Holocaust Controversies

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues.

2012-12-31T23:44:00.000Z

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka

Holocaust Denial and OperationReinhard

A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf andKues

A HolocaustControversies White Paper, First Edition, December 2011

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com

NOTE: the definitive version of this Critique is in the PDF format. It can be downloaded from the following sources:

The blog version should be considered as an earlier version.

This work may befreely distributed electronically as a PDF or reproduced on websites, butrights of authorship are reserved; please credit this to ‘HolocaustControversies’. Reproduction for commercial purposes is prohibited.

Dedicated to Harry Mazal (1937-2011)

Table of Contents

Introduction.

Chapter 1: The Hoax That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Chapter 2: Nazi Policy

Chapter 3: Aktion Reinhard and the Holocaust in Poland

Chapter 4: So Where Did They Go? “Resettlement” to the East

Chapter 5: Gas Chambers at the Aktion Reinhard Camps

Chapter 6: Death Camp Witnesses

Chapter 7: Mass Graves

Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses

Conclusion

Afterword: A Special Note by Jason Myers

Denier Hoaxes: Ball and Krege

2012-01-28T18:12:00.000Z

A minority at CODOH has started to realize that Krege's claimed work on Treblinka is a hoax, not simply because it is unpublished but because it claims no soil disturbance at all. As can be seen in this post and this one, the slightly smarter Kollerstrom and Kingfisher types of poster are aware that there would have to be some disturbance if the dead from transports and disease were buried there. The same criterion can be used to consign John Ball's balls to the trash: Ball argued here that the soil at all three Reinhard camps was undisturbed. Today, Ball's site still claims that "Belsec [sic] was actually a logging camp where tree stumps and thin soil would have prevented corpse burial." Moreover, in 2004, none other than Graf was sticking to the "no disturbances" line here: "all traces of similar soil disturbances are missing in Treblinka and Belzec." Graf 2004 therefore demurs from MGK 2010. Such is the empty vessel that sails from the remnants of pro-Nazi apologetics. [Footnote: thanks to Jason Myers for pointing me in the direction of Ball].

Thomas Kues on recent archaeological finds at Treblinka

2012-01-28T15:39:00.004Z

It comes as no surprise that "Revisionist" coryphée Thomas Kues tries to explain the recent finds of Caroline Sturdy Colls at the site of Treblinka extermination camp in accordance with his "Revisionist" theories.

In his first article on the Inconvenient History blog site this year (also the first article after publication of the HC critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues, about which he is instructively silent), Kues predictably makes a big deal out of the size of the presumable burial/cremation pits so far identified by Caroline Sturdy Colls, which is supposed to vindicate his pet theory that the number of Jews buried at Treblinka is far below the ca. 800,000 known to have been deported to that place in 1942/43 (Kues reckons on "a total of some 40,000 en route deaths" plus "a smaller percentage of the deportees" supposedly "subjected to “euthanasia” due to contageous or mental diseases, or for being too weak for further transport", plus "a smaller number of deaths among the camp inmates caused by epidemics etc, as well as those killed by guards in connection with attempts at escape or uprisings").

Kues’ stance is essentially based on the images shown below, which are included in the BBC news article Treblinka: Revealing the hidden graves of the Holocaust, apparently written by Caroline Sturdy Colls herself. These and other images in this blog can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Kues placed these two composite maps side by side and numbered the yellow areas designating "probable burial/cremation pits":

Regarding the pits numbered "1" and "2", Kues writes that they "together appear to have a surface area of some 600-700 square meters", are clearly outside the Treblinka "death camp" sector and "may be identical with the mass graves mentioned by the witness Abraham Kszepicki, in which the bodies of Jews who had died en route to the camp were buried during the first months of operation".

The mention of Abraham Kszepicki (also spelled Krzepicki) is quite interesting considering this witness's harrowing account of the eighteen days he spent in Treblinka death camp before managing to escape from that place. One need not wonder which parts of this witness's account Kues accepts as accurate and which he dismisses as inaccurate, and what criteria (other than convenience or inconvenience for the "Revisionist" position) the "inconvenient historian" applies to distinguish one from the other.

Regarding the pits numbered "3" to "10", Kues treats his readers to the following wisdom:

Altogether, pits #3-10 as mapped by Sturdy Colls cover a surface hardly exceeding 1,800 square meters. If again, for the sake of argument, we assume the no doubt overly generous average effective depth of 6 meters with vertical pit walls – and once more I want to remind my readers that the pits identified at Belzec and Sobibór averaged some 4 m in depth – this would mean that the “probable burial/cremation pits” in the “death camp proper”/”upper camp”/”camp 2″ [14] had a total volume of some (1,800 x 6 =) 10,800 cubic meters. The pits at Belzec as identified by Kola have a total estimated volume of 21,310 cubic meters,[15] whereas those at Sobibór have a total estimated volume of 14,718.75 cubic meters.[16] The no doubt greatly exaggerated estimate of 10,800 cubic meters could have contained at most some (10,800 x 8 =) 86,400 corpses (assuming instead a more realistic average effective depth of 5 m this figure would change to 72,000 – and this still disregards the likely enlargement of the original grave volumes due to clandestine diggings and other causes).

The antics of Kues and Mattogno about the mass graves at Sobibór and Bełżec have been refuted in Chapter 7 of the critique and need not be addressed here.

Kues' eyeballing and calculations regarding the Treblinka pit areas pointed out by Caroline Sturdy Colls, on the other hand, would be quite interesting - if the archaeologist had stated or there were any reasons to assume that she identified all and/or the complete size of the burial pits existing at Treblinka.

Of course this is not so, as becomes abundantly clear from the archaeologist's statements, some of which are quoted by Kues himself.

The following text, transcribed by Kues, is from the podcast interview on 23.01.2012 that was uploaded by the University of Birmingham "Ideas Lab" (emphases added):

Interviewer: So you’ve now presented your findings to the authorities responsible for the memorial at Treblinka. Does this conclude investigations at the Treblinka site or is it sort of an ongoing project?

Sturdy Colls: It’s absolutely an ongoing project. The survey demonstrated that the site has got huge potential in terms of what we can learn from the application of archaeological method and very much was the tip of the iceberg in terms of being the first survey of what I hope will be many more to come. I hope to return to the site later on this year and there will be subsequent seasons of fieldwork in coming years. As I mentioned, at the moment what we’ve got is a map of what survived at the camp as a result of my findings. However, in order to build up a map of the camp as it existed we need to do more work, we need to survey the site. Only a small proportion of the site has actually been surveyed so there’s huge potential to find out more about the history of this camp in the future.

This is from the BBC Radio 4 broadcast "Hidden Graves of the Holocaust" on 23 January 2012, 20:00 GMT (my transcription and emphases):

Rabbi Michael Schudrich:
The work that’s going on at Treblinka, there was no question of convincing, because it’s very important work that’s going on, as we want to know where the graves are.
[…]
Jonathan Charles: At the end of this, what do you think we are going to know that we don’t know now?
RMS: I think we are going to know if the method works. That’s the first thing we are going to know. There are graves somewhere, there are graves meaning, both of bones and also of burned bones. They have different compositions. This is a rather horrible thing to say in a calm voice, but that’s what you need to be able to understand when you’re dealing with death camps. There is a very high probability that we will be able to say, OK well we know that the boundaries of the mass graves are from here to there, and now we can properly map it out, and properly preserve it, because there’s a huge chance that right now people are walking over the mass graves, just because we don’t know where they are.
[…]
Caroline Sturdy Colls: The effect of burying something in the ground can either boost plant growth or it can limit it, and we’re seeing a lot on this particular site that there are areas where very little grows at all, and the kind of plants that do grow don’t have any roots, they just sit on the surface, so we can tell straight away just by looking that there’s going to be something buried under that, it’s a fact, the actual vegetation …
JC: So that means there’s something under here which preventing vegetation being rooted?
CSC: Essentially, yes, and also if you imagine that what the Germans were doing was mixing the ashes of the victims with the very sandy geology in this area and then putting it back into the earlier graves, then obviously that kind of combination of burned soil, burned sand, ashes, all together, is not a very nice environment for plants to grow, and nothing has reestablished itself since the war.
JC: Let’s walk on and see what else we can see in this forest area, then. Again, there’s almost a pit over there, you can see the indentation in the ground.
CSC: There is, and there is lots of these grouped[?] around this area of woodland, and this is where, a little bit further in, we have seen local families laying candles.
JC: So they obviously think there’s something here.
CSC: They do. I think it’s common knowledge that this part was the death camp, and largely the parts containing the graves are now in this area of forest, and we have actually been urged by a few visitors who’ve come here to look in the forest and not just be drawn to the open area there, which we will follow upon.
[…]
CSC: I’ve identified a number of buried pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable. One in particular is 26 meters by 17 meters.
JC: That’s huge.
CSC: It is huge, that we’re talking a considerable number of bodies could have been contained within pits of that size.
JC: Well that could have contained hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies. We do not know how deep it is, or do you know how deep it is?
CSC: Unfortunately no, the survey technology doesn’t allow us to go to certain depths. I know that it’s over 4 meters …
JC: Over four meters deep?
CSC: Yes. It’s a considerable pit.
JC: There are quite a few pits that you’ve discovered.
CSC: Absolutely. There are a number of pits, in particular to the rear of what is not the current memorial, five that are actually in a row, again of a considerable size, in an area where witnesses state this was the main body disposal area, this is behind the gas chambers, it was where the majority of victims who were sent there were then subsequently buried, and later where the cremated remains of victims were also placed.
[…]
JC: Caroline Sturdy Colls has presented her findings to the authorities responsible for the memorial at Treblinka, and there are many plans now being discussed for altering the site in the future: changes to the camp boundary, excavations of the buildings, but perhaps most important of all, marking out those mass graves, so that visitors won’t disturb them, and relatives can mourn.

And this is from the BBC news article Treblinka: Revealing the hidden graves of the Holocaust (emphases added):

But this work is just the beginning and further work is required to understand the complexity of the site.

This initial survey should be viewed as a start of what will hopefully be a long-term collaboration between myself and the Treblinka museum, aimed at providing new insights into the physical evidence, and allowing the victims of the Holocaust to be appropriately commemorated.

Does any of the above excerpts suggest that Caroline Sturdy Colls' work at Treblinka is considered finished, that all mass graves in the Treblinka area are considered to have been identified in their full extent?

Quite the contrary.

What Caroline Sturdy Colls has presented are the results of an initial survey, which she hopes will be followed by many others. What she has found so far "very much was the tip of the iceberg in terms of being the first survey of what I hope will be many more to come" Only a small proportion of the site has actually been surveyed so far. Vegetation changes suggest that there's much more in places that apparently have not been probed so far by geophysical means.

What is more, it seems that the areas covered by the memorial have not yet been subjected to geophysical probing, for none of the pits so far identified by Caroline Sturdy Colls are in these areas, and she doesn't mention whether she has already probed these areas with geophysical equipment, as Kues himself points out. In these areas one can expect a lot of ground disturbance that resulted from the construction of the memorial, thus making it more difficult to establish what subsoil changes correspond to original graves, and this may be the reason why geophysical assessment of these areas was not yet carried out but will be done only in the course of one or more future surveys. Caroline Sturdy Colls pointed out the identification problems resulting from subsequent soil changes in her podcast interview partially transcribed by Kues:

Issues such as post-war looting and the construction of the memorial itself and a number of other forms of landscape change that have taken place at the site, you know, could confuse interpretation so it was essential that all of these were considered when the results from the geophysical survey in particular were being assessed.

It being thus clear that the search for the Treblinka mass graves (and other archaeological features) is far from finished according to those carrying out the work or interested in seeing it done, are there any reasons to expect that the "presumable burial/cremation pits" pinpointed so far are the only such pits in the area of Treblinka extermination camp?

The answer to this question is clearly "no", if all relevant evidence is taken into consideration.

Besides the eyewitness testimonies (both from former inmates and former members of the camp staff), which mention burial pits much larger than those identified so far, this evidence includes air photography and postwar crime site investigation reports.

One of Caroline Sturdy Colls' superimposed maps:

clearly shows a vast expanse of churned-up soil between and around the place where the gas chamber builings are mapped and the five pits found to the rear of the current memorial. This area, which I have outlined in the image below, is partially covered by the memorial, while other parts of it are outside the memorial and largely covered by forest at present.

In an earlier blog, I argued that a part of this area is identical with the "area of cremation" shown in a 1945 survey map, where it was stated to be 1.8 hectares large. This was obviously the area described as follows in Judge Łukaszkiewicz' report of 29 December 1945:

In the northwestern section of the area, the surface is covered for about 2 hectares by a mixture of ashes and sand. In this mixture, one finds countless human bones, often still covered with tissue remains, which are in a condition of decomposition. During the inspection, which I made with the assistance of an expert in forensic medicine, it was determined that the ashes are without any doubt of human origin (remains of cremated human bones). The examination of human skulls could discover no trace of« wounding. At a distance of some 100 m, there is now an unpleasant odor of burning and decay.

It must have been in this area that Łukaszkiewicz had ordered digging in a bomb crater (made by robbery diggers using explosives) in order to establish the depth of at least one of the former burial pits in this part of the camp, which he described as follows in his report of 13 November 1945:

The largest of the craters produced by explosions (numerous fragments attest to the fact that these explosions were set off by bombs), which is at maximum 6 meters deep and has a diameter of about 25 meters – its walls give recognizable evidence of the presence of a large quantity of ashes as well as human remains – was further excavated in order to discover the depth of the pit in this part of the camp. Numerous human remains were found by these excavations, partially still in a state of decomposition. The soil consists of ashes interspersed with sand, is of a dark gray color and granulous in form. During the excavations, the soil gave off an intense odor of burning and decay. At a depth of 7.5 meters the bottom was reached, which consisted of layers of unmixed sand. At this point the digging was stopped here.

It beggars belief that this area, visibly churned up on a 1944 air photograph and later described by Łukaszkiewicz as being covered with ashes and larger human remains, contains only the pits so far identified by Caroline Sturdy-Colls to the rear of the current memorial and those at the area's opposite end. What is far more probable is that these pits are part of larger pits now covered by the memorial or by forest, whose position and original shape - notwithstanding Kues' derisive remarks against Alex Bay and the eyewitness Wiernik - might well have been similar to those of the pits projected by Bay in Figure 42 of his article The Reconstruction of Treblinka.

Also in the area of the pits numbered "1", "2" and "3" by Kues, one sees significant ground disturbance on the 1944 air photo, suggesting the presence of further pits. Peter Laponder, as pointed out in my aforementioned blog, pointed out several rectangular pit shapes in this area, which overlap only partially if at all with the burial pits identified by Caroline Sturdy Colls in this part of the former camp:

Thus it's altogether reasonable to conclude that there is much more pit space in the Treblinka area than has so far been detected by geophysical means, and that at least some of the pits thus detected are parts of much larger pits.

It is accordingly reasonable to expect that much larger pit areas will be identified in the course of future surveys, if Caroline Sturdy Colls should be allowed to continue her excellent work, as seems likely and as I hope she will.

That being so, what's the point of Thomas Kues' making such a fuss about the results of what has expressly been called an initial survey?

The "Revisionist" coryphee's behavior is aptly characterized, in my opinion, by the remark made by RODOH poster "Balmoral" in connection with a similar undertaking by another "Revisionist":

Interesting how one radio show about an incomplete and ongoing incomplete, un-reviewed study can provoke chimps to paroxysms of auto head-slapping.

Kues also kindly showed that the ten pit areas so far identified by geophysical methods occupy only the smaller part of 1 hectare:

According to my earlier calculations regarding the capacity of the graves, the burial of 721,555 corpses at Treblinka would at most have required a volume of 60,130 cubic meters and an area of 8,841 m² - less than one hectare, and roughly 21-22 % of the "Death Camp" sector’s entire area.

Now to Kues' pit volume calculations. Assuming that his eyeballing of the yellow areas signaling "presumable burial/cremation pits" is fairly accurate, these calculations leave much to be desired.

It having been established in Judge Łukaszkiewicz' postwar crime site investigation (see the above quote from Łukaszkiewicz' report of 13 November 1945) that the depth of a burial pit in the "death camp" sector of Treblinka was 7.5 meters, assuming the witness Rosenberg's depth estimate of 6 meters for volume calculations is not "generous" but overly conservative. If pits "3" to "10" identified by geophysical methods have a total area of 1,800 square meters, as Kues claims, their arithmetic volume must be assumed to be (1,800 x 7.5 =) 13,500 cubic meters. If this volume is corrected for sloping with the factor 0.68, pursuant to Alex Bay's calculations for a pit 50 meters long, 25 meters wide and 10 meters deep, the volume available for burial in these pits would be 9,180 cubic meters.

Assuming a density of 8 corpses per cubic meter is exceedingly conservative if one takes into account the factors considered in my aforementioned grave capacity calculations, namely the relatively small size and malnutrition of most deportees, the presence of many children among them and the fact that they were not all buried at the same time and body volume reduction due to decomposition must thus have influenced the volume available for burial to some extent.

If the density of corpses in these 9,180 cubic meters of pit volume was 21 corpses per cubic meter (as it was at Bełżec according to my calculations, if all corpses were buried in the 33 pits discovered there by Prof. Andrzej Kola), these 8 pits (or parts of pits) alone contained (21x9,180=) 192,780 dead bodies. At the density considered by Alex Bay (ca. 12 corpses per cubic meter), they would have contained (12x9,180=) 110,160 dead bodies.

The pits numbered "1" and "2" have a surface area of 600 to 700 square meters, according to Kues. Let's take the lower value, multiply it by 7.5 and apply the sloping correction factor of 0.68, and we have a volume of 3,060 cubic meters available for burying corpses, which would take in between (12x3,060=) 36,720 and (21x3,060=) 64,260 dead bodies.

It is thus realistic to assume that the burial pits (or parts of pits) so far identified by geophysical methods contained at least 146,880, but perhaps as many as 257,040 dead bodies before the bodies were exhumed for cremation.

I'd like to see how Thomas Kues tries to marry either figure with his pathetic "deaths in transport plus euthanized deportees" conjectures (which, by the way, are not likely to make him friends in certain more wild-eyed circles of "Revisionism").

Considering the above, the pious wish expressed by Kues at the end of his article (that "the information revealed seems to hint that the findings of Caroline Sturdy Colls may well spell the doom of the official historiography on Treblinka") can - to use an expression of Kues' associates Mattogno & Graf - only evoke amusement.

A forensic archaeologist's investigation of Treblinka ...

2012-01-18T11:10:00.002Z

... made "Revisionist" propagandist Thomas Kues nervous when first mentioned.

And his worries are likely to increase, given that Caroline Sturdy Colls has reported some interesting finds at Treblinka. In a recent article in the Irish Independent, the forensic archaeologist is quoted as follows:

"I've identified a number of buried pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable in size, and very deep, one in particular is 26 by 17 metres."

I hope Mr. Richard Craigie (or Krege) is also reading this.

And I look forward to learning more about Caroline Sturdy Colls' finds at Treblinka.

These news come shortly after publication of HC's critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues. The year 2012 hasn't started too well for "Revisionism"

CODOH Reactions to the Critique

2012-01-04T20:56:00.002Z

Reactions on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" to the HC critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues are recorded and commented on the RODOH thread Our Holiday Gift to Mattogno, Graf and Kues: The AR Critique.

The most commendable effort so far to address arguments included in the critique was made by "Toshiro", albeit in connection with my earlier blog about Mattogno’s Chelmno book. See my response to this gentleman’s latest post in my RODOH post 13314.

Update, 09.01.2012: See my RODOH posts 13321, 13322 and 13323.

Update, 20.01.2012: More from Toshiro, discussed in my RODOH post 13325.

Homicidal gassings at the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial – A statistical survey

2012-01-01T10:21:00.025Z

About 7000 SS men and auxiliary women were serving in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, some with relatives nearby, external authorities were in contact and corresponding with the Auschwitz camp, hundreds of thousands of people were deported to the site and a certain number of civilian workers had access to the camps. Not too far away were villages as well as the town of Auschwitz. In short, there were many people involved in and around the Auschwitz complex.

Now, suppose the Revisionist view on Auschwitz, i.e. the falseness of homicidal gassings, is true. Then this mass of people with different backgrounds, abilities and personalities should generate substantial testimonial evidence to support. Yet, only very few accounts are known – three come to my mind, Wilhelm Stäglich[1], Thies Christophersen[2] and Walter Schreiber[3], none of them can be classified as actual eyewitness against homicidal gassings and none is without substantial problems. Is this really it?

A large and easy accessible source of testimonies on Auschwitz concentration camp is the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which took place in the years 1963 – 1965, but investigations and interrogations go back to 1958. The testimonies of more than 400 witnesses were heard or read out (excluding expert reports) during the trial. The testimonies were published in 2005 by the Fritz Bauer Institute and the Auschwitz State Museum as DVD (Digitale Bibliothek 101 - Der Auschwitz-Prozeß), which allows for convenient full text search in the transcripts and interrogation protocols. The DVD was screened specifically for testimonies on homicidal gassings in Auschwitz.

Homicidal gassings were an issue in the accounts of 254 witnesses, which are reproduced here. A summary list is shown here. One SS man refused to comment on the issue whether he took part in homicidal gassings, which not only suggests that he knew about homicidal gassings, but also that he took part in it. But as there is no explicit affirmative statement available from him, this account is treated as if it is unclear. 11 more accounts are unclear with respect to homicidal gassings and have to be ignored too.

So effectively they are 242 remaining witnesses on homicidal gassings, thereof 64 from former SS personnel, 169 from former prisoners and 10 from others like civilians and former British army personnell. 239 witnesses (99 %) testified affirmative on homicidal gassings, while three witnesses (1 %) claimed they had no knowledge. There is not a single witness (0 %) who doubted or denied that homicidal gassings were carried out in Auschwitz. Of those 239 affirmative witnesses on homicidal gassings, 195 can be classified as hearsay and 44 as eyewitnesses. This data is illustrated in figure 1. The latter split into 7 eyewitnesses, who testified they saw gassed corpses at the gassing sites, 8 eyewitnesses, who testified they saw the gassing sites (without corpses) and the remaining 29 eyewitnesses testified they saw gassing operations.

Figure 1: Pie chart of testimonial evidence on homicidal gassings at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial

Due to their indirect nature, the hearsay testimonies are less reliable individually but powerful as bulk and from a statistical point of view. It is also reasonable to make the distinction between hearsay testimonies from SS personnel and prisoners. SS men were often in a more suitable position to obtain reliable hearsay information about German atrocities, either officially as part of their duty or unofficially from other SS men. 40 former members of the SS testified about homicidal gassings in Auschwitz (supposedly) from hearsay source, including high positioned officers such as the commander of Security Police and SD in Kattowitz Johannes Thümmler, Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer, Auschwitz adjutants Karl Höcker and Robert Mulka, SS investigator Helmut Bartsch, SS doctors Victor Capesius, Franz Lucas, Willi Schatz and Willy Frank. It is improbable that all these people were not in the position to obtain reliable knowledge on whether homicidal gassings were carried out in the Auschwitz. The breakdown of all 64 testimonies from SS personnel is shown in figure 2.

Figure 2: Pie chart on testimonial evidence of SS personnell on homicidal gassings at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial

Summary

At the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and at its pre-trial interrogations, the vast majority of witnesses, who were questioned on the issue, testified affirmative on homicidal gassings in Auschwitz. Only an insignificant number of witnesses testified they had no knowledge and zero witnesses testified negative on homicidal gassings. This result is the worst case scenario for Revisionism and does not provide evidence to doubt that homicidal gassings were carried out in Auschwitz.

[1] Stäglich wrote that he did not saw “cremation ovens” in Auschwitz, which indicates that he never was in Birkenau, where the mass gassings took place. It also suggests that he was unable to obtain reliable hearsay information about Birkenau. Curiously, he wrote that the Topf double-muffle oven shown in Dachau reminded him of the ovens in the bakery in Auschwitz. See letter of Stäglich in Christophersen, Die Auschwitz-Lüge, p. 68 ff.

[2] Christophersen did not know there were four crematoria in Birkenau either, even though he is supposed to have visited the camp. He was only told there was “a crematorium…in Auschwitz”. He did not know anything about open air cremations in Birkenau, even though these were carried out in Auschwitz in summer 1944 according to aerial and Sonderkommando ground photographs. Therefore, either Christophersen was a poor observer and not much talented to obtain reliable hearsay information about Birkenau or suffered from severe memory fading at the time he wrote down his account. See Christophersen, Die Auschwitz-Lüge.

[3] Schreiber was supposed to be chief engineer of Huta since November 1943, but the crematoria in Auschwitz were already finished at this time. Schreiber’s opinion that homicidal gas chambers in the crematoria are unlikely is based on false assumptions with respect to the technical prerequisites. There are, in fact not many and in principle any room, which can be closed, can serve as a homicidal gas chamber for mass murder. See testimony of Schreiber of 1999, http://www.vho.org/VffG/2000/1/Rademacher104f.html.

The e-mail we sent out to Mattogno/Graf/Kues.

2011-12-30T23:30:00.001Z

To the attention of Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, and Thomas Kues:

Please see the attached critique of your works concerning Aktion Reinhard. It has also been made available on Google Documents, RapidShare, and Wayback Machine.

Over one year ago, Mr. Graf challenged the Holocaust Controversies blog to provide a “detailed and comprehensive critique” of one of a number of books he offered. By that time we had already decided not to limit ourselves to one Revisionist work, but the three works on the Reinhard camps (Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, which was earlier discussed in the Akte Sobibor brochure). These three works repeat and rely upon one another to such an extent that it would be silly to look at one in isolation. More information on our motivations can be found in the introduction to the work.

Our formal critique also provides a test for those Revisionists who claim to be interested in ‘open debate’. We encourage those Revisionists who control their own public website to announce the existence of the critique as well as provide a direct link to its contents. We have also established conditions for a response in our conclusion.

Since the critique originally began to appear on the HC blog on Christmas Eve, various responses have arisen from Revisionists on internet forums. When one HC supporter posted web links and a brief introduction to the critique on the CODOH Revisionist Forum and invited critical Revisionist comments on the work (open debate, right?) his post was quickly deleted by the powers-that-be. This was the second time that reference to the critique was censored on the CODOH forum. Other Revisionists have simply engaged in base invective, without offering any substantial criticisms of our work. One fellow-traveller even decided to distract attention by faking an email purportedly from us. We trust that you will join us in unreservedly condemning such puerile antics.

Happy Holidays,

HC Team

P.S. This letter has been sent to other Revisionists as well as professional scholars who we feel would be interested in its content.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Afterword: A Special Note by Jason Myers.

2011-12-29T23:41:00.000Z

Afterword:A Special Note by Jason Myers

“I am not aJew and I was at one time a ‘revisionist.” So said Jean-Claude Pressac in thepostface to his monumental and technical study of the Auschwitz-Birkenau deathcamp.[1] Thiswriter can sympathize with Pressac, as I too identify with such a statement. Adetailed history of my earlier Holocaust denial and subsequent ‘road toDamascus’ moment will not be offered here, as a brief account will be more thansufficient.

My acceptance of revisionism occurredat a young and defiant age, as I’m sure most people experience in high school.Of course, few would see Holocaust denial as an opportune or desirous way toget back at the standard-bearers, but as a student fascinated with modernEuropean history it presented itself as such. While I initially took interestin denial for contrarian reasons, I spent much time studying the writings ofrevisionists. As a naïve youth, without an adequate knowledge of the Holocaustitself, and seeking to show my ‘superior’ knowledge compared to the rest of theworld, I came to honestly accept the revisionist arguments based on (what Iviewed at the time as) their evidentiary merit. Greatly influenced by the CSITV series popular around this time, I was quickly taken in by the deniers’focus on technical and ‘forensic’ issues, such as cyanide residue in the gaschambers and the remains left from open-air cremations. My revisionist beliefsneither began nor were fuelled by any prejudice against Jews, although Icertainly recognized an anti-Semitic presence among the majority of deniers.

As the years went on, far tooconfident in my own cleverness, I began to take an active role propagatingHolocaust denial on the internet.[2] Incollege, on my own initiative I organized and helped found the InconvenientHistory blog, to which Thomas Kues belonged and now runs.[3] Whileworking on the blog, I also assisted in miscellaneous research efforts, andhelped edit the English translation of one of Carlo Mattogno’s articles.[4] I wasproud to offer such assistance, as I had avidly read and studied Mattogno’swork.

Hopefully as all other honest andopen-minded researchers do, I kept running into ‘stumbling blocks’ that werehard for me to rationalise in keeping with revisionist beliefs; these problemsarose from both documents (many of which have been quoted or cited in thiscritique), as well as hard to impugn witness testimony. When such instancesoccurred, I would search works of Mattogno, Graf, Kues, as well as otherrevisionists to ease my concerns about the validity of revisionism in general.These episodes were not initially too bothersome to me; one can’t expectanswers to everything, I thought. However, as my knowledge of historicalmethods grew (I majored in history at undergraduate) and as I became morefamiliar with current research on the Holocaust, as well as the evidence usedby historians to support their interpretations, the more uncomfortable I feltabout my revisionist stance.

After learning to separate the wheat from thechaff and as I became increasingly convinced that the revisionist position wasdeeply flawed, I expressed doubts about my own past positions, first in privatean then in public. As I did so, I became ever more ostracized from the blog teamat Inconvenient History, leading me to leave that blog in late 2009. One yearlater, as I continued to find substantial flaws to denier arguments, I joinedthe already underway effort to critique the writings of MGK. I can safely andunhesitantly state that my abandonment of revisionism was the correct choice,as I believe any impartial and objective look into the evidence would attest.

[1] Pressac, Auschwitz, p.537.

[2] See Myers,‘CODOH: The Forum That Moderated Itself to Death’ for more details on myactivities.

[3] http://www.revblog.codoh.com

[4] Mattogno,‘Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp’.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Conclusion.

2011-12-29T23:35:00.000Z

Conclusion

This critiquehas presented new sources, and cast new light on old sources, which demonstratethe many different forms of proof that exist for the Aktion Reinhardextermination program. We have clearly established in Chapters 2-4 the timelinethrough which policy evolved from decimation to extermination, and how theplanned locations shifted from the Strongpoints to the death camps in Poland.We have synthesized documents from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials with thosein American, German and former Soviet archives to build a detailed picture ofhow the policy of extermination was understood and implemented at the centreand at the sites of death themselves. We have taken the twisted road to Belzecvia this documentation and shown how the twists in the road can be betterunderstood in the light of the convergence of evidence.

We have then gone into the deathcamps themselves in more detail on some issues than has ever been attemptedbefore in published form by an academic historian. Four full chapters presentour extensive findings from over 65 years’ worth of site report, maps andexcavations. We have proved conclusively that “no mass graves” is a denierfantasy, repetition of which would make MGK seem as moronic as the posts thatappear from denier cheerleaders on the Internet. The perpetrator testimoniesfrom the NIOD files and from the Trawnikis that we have presented here haveenabled us to put to rest denier memes such the diesel issue, although we wouldexpect this meme to be too big a crutch for deniers to throw away even withsuch a comprehensive review of the witnesses. We have also demonstrated howdenial arguments concerning such technical matters as skin color, which Kues inparticular has chosen to embrace, are based on misreading and mistranslation ofsources.

It is important to contrast this withwhat we have shown to be the mediocre output and skewed logic of MGK. We cansummarize the failures of their work, not only in the order of our chaptershere, but also by following the perverse chapter structure which they impose ontheir own books, such as in Sobibór. Our chapter structure shows theirnon-existent grasp of Nazi policy, deportation realities, the political economyof Nazi occupation of the East (such as food supply, which made resettlementimpossible), the nature of eyewitness testimony, and the scope and findings ofpostwar site investigations. Their own structure shows a failure to document aconspiracy in World War II; their inability to confront the real sequence bywhich knowledge of extermination came to be accepted in the West; their lack ofany methodology or internal consistency in how they treat witnesses; theirreliance upon a view of West German legal processes that is taken from paranoidfiction; and their total inability to document the survival of the AktionReinhard deportees whom the rational world and legal system assumes to havedied in the camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor.

Conspiratorial reasoning cannotexplain why West German defendants gave testimonies that converge with thosegiven by Trawnikis that have been buried for decades in obscure files. It isunable to reason with the sentencing of defendants whose terms bore no relationto whether they made admissions or not. It leads them to overlook facts documentedin judgments, such as the fact that Oberhauser’s sentence was reduced in WestGermany because he had already served a sentence in East Germany, having beenconvicted in Magdeburg in 1948.[1]

Conspiracy also cannot grasp whyevidence concerning Aktion Reinhard was given by perpetrators during postwarinterrogations concerning other sites. For example, as we showed in Chapters 2and 5, Wirth was linked to a euthanasia task in the Lublin area by the T4testimony of Gorgass. He was shown to have already shot Jews at Hartheim by thetestimony of Nohel. MGK also never discuss why Eichmann described exterminationto Sassen while a free man; or why Rauff gave a deposition while free in Chile;or why Gomerski accepted after his release on health grounds that he haddeserved a custodial sentence, albeit a shorter one. Kues’ paranoid fantasiesabout defendants being ‘conveniently’ murdered, usually by unnamed Jews, arebuilt on false assumptions and a selective reading of newspaper sources,deliberately omitting details that disprove his thesis.

Graf’s conspiracism regarding WestGermany in the 1960s exaggerates the nation-state’s power to control alldissenting information at that time. This can be shown by the example of theUSSR dissidents Sinyavsky, Daniel and Ginzburg whose trials were reported inthe west. In 1969, Daniel and Ginzburg, “along with four other prisoners [wrote] an openletter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, urging "correctivelegislation" to change the regulations in camps like Potma, where,according to official designation, "especially dangerous politicalprisoners" are held […] [The] letter was being circulated widely inMoscow.”[2] Whycouldn’t MGK’s persecuted Nazis smuggle out such letters? Why did they not giveexculpatory details anonymously to third parties (sympathetic pro-Nazis likeMGK themselves) who would have been only too happy to courier them? Why didthese victims of the hoax not even retract their confessions on theirdeath-beds or in private manuscripts that could later be sent to denier outletsafter the perpetrator’s death?

Thisraises another problem: the resettlement hypothesis. If the Soviets could noteliminate dissent from three dissidents, how could they silence all thewitnesses to the resettlement of the Jews? The resettlement hypothesis does notjust require the state to silence most witnesses most of the time, but all ofthem all the time in all places, even after Jews emigrated from the USSR toIsrael and the USA. State repression must attain perfection and be enforced ona global scale, which is simply a mirage of the conspiracy theorist.

This is just one of many problemsthat MGK have with witnesses. A further insurmountable problem is that Mattognoand Kues fundamentally disagree on the value of witnesses. Mattogno misusesBaynac out of context to insist that “testimony, if not supported by adocument, is worthless from the historical point of view, regardless of thenotion of “converging testimonies”, as is shown by the example of the“converging” testimonial evidence for the Auschwitz 4 million victim figure.”[3] Incontrast, Kues attempts to use convergence of witnesses without documents toprove resettlement, as we showed in Chapter 4. This contradiction can only besustained through cognitive dissonance on the part of both parties.Furthermore, Mattogno breaks his own rule in his policy chapters, such as inhis reliance upon Höss and Wisliceny to dispute the historiography of thespring 1942 escalation, while ignoring the copious documentation on thatescalation that we discussed in chapters 2 and 3. Mattogno’s obsession with“the ‘converging’ testimonial evidence for the Auschwitz 4 million victimfigure” ignores the fact that Höss gave lower figures.[4]

Such contradictions and confusionsarise, in part, from MGK’s refusal to spell out their working assumptions whenthey discuss testimonies. They rely on the reader’s incredulity, but suchreliance can only preach to the converted denier. A neutral reader will alwaysask why such-and-such an anomaly should matter, or why this testimony is beinghighlighted while others are ignored. We are compelled to conclude that thissilence is designed deliberately to permit MGK to choose methods ofconvenience, which then makes them unaccountable for their omissions and selectivebiases. This is also a major reason why MGK avoid peer review.

MGK have also, by pursuing thisstrategy, made themselves unaccountable to other deniers. For example,Mattogno’s use of Himmler’s racial policy document of May 1940[5] tosupport a policy of ‘emigration’ can be traced all the way back to his first‘Myth’ essay of 1985[6], butthis was implicitly rejected by Walendy, who declared it a forgery in 1991.[7] IfMattogno cannot defend his case against refutations by Revisionists with whomhe concurs elsewhere in his texts, why should we expect him to engage withopponents such as ourselves who deal with the evidence in good faith? Or isMattogno brushing this Revisionist dissensus under the carpet in the knowledgethat such open disagreements on method expose negationism as actually having nomethod except negation?

This leaves MGK grasping at the “nomass graves” straw, but this rings more hollow every year. The attempt topoison the well by blaming the Soviet investigators for effectively hoaxingmass graves ignores the fact that western journalists were shown human remainsat Babi Yar[8],Klooga[9] and nearMajdanek, and a huge store of plundered property in Lublin.[10]

The misrepresentations in MGK’s workare too systematic to be simply due to misreading and miscomprehension. Thereare numerous occasions when their statements about a text are contradicted bythe very text that is front of their noses. For example, Sobibór attacksHenry Friedlander and claims there is no documentary proof, only post-war testimony,of the use of gas chambers in the euthanasia program[11], yetthe Friedlander book they cite has such a document clearly spelled out, inwhich gas canisters were delivered from I.G. Farben’s BASF site.[12]

The numerous mistakes found in MGKcan be classified under the following types: contradictions amongst themselvesand within their own arguments, quote-mines of various material (documents,witnesses, and secondary literature), selective citations of the availableevidence or historiography, blatant misrepresentations of the evidence ofhistoriography, arguments based on incomprehension and incredulity, and variousother types of logical fallacies (e.g. falsus in uno). Many of themistakes arise from the basic shortcomings found in their work, most notably alack of reading, a lack of archival research, as well as their piecemealapproach to the evidence. In short, MGK have failed to address the evidence,let alone do so in a reasonable fashion. This critique then has demonstrablyproven their works to rely largely on ignorance and dishonesty, two attributesmost associated with Holocaust denial by the public at large. Which flaw ismore central to MGK’s work, the present authors shall leave as an openquestion.

As MGK are the most prolific andresearch driven of all active Revisionists, and are also typically the mostpraised authors among the few deniers that actually read their own literature,the downfall of MGK then serves as a telling sign about the state ofRevisionism. If they are the best, what does that say about the rest? Nothinggood, as should be fairly obvious. Indeed, as the only Revisionists left whohave visited an archive, and producing the most credible attempts to rewritethe history of the Holocaust, MGK’s failure to honestly and openly argue theavailable evidence should remove all possible doubt to any ‘skeptics’ about thelack of professional integrity and accuracy of Holocaust denial. Simplyrefuting their work, however, misses a crucial part of a proper analysis ofMGK, namely the driving force behind MGK’s fraudulent work.

This need to misread Holocausthistorians, in order to defame their work, derives partly from envy of genuineacademic achievement but also, most strongly, from a commitment by all threeauthors to neo-Nazi politics and/or antisemitic beliefs. Sobibór isdedicated to Jürgen Rieger, the deceased former deputy chairmanof the National Democratic Party of Germany. The final chapter of the same workcontains a eulogy to Horst Mahler[13], who once stated that "billions of people would be readyto forgive Hitler if he had murdered only the Jews."[14] Sobibóralso has unsourced speculation by Graf that Zionists were “unhesitatinglyprepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of their own brethren.” The samepage then blames Zionists for “firing up” German anti-Jewish feeling in 1933.[15] Graf ishappy to play the typical racist blame-the-victim game.

Indeed, among the three authorsGraf’s political statements and beliefs emerge as the strongest. He joined thepro-Stalinist Institute of the Russian Civilization, a group that spreadsantisemitic positions, such as through reprinting and defending theauthenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and accusing Jews of usingChristian blood in their rituals.[16] In a2002 interview, Graf asked, “What to do with those Jews? We’re cultured people,we can’t exterminate them. What to do with them? I don’t know.”[17] Grafhas stated that he believes that we are living in "a globalist system ofpseudo-democratic régimes in which Jews control the government and theopposition at the same time (the classic examples being the U.S., GreatBritain, and France)" and that "in any European society the JewishCommunity will attempt to continue its destructive work.”[18] Hedeplores the "fallacious doctrine of racial equality", which hebelieves "made possible the catastrophe of forced racial integration inthe USA, which has done immeasurable harm to both the white and the blackpopulations..."[19]

Furthermore, in a recent response toChristian Lindtner, a Revisionist who later became convinced about the truth ofexterminations, Graf unleashed a barrage of horrid antisemitic attacks. Indesperately trying to explain why some German perpetrators who providedconfirmation of exterminations and gassings were given life imprisonment(instead of leniency or pardons, as Graf argues as a method of coercion, seeChapter 1), Graf writes that such long sentences arose because “after all, theJews wanted their pound of flesh!”[20] Grafprovides no evidence that Jews had any power over the German judiciary systemin the postwar period, while such a reference to “pound of flesh” harks back tomany centuries old religious attacks on Jews of the blood libel type. Graf thengoes on to accuse Lindtner of identifying with “the Jewish version” of events,and even using “Jewish newspeak” by labelling Revisionism as denial.[21] Thus,in his fit of rage against Lindtner, Graf further exposed his antisemiticbeliefs.

Mattogno is much more guarded in hisstatements but, in 2010, wrote an article on the Protocols of the Elders ofZion which stated that the “aspiration to world domination by theJews…is already expressed explicitly” in rabbinical texts and constitutes “thevery essence of Jewish messianism.” Mattogno cites approvingly the claims byBernard Lazare and his own brother that Jews have, throughout history andacross all societies in which they have settled, brought persecution uponthemselves through their own behaviours.[22] Hisbrother has also given an interview in which he has stated that:

From the Talmud, the Midrash and otherrabbinical texts of the tradition we learn that the murder of non-jew [sic] isnot only permitted but also required, and that this murder could take the formof an actual ritual sacrifice offered to Yahweh. It is a subject that deservesto be investigated, starting from the concept of "cherem", anathema,the extermination of votive enemies of Israel, the annihilation of the Jewishgoyim consecrated to God.[23]

Distaste for Jews wasexpressed by Mattogno when he wrote the following regarding van Pelt in 2003:

[Jean-Claude Pressac] was no longer avaluable goldmine to the guardians of the 'Holocaust' orthodoxy, but had turnedinto a more and more rebellious and uncontrollable Goy, jeopardizing the official historiography with each newpublication.[...]
For this reason, the position as the "world's leading Auschwitzexpert," until then occupied by Pressac, was taken by a trustworthy Yehudi, who was to take Pressac's theses- cleaned from all revisionist waste - and embed them into an unalterable,definitive version of Auschwitz.[24]

It is very noteworthy that Mattogno identifiesthe two historians most damaging to his work on Auschwitz, Jean-Claude Pressac(‘uncontrollable Goy’) and Robert Van Pelt (‘trustworthy Yehudi’), with Jewishnames and terms.

Perhapsthe most elusive of the trio in terms of antisemitism is Thomas Kues. Kues seesthe global community, particularly the European Union and NATO, as being run by“Zionist masters.”[25] Kuesoffers no proof that Israel controls such entities, but simply assumes thatthis is the case based on a 2008 letter from the chairman at Yad Vashem to theLithuanian prime minister[26]; notany statement from a US, EU, or NATO figure. Kues attacks Jewish historianYitzhak Arad as an “NKVD hangman”, without any shred of evidence.[27] Heplays up Jewish guilt for various things, such as serving as “butchers” duringthe Second World War (presumably in the form of partisans or NKVD officials),while also chastising Israel for being “a haven for any criminal who can proveJewish ancestry.” This is a strawman of the realhistory of the Law of Return, which has infact been used to exclude persons“with a criminal past, likely to endanger public welfare.” Kues also ignoresthe fact that the Law of Return is a subject of controversy in Israel itself;like all antisemites, he treats Israeli politics as monolithic.[28] Itseems that Kues is happy to neglect basic research and crucial distinctionswhen he has a polemical agenda. Kues understands his audience and the support they would offer to suchstatements; for instance, see Kues’ requests for revisionist information fromBrazilian white nationalists on Stormfront.[29]

Whenasking his readers to decide between two groups of intellectuals on whose workour civilization rests (creating an artificial division which no respectablephilosopher or intellectual historian would allow, as ideas from the givenwriters transgress such divides), Kues lists the lesser intellectuals as “Freud,Marcuse, and Elie Wiesel.”[30] Is itjust coincidence that these three are all Jewish?

It isan easily observed point that conspiracy theorists (such as Holocaust deniers)have a strong propensity to believe in more than one conspiracy. Obviously, ifthe world and its history are not as we are told for one instance, than everyagency involved with that instance should be interpreted differently. As nooccurrence is wholly independent from its circumstances, conventional reasonsfor previous and subsequent events are then to be altered to reflect adifferent trajectory of historical development, better reflecting reality ifthe original conspiracy were true. This brings about a cascade or avalanche ofconspiracies and fringe beliefs in the continued attempt to establish a truehistory of events, based on the core conspiracy claim. The idea that conspiracy theorists “live in their ownworld” thus is not simply criticism of their mental capacity, but also astatement sufficiently describing reality and historical events as they aretypically understood by conspiracy theorists.

It isin this light that one should view the conspiracy claims that MGK make acrosstheir work regarding the hoax of the Holocaust, many of which have beendiscussed in the chapters of this critique. This also accounts for theconspiracy claims made by the trio beyond the years of 1933-1945. For instance,Graf and Mattogno’s defense and association with the Protocols of the Elders ofZion fits this pattern, as does Kues’ belief that “sick Jewish gangsters and their ilk” were behind thesuicide of German death camp perpetrators far into the postwar years.[31] So toodoes Graf’s belief that the September 11, 2001 terror attacks upon the UnitedStates (one of the states dependent on the lie for the Israeli state,allegedly) were an example of a “self-inflicted” attack, which he fears is partof the possible wider “response of democracies to Revisionism.”[32] Nodoubt these conspiracy claims are fuelled by antsemitism, as already shown, tovarying degrees amongst the three authors.

These antisemitic and conspiratorialpolitics, combined with systematic lying, are clearly a major factor in therefusal of Holocaust historians to debate MGK, yet they continue to play therole of the aggrieved party. The Holocaust Handbooks series carries thispromotional spiel:

These books are designed to have the powerto both convince the common reader as well as academics in this field. And itis very successful with this approach! The final goal is to eventually tip theacademic scale, so that academia will start doing its duty: to demand andpursue public scrutiny of this most influential topic of all western societies.Because as long as academics don't do this, the media and politicians certainlywill not do it either.[33]

If MGK subscribe to thisbelief, we must question their ability to acquire any self-awareness over alifetime of failure to convince any academic historian that they may have apoint.

In the light of their politics anddishonesty, and the hammering their work has received in our foregoingchapters, we must also ask: where now for the Three Stooges of Revisionistpseudohistoriography? A major problem they face is simply the lack of anaudience. The crew at Holocaust Controversies are now virtually the only peopletaking more than a passing interest in the writing of Mattogno as he enters hissecond quarter-century as an author. For example, according to an Internetsearch done by ourselves, in the twelve months spanning August 2010 to July2011, Mattogno was mentioned only 112 times at CODOH, whilst Kues received 70mentions and Graf, who has become the runt of this litter, only 48. Many ofthese mentions were generated by Internet exchanges between HC authors andMattogno or Graf, thereby confirming that MGK are dependent on traffic from HCto a degree that must cause them discomfort. Ironically, however, Kues, Grafand Mattogno have failed to respond to the vast majority of points made inarticles which we wrote about them between 2006 and the present.

Moreover, what does the term‘research’ mean to MGK? For Kues, it does not yet seem to have includedvisiting an archive, although his reading of the up-to-date secondaryliterature seems to be more thorough than that of Mattogno. Although Mattogno hasvisited archives, his bibliography in Sobibor is missing entire collectionsthat would be essential to such a project. In other cases, he has visitedrelevant archives in Warsaw and Lublin but evidently did not spend long enoughthere to find a number of frequently cited files widely used by genuinespecialists in the field. The greatest omission is really his ignorance of thecore captured German documents and BDC materials, available in the USA and inGermany. In the entire trilogy, Mattogno cites from just one file from theBundesarchiv and two from the German Foreign Office archive. This is asufficiently low number that one could justifiably doubt whether Mattogno haseven seen the files in question. He cites from just one file from the NationalArchives of Belarus which is misnumbered in Treblinka.Would Mattogno expect us to believe that he stopped off in Minsk and asked tosee a single file?

It is therefore to be expected thatMGK’s work will continue to decline in quality, and will lean increasingly onKues’ IH outlet, where he can focus narrowly on just one piece of the jigsaw ata time. Meanwhile, potential converts to their work will continue to becomedisaffected and walk away from their circle, as one founding member of IH hasalready done.[34]Comments from that former member can be found in the Afterword.

In case MGK have the courage torespond to this critique, we would like to set some provisions required for usto take any ‘risposta’ into serious consideration. We will not accept anyeffort that only deals with our critique in a piecemeal and isolated fashion,hence we will be little concerned with any response that just focuses on thetechnical minutiae of the camps without recognizing the importance of Nazipolicy. The Reinhard camps weren’t created in a vacuum, and we expect MGK torecognize that fact. That is why we dare MGK to follow the structure of thepresent critique, so as to put things in proper perspective. As mentioned,arguments not told in narrative form often fail a simple bullshit test.

While we don’t expect MGK to dealwith all of the evidence (we haven’t either, which goes to show how muchexists), we do insist that they deal with far more than they have so far intheir previous failed attempts. It is also incumbent upon them to include allrelevant contexts for the evidence they do select, and thus avoid isolatingdocuments as if they too were created in a vacuum. For example, in looking atKorherr’s use of “Sonderbehandlung” in his famous report, the understandingthat such a phrase meant killing does not stand on its own but exists inside awider pattern of abductive inferences from many other sources related toNazi-Jewish policy. A reversion by MGK back to old ways of decontextualizationand isolation of the evidence is simply unacceptable to us, and will meet agrade of non sufficiente.

We also expect MGK to take note ofmany of the serious errors which we have spotlighted in this critique. We havedemonstrated that they are unequivocally wrong on innumerable occasions. Simplyadapting or omitting their mistakes from future versions of their work will notbe good enough; instead, we would hope that MGK admit their mistakes in anhonest fashion, open to their readers and the public.

The late Raul Hilberg once said,deniers "are like children who say: prove it! And so we must, proveit!" Hilberg could have added that deniers are asking historians toreinvent the wheel, because the Holocaust was already proven in the 1940s. Wehave therefore responded to a child who is not asking for proof beyondreasonable doubt, but is instead insisting on proof beyond unreasonable doubt.We have shown that the unreasonable doubts are based on bad faith, yet we havestill managed to overcome them by providing proof that even a manic hyper-positivistwould find hard to deny. We therefore request MGK to make a reasonable responseto this critique, but we can only predict that their response will beunreasoned, hysterical and not fully honest.

[1] JuNSV Lfd. Nr.585 Bd.XX, pp. 628-47; LG München I vom 21.1.1965,110 Ks 3/64:

http://www.holocaust-history.org/german-trials/belzec-urteil.shtml; DJuNSV Lfd.Nr.1551, LG/BG Magdeburg vom 24.9.48, 11 Ks 246/48.

[2] ‘A Day inthe Life of Yuli Daniel’, Life, 6.6.69:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941670-1,00.html .

[3]Carlo Mattogno, ‘Rebuttal to Joachim Neander’, Inconvenient Historyblog, 8.2.10: http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/02/rebuttal-to-joachim-neander/ ; Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno, Concentration Camp Majdanek, p.239.Joachim Neander responded and pointed out Mattogno’s misuse of Baynac: JoachimNeander and Sergey Romanov, ‘Dr. Neander responds to Carlo Mattogno,’ HolocaustControversies, 13.2.10, http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/02/dr-joachim-neander-responds-to-carlo.html. Romanov’s Postscript to the article responds to Mattogno’s “Auschwitz4 million” canard.

[4] Höss affidavit, 20.5.46, NI-034.

[5] Himmler an Hitler, 25.5.40, NO-1880.

[6] Mattogno, ‘The Myth of the Extermination of the Jews: Part I’.

[7] Udo Walendy, ‘Lügen um Heinrich Himmler. 1. Teil’, HistorischeTatsachen 45, 1991, pp.3-11.

[8] New York Times, 29.11.43; the reporter, W.H. Lawrence, wassceptical about the number of deaths claimed: Laurel Leff, Buried by TheTimes: the Holocaust and America’s most important newspaper, Cambridge, 2005;Bill Lawrence, Six Presidents, Too Many Wars, New York, 1972, p.92.

[9] ‘Nazi Death Camp: A Scene of Horror,’ New York Times,6.10.44, p.6; John Hersey, ‘Prisoner 339: Klooga’, Life, 17/18,30.10.44, pp.72-83, including photographs.

[10] ‘Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp’, New York Times,30.8.41, p.1. The journalist, again W.H. Lawrence, expressed uncertaintyregarding the reliability of the Soviets’ 1.5 million death estimate, butpersonally witnessed “three of ten opened mass graves and looked upon 368partly decomposed bodies of men, women and children who had been executedindividually in a variety of cruel and horrible means” at nearby Krepiecki. Healso visited “a warehouse in downtown Lublin in which I saw hundreds ofsuitcases and literally tens of thousands of pieces of clothing and personaleffects of people who died here”; and he “had the opportunity of questioning aGerman officer, Herman Vogel, 42, of Millheim, who admitted that as head of theclothing barracks he had supervised the shipment of eighteen freightcar loadsof clothing to Germany during a two month period and that he knew it came fromthe bodies of persons who had been killed at Maidanek.” Vogel was laterexecuted by the Poles.

[11] MGK, Sobibór,pp.276-81.

[12] Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.331n.65, citingcorrespondence between the KTI, the KdF, and IG Farbenindustrie. DÖW, E18370/1,and BAK, R58/1059. See also De Mildt, Dick, In The Name of the People.Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996, pp.78-94, citing JuNSV Bd. 733.

[13] MGK, Sobibór, p.400.

[14] ‘Berufsverbotfür Horst Mahler’, Die Welt, 20.4.04:

http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article308012/Berufsverbot_fuer_Horst_Mahler.html.

[15] MGK, Sobibór,p.373.

[16] Graf islisted as a member to the Institue on ther webpage, available here: http://www.rusinst.ru/contents.asp?id=1.

[17] See theinterview with Graf here: http://www.svenlib.sandy.ru/pugovichki/vesti/graf.htm.

[18] JürgenGraf, ‘"The New Jewish Question," or The End of Guillaume Faye’,CODOH, 29.10.07: http://www.codoh.com/viewpoints/vpfaye.html.

[19] Jürgen Graf, ‘Review of Vladimir Avdeyev: Rasologia’, 30.11.07: http://www.velesova-sloboda.org/misc/graf-avdeyev-rasologia-review.html.

[20] Jürgen Graf, ‘The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of a Scholar:Dr. Christian Lindtner and Holocaust Revisionism,’ National Journal, 22.7.11,Part four: ““Eyewitness evidence” and“confessions””

[21] Ibid., seePart 7 on “The ‘Vergasungskeller’ letter.” Graf should also have a conversationwith pseudonym Denierbud and Friedrich Paul Berg over their use “Jewishnewspeak,” as both readily identify themselves as ‘deniers’.

[22]Carlo Mattogno, ‘I Falsi Falsi Protocolli Scopo E Significato Dei “ProtocolliDei SaVi Anziani Di Sion”’, parte 3. http://olo-dogma.myblog.it/archive/2010/06/22/i-falsi-falsi-protocolli-scopo-e-significato-dei-protocolli2.html.

[23] http://sololislam.blogspot.com/2011/04/giovanna-canzano-intervista-gian-pio.html

[24] Carlo Mattogno, ‘My Memories of Jean-ClaudePressac’, The Revisionist 1(4) (2003), pp. 432-435.

[25] ThomasKues, ‘Troubling Symptom of Revisionism’, http://www.codoh.com/newrevoices/nrtkarad.html.

[26] The letterinvolved Lithuania’s investigation of former Yad Vashem chairman Yitzhak Aradfor war crimes while fighting as a partisan in Lithuania against Nazi Germany.Kues never bothers to consider the public relations interest that Yad Vashemhad over the issue involving its former personell, but instead identifies theinstitute with a Zionist control over Europe.

[27] Theinvestigation mentioned in the previous footnote was stopped due toinsufficient evidence.

[28] Law of Return (Amendment No. 2) 5730-1970: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/Other_Law_Law_of_Return.html. ‘In Search of Meyer’, Jewish Magazine, February 2009, on-line: http://www.jewishmag.com/130mag/meyer_lansky/meyer_lansky.htm.

[29] See Post of ‘Thomas Kues’ on 3-7-2008 here http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t467370/.

[30] ThomasKues, ‘Speaking about Satan-A Note on Yehuda Bauer’s foreword to Filip Müller’sThree Years in the Gas Chambers’, http://www.codoh.com/newrevoices/nrtkbauer.html. Kues offers the superior thinkersas Aristotle, Voltaire, and Nietzsche. Nietzsche would hardly enjoy beinginvoked by Kues. As Nieztsche once wrote to his sister in the 1880s, “ Your association with an anti-Semite expresses aforeignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again and again withire or melancholy...It is a matter of honor to me to be absolutely clean andunequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely opposed as I am in mywritings...My disgust with this party (which would like all too well theadvantage of my name!) is as outspoken as possible. And that I am unable to doanything against it, that in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet the nameof Zarathustra is used, has already made me almost sick several times.”

[31] See post of ‘LaurentzDahl’ (aka Thomas Kues) of January 25, 2007at http://revforum.yourforum.org/viewtopic.php?t=3674&start=15.

[32] Graf, Neue Weltordnung,pp.145-146. Graf actually misspellsrevisionism in the section title.

[33] http://holocausthandbooks.com/

[34] Jason Myers, ‘CODOH: The Forum That Moderated Itself to Death’,Holocaust Controversies blog, http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/02/codoh-forum-that-moderated-itself-to.html.

A Holiday Gift for Mattogno, Graf and Kues

2011-12-29T09:59:00.000Z

The members of Holocaust Controversies have prepared a large critique entitled 'Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard: A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues.' It is the First Edition of a White Paper, and the background events that led to its creation are discussed in the introduction. We will be publishing the whole work as a PDF file on the Internet within the next 14 days; but first we are rolling out our current working version as a blog series, starting here. We have not employed a professional proofreader and we are working on this project for free in our spare time, so we would like to appeal to all readers to post feedback on any typos or other errors in the Comments below each blog article. We will incorporate any necessary corrections into the PDF and any subsequent versions of the White Paper.

Happy Holidays and Enjoy!

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses (6). Why Cremation?

2011-12-28T20:43:00.006Z

Why Cremation?

In his Belzec book Mattogno provided the following explanation for the human cremation remains discovered at Belzec extermination camp:

The cremation of the bodies of the dead constitutes in and of itself neither proof nor evidence in favor of the official theses, because this was the practice in all concentration camps and had a well-established hygienic function. In the area of the Belzec camp, Kola’s findings show that, along a line linking grave 3 and grave 10, about two-thirds of the length of the camp,284 the groundwater level was at a depth of 4.80 meters.285 In the area below, toward the railroad, this level was obviously at a smaller depth; in the area of grave 1, it was 4.10 meters.286 It is probable that the cremation had to do with the danger of contamination of the ground water, as I have discussed elsewhere.287 Fundamentally, however, one cannot exclude the explanation adopted by the official historiography, while giving it a different interpretation. If the Soviets had discovered mass graves full of corpses dead of disease or malnutrition, then they would certainly have exploited them for propaganda against the Germans, as the latter did in Katyn and Vinnytsya against the Soviets.[264]

If, as Mattogno claims, the cremation was related to avoiding contamination of the ground water (this was actually the reason why cremation replaced burial as the body disposal method at Sobibor starting October 1942, see section 1 of this chapter), then why were the mass graves dug as deep as the ground water level in the first place, although for "several thousands, perhaps even some tens of thousands" of dead bodies[265] one really didn’t need pits that deep? The pits near Treblinka I labor camp, regarding which Mattogno conceded "circa 6,800" corpses in a feeble attempt to explain away the Wehrmacht local commander of Ostrow’s complaint about the unbearable stench from the corpses of the "not adequately" buried Jews at Treblinka[266] were only as deep as or not much deeper than the proverbial 6 feet below ground, besides having a much smaller overall area than the mass graves at Belzec.[267]

The major concentration camps run by the SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt may have had cremation ovens, but Belzec was not one of those concentration camps. Smaller sub-camps of the major concentration camps usually had no cremation facilities, and there are also few reported cases of open-air cremation from these camps that the author is aware of, like the bungled last-minute cremation attempt at Ohrdruf concentration camp shortly before US troops reached the area.[268] The same goes for prisoner-of-war camps and labor camps, with some exceptions like the camp Klooga in Estonia (where a similar bungled attempt to cremate the bodies of about 2,500 inmates massacred in September 1944 took place as the Red Army was approaching)[269], the Jewish labor camps in the Lublin area liquidated in the course of Aktion Erntefest ("Operation Harvest Festival", the largest single Nazi massacre of Jews, in which an estimated 42-45,000 people were shot between November 3-7, 1943)[270], and the Janowska and Maly Trostinets camps, which also functioned as places of mass extermination.[271] If, as Mattogno surmises, concern about the Soviets using for propaganda purposes "mass graves full of corpses dead of disease or malnutrition" (as opposed to victims of mass shooting or gassing) was a reason for cremating the bodies of camp inmates in open pyres, then why were the corpses of Soviet prisoners of war at a number of camps in the occupied Soviet territories, where there were tens of thousands of them, victims of executions, starvation or exposure[272], not removed by incineration? Why were the mass graves found by the Soviets or Poles at Treblinka I labor camp not removed by incineration? Why would the Germans at Belzec (and for that matter at Sobibor, Treblinka II and Chełmno) make an effort they obviously didn’t consider necessary at Treblinka I, in the face of considerations that according to Mattogno’s thesis would have been exactly the same?[273] At many a Nazi massacre site in the occupied Soviet territories the bodies were not destroyed for lack of time or because the graves could not be found by the Aktion 1005 disposal squads.[274] But neither of these problems existed at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chełmno.

Unsurprisingly Mattogno skipped this issue in his response to the author.[275] Unless the author missed something, the question why the victims were cremated is neither addressed in MGK’s Sobibor book or in Mattogno’s Chełmno book.

[264] Mattogno, Bełżec, p.91.

[265] Ibid.

[266] Mattogno, ‘Controversie’, p.55; Mattogno, ‘Controversy’; for discussion of this claim see Muehlenkamp, ‘Belzec Response 4 (4)’.

[267] See Chapter 7

[268] USHMM webpage about Ohrdruf, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10006131.

[269] USHMM, photograph query ‘Klooga’, http://resources.ushmm.org/inquery/uia_query.php/photos?query=kw113012. Graphic images!

[270] Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, pp.368-69; Golczewski, ‘Polen’, p.478.

[271] Janowska: testimonies of Heinrich Chamaides on 21.9.1944 and of Moische Korn on 13.9.1944. Klee/ Dreßen (eds), Gott mit uns, pp.225-229, Sandkühler, Endlösung in Galizien, p.183; Maly Trostinec: Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp.768-774.

[272] Gerlach (Kalkulierte Morde, p.856) lists a number of POW camps in present-day Belarus with death tolls ranging from about 10,000 to over 100,000. According to Gerlach, a total of at least 633,000 Soviet POWs perished at these camps – more than the number of deportees killed at Belzec and Sobibor combined. Even if the Belarusian sources used by Gerlach to establish this figure exaggerated the death toll of these POW camps by a factor of two, it would still be almost twice as high as that of Sobibor extermination camp.

[273] Jonathan Harrison, ‘A Burning Question’, http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2009/02/burning-question.html.

[274] Hilberg, Destruction of Europan Jews, 1985, p.153; Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp.773-74.

[275] As pointed out in Muehlenkamp, "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (5,2)’, http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2009/07/belzec-mass-graves-and-archaeology-my_2802.html.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses (5). Cremation Remains.

2011-12-28T20:43:00.005Z

Cremation Remains

The remains left behind by cremation would correspond to about 5 % of the corpses’ non-decomposed weight and 6 to 8 % of the wood weight, according to Mattogno, Graf & Kues.[232] With the exaggerated corpse weights and enormous amounts of wood they claim (see section 8.3), this allows them to argue that the volume of ash (assuming specific weights of 0.5 g/cm³ for human ash and 0.34 g/cm³ for wood ash) would, in some camps at least, have exceeded the established or estimated volume of the mass graves.[233] With the more realistic corpse and wood weights explained in section 8.3, on the other hand, the problems that Mattogno and his colleagues make so much of become rather insignificant, as shown in Tables 8.37 and 8.38 below.[234] The average portion of the grave volume occupied by human and wood ashes is about 10 % in Table 8.37 and 12 % in Table 8.38, Belzec being the camp with the highest density of buried ashes (16 % respectively 19 %).

One should however bear in mind the possibility that the residue percentages considered in the above tables are too low, because combustion on the extermination camp pyres was not necessarily as complete as would correspond to such residues and there are also data from open-air carcass cremation pointing to higher amounts of residue.

Table 8.37

Table 8.38

According to a document from the British Environment Agency (EA) referred to by MGK[235], a typical pyre for 300 cows at the time of the British Foot & Mouth Disease Crisis in 2001 included 175 tons of coal, 380 railway sleepers, 250 pallets, four tons of straw and 2,250 liters of diesel. Such a pyre could leave 15 tons of carcass ash and 45 tons of other ash to be disposed of. Assuming that each cow weighed 500 kg[236], the original carcass weight was 150 tons, i.e. the carcass ash amounted to 10 % of the original weight. The other ash amounted to 300 kg for each ton of carcass burned.

Table 8.39 contains a calculation of the presumable original weights per ton of carcass of the substances used for burning the carcasses[237] and the corresponding residue after cremation.[238] The wood equivalent of the coal, straw and wood used for cremation was calculated on hand of each substance’s heating value in BTU[239], in order to establish the weight of wood residue, calculated as the weight of wood residue that would accrue if all flammables left the same amount of residue (which is unrealistic insofar as coal leaves a higher percentage of residue than wood when combusting). The diesel oil was left out of the calculation as its residue is assumed to be negligible.

Table 8.39

The weight of ash other than carcass ash per ton of carcass burned is 191 kg in the above table, 109 kg short of the 300 kg per ton of carcass reportedly left by a typical pyre according to the EA. So if the EA’s data are accurate, the residue left by the coal, straw and wood burned must have been somewhat higher than considered in Table 8.39. In the next table (8.40), the assumed residue ratio for these substances is multiplied by a factor so as to yield 300 kg per carcass, raising the coal residue ratio from 0.13 to 0.20 and the wood and straw residue ratio from 0.10 to 0.16.

Table 8.40

Dividing the 300 kg of other-than-carcass ash by the 2,137 kg of wood corresponding to the flammables (except the residue-neutral diesel) used per ton of carcass in these pyres yields a theoretical wood residue factor of ca. 0.14, vs. a carcass residue factor of 0.10.

As mentioned in section 2 of this chapter[240], MGK tried to use IAEA guidelines for carcass burning[241] to support the wood-to-carcass weight ratio that underlies their wood requirement calculations, conveniently omitting the fact that the ash figure given by Mercer et al, 350 kg per ton of animal, is not just carcass and wood ash but also includes coal ash. In Table 8.41 below the exercise done in Table 8.39 is repeated considering Mercer et al’s figures for amounts of external flammables and total amount of residue.[242] One can see that the residue weight per ton of carcass calculated with the same assumptions (317 kg including the carcass ash, 217 kg without it) falls short of the 350 kg mentioned by Mercer et al.

Table 8.41

As Mercer et al – unlike the EA – give no separate weight for the carcass ash; their total residue weight of 350 kg can be reached in two ways: by leaving the carcass residue unaltered and assuming a higher amount of coal and other ash (Table 8.42) or by assuming a higher carcass residue (Table 8.43).

The calculated wood residue factor is 0.13 in Table 8.42 and 0.11 in Table 8.43, whereas the corpse residue factor is 0.10 in the former and 0.133 in the latter.

Table 8.42

Table 8.43

The calculations in Tables 8.42 and 8.43 incidentally show that the amount of residue stated by Mercer et al is compatible with the author’s earlier wood equivalent calculations based on their article[243], which yield a wood-to-carcass weight ratio of about 2:1, rather than with MGK’s conveniently oversimplified calculations mentioned in section 2 yielding their desired, much higher ratio.[244]

The residue factors for carcass ash and wood ash from Tables 8.40, 8.42 and 8.43 were applied to calculate the amounts of cremation remains at the extermination camps, instead of the lower residue factors considered in Tables 8.37 and 8.38. The results of this exercise are shown in Tables 8.44 and 8.45 below.

Table 8.44

Table 8.45

The concentration of ash would be considerably lower if the burning was carried out mainly using flammable liquids rather than wood, in which case cremation remains would mostly be of human origin. There is evidence that this was indeed the case. At Treblinka, according to Judge Łukaszkiewicz' protocol dated December 29, 1945, examination by an expert in forensic medicine of the ashes spread across an area of about 2 hectares together with bones, skulls and other human remains revealed that "the ashes are without any doubt of human origin (remains of cremated human bones)."[245] At Belzec, coroner Dr. Pietraszkiewicz found that the ash he examined was predominantly of human origin and only a small part came from wood.[246]

Even if substantial amounts of wood were used, on the other hand, the density of cremation remains in the mass graves must have been lower at the time of the camps’ dismantling than results from the above calculations, because cremation remains were not always returned to the burial pits. At Sobibor ashes from the cremated bodies were used as fertilizer for vegetable plots, mixed with sand and spread out across the soil, or taken out of the camp area.[247] Regarding Treblinka there is evidence that cremation remains were not always buried in the emptied mass graves but also moved outside the camp area (see section 1 of this chapter). Also at Chełmno part of the cremation remains was not buried in the mass graves or elsewhere on site.[248] Regarding Belzec, the scattering of ashes in fields and woods near the camp is mentioned by at least one witness.[249]

After the Soviet army reached the camp areas – or even before that, as suggested by the mention of ashes covering a large part of the camp area in the Soviet investigation report about Treblinka dated August 24, 1944[250] -, robbery diggers brought further cremation remains to the surface. The effects of their activity at Belzec were described as follows by Prof. Andrzej Kola:

One can suppose that the ashes filled the pits completely, and only a very thin layer of surface soil was used as a cover. Therefore during the camp closing in 1943 year and leveling 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, particularly in the western and northern part of the camp. In those very parts the zone of graves was located.[251]

These facts make it somewhat-less-than-relevant to argue that the concentration of cremation remains found in archaeological investigations of mass graves is lower than would correspond to human cremation on the evidenced scale, but Carlo Mattogno nevertheless indulged in this exercise regarding Belzec and Chełmno.

In his Belzec book Mattogno claimed that "the graphs of the analyses of the 137 drill cores presented by Kola show that the ash in the graves is normally intermingled with sand, that in more than half of the samples the layer of ash and sand is extremely thin", and that furthermore "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."[252] However, he never undertook to explain how he had managed to determine, on hand of the schematic representations of core samples in Kola’s book[253], how high the ash content detected in each of the samples shown was. Instead he claimed 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 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, would be incompatible with Kola’s finds which, as Mattogno claimed without substantiation, suggest moderate to modest rather than high concentrations of cremation remains in the mass graves.[254] Mattogno’s claim about the thickness of the cover layer – based on the author’s quote of what Arad wrote about that layer at Treblinka, not Belzec – is belied by the report about the excavations at Belzec directed by judge Godzieszewski’s on October 12, 1945, according to which there were layers of cremation remains well above two meters below ground, which cannot have been the result of robbery digging alone.[255] An originally thin cover layer of sand was also the conclusion of Kola (see above quote), whose findings about a resulting noticeable presence of human cremation remains above ground throughout the Belzec site Mattogno challenged by amusingly claiming that he and Graf had seen no such traces when they visited the site in 1997.[256] This argumentation, on the other hand, didn’t keep Mattogno from invoking the scattering of cremation remains throughout a large part of the camp area, as described by eyewitness Stanislaw Kozak, to call in question the accuracy of Kola’s conclusions regarding the area and volume of the mass graves.[257] Like other Revisionists, Mattogno has no problem with arguing on both sides of his mouth.

Regarding Chełmno, Mattogno claims that the cremation of 145,000 corpses would have left 326 tons of human ashes occupying a volume of 652 cubic meters, assuming a corpse mass weight of 6,525 tons and a corpse residue factor of 5 % [258](the same as in Tables 8.37 and 8.38). Assuming the highest carcass residue factor considered above (13.3 %, Table 8.43) and the weight of the ca. 150,000 corpses from Chelmno’s 1^st phase according to Table 8.21, the amount of human cremation remains would be the following: [(3,321,706x0.133)÷1,000 =] 441.79 tons of ash weight, corresponding to 441.79 ÷ 0.5 = 883.58 m³ of ash. The four Chełmno mass graves in which corpses were buried had an estimated total volume of 16,179 cubic meters[259], which means that if the corpse’s cremation remains had been wholly returned to the mass graves they would have occupied no more than 5.46 % of the graves’ volume. Even if this mass of human cremation remains had been dumped only into the 11 pits called the "fifth grave" in Pawlicka-Nowak’s online article, with an assumed total volume of 4,096 cubic meters[260], they would have occupied no more than (883.58÷4,096 =) 21.57 % of these pits’ volume. This was not so, however, for human cremation remains were also found in the former burial graves as well as in the objects called "field crematoria" in Pawlicka-Nowak’s article, and besides not all cremation remains were disposed of inside the camp area, as mentioned above.

Oblivious of the fact that one should thus not necessarily expect to find human cremation remains in high concentrations in the Chełmno mass graves, ash pits and cremation structures, Mattogno triumphantly announces that a 1988 examination of soil samples containing human ashes revealed a human ash concentration of just "some percent" in these samples.[261] And he further disgraces himself by speculating that these samples must have come from the ash disposal pits making up the "fifth grave". Apparently Mattogno "forgot" that these pits (in which the soil was found to contain "a significant mixture of burn waste and crushed human bones"[262]) were not subject to archaeological investigation before 2003/04 and soil samples examined in 1988 are thus not likely to have been from these pits.

As concerns Sobibor, MGK reduce the amount of cremation remains in that camp’s mass graves by creatively interpreting their translation of Kola’s descriptions of these graves. Kola’s translated statement that "Particularly noticeable traces of cremation occurred in the lower parts of the graves where distinct layers of scorched bones, with a thickness up to 40-60 cm, could be identified" is first decried as contradicting the archaeologist’s description whereby the lower parts of graves nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6 contained not cremation remains but corpses in wax-fat transformation (apparently it didn’t occur to these keen text analysts that Kola, as the context of his quoted statement suggests, is likely to have meant the lower layers of cremation remains in graves nos. 1 and 2, which he considered to have been used for cremation only, and the layers closest to the corpse layers in the other graves, which after all were up to 5.80 meters deep). Then MGK swiftly convert Kola’s "particularly noticeable" traces of cremation into the only such traces that were found in the Sobibor mass graves, further ignore that Kola said nothing about how many "particularly noticeable" layers of cremation remains were in the lower parts of the graves, and postulate that each mass grave contained only one layer of cremation remains, which they generously assume to be 50 cm thick. Considering the graves’ area of 3,210 m², this would mean "(3,210×0.5=) 1,605 m3, equal to (1,605×0.4=) 642 tons, corresponding to about 34,500 corpses."[263]

Apart from being based on a conveniently creative text interpretation, these calculations (which MGK furthermore proclaim to be a "somewhat unrealistic hypothesis", without explaining why) don’t help their case, especially if one considers the cremation residue calculations in Tables 8.37 and 8.38, which are based on corpse and wood weight assumptions more realistic than those of MGK. For 1,605 m³ of corpse and wood ash is not far below the amounts calculated in these tables as corresponding to the corpses of all Sobibor victims - 1,642 to 1,992 cubic meters. And it is quite possible that, as established by coroner Dr. Pietraszkiewicz at Belzec, and as must have been the case on the Dresden Altmarkt considering the rather small amounts of wood one sees under the grate in Image 8.5, cremation ashes are predominantly of human origin also at Sobibor.

[232] M&G, Treblinka, p.150; Mattogno, Bełżec, pp.86 f.; MGK, Sobibór, p.148. On p.136 of the Sobibor book MGK refer to a source (http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~blpprt/bestwoodash.html) according to which the burning of wood results in about 6-10 % ashes on average. Having assumed the use of fresh wood for their Sobibor calculations of wood requirements, MGK generously assume the lower value "because it is fresh wood, very rich in water" (p.148).

[233] See for instance Mattogno, Bełżec, p.86.

[234] The former table uses the amounts of dry wood per corpses from Table 8.22, the latter the fresh wood amounts from Table 8.23. The wood weight percentage of cremation residue considered is 8 % for dry wood and 6 % for fresh wood. The volume calculations from the weight of residues are based on the data about the specific weight of human and wood ashes provided by Mattogno. Regarding the grave volume figures for Belzec, Sobibor and Chełmno in column 10 see Chapter 7. The Sobibor volume is the volume of graves nos. 1 to 6 corrected for sloping (12,746.50 m³) plus the volume of the small pit called grave # 7, which had an area of 30 m² and a depth of 0.90 meters, thus a volume of 27 m³ (no correction for sloping required due to the low depth). The grave volume considered for Treblinka is the volume required to bury 721,555 at a density of 12 corpses per cubic meter (Chapter 7).

[235] Environment Agency North West Region Area, ‘Extracts from Submission to Cumbria County Council’s Inquiry into the Foot and Mouth Crisis’. (http://cmis.carlisle.gov.uk/CMISWebPublic/Binary.ashx?Document=6837), section 5.2.4 on page 13, quoted in MGK, Sobibór, p.135 n.394.

[236] As note 208.

[237] Sleepers: the larger of the two types of new oak railway sleepers sold by the company Timber2you advertising under http://www.limelandscapes.com/ weighs 80 kg and has a volume of 2.4 x 0.225 x 0.125 = 0.0675 cubic meters. A European railway sleeper, as considered for the wood equivalent calculations in Muehlenkamp, ‘Belzec Research 4 (2)’, has a higher volume (0.0975 m³) and is assumed to have a correspondingly higher weight. 380 such sleepers are held to weigh (380x80x0.0975÷0.0675) = 43.911 kg. Pallet: wood pallets sold by the company ULINE advertising under http://www.uline.com/BL_8201/Wood-Pallets, weigh up to 100 lbs = 45.36 kg; 250 pallets would thus weigh 11,340 kg.

[238] Residue of coal estimated as the quotient between 130 million tons of coal ash generated by the United States each year according to the CBS News article ‘Coal Ash: 130 Million Tons of Waste’ (August 15, 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/01/60minutes/main5356202.shtml) and the US coal consumption in 2008 according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) table ‘Coal Consumption by Sector’ (http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec7_9.pdf), which is 1,120.5 million short tons corresponding to 1,017 million metric tons. Residue of wood and straw estimated as 10 % according to Mark Risse and Glen Harris, ‘Best Management Practices for Wood Ash Used as an Agricultural Soil Amendment’ (http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~blpprt/bestwoodash.html).

[239] BTU/kg values from Muehlenkamp, as note 239, where straw is considered with a thermal value of 6,000 per pound according to Alex English, ‘Round Bale Burner’ (31 January 1997, http://web.archive.org/web/20050321083913/http://listserv.repp.org/pipermail/bioenergy/1997-February/004492.html). 1 kg = 2.2 pounds, so the heating value of 1 kg of straw equals (6,000x2.2=) 13,200 BTU.

[240] See note 105.

[241] Mercer J.A., Hesketh N., Hunt J., Oughton D.H, ‘Burning of Carcasses’, http://www-infocris.iaea.org/en/w3.exe$EAFull?ID=67.

[242] Weight of one sleeper as in note 239; weight of 250 sleepers thus equals (250x80x0.0975÷0.0675) = 28,889 kg. Weight of straw bale considered: 1,500 pounds (heaviest bale that can be handled by Tractor Loader Hay Bale Spear LB-8 advertised by Everything Attachments (http://www.everythingattachments.com/Tractor-Loader-Hay-Bale-Spear-LB-8-p/lb-hay-bale-spear-lb8.htm) = 680 kg, 250 bales thus weighing 170,000 kg. BTU/kg values for calculation of wood equivalent and residue ratios are the same as in Table 8.39 (notes 239, 240).

[243] Muehlenkamp, ‘Belzec Research 4 (2)’.

[244] See note 105.

[245] See Chapter 7.

[246] Ibid.

[247] Schelvis, Sobibor, p.112. Inmate witness Jakob Biskobicz mentioned having been ordered by SS-officer Wagner to scatter human ash from the extermination area in the Sobibor vegetable yard (deposition in Tel Aviv on 06.06.1962, translation to German in BAL B162/208 AR-Z 251/59, Bd. VII, f. 1471 ff. (f.1479). According to inmate witness Kurt Thomas, ash was loaded into barrels and sent to Germany as fertilizer or mixed with unburned coal and dirt and then scattered on the camp’s roads (letter to the Jewish World Congress dd. 3.12.1961, translation to German in BAL B162/208 AR-Z 251/59, Bd. V, f.1024 ff., f.1044). Bystander witness Bronislaw Lobejko reported having learned from Ukrainian guards that the human ash was mixed with gravel (Schotter) from locomotives (?) and scattered upon the camp’s roads and paths, whereas unburned bones were crushed by Jewish inmates with hammers and then mixed with grit (Kies) – see Lobejko’s deposition before judge Zielinski in Olesnica on 08.01.1946, as note 23. According to bystander witness Jan Piwonski, the corpse’s ashes were taken out of the camp by train (deposition in Chelm on 10.11.1945, translation from Polish to German in StA.Do Sob 85 PM III NO 109, p.5 of the interrogation protocol).

[248] See section 1; Pawlicka-Nowak, ‘Chełmno Museum’.

[249] Report of Rudolf Reder regarding Belzec – BAL B162/208 AR-Z 252/59 Bd. II, p.258 ff. (p.286). Reder refers to conversations he had with local inhabitants after the area was occupied by the Soviet army.

[250] As note 47.

[251] Kola, Bełżec, p.20.

[252] Mattogno, Bełżec, p.87. Regarding the dishonesty of Mattogno’s claim that the samples in Kola’s book are the only relevant core samples from mass graves, see Chapter 7.

[253] Kola, Bełżec, pp.14-18.

[254] Mattogno, ‘Controversie’, pp.48 ff.; Mattogno, ‘Controversy’.

[255] See Muehlenkamp, ‘Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,3)’. Mattogno’s translation of Godzieszewski’s report is reproduced in Chapter 7.

[256] Mattogno, ‘Controversie’, p.50 n.158; Mattogno, ‘Controversy’; commentary in Muehlenkamp, ibid.

[257] Mattogno, ‘Controversie’, pp.52 f.; Mattogno, Bełżec, p.89. For discussion of these arguments see Chapter 7.

[258] Mattogno, Chełmno, p.134.

[259] See Chapter 7.

[260] See Muehlenkamp, ‘Chełmno Cremation 3’.

[261] Mattogno, Chełmno, pp.123, 134-35

[262] Pawlicka-Nowak, ‘Chełmno Museum’.

[263] MGK, Sobibór, p.148.

Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. Chapter 8: Burning of the Corpses (4). Duration of Cremations.

2011-12-28T20:43:00.004Z

Duration of Cremations

As mentioned in section 1 of this chapter, the author estimated the area of each of the grids used for burning the bodies at Treblinka extermination camp at 66 m², assuming a length of 25 meters and a width of 2.625 meters. Mattogno & Graf’s estimate, also based on the grates’ description in the judgment at the 1st Düsseldorf Treblinka trial (Kurt Franz et al)[188], is somewhat higher: 30 meters long by 3 meters wide = 90 m².[189] The first layer of bodies on this large area, according to the same authors, could have been no more than 4 bodies per 3 square meters, as each body would have occupied "a theoretical average surface area of the size of a rectangle of 1.75 m × 0.50 m, which also includes the necessary intervening space for the passage of the products of combustion." At 120 bodies per layer, and assuming a layer height of 0.30 m, a pyre of 3,500 bodies (the number that had to be burned on each of two pyres every day to dispose of about 860,000 bodies within 122 days[190]) would thus consist of 29 layers with an impracticable total height of 8.7 m.[191]

Why and how big the "necessary intervening space" between the bodies was calculated is not explained by Mattogno, which allows for assuming that it was deemed rather low, say no more than 5 cm, and that the average body they considered was 1.70 meters long and 0.45 meters wide. These are rather unrealistic measurements, considering that the deportees to Treblinka were largely if not predominantly women and children and mostly came from Polish ghettos where they had been subject to prolonged malnutrition, an adult with the aforementioned measurements thus being a rare exception rather than the rule.[192] Moreover most of the bodies had been lying in mass graves prior to cremation and lost a significant part of their volume as their water left them during the decomposition process. The average area occupied by a dead body on one of the Treblinka grids was thus considerably lower than results from Mattogno’s calculations.

On the page preceding these calculations, Mattogno takes issue with an obviously misunderstood or mistranslated statement in Alexander Donat’s publication of Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka, whereby an excavator could dig up 3,000 corpses "at one time" (the witness must have meant to say something like "in one day" or "in one shift"), derisively pointing out that "3,000 bodies take up a volume of about (3,000×0.045 =) 135 m³."[193] 135 m³ would be the volume occupied by a pile of bodies stacked on a 90 m² grate at a height of (135 ÷ 90) = 1.5 meters – 5 layers of bodies with an average height of 0.3 m per layer as considered by M&G, each layer consisting of (3,000 ÷ 5 =) 600 bodies. Assuming the area of 66 m² estimated by the author, the height of the pile would be ca. 2 meters (135 ÷ 66), corresponding to about 7 layers, each layer consisting of ca. 429 bodies (3,000 ÷ 7).

Assuming this lower area and the higher volume displacement of the "ideal man" calculated by Alex Bay[194], i.e. 3.3 cubic feet or 0.093 cubic meters (a rather conservative assumption that ignores both the presence of women and children among the corpses and the effects of decomposition), 3,000 bodies would occupy a volume of 279 cubic meters, and the pile of bodies on the grid would have to be about 4.2 meters high (279 ÷ 66), corresponding to 14 layers consisting of about 214 bodies each.

With 3,500 bodies, the figures calculated on the basis of the above assumptions for one body’s volume displacement (0.045 m³ or 0.093 m³) would be the following:

· Volume displacement of 0.045 m³ per body, grate area 90 m²: pyre volume above grate 157.5 m³, pyre height above grate 1.75 m = about 6 layers of about 583 bodies each;

· Volume displacement of 0.045 m³ per body, grate area 66 m²: pyre volume above grate 157.5 m³, pyre height above grate 2.4 m = about 8 layers of about 438 bodies each;

· Volume displacement of 0.093 m³ per body, grate area 90 m²: pyre volume above grate 325.5 m³, pyre height above grate 3.62 m = about 12 layers of about 292 bodies each;

· Volume displacement of 0.093 m³ per body, grate area 66 m²: pyre volume above grate 325.5 m³, pyre height above grate 4.93 m = about 16 layers of about 219 bodies each.

It follows that, if indeed there had been only two grates at Treblinka and it had been necessary to cremate about 860,000 bodies within a mere 122 days, building a pyre of 3,500 bodies wouldn’t have been an impracticable undertaking as Mattogno claims.

Another approach to establishing the number of bodies that could be burned on one of the Treblinka grates is looking at the cremation grid on the Dresden Altmarkt. This grate was about 20 feet (ca. 6.1 meters) long according to David Irving[195], roughly one fourth or one fifth of the length of a Treblinka grate. Assuming the same proportion for the area, the Treblinka grids had an area 4 to 5 times larger than the grate on the Dresden Altmarkt. According to Taylor[196], the dead on the Altmarkt were burned at the rate of one pyre per day, with around five hundred corpses per pyre. Assuming that the height and density at which the bodies were piled up at Treblinka was no larger than at Dresden[197], a pyre with an area 4 to 5 times higher could thus have burned 2,000 to 2,500 bodies per day. Building a pyre this size did not necessarily take longer than at Dresden if a sufficiently large labor force was available, moreover as such labor force would be assisted by excavators (which were not available at Dresden)[198] and, unlike at Dresden, no time was spent trying to identify the victims. A lower number of bodies per pyre were mentioned by Ukrainian Leleko[199], who testified that about 1,000 bodies were burned simultaneously. On the other hand, this witness mentioned that the burning process lasted "up to five hours", which could allow for more than one burning process per grid per day.

How many dead bodies per day did the Treblinka grids have to process on average? As mentioned above, bodies were cremated during a period of at least 5 but possibly as many as 7 months, so the average number of daily cremations, considering a total of ca. 789,000 corpses, was between 3,757 (7 months = 210 days) and 5,260 (5 months = 150 days). Two or three grids with a capacity of 2,000 to 2,500 corpses per day each would have been sufficient to achieve this daily average. However, evidence shows that the number of rosters was higher and that a correspondingly higher daily number of corpses could be burned at Treblinka:

Other efficiency measures introduced included increasing the number of cremation sites to six – thus enabling the workers to burn up to 12,000 corpses simultaneously – and placing the roasters nearer the mass graves to save time in transferring the bodies. The roasters occupied a good portion of the area east of the gas chambers, which was clear of mass graves and buildings.[200]

Mattogno mentions the statement of witness Henryk Reichman [Chil Rajchman) on 9 October 1945[201], quoted in, whereby five to six grates were built, each of which was able to accommodate 2,500 bodies at a time.[202] Wiernik doesn’t give the number of roasters, but mentions that "the Germans built additional fire grates and augmented the crews serving them, so that from 10,000 to 12,000 corpses were cremated at one time."[203]

The burning time of a pyre was calculated by Mattogno as the time required for the wood to be consumed by the fire, assuming a "sustainable value" for an open pyre of 80 kg per square meter per hour, and thus that 7,200 kg of wood could be burned under their 90 m² pyre in one hour.[204] The corresponding amount for a 66 m² pyre would be 66x80 = 5,280 kg of wood per hour. Considering the amounts of wood per corpse shown in Tables 8.22 and 8.23 (12.18 kg of dry wood or 23.14 kg of fresh wood), the average cremation times for 2,000 to 2,500 dead bodies would thus have been as shown in Table 8.25 below.

The highest burning time shown in this table is 11 hours and corresponds to the burning of 2,500 bodies with fresh wood on a 66 m² grate. With a 90 m² grate, the time would be reduced to 8 hours. Using dry wood, the time required to burn the amount corresponding to 2,500 bodies would be 6 hours on a 66 m² grate and 4 hours on a 90 m² grate.

Table 8.25 * Values rounded to nearest full hour

Another way to estimate the burning time of a pyre is to look at the times required for mass burning of carcasses when more or less competently handled. A related online source[205] contains information about the burning at High Bishopton Farm, Whithorn, Scotland, of 511 cattle, 90 sheep and 3 pigs over a period of three days on two separate pyres, each of which was 50 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. Assuming average carcass weights of 500 kg for cattle, 100 kg for pigs and 50 kg for sheep[206], the total weight of carcass mass burned was (511x500)+(90x50)+(3x100) = 260,300 kg. The area of the pyres was 2 x (50x1.5=) 75 m² = 150 m². Assuming a total cremation time of 72 hours[207], the carcass weight cremated per hour and square meter of pyre was 260,300÷(72x150) = 24.1 kg. At this rate a 66 m² pyre could burn 1,591 kg of carcass per hour, while 2,169 kg of carcass per hour could be burned on a 90 m² pyre.

Similar times were achieved by Dr. Lothes & Dr. Profé in their aforementioned carcass-burning experiments.[208] In experiments IV to VI (carcass placed on inner pit below ground), the outer pit was 2 meters long and 2 meters wide, the inner pit 2 meters long and 1 meter wide. T-carriers two meters long were placed across the width of the inner pit, resting on that pit’s borders, which were 0.5 meters wide on each side. The grate area was thus 2x1 = 2 square meters. Regarding experiments I to III (carcass placed on pit above ground) the length and width is not mentioned in the article, but it can be assumed that the 2-meter T-carriers also used in these experiments rested on the pit’s borders in the same way as they did on the inner pit’s borders in experiments IV to VI (that is, lying above 0.5 m of ground on either side) and that the area of the pit containing the combustion material, and accordingly the area of the grate, was 2x1 = 2 square meters in these experiments as well. The times required to burn the respective carcass weights, and the carcass weights consumed per hour and square meter of grate, were as shown in Table 8.26 below.

Table 8.26

The average of 16.51 kg burned per hour and square meter of carcass in the experiments I to III is below the corresponding average of the Whithorn pyres, whereas the average of experiments IV to VI is somewhat higher, further proving the efficiency of a method that combines protection of the fire against wind on the one hand and good air circulation on the other. The higher average achieved in mass cremation at Whithorn, in comparison to the burning of single carcasses in Lothes & Profés experiments I to III, suggests that the average of Lothes & Profés most efficient experiments could have been exceeded in mass cremation.

The following tables (8.27 to 8.29) calculate the number of hours required to burn 1,000, 2,000 and 2,500 corpses at Treblinka with an average weight of 18.95 kg per corpse (from Table 8.20), pyre areas of 66 m² and 90 m² and the aforementioned per hour and square meter throughputs of 16.51, 24.1 and 40.12 kg.

Table 8.27

Table 8.28

Table 8.29

It is noteworthy that the burning time mentioned by Leleko (5 hours for 1,000 bodies) is feasible assuming a time-efficiency comparable to that of Lothes & Profé’s experiments IV to IV – a scenario that should not be ruled out considering the possibility that accelerants like gasoline made up much if not most of the external combustion material.

Tables 8.30 and 8.31 show how long the burning of 789,000 corpses would take (considering the throughput, pyre area and corpse weight data from tables 8.27 to 8.29) with, respectively, 5 (Table 8.30) and 6 (Table 8.31) cremation grates of the sizes mentioned.

Table 8.30

Table 8.31

The worst case scenario in these two tables (5 grates with 66 m² each, throughput as in Lothes & Profé’s less efficient experiments I-III) means about 114 days (24-hour periods) required for cremation only, leaving between (150-114=) 36 and (210-114=) 96 days for building the pyres and other preparatory work depending on whether one considers a total cremation period of 5 months = 150 days or 7 months = 210 days. Assuming a grate area of 90 m² as M&G do, the period for such preparatory work is extended to (150-84=) 66 or (210-84=) 126 days. Assuming a throughput as in the Whithorn pyres, time for preparatory work would be extended to (150-78=) 72 days or (210-78 =) 132 days with 66 m² grates and (150-57=) 93 days or (210-57=) 153 days with 90 m² grates. With a throughput as in Lothes & Profé’s more fuel-efficient experiments IV-VI, time for preparatory work would largely exceed burning time proper with any grate size. With 6 instead of 5 grates, the burning times would be accordingly shorter and the time available for preparatory work accordingly longer. One can thus conclude that the SS at Treblinka could master the task of burning about 789,000 corpses within 5 to 7 months, if only they implemented an efficient cremation procedure and properly organized the preparatory work.[209]

Mattogno & Graf claimed that "if the cremation of 860,000 bodies in Treblinka had been initiated at the beginning of April 1943, then under the most favorable conditions it would have ended in December 1945, and the Soviets as well as His Honor Judge Łukaszkiewicz would have been able to personally attend the performance!"[210] Considering the above conclusions, this claim can – to use an expression of Mattogno & Graf’s[211] – evoke only amusement.

At Belzec the corpses cremated within a period of about 5 months weighed about 23.65 kg on average (Table 8.18), so the total corpse mass corresponding to ca. 435,000 corpses was 10,287,750 kg. Assuming the installed cremation capacity that was assumed for Treblinka in Table 8.30, one gets the burning times shown in Table 8.32.

Table 8.32

In the lowest average throughput scenario of Table 8.32, cremation would last between 58 (90 m² pyre) and 79 (66 m² pyre) complete days, leaving between 71 (66 m² pyre) and 92 (90 m² pyre) out of an assumed total cremation period of 150 days for preparatory work.

With only three equally dimensioned cremation grates (as assumed in Mattogno’s calculations[212]), times would be as shown in Table 8.33:

Table 8.33

The lowest installed capacity and throughput scenario (i.e. 3 pyres with an area of 66 m² with an average throughput of only 16.51 kg of corpse combusted per hour and square meter of grate) would mean 131 days of pure cremation time, leaving only 19 out of 150 days for preparatory work. In this scenario the cremation period would thus have had to be longer than 150 days, which would not be incompatible with the evidence insofar as at least one bystander witness mentioned cremation throughout the spring of 1943[213] and the stench of exhumed bodies was still noticed by another witness in April 1943, according to Reitlinger.[214] In the other scenarios the time left for preparatory work ranges between (150-96=) 54 and (150-40=) 110 days.

According to Belzec SS-man Heinrich Gley (see section 1 of this chapter), each of the camp’s first one and then two fireplaces (Feuerstellen) could burn about 2,000 corpses within 24 hours, the burnings being carried out night and day without interruption during a period of 5 months. This number corresponds to throughput scenario c) in Table 8.28 (Lothes & Profé’s experiments IV-VI) with 90 m² of pyre area, assuming that out of 24 hours 14 were available for preparatory work and 10 were pure cremation time, or with a 66 m² pyre assuming 10 hours for preparation and 14 hours for cremation. It is not clear whether by fireplace (Feuerstelle) Gley meant a single pyre or a cremation site consisting of more than one pyre like there were at Whithorn and Treblinka. Testimonies of outsider witnesses mentioning 3 or an undetermined number of cremation grates at Belzec[215] point in the latter direction.

Sobibor extermination camp could afford to burn its about 170,000 corpses weighing 36.43 kg on average (Table 8.16) at a more relaxed pace than Treblinka and Belzec, as it operated for a year after having implemented cremation as its body disposal procedure in October 1942. As shown in Table 8.34 below, a single 66 m² pyre could have handled all corpses within 237 days at most (leaving 365-237 = 128 days for preparatory work), but possibly within as few as 97 days (time left for preparatory work = 268 days). With a 90 m² pyre, cremation would have lasted 174 days at most (leaving 191 days for preparatory work), but possibly as little as 71 days (time left for preparatory work = 294 days).

Table 8.34

According to Mattogno, Graf & Kues, "the only incineration site identified for Sobibor" had an area of merely 30 square meters.[216] This claim is based on Kola’s description of the pit he called grave # 7[217], which translates as follows according to the Revisionist authors:

Grave No. 7 (?) is a site where corpses were burnt, with an area of at least 10 × 3m and a depth of up to 0.90 m, located in the central part of hectare XVIII, approx. 10 – 12 m to the south from the southern edge of grave No. 4. The deposits of cremated corpse remains appeared in 6 boreholes during drilling. There are soil transformations around the grave of unknown origins. The structure was classified as a grave only because of the cremated corpse remains. However, it is possible that it was just a place where corpses were burnt. In order to determine the function of the place accurately, more detailed excavations are required.[218]

The above text shows that Kola considered it possible (but not certain) that this "grave" was "just a place where corpses were burned". Not the (only) place where corpses were burned, but a "place where corpses were burned", i.e. one out of several burning sites. MGK conveniently transformed this into a categorical statement that grave # 7 was the (only) cremation site at Sobibor.

To make matters worse, MGK also ignored the fact that Kola considered each of graves nos. 1 and 2 to have been body-burning graves, obviously on account of having found only cremation remains but no whole corpses or larger unburned remains in these pits. The available English translations of Kola’s descriptions of these graves by MGK[219] and by Katarzyna Piotrowska[220] don’t differ significantly except as concerns the last paragraph of each grave’s description, which reads "It contains the remains of burned corpses" according to MGK and "It was a body burning grave" according to the author’s translator. The original Polish term in the article is "Grób cialopalny". "Grób" means "grave" and "cialopalny" obviously refers to a property of the grave, so it doesn’t look like the author’s translator made a mistake here. MGK, on the other hand, translated the term "Grób cialopalny" as "It contains remains of cremated corpses". This translation, while accurately rendering what the original text says about the contents of the grave (remains of cremated corpses), obfuscates Kola’s assessment of what the grave’s purpose had been, which the translation "body burning grave" conveys. Kola obviously assumed that, as graves nos. 1 and 2 contained only cremation remains, they had never been used for burying whole corpses but only for burning corpses whose cremation remains had then been buried in them.[221] One cannot help the suspicion that MGK mistranslated this passage in order to conceal from their readers the fact that the archaeologist had located two other cremation sites besides grave no. 7, which belies their claim that grave no. 7 was the "only incineration site identified for Sobibor".

MGK’s mistranslation is all the more understandable – from the point of view of their agenda – considering the surface areas of these graves: 400 m² for grave no. 1, 500 m² for grave no. 2. Even assuming that (as described in the Judgment LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64, see section 8.2.2) the cremation grid was placed inside the pit (possibly across a smaller pit dug at the bottom of a bigger pit, like in experiments IV to VI by Dr. Lothes & Dr. Profé) and that the pit’s bottom area was smaller than its surface area[222], it seems reasonable to assume that the two pits, with a combined surface area of 900 m² (or the single huge pit they originally constituted, see section 1 of this chapter), could accommodate a pyre area at least half the surface area, i.e. 450 m². So large an area would not have been required to cope with an average daily number of ca. (170,000÷365 =) 466 cremated corpses. However, there is evidence suggesting that cremation capacity at Sobibor was high enough to cope with peak loads more than 10 times higher. A Polish witness by the name of Piwonski, living in the village of Zlobek three kilometers to the north-west of the camp, was told by some of the Ukrainian guards that one day as many as 5,000 to 6,000 bodies were disinterred at Sobibor, obviously in order to be burned.[223] Piwonski’s mention of disinterred corpses calls for assuming that the cremation performance suggested by his Ukrainian interlocutors was achieved with decomposed corpses of deportees killed and buried during the first phase of the camp’s operation, until the end of July/early August 1942. The average weight of these deportees (Table 8.16, categories "A" and "B") was (1,968,046 ÷ 80,000) = 24.60 kg. With this average weight the times required to burn 6,000 corpses, assuming the same pyre areas as in Table 8.30 would have been as shown in Table 8.35 below.

Understandably uncomfortable with the idea of efficiently burning corpse pyres, MGK claim that "in mainstream Holocaust historiography the descriptions of the fires provided above speak of smoke and dust as phenomena which normally accompanied the incinerations, but this only goes to show, as we have already noted, that the combustion proceeded poorly.”[224]

Table 8.35

First of all, the descriptions provided "above" don’t necessarily bear out MGK’s reading, for they mostly mention flames that were widely visible, especially at night, rather than smoke and dust.[225] Second, smoke and dust do not necessarily indicate poor combustion but may also be due to the use of certain materials for burning, for instance tar. Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé observed in their experiments[226] that the smoke developed was considerable only as long as the tar was burning, their article further mentioning that stronger development of smoke was found to take place only at the start of the burning process. Even MGK would hardly argue that combustion proceeded "poorly" in the experiments of Dr. Lothes & Dr. Profé.[227]

Another of MGK’s claims is that, while fresh corpses could be arranged on the grate in a somewhat orderly fashion allowing for open spaces to be provided for the passage of air, the unearthed corpses were simply dumped from the excavator in vague piles of shapeless mass.[228]

One wonders whence MGK derived the notion that at Sobibor and the other Aktion Reinhard camps the unearthed corpses were simply dumped from the excavator onto the pyre. Certainly not from related eyewitness descriptions considered by historians, according to which the corpses were placed and arranged on the pyres by prisoner-workers after excavators had extracted them from the graves.[229] It’s also not like the corpses in the mass graves were necessarily a gooey, indistinguishable mass of flesh and bone; they might well have looked like the decomposed corpses of civilians found by Soviet investigating commissions at many Nazi killing sites.[230]

To be sure, arranging decomposed bodies on the grid must have been more unpleasant than doing so with bodies of freshly killed people, but there’s no reason why the prisoner-workers couldn’t have arranged them in a fashion at least as "orderly" as victims of the Dresden air attack on the pyre at the Altmarkt (see Image 8.5), whose cremation doesn’t seem to have been hampered by insufficient air circulation. The fragility of such bodies, which were likely to become separated into several pieces in the hands of their handlers, might even have helped a cremation-friendly arrangement.

Mattogno’s attempt to downsize cremation capacities at Chełmno has been discussed in detail in an earlier blog article[231], where it was demonstrated that the installed capacity of the two cremation ovens used on the camp’s 2^nd phase, assuming they were comparable to the Feist apparatus as Mattogno claims, was 288 x 2 = 576 corpses weighing 34 kg on average within 24 hours. This was sufficient to deal with the 7,176 deportees that arrived at Chełmno between June 23 and July 14, 1944, at an average of 326 per day.

The first phase of Chełmno extermination camp produced about 150,000 corpses, which were mostly burned on grid structures resembling those applied in the experiments of Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé, at the Aktion Reinhard camps and on the Dresden Altmarkt. In fact, the descriptions of Ismer and Frank Sch. mentioned in section 1 of this chapter suggest a method akin to the one applied by Lothes & Profé in experiments IV to VI, that of burning the corpses on grates placed inside of pits.

The witnesses’ descriptions, as also pointed out in section 1, are corroborated by the results of archaeological investigations in 2003/04, namely the descriptions of objects 3/03, 4/03, 20/03 and 5/03 and of indications that corpses were burned inside the second grave. Frank Sch.’s description points to 3 or 4 pits with an area of 20 m² each, i.e. a total pit area of 60 to 80 m². The witness’s estimates may have been on the low side, or the burning pits may have been enlarged after the time of his observation, for objects 3/03, 4/03, 20/03 and 5/03 have areas of, respectively, 72 m², 56 m², 64 m² and 14 m². Considering the possibility that the square object 20/03 was one of the 2nd phase ovens (like object 2/03, which has an equally large square surface area), it will for good measure be left out of the equation. The sum of the areas of objects 3/03, 4/03 and 5/03 is 142 m². Assuming for the scenario corresponding to Lothes & Profé’s experiments IV to VI that the grid area was half the pit surface area as in these experiments (i.e. 30 m² or 71 m² instead of 60 m² or 142 m² as in the scenarios corresponding to Lothes & Profé’s experiments I to III and the Whithorn pyres), and considering that only the decomposed corpses extracted from mass graves (104,360 corpses weighing 16.96 kg on average and 1,769,946 kg in total, see Table 8.21) were burned in open pyres whereas the corpses of those killed after July 1942 were burned in crematoria of the kind also described by Frank Sch., the corresponding burning times would be as shown in Table 8.36. In this table one can see that even a 30 m² grate area could have been sufficient to destroy these corpses within the assumed minimum cremation period of 5 months = 150 days, time for preparatory work exceeding cremation time proper in all throughput scenarios. The remaining 45,640 corpses of the 1^st phase could have been burned within about (45,640÷576 =) 79 days even with the two ovens used in the 2^nd phase. If can be safely assumed that the two crematoria with chimneys used in the 1^st phase had a higher capacity.

Table 8.36

[188] As note 35.

[189] M&G, Treblinka, p.148.

[190] M&G, Treblinka, p.147.

[191] M&G, Treblinka, p.148.

[192] See Chapter 7, where the average height of an adult Polish ghetto Jew was calculated as being about 1.60 meters. According to the R&D Ergonomics webpage (http://www.morencyrest.com/sizing.htm), the width of people with narrow shoulders, weighing less than 100 lbs (45.3 kg, more than the average weight of a malnourished adult Polish ghetto Jew considered by the author), is less than 16 inches (0.41 meters).

[193] M&G, Treblinka, p.147: "If one takes into consideration the fact that 3,000 bodies take up a volume of about (3,000×0.045 =) 135 m3, the claim, according to which the shovel of the excavator could be loaded with 3,000 bodies at a time, will evoke only amusement."

[194] Bay, Treblinka, ‘Appendix D - Ash Disposal and Burial Pits (Continued)’.

[195] As note 176.

[196] As note 177.

[197] Photographs such as the one shown as Image 8.5 above and on the website of the Deutsches Historisches Museum under http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/ph003739/index.html suggest that the height of the corpse pile above the grid was 2 to 3 meters. The volume of the pile of bodies was thus between (66÷4x2=) 33 and (90÷5x3 =) 54 cubic meters, meaning that the 500 bodies in each pyre were piled up at a concentration of 9 to 15 bodies per cubic meter.

[198] Survivor witness Oskar Strawczynski mentions the presence of three excavators, which "growled away from 4 o'clock in the morning until nightfall" over a period of "many months" (Strawczynski, ‘Escaping Hell’, p.169). His information as concerns the number of excavators corroborates and is corroborated by Alex Bay's analysis of the excavator photographs taken by the extermination camp’s deputy commandant Kurt Franz (Bay, Treblinka, ‘Reconstruction of the Death Camp (Continued’). Based on air and ground photo analysis, Bay managed to establish the place inside Treblinka extermination camp at which some of Franz’s excavator photos were taken (Bay, Treblinka, Figures 36, 37, 38, 43, D2 to D8), which hinders the claim that Franz went to photograph excavators at the gravel quarry by the Treblinka I labor camp in his free time – the only argument "Revisionists" have regarding these excavator photos, as the use of excavators is incompatible with a mere transit camp.

[199] See notes 34 and 42.

[200] Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, pp.175 f.

[201] Protokol, Henryk Reichman, 12.11.45, Lodz, AIPN NTN 69, p.29R, also published in Z. Łukaszkiewicz, Obóz straceń w Treblince.

[202] M&G, Treblinka, p.148.

[203] Wiernik, ‘A Year in Treblinka’, p.171. Mattogno & Graf (Treblinka, p.147) ignored the quoted passage and referred to a plan of the camp drawn by Wiernik that was presented at "the trial in Düsseldorf" to claim that there were just two cremation facilities because two are drawn on said plan. The plan, shown as Document 5 on page 319 of M&G’s book, is a sketch not drawn to scale that contains two symbols representing cremation grids, which are obviously meant to give a rough idea of the location of the grids rather than make a statement as to their number. It was also understood in this sense by the judges at the first Düsseldorf Treblinka trial, who in the judgment stated that the number of cremation roasters could not be established exactly in the main proceedings. M&G omit the respective passage from the judgment, even though it is at the end of the paragraph containing the description of the grids, which they quote on page 147.

[204] M&G, Treblinka, p.149. The same calculation was presented in Mattogno, Bełżec, p.86.

[205] ‘Report to Dumfries and Galloway Council about Air Monitoring of Carcass Pyre at Whithorn’, by Dr. C. MacDonald Glasgow Scientific Services, 3.10.2001, http://www.fmd-enviroimpact.scieh.scot.nhs.uk/Papers/FMD%20Whithorn.pdf. Pyre data are on page 6.

[206] As is done in the article ‘CBA of Foot and Mouth Disease Control Strategies: Environmental Impacts’ by Paul Watkiss and Alison Smith, http://archive.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/farmanimal/diseases/atoz/fmd/documents/environmental_report.pdf, p.4 n.7.

[207] It is not clearly stated in the source mentioned in the Report to Dumfried and Galloway Council (n.207) whether the set of pyres burned for three continuous days or whether several incinerations were carried out over a period of three days, as in the swine carcass burning experiment at Pilot Point, Texas in 1994 (as note 103). An indication in the latter direction is the mention on page 6 of the Whithorn report that on the third day of the pyre (50 hours after commencement) cattle mats were added, whereas descriptions of the plume monitoring process suggest continuously burning pyres. Assuming the latter, it is possible that not all carcasses were on the pyre at the time it was lit but some were added later in the manner suggested by photos in the BBC articles ‘Costly memories of foot-and-mouth’ (3 August 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6930719.stm), ‘Pollution fears of animal pyres’ (27 February, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/1843860.stm) and ‘Water warning over burial sites’ (25 May, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1350404.stm) and in the Sun article ‘Devastation of 2001 outbreak’ (4 August 2007, http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article262100.ece).

[208] As note 117.

[209] In this context it should also be borne in mind that cremation at Treblinka did not necessarily reduce the corpses to ashes like the carcasses on the Whithorn pyres or in the experiments of Lothes & Profé (see section 1 of this chapter).

[210] M&G, Treblinka, p.149.

[211] See note 196.

[212] Mattogno, Bełżec, p.86.

[213] Eustachy Ukraiński, see note 5.

[214] See note 8. Reitlinger also writes that working inmates were "occupied in effacing the mass graves" until June 1943.

[215] See note 5.

[216] MGK, Sobibór, p.145: "According to the official Holocaust historiography, the cremation of the corpses was carried out in a trench, on grates made of railway rails which rested on blocks of concrete. This trench, A. Kola informs us, measured 10 × 3 meters and was 90 centimeters deep." P. 146: "However, the only incineration site identified for Sobibór (cf. above) covered a surface area of 30 square meters and was 90 centimeters deep."

[217] Kola, ‘Sobibór’.

[218] MGK, Sobibór, p.120.

[219] MGK, Sobibór, p.118 f.

[220] Available under http://holocaustcontroversies.yuku.com/topic/1071

[221] As mentioned in section 1 of this chapter, Kola’s find corroborate related witness testimonies.

[222] Due to the sloping of the walls, see Chapter 7.

[223] Deposition of Jan Piwonski in Lublin on 29.04.1975, as note 24.

[224] MGK, Sobibór, p.147

[225] On p.141 of their Sobibór book, MGK quote an excerpt from the judgment LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64, including a passage whereby the light from the fires was visible inside and outside the camp. On page 142 they quote an excerpt from Schelvis, Sobibor mentioning that the mass cremations "resulted in huge fires, which flared up so high they could be seen far and wide, especially at night", that the Ukrainians in their watchtowers "could see the flames whenever the wind blew in their direction" and that the flames "were visible even from Piwonski’s house in the village of Zlobek three kilometres to the north-west". Judge Zdzisław Łukaszkiewicz is quoted on the same page with the following description: "The burning of the corpses was, however, difficult to hide, as the wind would spread a specific smell of fire all around and because the smoke and the fire from the burn sites were visible from far away. " This is the only mention of smoke from mainstream Holocaust historiography "provided above" by MGK.

[226] Lothes & Profé, as note 117

[227] Smoke can often be seen rising from carcass pyres, e.g. on the photos in the BBC articles ‘Dioxins: What are they?’ (23 April, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1292138.stm) and ‘Focus back on foot-and-mouth pyres’ (22 April, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1290619.stm). Were those pyres combusting poorly?

[228] MGK, Sobibór, p.147 f.

[229] See for instance Schelvis, Sobibor, p.111: "The operator would drive right up to the grid, where the Arbeitshäftlinge from Lager 3 piled the bodies into human pyramids. Then they were burnt." At Treblinka the procedure was the following (Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, p.176): "After the cremation installation had been constructed, the process of removing the bodies from the pits began. The work was initiated by a single excavator; later, a second excavator was brought in. The shovel’s scoop removed six to eight corpses with each dip and dumped them on the edge of the pit. A special team of prisoners, working in twos, transferred the corpses to the crematorium on stretchers."

[230] See, for instance, the following photos included in Muehlenkamp, ‘Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes’, 1.2.27,1.2.28,1.4.2, 1.4.3, 2.3.20, 2.3.21, 2.3.22, 2.3.23, 2.5.2, 2.5.6.

[231] Muehlenkamp, ‘Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 3)’.