Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,3)

(1) - Introduction and 1. Nature and Purpose of Kola’s Archaeological Investigation

(2) 2. Location and Form of the Mass Graves

(3) 3. Corpses Found

(4,1) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.1 The Capacity of the Graves

(4,2) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.2 Wood Requirements
4.3 Duration of the Cremations


4.4 The Soil removed from the Graves[282]

In section 4.4 of my original article[283], I had addressed Mattogno’s false dilemma about the supposed lack of space for the soil removed from the Belzec mass graves, by arguing that a generously assumed maximum of 35,700 cubic meters of soil extracted from these graves could have been either left by the graves or stored somewhere else inside or outside the camp in 4-meter piles. I demonstrated that transporting the sand to places of storage would not have been such a big deal (10,000 truckloads of 5 tons each could be moved by 100 trucks in 10 days or by 10 trucks in 100 days).



Mattogno’s objection is that I'm arguing in mere possibilities rather than "real facts" because there is no evidence to such sand movement having taken place. Apparently he hasn’t realized that evidence to mass murder at Belzec, i.e. eyewitness testimonies describing the killing and body disposal as well as documents and physical traces on site corroborating these testimonies, is also evidence to the logistics required for mass murder except insofar as those logistics are proven impracticable and the evidence to mass murder must thus be eyed with suspicion. It is Mattogno’s encumbrance to demonstrate the logistical impracticability that he alleges, and that is not done by arguing that there’s no evidence directly mentioning the logistics in question. Absence of evidence is only evidence of absence where evidence where one should reasonably expect evidence to be present, and that, contrary to Mattogno’s claims, is not the case in what concerns the handling of the sand removed from the mass graves at Belzec, or any other logistical issue for that matter. There is no reason why such issues should have necessarily been known to or caught the attention of inmates or outside observers who, to the extent they could observe the logistics of soil removal and storage in the death camp area at all, would naturally have been more "interested" in the utter horror of what was going on than in the mechanics or logistics thereof. There’s no reason why Soviet or Polish investigators should have focused their attention on logistical details. And there is also no reason why SS-men testifying as defendants or eyewitnesses, to the extent they knew or cared about what was going out outside their immediate area of activity, should have mentioned such details in the usually terse statements they made before criminal justice authorities of the German Federal Republic, to whom in turn such details were of secondary importance at best as they contributed nothing to establishing in what manner any of the individual suspects or defendants under investigation or on trial had taken part in the mass murder at Belzec. So if no sand piled up anywhere else inside or outside the camp was mentioned by any witness, this doesn’t mean a thing in our context. If, as Mattogno points out, SS-witness Alfred Schluch only mentioned soil piled up on the edges of the grave, the logical conclusion is that the witness for some very banal reason failed to mention the sand piled up elsewhere inside or outside the camp. The illogical conclusion is that what Schluch stated belies the existence of the huge mass graves he described. We see here again Mattogno’s schizophrenia in dealing with eyewitness testimonies: if Schluch, as Mattogno claims, was right about the extracted soil being wholly piled up alongside the graves (assuming, as Mattogno obviously does, that this was the message the witness meant to convey), why wasn’t he right as concerns the existence of these graves and the purpose they were used for, as Mattogno obviously contends as well?

Incidentally, there seems to be evidence to excavated soil having been taken out of the Treblinka extermination camp, and this evidence, as pointed out by Sergey Romanov, is obviously known to Mattogno and further detriments his arguing against the possibility of analogous procedures in analogous extermination camp Belzec [284].

4.5 The Ash[285]


In section 4.5 of my original article, I submitted calculations whereby the ashes of the 434,508 people deported to Belzec according to the Höfle report (rounded downward to 434,000) and of the wood used to burn the corpses made up less than 24 % or less than 41 % of the volume of the mass graves estimated by Prof. Kola on the basis of his archaeological finds (21,310 cubic meters), thus debunking Mattogno’s claim that the volume of ashes would have exceeded the volume of available grave space. My calculations, based on Mattogno’s own assumptions regarding the weight and volume of human and wood ashes, were the following:

Table 33

I had stated it to be incorrect in favor of Mattogno to calculate the amount of human ashes on the basis of a pre-cremation weight (column (c) in the above table) equal to the life weight, instead of taking the assumed average decomposed weight of 25 kg as the basis for the calculation. Mattogno points out – correctly for once – that my calculating the human ash weight based on the life weight was no favorable incorrectness at all because human body ashes consist of organic material, the quantity of which is not diminished by loss of water during the decomposition process. He then bitches about my supposed "ineptitude" revealed by this minor error – a rather amusing accusation coming from a charlatan who, among other blunders, assumes an average adult weight of 70 kg for undernourished, half-starved Polish ghetto Jews and didn’t take into account the important implications of decomposition on burial capacity and burning fuel requirements prior to my reminder.

My calculation may not have been incorrect in Mattogno’s favor as concerns assuming the corpse’s life weight for calculating the weight of human ashes, but it certainly was – as I pointed out in my original article, this time correctly – in what concerns assuming that weight for calculating the weight of wood ash residue. The calculation of wood weight and corresponding ash weight should have been based on the assumed decomposed rather than the life weight of the corpses, i.e. 25 kg, and with this value the proportion of the graves’ volume occupied by human and wood ashes would have been reduced to 19 % or 31 % for, respectively, the 1:1 and the 2:1 wood weight to corpse weight ratio, as shown in Table 34 below.

Table 34

Assuming 434,500 dead bodies and the average life weight of 34 kg and decomposed weight of 17 kg estimated in section 4.2 of this riposte[286], the human and wood ashes would respectively have occupied 15 % or 23 % of the graves’ volume, as shown in Table 35 below.

Table 35

All these calculations assume wood ash residue corresponding to 8 % of the original wood weight. This percentage comes from Mattogno & Graf’s Treblinka book[287], which in turn refers to Mattogno’s article about his combustion experiments with animal flesh and fat[288]. A look at that article[289] shows that the experiment yielding an ash residue of 8 % was that described in section 4.3, "Burning in a Pit Excavated in the Ground (February 21, 1995)". Burning inside a pit without a grid – this doesn’t have much in common with the Heepkian methods applied at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps (burning on a grid over or inside a pit), does it? More similar to what was done at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka is Mattogno’s "Experimental Incineration in an Open Furnace", described in section 4.2 of his article. The results of this experiment were the following (emphasis added):

# duration: 2 hr 40 mins

# ash from beef: 0.55 kg (= 5.1% of initial weight)

# wood consumption: 33.5 kg

# ash from wood: 0.85 kg (= 2.5% of initial weight)

# ratio fuel/flesh: 33.5/10.8 = 3.1 (the weight of the fuel used was 3.1 times the weight of the incinerated beef)

Were Mattogno an honest researcher, he would have used these latter results to assess the wood-weight-to-corpse weight ratio in cremations at Treblinka and Belzec (he would still have been on the high side, but at least he would have been consistent with his experiment results) and, more importantly, the percentage of the initial wood weight that remained as ash residue from the corpse cremations – 2.5 % instead of 8 %. The impact on the calculation of the total volume of ashes is significant in each of the scenarios considered in tables 33, 34 and 35, as shown in the corresponding tables below.

Table 33a
: percentage of graves’ volume occupied by human and wood ashes = 12 % (1:1 ratio) or 18 % (2:1 ratio).

Table 34a
: percentage of graves’ volume occupied by human and wood ashes = 11 % (1:1 ratio) or 15 % (2:1 ratio).

Table 35a
: percentage of graves’ volume occupied by human and wood ashes = 9 % (1:1 ratio) or 12 % (2:1 ratio).

In all these three scenarios the cremation remains consist predominantly of human ash, whereas in the scenarios of tables 33, 34 and 35 most of the ash is wood ash.

Why did Mattogno apply the wrong experiment results as concerns the ash residue to his calculations? Was this a mere mistake or oversight? Or did Mattogno deliberately use the data from the "wrong" experiment because he realized that correctly applying the data from the open furnace burning experiment would not have brought him the desired calculation results as concerns the ash volume resulting from the Belzec cremations? The reader may decide.

In the above table 33 to 35 and 33a to 35a the total ash weight (human plus wood ashes) represents a proportion of the corpses’ life weight ranging from 6 % (Table 35a, 1:1 wood weight to corpse weight ratio scenario) to 21 % (Table 33, 2:1 wood weight to corpse weight ratio scenario). However, according to the IAEA source that I used to calculate a ratio of 2:1 in my original article, the weight of the ash produced by burning carcasses on an open-air pyre is about 35 % of the carcasses’ pre-burning weight[290]. The same huge proportion of cremation remains need not but may have been produced in open-air burning of corpses on grids at Belzec, and the volume occupied by these remains would accordingly be much larger than in the above tables. According to the calculations presented in Table 36 for the various 2:1 ratio scenarios considered in Tables 33 to 35 and 33a to 35a (no such calculations were done for the 1:1 ratio scenarios in the same tables because the IAEA data point to a 2:1 ratio), the amount of ash corresponding to the aforementioned IAEA source would have originally occupied between 50 % and 61 % of the volume of the Belzec mass graves estimated by Prof. Kola, the lowest percentage corresponding to the life and decomposed corpse weights calculated in section 4.2 of this riposte (respectively 34 and 17 kg) and the wood ash percentage from Mattogno’s open furnace burning experiment (2.5 %). It is assumed that the wood ash weight is the same as in Tables 33 to 35 and 33a to 35a and the higher overall weight of residue is due to the corpses being consumed less thoroughly than would correspond to the 5 % ash residue considered by Mattogno. Human ash in the table below makes up between 19 % (Table 36.1) and 32.5 % (Table 36.6) of the corpses’ life weight.

Table 36

After repeating his silly argument that I should have based my calculations on the original Polish estimate of 600,000 Belzec victims (which is supposed to be a “dictate” of historiography) rather than the somewhat lower death toll that becomes apparent from the Höfle report[291], Mattogno uses a quote of mine to argue that the cover layer of the Belzec mass graves after they were refilled with sand and cremation remains must have been two meters thick and therefore, according to his calculations about the area of the Belzec mass graves identified by Prof. Kola, more than half of the mass graves’ volume would have been occupied by soil not mixed with cremation remains (the cover layer) whereas the layer below the cover would have mostly or almost exclusively consisted of such remains. Such concentration of cremation remains in the lower half of the mass graves, in turn, is claimed to be incompatible with Prof. Kola’s finds, which allegedly suggest moderate to modest rather than high concentrations of cremation remains in the mass graves.

The quote on which Mattogno bases this argumentation translates as follows:

The camp commanders stood before the problem how they were to remove the mountains of ashes and bone fragments. Attempts to mix the ash with dust and sand in order to hide it were a failure. Finally it was decided to throw the ash and the bone fragments back into the empty pits and cover them with a thick layer of sand and waste. In several layers the ash, alternating with layers of sand, was poured into the pits. The upper layer consisted of earth 2 meters thick.

and was referred to in the following context in section 4.5 of my original article[292]:

The mixing of the ashes with sand or alternation of layers of ashes and sand also allows for no conclusions favorable to Mattogno, insofar as it points to a procedure which, based on eyewitness testimonies, was described as follows by Yitzak Arad (hereinafter quoted after Kogon et al, as above page 190) in regard to Treblinka extermination camp:

As can be seen, I didn’t claim that the upper layer of mass graves at Belzec was two meters thick but pointed out that the mixing of ashes with sand in the Belzec mass graves is not favorable to Mattogno in that it suggests a procedure similar to that applied at Treblinka. As can also be seen, the quote refers to Treblinka and not to Belzec. Mattogno conveniently ignores both of these aspects as he postulates that the Belzec mass graves must have had a sand cover two meters thick.

While the procedure of returning soil to the emptied mass graves and covering it with more soil may have been the same at Belzec as at Treblinka, it is not a given that the top cover of the graves was two meters at Belzec as well, or that it was two meters in all Belzec graves. In fact, examining judge Godzieszewski’s report about excavations at Belzec on 12 October 1945, which Mattogno quotes from[293] , suggests that in some graves there were layers of cremation remains well above two meters below ground, which cannot have been the result of robbery digging alone. Emphases in the following quote are mine:

The opening labeled No. 1 was taken down to a depth of 8 m and a width of 10 m and attained the bottom level of the graves. During the operation, at a depth of about 2 m, we struck the first layer of ash stemming from incinerated human bodies, mixed with sand. This layer was about 1 m thick. The next layer of ash was discovered at a depth of 4 – 6 meters. In the ash removed, some charred remains of human bodies were found, such as hands and arms, women’s hair, as well as human bones not totally burnt. We also recovered pieces of burnt wood. In trench No. 1, the layer of human ash stopped at a depth of 6 meters. The opening labeled No. 2 was taken down to a depth of 6 meters. In this trench, the layer of human ash began at a depth of 1.5 m and continued down to a depth of some 5 m, with occasional breaks. Here, too, the ash contained human hair, part of a human body, pieces of clothing, and remnants of incompletely burnt bones. Openings labeled Nos. 3 and 4 were freed to a depth of 3 meters. In hole No. 4, at a depth of 80 cm, we found a human skull with remnants of skin and hair, as well as two shinbones and a rib. Furthermore, at a level of between one and three meters, these holes yielded human ash mixed with sand and fragments of incompletely burnt human bones. Openings labeled Nos. 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 were dug to a depth of 2 m, but showed only human ash mixed with sand and human bones, such as jawbones and shinbones.

The above suggests that in most Belzec mass graves the soil cover placed over the cremation remains was less or considerably less than two meters. Godzieszewski’s report, later invoked by Mattogno to refute Prof. Kola’s assumption that after backfilling the graves following cremation of the corpses "the ashes filled the pits completely, and only a very thin layer of surface soil was used as a cover"[294], is furthermore of interest in that, in connection with Prof. Kola’s finds in 1997-1999, it allows for more or less estimating the amount of ashes present in the excavated Belzec mass graves in 1945. Consider the following part of the above quote:

During the operation, at a depth of about 2 m, we struck the first layer of ash stemming from incinerated human bodies, mixed with sand. This layer was about 1 thick. The next layer of ash was discovered at a depth of 4 – 6 meters. In the ash removed, some charred remains of human bodies were found, such as hands and arms, women’s hair, as well as human bones not totally burnt. We also recovered pieces of burnt wood. In trench No. 1, the layer of human ash stopped at a depth of 6 meters.

One layer of human ash 1 meter deep, between 2 and 3 meters below ground. Another layer 2 meters deep, between 4 and 6 meters below ground. Three layers of ash three meters thick in total, in a pit that, judging by the depth to which human remains were found, had been at least 6 meters deep during camp times (the depth of the pit, incidentally, confirms the correctness of Alfred Schluch’s estimate and of assumptions about the original depth of the mass graves derived from that estimate [295]). Unfortunately the excerpt quoted in Mattogno’s book contains no data about the area of this pit, otherwise it would be interesting to see how Mattogno matches the resulting amount of ash in this grave alone with his idiotic claims about the origin and scale of mortality in this area. If Godzieszewski's grave # 1 had the area of, say, Kola's grave # 6 (300 square meters, according to Mattogno’s table[296]), we would be talking about 900 cubic meters of ash mixed with sand here. If only half of this (450 cubic meters) was ash and only 18 % of that volume was human ash (as in Table 33), we would be talking about 81 cubic meters of human ash plus 369 cubic meters of wood ash in this one pit, respectively weighing 81x0.5 = 40.50 tons plus 369x0.34 = 125.46 tons, for a total ash weight of 165.96 tons or 165,960 kg. Assuming that this ash weight corresponds to as much as 35 % of the weight of the corpses burned, according to the aforementioned IAEA data[297], the life weight of the corpses corresponding to this mass of ash was 165,960÷0.35 = 474,171 kg, corresponding to 13,946 corpses at my reasonably assumed average life weight of 34 kg per person [298]. If, on the other hand, the assumed 450 cubic meters of ash were mostly human ash (as in the scenario of Table 36, where human ashes make up 90 % of the entire ash volume), we would have 405x0.5 = 202.5 tons of human ash and 45x0.34 = 15.30 tons of wood ash, a total ash weight of 217.80 tons or 217,800 kg, corresponding to a body life weight of 622,286 kg = 18,303 bodies weighing 34 kg on average[299]. As I pointed out earlier in this analysis, Mattogno did historiography a favor by quoting/translating from judge Godzieszewski's investigation report of 12 October 1945[300].

Never one to shy away from misrepresenting an opponent’s argument, Mattogno has me state that the human and wood ashes identified by Kola occupy only a meager part of the volume of the mass graves. Actually what I wrote in my original article was the following:

As the human and wood ashes together thus made up only the above-mentioned parts of the volume of the mass graves at most, if would of course not be surprising if more than half of the "relevant" samples showed "only a very thin layer of sand and ash" and in the remainder the percentage of sand was "not less than 50%", as Mattogno claims, and if in some samples no ash at all had been detected. Nevertheless one must wonder how Mattogno is supposed to have come to these conclusions. Apart from the fact that – apparently caught in "Revisionist" conspiracy thinking – he swiftly and just as unreasonably dismisses the soil samples not schematically represented by Kola as "irrelevant", although the schematic representation of a part of the samples has an exemplificative character according to Kola and the description of the graves partially quoted in part 3 suggests that the samples not schematically represented were everything other than irrelevant, it seems rather difficult to me to determine, on hand of the schematic representations shown in part 3, how high the ash content detected in each of the samples shown was.

So I did not state that the concentration of ashes found by Prof. Kola in the mass graves was a low one, but merely pointed out that a low concentration would not help Mattogno’s argument. At the same time I questioned the consistency of his claim that the concentration of ashes in the mass graves was a low one. One would now expect Mattogno to provide a detailed explanation of how, based on the core sample drawings in Prof. Kola’s book, he arrived at the conclusion that the samples contained only a low concentration of ashes. Yet Mattogno does not even try to provide this indispensable explanation. Instead he repeats his claim that

Out of the 236 samples, 99 are irrelevant, and among the 137 relevant ones more than half show only a very thin layer of sand and ash, whereas among the remainder the percentage of sand is not less than 50%, and the thickness of the sand/ash layer varies greatly.

and makes an amusing fuss about my having taken issue with his dismissing the samples not schematically represented by Prof. Kola as "irrelevant". While protesting that he had not claimed the samples dismissed as "irrelevant" to be devoid of ashes (then why are they supposed to be "irrelevant"?), he argues that the absence of numerical data based on the diagrams of the drillings, together with the fact that showing all samples from mass graves would have taken up just a few more pages in Kola’s book (it obviously didn’t occur to Mattogno that drawing these core drill samples is a lot of work and Prof. Kola or his editors may have reasoned that the samples shown sufficed to give an idea of what was found whereas more sample representations would just saturate general public readers and make them lose interest), means that the samples shown were not exemplificative but scale diagrams representing the contents of the graves and their respective thickness. This bizarre argumentation, a characteristic mixture of non-sequitur conclusions and "I smell a rat" - conjectures, looks all the more miserable after it has been demonstrated that the 137 core samples shown in Prof Kola’s book, besides being expressly called "examples of graphic illustration of the results" and covering only about one third of the mass graves identified at Belzec, include 60 samples from areas other than graves whereas only 77 samples are from graves[301], thus making Mattogno’s false juxtaposition of "relevant" versus "irrelevant" samples look not just as a flight of fantasy but as a downright lie.

However, the one who lied in Mattogno’s book is not Mattogno but Prof. Kola, who is supposed to have falsely claimed that "during the camp closing in 1943 year and levelling works taken up at that time, as well as robbery digs around the camp area directly after the war, the most part of body ashes was placed over the surface, and even now the presence of burnt bodies’ traces is quite clear in the surface structures"[302] in order to make the supposedly low concentration of ashes found inside the mass graves compatible with the "alleged" gassings and cremations at Belzec. How does rat-smelling Mattogno know that this claim of Kola’s is false, i.e. that the body ashes were not mostly scattered above the surface? Mattogno tells us in footnote 158, hereinafter transcribed from the English translation of his risposta:

At the time of mine and Jürgen Graf's visit to Bełżec in June 1997, there were no traces of burnt bodies to be seen at the former camp site.

Who said that Mattogno doesn’t have a sense of humor?

A Jewish rabbi made a big bloody fuss about how the construction of the Belzec memorial desecrated the dead because bone fragments were lying all over the place [303]. The issue of disturbing the human remains saturating the ground at Belzec was even the subject of a lawsuit[304]. When I was at Sobibor in the October 2008[305], it took me less than ten minutes from the moment I entered the area surrounding the local monument to find bone fragments like those scattered in the ground on photos from Belzec[306], which match the description in Rabbi Weiss’ article[307]. So, am I supposed to believe that "Revisionist" propagandists Mattogno and Graf really saw no human remains, such as the scorched bone fragments I found and photographed at Sobibor, when they walked the Belzec area in June 1997 (if they so did)? I'd say that, if they didn't see remains of burned human bodies, the two "Revisionist" gurus must have been walking around with big fat ideological tomato slices covering their eyes. It’s at least equally likely, of course, that Mattogno is just lying through his teeth.

Of course Mattogno has not problem with the scattering of cremation remains from the mass graves throughout the surface in surrounding areas where it suits his argument. Never one to shy from arguing on both sides of his mouth, he thus refers to what he wrote in his book about the testimony of Stanislaw Kozak whereby "the soil removed from the graves was spread across a large area of the camp, leaving ash and human remains exposed", in order to claim that "this mixture of soil, ash, and human remains ended up both in places which had originally been earthen walls separating the graves, and in holes where there were originally neither remains nor ash, thus creating the illusion of more numerous and more extensive mass graves" and thus call in question the accuracy of Prof. Kola’s conclusions regarding the area and volume of the mass graves[308]. Mattogno’s arguments in this respect shall be discussed in the next section of this riposte.

At the end of this part of his response, Mattogno tries to make up for his lack of substantial arguments by making a fuss about a minor misunderstanding in my original article – I had wrongly assumed the term "canine tooth" in sample 484/XV-30-55 from grave # 10 in Figure 13 of Prof. Kola’s book[309] to mean the tooth of a dog rather than a human canine tooth. Against my more important objection to his claim that the human remains in the mass graves are mingled with animal remains and Prof. Kola is shy to mention this – I showed that the animal remains in question, mentioned by Tregenza and also by Prof. Kola himself, had been found not in the mass graves but in excavations around the remains of the camp buildings, together with a huge amount of human bones – Mattogno doesn’t have much to say, on the other hand. The only subterfuge that the coryphée of "Revisionism" can think of to distract from his having (again) been caught with his pants down, as either a very sloppy reader or a liar trying to pull the wool over his readers' ears, is to lamely ask what "we" are supposed to make of the finding of animal and human bones [310] in excavations around the remains of the camp buildings.

I don't remember having said anything about the possible meaning of human remains found in this part of the camp area. But whatever the presence of these remains means, it is hardly favorable to Mattogno’s articles of faith. As to the animal bones: if – as Kola presumes [311] – the animal bones were "placed there after the object had been pulled down", they were probably related to the activities of robbery diggers pick-nicking on roasted chicken or pork chops while digging for valuables from the murdered Jews. As robbery digging went until at least the early 1960s and probably even beyond that (considering the desolate state the site was in when visited by initiators of the memorial project[312]) it would not be surprising if a huge number of animal bones had piled up, as it would not be surprising if they had been dumped in shallow pits, either by the robbery diggers themselves or by someone embarrassed about this evidence of somewhat disgraceful activities in the area.

Notes

[282] Controversie, Pages 47/48; see also the recently published English translation.

[283] Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research - Part 4 (3).

[284] Sergey Romanov, That "removed soil" problem.

[285] Controversie, Pages 48-51; English translation.

[286] Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,2).

[287] Mattogno, Belzec, page 86, footnote 266.

[288] Mattogno & Graf, Treblinka, page 149, footnote 438.

[289] As note 197.

[290] See notes 176 and 184. According to the IAEA article, approximately 350 kg of ash are produced per ton of animal.

[291]Issue discussed in section 4.1.

[292] As note 283.

[293] Mattogno, Belzec, pages 79/80.

[294]Kola, Belzec, page 20.

[295] See section 4.1.

[296] Mattogno, Belzec, page 73.

[297] As note 290.

[298] Assuming that the human ash weight was 5 % of life weight as per Mattogno’s data derived from cremation in a crematorium, 40.5 tons of human ashes would correspond to 810 tons or 810,000 kg of life weight, the equivalent of 23,824 dead bodies weighing 34 kg on average.

[299] Assuming that the human ash weight was 5 % of life weight as per Mattogno’s data derived from cremation in a crematorium, 202.50 tons of human ashes would correspond to 4,050 tons or 4,050,000 kg of life weight, the equivalent of 119,118 dead bodies weighing 34 kg on average.

[300] Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (3).

[301] As above.

[302] As note 294.

[303] Avi Weiss, A Monumental Failure at Belzec: "There was a large field and throughout this field there were literally bones everywhere. It is very hard to imagine. In fact I was there and I myself couldn't believe it," said Rabbi Herzfeld. "I kept seeing these small white shards which looked to me like they were small stones. But then the archaeologist of the camp came over and toldme that these white pieces were in fact bone shards. I said, 'These things are bones, but they are everywhere.' And, he answered me, 'Of course, the bones are everywhere in this field.'"; see also section 1 of this riposte.

[304] Joe Berkofsky, Memorial project in Poland sparks a lawsuit from Holocaust survivor.

[305] See my blog Mass Graves at Sobibor – 10th Update.

[306] Photo collections "Belzec"; "Belzec 13th of July 1999"; "Belzec Building Site 2003/2004"(photo captioned "Remnants").

[307] See note 303.

[308] Mattogno, Belzec, page 89.

[309] Kola, Belzec, page 15; Figure 13

[310] The English translation of Mattogno’s response mentions only the latter, whereas the original Italian text (Controversie, page 51), mentions both animal bones (found in Building "E", Kola, Belzec, pages 58f) and human bones (found in Building "A", Kola, Belzec, page 47).

[311] Kola, Belzec, page 59.

[312] Alan Elsner, "Unearthing the Horror of Belzec", The Washington Post, December 28, 2003, online transcription; Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt, Belzec: The Forgotten Camp.


(4,4) 4. Volume of the Mass Graves, Human and Wood Ashes
4.6 The "Actual" Surface Area of the Graves
4.7 Density of Corpses in the Graves