Mattogno on early cremation at Treblinka

Following his failed attempt to challenge the authenticity of an inconvenient war diary entry^[1], Mattogno tries to tackle the evidence to early cremation at Treblinka extermination camp^[2], on pp. 1101 – 1107 of Mattogno, Kues and Graf’s magnum opus^[3]



His first target in this context are the following statements by my fellow blogger and co-author Jason Myers on p. 358 of the HC critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues^[4]:

Another Treblinka I inmate, Israel Cymlich, wrote in 1943 that "smoke was billowing from the pits and the terrible smell of burning human bodies spread through the air." Obviously the smells that Cymlich and Chodzko experienced were from the cremation of the mass graves filled with hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Treblinka extermination camp, which the Wehrmacht command of Ostrow believed were "not adequately buried."

which Mattogno comments in the following erudite manner:

Considering that this witness was detained in Treblinka I, which, as mentioned above, was located some 1.5 km as the crow flies from Treblinka II, any person of intelligence and good faith would ask how Cymlich could possibly know that the smoke "was billowing from the pits," but Myers does not meet these criteria, as is obvious from his conclusion:[…] "Obviously" this is a dishonest and ridiculous interpretation, because, as the “plagiarist bloggers” are well aware, the cremation of corpses, according to the canon of Holocaust historiography, began "at the end of February/beginning of March 1943." (p. 445). This is the reason for Myers’s hypocritical silence on the date of the complaint from Ortskommandantur Ostrów: 24 October 1942.

It obviously didn’t occur to the author of these fine lines that the first of the targeted statements didn’t contain a claim that Cymlich positively knew the details of the burning whose smell he noticed, the argument rather being that the witness noticed this smell and assumed (based on what he had learned about the place and his own conjectures) that the smell was coming from the burning of corpses in "the pits" at Treblinka extermination camp. In fact the witness Cymlich expressly stated that he didn’t know any particulars about the killing and body disposal process. ^[5]

As concerns the second targeted statement ("Obviously …"), Mattogno’s mumbling about "hypocritical silence" is hard to understand: just how is the recorded date of Ortskommandantur Ostrów’s complaint about the stench of decomposing corpses in Treblinka (24.10.1942) supposed to contradict the notion that the general exhumation and cremation of the corpses in the mass graves (which seems to be what Cymlich was referring to, judging by the context of his mention of the smoke "billowing from the pits")^[6] began in late February or early March 1943?

The rest of Mattogno’s above-quoted utterances is not much brighter, not only due to the "plagiarist bloggers" nonsense but also because there is no such thing as a "canon of Holocaust historiography" whereby corpse cremation at Treblinka only began at the end of February/beginning of March 1943, especially not in the sense that no corpses had been cremated at Treblinka before that time. The absence of such "canon" obviously didn’t escape Mattogno, for right after the above-quoted pearl he quotes, following a self-projecting accusation of "equal dishonesty", the following passages from p. 445 of the Critique:

From Treblinka extermination camp there are reports of corpse burning as early as August and September 1942. [27] These cremation procedures don’t seem to have been aimed at destroying all corpses in the graves, but rather at carbonizing the upper layers to stretch burial space and for hygienic purposes.[28] The same may have applied to reported cremations in the months of October, November and December 1942, another possibility being that these were early and not very successful attempts at wholesale cremation, perhaps motivated by shortage of burial space and/or by complaints such as one from the Wehrmacht local commandant in Ostrow about the unbearable stench of corpses emanating from Treblinka because the Jews there were not sufficiently buried.[29].

Note that the quoted paragraph refers to three footnotes. The first of them, note 27, mentions the following sources for cremations at Treblinka in August and September 1942: "Krzepicki, ‘Eighteen Days in Treblinka’, p.92; Eddi Weinstein, Steel Quenched in Cold Water, The Story of an Escape from Treblinka, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001, online excerpt under http://www.zchor.org/losice/weinstein.htm#treblinka; deposition of Samuel Rajzman on 26.09.1944, quoted in M&G, Treblinka, p.141f.". The second, note 28, is a comment about the witness Rajzman’s depositions, which will be addressed below. The third mentions the following sources for cremations in the months October, November and December 1942: "Strawczyinski, ‘Escaping Hell’, pp.129 ff.; Glazar, Trap With A Green Fence, p.29 f.; Mendel Korytnicki, 23.09.1944, GARF 7445-2-134, pl.57ob, quoted in Sergey Romanov, "The Clueless Duo and early corpse incineration in Treblinka and Belzec" (http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/01/clueless-duo-and-early-corpse.html)”.

Regarding the first two witnesses to cremation in August and September 1942 (Krzepicki and Weinstein), Mattogno is notably short of arguments; the only contradiction he can point out concerns the dates on which the burning of the corpses started: 24 August 1942 according to Weinstein, 27 August 1942 according to Krzepicki. The worst thing this would mean is that one or both of the witnesses were wrong about the date, without this affecting the accuracy of their remaining statements. However, if one considers the apparent purpose of cremations in August 1942 (carbonization of the upper layer of corpses as a hygienic measure, with a slight decrease in the volume of the corpses as an added benefit^[7]), neither of the two witnesses need have been wrong in his dating. It is also possible that the burning of bodies inside the mass graves, while a regular procedure, was not done every day. Krzepicki’s only mistake would then have been to assume that burning the corpses in the graves was a "new system" implemented after his first days in the camp, when actually the procedure had already been adopted prior to his arrival.

Mattogno gets more eloquent when it comes to witness Rajzman, who in his interrogation on 26 September 1944 had stated that when he arrived at Treblinka on 27 September 1942 "the corpses were burnt in primitive furnaces" and the pyres "burned day and night". To Mattogno, this means that "all three witnesses adduced by Muehlenkamp are in fact contradicting each other on “essential” matters". To a more reasonable mind, all this means is that Rajzman mixed up in his memory the kind of burning he had witnessed upon his arrival at Treblinka – burning of the corpses inside graves – with the burning in what he called "primitive furnaces" or "pyres", i.e. the general exhumation and cremation of the corpses that began at a later stage. No banana here for Mattogno, who then tries to discredit Rajzman by quoting Rajzman’s mistaken conjectures about the gassing process (pumping out the air from the chambers^[8], later replaced by poisoning with chlorine gas and Cyclon gas) and exaggerated estimate of the number of victims (2,775,000), as if these mistakes excluded Rajzman’s having been right about corpses having been cremated at Treblinka (albeit still sporadically and/or incompletely) at the time of his arrival. Mattogno also considers it a cardinal sin of Rajzman’s that in a later statement given to the Jewish Historical Commission the witness altered his previous version, attributing the burning of corpses at the time of his arrival to the camp’s "Lazarett", where "raging flames were unceasingly burning both the corpses of the transports and the persons killed on the spot". It may come as a surprise to Mattogno that forensic psychology assesses the phenomenon of witnesses changing certain parts of their account from one testimony to another rather differently than he does:

Constancy in the core of the action experienced as central by the informing person, as well as changes of single parts of the deposition( insofar as expectable according to the findings of the doctrine of error) speak for an event grounded in reality. Explanation: From the doctrine of error you know that nobody can at any given point in time completely recall all information that he has stored in his memory. Therefore it is only natural that in a repeated deposition additional details show up that were missing in the first deposition, while on the other hand some details from the first deposition are missing in the second deposition’s account and can only be brought back to memory through a reminder. Not only extensions on the one hand and one or the other omission on the other are a reality criterion, but even major corrections of the first deposition may be (see marginal note 293). ^[9]

So the differences between the first and second of Rajzman’s depositions quoted by Mattogno enhance rather than reduce the witness’s credibility.

What Mattogno calls a "third version" presented by Rajzman:

As soon as we came to Treblinka, we could smell the stench of tens of thousands of corpses. When I arrived, the Germans weren’t cremating the corpses; they were burying them, tens of thousands of people in ditches. They later figured that burying the victims was not such a good idea, because someday those ditches would be dug up and what had gone on there would become known. So they made these fires with grates and they brought steam shovels. They dug the dead out of the ditches and loaded them on the fire, where they burned 24 hours a day. The Germans poured oil on the corpses and oil underneath, and the fire burned continuously.

is not really a new version, but rather a juxtaposition of two different periods, one in which burial (despite partial cremation of corpses in mass graves, namely at the Lazarett) was the camp’s essential body disposal method, and another in which the previously buried corpses were disinterred and cremated.

Mattogno has no argument against my hypothesis that in his September 1944 deposition Rajzman may have mixed up in his memory the burning of the corpses in graves he witnessed upon his arrival with the later general exhumation and cremation of the interred corpses on pyres. All he can produce is this lame hollering:

In reality it is more likely that the witnesses "mixed up" mere propaganda stories, the same as he did with the claims regarding the pumping out the air ("Auspumpen der Luft") and "chlorine gas and Cyklon gas [Chlor-Gas und Cyklon-Gas]."

Needless to say, Mattogno’s spiteful (or shall we say frustrated?) bitching doesn’t explain where Rajzman is supposed to have got his "propaganda stories" from and/or why on earth a purveyor of "propaganda stories" (as opposed to a traumatized witness struggling to provide as accurate a picture of events as his fallible memory permitted) would mix up the same instead of keeping his story straight,.

So much for Mattogno’s attacks against Rajzman’s testimonies regarding cremation. Now, what about the witnesses whose testimonies I had referred to regarding corpse cremation in October, November or December 1942?

What about Oskar Strawczynski? This witness arrived at Treblinka with his (wholly murdered) family on 5 October 1942, and one of the impressions he recalled from the day of his arrival was the following^[10]:

We are led to an enormous square, piled with mountains of bundles. In the distance is a tall embankment on which a watchman saunters back and forth, his rifle at the ready. From behind the embankment, thick smoke bursts forth as if from a volcano.

What about Richard Glazar? This witness recalled the following^[11]:

One overcast November afternoon, flames leap into the sky from behind the sandy rampart and immediately spread. We catch sight of this enormous fire-spewing stage as we are marching down to evening roll call. Our bowls in hand, we hang out around the kitchen, illuminated by the dark red glow beyond and by light mounted on the barracks above us.
"They’re starting to burn the corpses." "There’s not enough room to bury them." "They want to get rid of every trace." Rumors spread with lightning speed through the camp, even before we reach our barracks. Robert is the last to crawl up into his bunk. "It’s not all that easy to burn so many bodies, and especially not on an open fire like that." He continues: "Bodies don’t really burn that well. They burn very poorly, in fact. You have to build big bonfires and put a lot of kindling in among the corpses, and then douse the whole thing in something very flammable. They’ve already had to do some trial runs." The bread sacks lay where they’ve been thrown, unopened. Everyone’s eyes turned from the bunks to the few small barred windows in the barracks. Beyond the windows, red flames have spilled across the sky, coloring the entire night dark red, then orange, and finally wafting away in sulphury smoke.

And what about Mendel Korytnicki? This witness’s deposition on 23.09.1944 was quoted by Sergey Romanov as follows^[12]

Incineration of corpses acquired a massive character in November of 1942. I saw how special excavators were digging up previously piled corpses, I also saw the so-called furnaces, in which the burning was performed.

How does Mattogno address these testimonies? Well, he doesn’t address them at all. In what is yet another demonstration of his intellectual dishonesty, Mattogno simply ignores these testimonies, quietly sweeps them under the carpet, and produces the following jewel (p. 1105):

Muehlenkamp therefore quite arbitrarily introduces "cremations in the months of October, November and December 1942" which are not attested to by any witness.

Then he attacks my above-quoted hypotheses concerning the reasons for early cremations at Treblinka as being "nothing but ridiculous", on the following grounds:

a) Cremation for hygienic purposes can be ruled out because "any carbonization of the surface layer of corpses in the graves would, needless to say, not have prevented the decay of all those below".
b) Cremation attempts in the period from 24 August to 27 September 1942 could bear no relation to the Ortskommandantur Ostrów’s complaint about the stench of insufficiently buried corpses in Treblinka, recorded on 24 October 1942.
c) An endeavor to stretch burial space or shortage of the same can also be ruled out ("merely a ridiculous excuse") as a reason for cremation, because burial space was not lacking at the Treblinka site ("From Muehlenkamp’s viewpoint this is all the more foolish because he supposes that the mass graves could contain "19.51 (20) corpses per cubic meter." (p. 418), from which follows that the mass grave described by Wiernik, measuring 100 × 25 × 15 = 37,500 m3 (cf. Chapter 8, point 97), could hold (37,500 × 20 =) 750,000 bodies – the vast majority of the alleged Treblinka victims! – in an area of a mere 2,500 square meters, while the total area of the camp amounts to 13.45 hectares2482 or 1,345,000 square meters.").

As concerns argument b), the complaint by the local Wehrmacht commandant in Ostrów recorded on 24 October 1942 may have been unrelated to cremation attempts in the period from 24 August to 27 September 1942, but it is likely to have been related to the attempts at wholesale cremation starting November 1942 that were mentioned by Glazar and Korytnicki – which is why Mattogno kept silent about these witnesses.

As concerns hygienic purposes, carbonization of the surface layer of corpses in the graves may not have prevented the decay of all those below, but the SS may have expected to create a crust that kept the effects of decomposition, i.e. stench and disease-causing germs, mostly below ground, in an endeavor similar to that undertaken by pharmacist Creteur at the Sedan battlefield in 1871^[13]. Whether either endeavor achieved the intended results is another matter.

As concerns space, the comparatively little reduction of the corpse volume by burning the upper layers of bodies in the graves (as described by Krzepicki and Weinstein) would have been an added benefit of the procedure rather than the reason why it was undertaken. In this context, it is amusing to see Mattogno, who elsewhere argues against the sufficiency of available burial space at Treblinka^[14], holler that space to accommodate hundreds of thousands of corpses was not lacking at the Treblinka site. All the more so as Mattogno tries to bring home his point with a straw-man, an obviously much exaggerated claim made by eyewitness Wiernik, who in his 1944 account about the camp^[15] provided more realistic (though probably still somewhat exaggerated, namely as concerns the depth^[16]) measurements for the pits in the camp’s reception area into which the corpses of deportees dead on arrival were thrown in the initial phase of the camp’s operation: 50 by 25 by 10 meters. Due to the sloping of the walls required to prevent the pit from caving in, such a pit would have a volume of 8502 m³, according to Alex Bay^[17]. At the initial concentration of 10.7 corpses per cubic meter that I am now considering for Bełżec^[18], such a grave could (without considering grave space recovery due to the corpses’ loss of volume during the decomposition process, namely loss of leachate seeping into the soil in the first two months after burial) have accommodated about 91,000 corpses. As Bay points out elsewhere in his reconstruction of Treblinka, graves this large would have taken weeks to complete even with mechanical excavators^[19]. And as Peter Laponder’s map reproduced on p. 424 of the Critique shows, it’s not like Treblinka extermination camp had wholly consisted of burial space or areas close to the places of killing (or to the places where dead people arrived) that could be converted into burial space. So burial space economy was an issue at Treblinka.

Following the lamentable arguments discussed above, Mattogno further disgraces himself by musing about "the flagrant contradiction between Myers and Muehlenkamp on this issue: while the former asserts that the commander could smell the stench coming "from the cremation of the mass graves filled with hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Treblinka extermination camp," although he "believed" the stench originated from the corpses not having been ‘adequately buried,’"2483 the latter has it that the cremations (anachronistically) began as a result of these complaints". Jason Myers was referring to Treblinka I inmates (not "the commander") sensing the stench of the burning of corpses whose decomposition stench the Wehrmacht commandant at Ostrów had earlier complained about, so there is no contradiction. The "anachronistically" remark as concerns this writer, again, is based on Mattogno’s dishonestly ignoring the above-quoted accounts of Glazar and Korytnicki, which I had referred to. Mattogno also ignores at least one survivor account that dates the beginning of a general endeavor to cremate the buried corpses to December 1942:

In December 1942 the criminals began to set up ovens to burn the corpses, but they did not work well, as the corpses refused to burn. For that reason a crematorium was built with special fittings. A special motor was attached that increased the flow of air, and in addition a lot of petrol was poured in. But the corpses still did not want to burn well. The maximum number of incinerated corpses reaches a thousand per day. The murderers are not satisfied with this small quantity. ^[20]

Last but not least, Mattogno takes issue with a statement by German author Jens Hoffmann, quoted in footnote 29 on p. 445 of the Critique (the same footnote, incidentally, in which I referred to the accounts of Strawczyinski, Glazar and Korytnicki), whereby the decision to undertake an overall cremation of the corpses was also related to the OK Ostrów’s complaint on 24 October 1942. Mattogno argues that this connection "does not make any sense from a exterminationist viewpoint, because cremations are said to have commenced only about four months later, and because this event was supposedly a direct result of Himmler’s visit to Treblinka in late February/early March 1943, and perhaps even initiated on his direct order."
Only in Mattogno’s fantasy world there is such a thing as an "exterminationist viewpoint" married to Yitzhak Arad’s assumption regarding the start of "cremations" at Treblinka. In the real world historiography is subject to revision, and what the evidence suggests is that there were three phases in which corpses were cremated at Treblinka:

- 1st phase, beginning in late August 1942 and lasting until October of that year: not very successful attempts to burn the upper layers of corpses in the graves for hygienic purposes (especially in order to combat the smell of decomposition emanating from the corpses), burning of deportees murdered in the Lazarett;
- 2nd phase, beginning in November or December 1942: not very successful attempts (see e.g. Rajchman’s account quoted above) to burn all the corpses, (also) motivated by at least one complaint about the stench emanating from insufficiently buried corpses as the graves in camp’s extermination sector were filled to or beyond capacity; ^[21]
- 3rd phase, after an efficient cremation procedure had been implemented, in which the corpses were systematically removed from the mass graves with excavators and burned on pyres made of concrete bases and railway rails.
The 3rd phase may have started in late February/early March 1943, or earlier than that. Rajchman^[22] mentions that a specialist nicknamed the "Artist" by the inmates arrived in January 1943, though his account of how the new procedure was put into practice suggests that it took some time before the "Artist" succeeded in implementing an efficient cremation system. Camp commandant Stangl recalled "the beginning of 1943" as the time when "excavators were brought in", "the corpses were removed from the huge ditches which had been used until then", and the "old" corpses "were burned on the roasters, along with the new bodies". SS Oberscharführer Heinrich Matthes, the commander of the extermination area, credited "SS Oberscharführer or Hauptscharführer Floss" with the new arrangement in which "railway lines and concrete blocks were placed together" and the corpses "were piled on these rails"^[23]. Floss must have been the man known as the "Artist" by the camp’s inmates, according to Rajchman.

The subdivision of cremation procedures at Treblinka into these three phases is hypothetical, and while supported by the available evidence it cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. However, it is an effort to construct a narrative based on the available evidence, which is what historiography is about. Mattogno would speak of "affirmationism" if he were undertaking such effort, instead of just attacking inconvenient evidence without attempting to put together a competing narrative.

Incidentally, 13.45 hectares are not 1,345,000 square meters, but 134,500 square meters.

Notes

[1] See the blog "A document that forced Mattogno to claim "forgery"" ([link])
[2] "Early" in this context means prior to the general exhumation of corpses and their cremation on pyres that began in late February or early March 1943 pursuant to Himmler’s orders, according to Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, pp. 173f.
[3] The "Extermination Camps" of "Aktion Reinhardt" An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the "Holocaust Controversies" Bloggers, 2013 Castle Hill Publishers, UK, online under [link]. Also known as "The Steaming Pile of MGK Manure" ([link]), or "MGK’s SPOM" for short.
[4]Jonathan Harrison, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jason Myers, Sergey Romanov, Nicholas Terry, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues, A Holocaust Controversies White Paper, First Edition, December 2011, online i.a. under [link] and [link], hereinafter the "Critique".
[5] The pertinent passage of Cymlich’s account reads as follows: "The Germans guarded the secrets of the death camp well. At a later stage, all this was to leak out – but meanwhile smoke was billowing from the pits and the terrible smell of burning corpses spread through the air. All we knew was that the corpses were completely burned; nothing specific, however, was known about the methods of mass killing". (Escaping Hell in Treblinka. Israel Cymlich. Oskar Strawczyinski, Yad Vashem and The Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project, New York and Jerusalem 2007, p. 38; emphasis added.)
[6]See previous note.
[7]See the blog "The Clueless Duo and early corpse incineration in Treblinka and Belzec", by Sergey Romanov ([link])
[8]The mistaken notion that air was pumped out of the gas chambers may have been related to a procedure described by Sobibór Gasmeister Erich Bauer whereby "The chambers were permanently connected to the engine; the way it worked was that if a wooden plug was pulled out, the fumes went outside; if the plug was pushed into the pipe, the fumes went into the chamber.". Such procedure may also have been at the root of Rudolf Reder’s mistaken notions about the gassing process at Bełżec extermination camp, see the blog "The oh-so-unreliable Rudolf Reder" ([link]).
[9]Rolf Bender and Armin Nack, Tatsachenfeststellung vor Gericht - Band I: Glaubwürdigkeits- und Beweislehre, excerpt quoted and translated under [link]).
[10] Escaping Hell in Treblinka , pp. 129f. (excerpt quoted under [link])
[11] Richard Glazar, Trap with a Green Fence, 1995 translation from the German original by Northwestern University Press, pp. 29f. (excerpt quoted under [link])
[12] See the blog "The Clueless Duo and early corpse incineration in Treblinka and Belzec" ([link])
[13] H. Froelich ("Zur Gesundheitspflege auf den Schlachtfeldern", in Deutsche Militaeraerztliche Zeitschrift, 1872, pp. 39ff, quoted in Sergey Romanov, "The Clueless Duo…" (as previous note).
[14] See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 2)" [link].
[15] Jankiel Wiernik: "One Year in Treblinka", in: The Death Camp Treblinka. A Documentary, edited by Alexander Donat, New York 1979, pages 147 to 188 (transcription under [link]).
[16] The pits in the camp’s "area of cremation", which I consider to have been the burial area (or one of the burial areas) of Treblinka’s extermination sector, were found by crime site investigations to have been 7.5 meters deep (see Critique, pp. 394-95). The pits in the receiving sector were probably no deeper.
[17] Alex Bay, "The Reconstruction of Treblinka" - "Appendix D - Ash Disposal and Burial Pits (Continued)" ([link])
[18] See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 1)" ([link])
[19] See Critique, pp. 438f.
[20] Chil Rajchman, The Last Jew of Treblinka, translated from Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld, 2009 Pegasus Books, New York, p. 84.
[21]Peter Laponder’s map of Treblinka in August 1943, shown on p. 424 of the Critique, suggests that all burial areas available in the "death camp" sector had been used. New graves could have been made elsewhere, but this would have taken time and the graves would have been further away from the gas chambers, thus delaying transportation of the corpses to the graves. Used grave space in the "death camp" could be recovered as leachate emanating from the corpses reduced their volume, but this would not solve the problem of decomposition stench.
[22]The Last Jew of Treblinka, pp. 85-88.
[23]Stangl and Matthes are quoted in Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, pp. 173f.