau , a body set up to collect evidence of war crimes committed by both the Allies and the Wehrmacht in World War II . Examples include the murder of Ukrainians in Lviv by the NKVD in 1941 , the murder of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn in 1940 , executions of German prisoners of war by French irregulars in 1944 , and the sinking of the German hospital ship '' Tübingen '' by the RAF in 1944 . De Zayas was the first researcher to evaluate the extant 226 volumes ; about half of the total records , the rest apparently having been burned in Langensalza , Germany , near the end of the war ( de Zayas ; pp . xiii-xiv ) . These records , captured by the United States Army in May 1945 , had been classified documents in the United States for several decades , and had been returned by the US National Archives to the German Bundesarchiv in 1975
Katyn
Katyn massacre
The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945