François Naville [SEP] date of death
François Naville
François Naville (14 June 1883 – 3 April 1968) was a Swiss physician, director of the medico-legal Institute of the University of Geneva, the only truly neutral expert in the international Katyn Commission investigating the Soviet Katyn massacre of some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war, mostly Polish Army officers, arrested and imprisoned in the course of the Soviet and German invasion of Poland. Their bodies were discovered in a series of large mass graves in the forest near Smolensk in Russia following the Nazi German Operation Barbarossa.
class pathologists, including Professor François Naville from University of Geneva, Dr. Ferenc Orsós from the University of Budapest, Professor Louis Speleers of the Ghent University in Belgium and Eduard Miloslavić, Croatian professor of pathology among others. The Commission concluded that the Soviet Union had been responsible for the massacre. Consequently, the German government made extensive reference to the massacre in its own propaganda in an attempt to drive a political wedge between the Allies of World War II alliance. The severing of relations between the Polish government-in-exile and