Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2
Part 2, Section 3
Part 2, Section 4
Part 2, Section 5
Part 3, Section 1
Part 3, Section 2
Part 4
Duration of Cremations (2)
Based on a number of eyewitness testimonies and a secondary source, the construction and size of a Bełżec cremation grate was reconstructed by Sara Berger as follows[271] (my translation):
Together with some comrades and guards Gley obtained ten railway rails about ten meters long, trolley rails and huge stones. They mounted the rails onto the stones, so that these, together with the trolley rails meant to keep the corpses from sliding through, formed a heightened grid roaster. With the help an excavator and the reinforced working detachment they alternately placed corpses and wood on the railway rails, poured flammable liquid like oil and gasoline over the corpses and ignited them. The Jewish »burning detachment« had to keep the fire going and see to it that the corpses burned completely.
The length of the grate, bar evidence that rails were aligned in a row to make it longer, was thus ten meters. Assuming that the rails were 12.5 cm wide at the base and the distance between them was 50 cm (which seems reasonable considering the use of trolley rails to keep the corpses from sliding through), the grate would have been 5.75 meters wide, about the same as one of the roasters or the single roaster at Sobibór, which was 10 meters long and six meters wide[272]. I shall therefore assume the same measurements (10 x 6 meters = 60 m²) for a Bełżec roaster.
According to Gley, as quoted on p. 441 of the critique[273], there was initially only one fireplace (Feuerstelle), and about 4 weeks after commencement of the burning operation another fireplace was erected. So Gley must have gone procuring rails on at least two occasions – possibly more, considering that it is not clear whether by fireplace (Feuerstelle) Gley meant a single pyre or a cremation site consisting of more than one pyre, while on the other hand there are testimonies of outsider witnesses mentioning 3 or an undetermined number of cremation grates at Bełżec[274]. So we can conclude that Bełżec had at least two grates with a total area of (2 x 6 x 10 =) 120 m² or 3 grates with a total area of (3 x 6 x 10 =) 180 m². That’s about 9 to 13 times the area of the Dresden pyre estimated above, so if that pyre could incinerate 500 corpses per day, the pyres of Bełżec could manage a daily average of 4,500 to 6,500 corpses. Gley stated that each grate could burn about 2,000 corpses within 24 hours, so the capacity of two grates would be 4,000, that of three grates 6,000 within 24 hours. Comparison with the Dresden pyres suggests that these figures are realistic, even conservative.
The other calculation method establishes, like in regard to Treblinka, how much time would have been required with the throughputs from Table 3.4 to cremate the mass of corpses and wood that would have required burning if Bełżec had relied on dry wood as its (main) external combustion agent. The results, considering the figures from Table 2.26 in Part 2 (12,555,644 kg of corpse mass plus 8,689,909 of wood = 21,245,553 kg) are the following:
We see that even with three grates of the assumed dimensions, burning the corpses of 434,508 deportees within the time frame given by Gley (5 months at one fireplace, 4 months at both) would be compatible only with the throughput values of Lothes & Profé’s experiments IV to V and the Whithorn pyres.
The picture changes, however, if the cremation relied chiefly on liquid fuel as the external combustion agent and the amount of wood was accordingly lower. In Part 2, Section 1 I submitted the following solid and liquid fuel requirements for the Dresden pyres, deliberately maximizing the former:
Dry wood placed under the grates: 115,356 kg
Dry wood equivalent of gasoline: 188,376 kg
Sum total: 303,732 kg.
The relation is roughly 38 % wood, 62 % liquid fuel. If this relation is applied to the Bełżec pyres and the amount of wood is reduced accordingly, the mass or corpses and wood to be burned is reduced to 15,856,031 kg, and the burning times are the following:
We see that in this scenario, the time frame given by Gley[275] is additionally compatible with the throughput of Lothes & Profé’s experiment nr. III, even though this would imply that only about 23 % of the time (ca. 5 ½ hours a day) was available for putting together a pyre.
An indication that liquid fuel was indeed the predominant external combustion agent at Bełżec can be found in the expert opinion of coroner Dr. Mieczyslaw Pietraszkiewicz, quoted on pp. 384f. of the critique. The coroner found that "the aforementioned bones and soft tissue parts as well as the ash are predominantly of human origin" whereas "A very small part comes from wood."
As concerns the time of cremations, Mattogno claims that I assume 150 days "without giving a source", even though on p. 499 I expressly refer to the testimony of Heinrich Gley, whose account of the cremations I had quoted at length on p. 441. Mattogno tries to make believe that I derived these 150 days from Gley’s recollection that the operation "should have lasted from November 1942 until March 1943", which he contrasts with Gley’s earlier statement that the general exhumation and cremation of the corpses began after the gassings were stopped. As this happened in December 1942 "according to Arad", Mattogno reasons that the cremation cannot have started before that month. However, he omits the fact that Gley not only gave the November 1942 to March 1943 time frame after that statement, but expressly stated the following, as reproduced in my quote:
One fireplace allowed for burning about 2,000 corpses within 24 hours. About two [correction: four] weeks after the beginning of the burning action the second fireplace was erected. Thus on average there were burned about 300,000 bodies at the one fireplace over a period of 5 months and 240,000 bodies at the other fireplace over a period of 4 months. Of course these are only approximate estimates. It should be correct to put the total number of corpses at 500,000.
Mattogno claims that in the interrogation of 8 March 1961 Gley explicitly said that he received the task to procure the rail tracks for the cremations in early 1943. As mentioned above, he must have performed this procurement task more than once, the first time before the first fireplace was erected, and later when the second fireplace was set up. Another of Mattogno’s arguments to shorten the cremation period is that the witness Reder escaped from Bełżec "at the end of November" 1942, the cremations had not yet started. However, Reder was not very good at dates. Thus he claimed in his report[276] that people from the surrounding areas had told him about ever less transports arriving in 1943 and the opening of the graves and cremation of the corpses having happened in 1944. It is thus possible that his escape from Bełżec happened earlier than he recalled.
After his failed attempt to shorten the cremation period at Bełżec, Mattogno disgraces himself by accusing me of having "kept silent about the fact that the total number of cremated corpses according to Gley is 540,000, 105,500 more than the number accepted" by me. I’ll leave it open whether he just overlooked the prominent quote of Gley’s account on p. 441 of the critique, with the footnote whereby "Gley’s estimate of the number of bodies cremated must be considered too high in light of the Höfle Report, whereby the total number of Jews deported to Belzec was 434,508", whether he had forgotten it by the time he got to arguing the duration of cremations, or whether he is again arguing against better knowledge. Either way, Mattogno once more made a fool of himself.
On we move to Sobibór. As mentioned in Part 1[277], cremation replaced burial as the camp’s body disposal method in October 1942 and was extended to the previously buried victims in late November or early December 1942. Sara Berger considers it probable that there was only a single roaster 10 meters long and 6 meters wide[278], so I’m assuming a total grate area of 60 m² for this camp. Comparison with the Dresden pyres suggests that the Sobibór roaster could burn over (4 x 500 =) 2,000 corpses per day. At this rate, burning the corpses of all 170,165 deportees murdered at Sobibór would take about 85 days, and burning the disinterred corpses (for which Mattogno gives the number 85,000 on p. 1438, quoting a witness statement by Jan Piwoński whereby these corpses were burned from December 1942 until February or March 1943) would take just 43 days, meaning that, if Piwoński’s time frame is correct, the cremation of the disinterred corpses must have proceeded at a comparatively relaxed and leisurely pace, unless numerous freshly killed deportees had to be cremated as well in that period. If we take the throughput values from Table 3.4 and consider the dry wood requirements from Table 2.25 in Part 2, the times required to burn 11,630,696 kg of corpses and wood (corresponding to 170,165 corpses) or 5,809,750 kg of corpses and wood (corresponding to 85,000 corpses) would have been the following:
According to the above table the cremation of the disinterred corpses must have taken longer than recalled by Piwoński, unless the throughput was like in Lothes & Profé’s experiments IV to VI or like in the Whithorn pyres – or unless the wood was mostly replaced by liquid fuel. The cremation of all corpses at Sobibór, which took place for a year after cremation was implemented, would be compatible with the throughput of Lothes & Profé experiment nr. III, the average of experiments I to III, each and the average of experiments IV to VI, the Whithorn pyres and the USDA/NAHEM model pyre. So, one grate with an area of 60 m² was sufficient to serve Sobibór’s cremation purposes.
Mattogno (p. 1436) insists that grave nr. 7 identified by Prof. Kola in 2001 was the only site to which Kola attributed the possibility of it having been a cremation site, even though this is not what becomes apparent from his own translation in MGK’s Sobibór book, which reads as follows[279]:
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 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.
Having realized that this translation does not serve his argument, Mattogno now changes the translation of the above paragraph’s fore-last sentence, which in Polish reads "Być może jest to jednak miejsce, gdzie palono zwłoki", into "this could be the location where the corpses were burned". However, the context of the previous sentence ("The structure was classified as a grave only because of the cremated corpse remains."), and the expression "a site where corpses were burnt", whose translation Mattogno left unchanged, suggest that Mattogno’s earlier translation of the fore-last sentence was the correct one, and that he is now manipulating his own earlier translation for his convenience.
Based on the translation of the term grób ciałopalny by Polish native speaker who translated Prof. Kola’s 2001 report into English for me, I had argued that Prof. Kola had considered each of graves nos. 1 and 2 to be "a body burning grave", i.e. a grave in which bodies were burned, whereas Mattogno insists that his translation, whereby grób ciałopalny means "a pit (gravesite) containing remains of cremated corpses, not a cremation pit", is the correct one. Though a Systran translation of grób ciałopalny as "crematory grave" confirms the correctness of my translator’s translation, the issue can be ultimately left open. This because the area of grave nr. 7 was stated by Prof. Kola to be "at least" 10 x 3 m, meaning that it could have been larger, and subsequent archaeological research by Haimi and Mazurek has further hardened this possibility. Their description[280] suggests the probability that the area of grave nr. 7 was twice or more than twice as large as the minimum estimated by Kola, and thus sufficient to contain a 60 m² cremation grate.
After briefly trying to rekindle the discussion about whether the grates of the Sobibór cremation facility were above a pit (as recalled by some witnesses and assumed by historian Jules Schelvis, who Mattogno quotes) or inside a pit (as recalled by other witnesses[281]), and after arguing that a pyre area of 450 m² (the possibility of which I had considered based on the assumption that graves nos. 1 and 2 were cremation graves) would have been far more than Sobibór needed (which is correct), Mattogno takes issue (p. 1437f.) with my interpretation of a statement by Polish witness Piwónski whereby he had been told by some of the Ukrainian guards that one day as many as 5,000 to 6,000 bodies were disinterred at Sobibór. Mattogno argues that, contrary to my interpretation, the witness’s statement doesn’t imply that the mentioned number of corpses was burned on the day of their disinterment. That is fine with me insofar as Sobibór never needed to burn that many corpses in a single day (neither did Treblinka or Bełżec, for that matter).
Thereafter Mattogno addresses the issue of smoke emanating from the cremation pyres as a sign of inefficient combustion (p. 1439). In this respect I had argued that a) outsider witnesses mostly mention flames that were widely visible, especially at night, rather than smoke and dust and b) smoke may also be due to the use of certain materials for burning, for example the tar used as an accelerant in some of Lothes & Profé’s experiments. Mattogno counters the first argument with a quote from p. 357 of the critique that refers to a Soviet report whereby hundreds of Treblinka bystander witnesses "saw giant columns of black smoke from the camp". The second he basically ignores, repeating his worn mantra whereby "comparison of Lothes/Profé’s single carcass with a grid containing several thousand corpses is nonsensical, because in the former case the combustion process could easily be managed while in the latter this was impossible" (Mattogno has not yet revealed what exactly, besides feeding entrails piecemeal into the fire in most but not all experiments, Lothes & Profé are supposed to have done to manage the combustion process, and there’s evidence regarding both Treblinka and Bełżec, mentioned in Sara Berger’s book[282], that managing the combustion process there was not as impossible as Mattogno claims). He also proclaims smoke as a sign of incomplete combustion to be "an elementary principle known for several centuries", and supports this with a quote from a 1918 technical publication whereby heat loss "can reach even 10%, in the case of black dense smoke" - such as can be seen on some pictures of FMD pyres, I presume[283]. However, his argument is hardly a strong one because, as we have seen, incomplete combustion (leaving behind whole skeletons, body parts that retained their natural shape, bones that had to be put on the pyre a second time or crushed in an almost unburned state, skulls, even unburned tissue) was precisely the result of the pyres at the Nazi extermination camps.
Mattogno further adduces the impact that the weather would have on the cremation process, namely if, like at Bełżec, it was done in the wintertime. He speaks of "frozen soil and frozen corpses" burned with "frozen wood cut every day in the forests". However, the soil of graves opened starting November 1942 need not have been frozen, the same applies to the corpses, and instead of "frozen wood cut every day in the forests" Gley and his work teams could have used stockpiled brushwood from the constant renewal of the camouflage fencings, dry wood obtained from external suppliers and high amounts of liquid fuel.
To Mattogno’s argument that "the unearthed corpses were simply dumped from the excavator in vague piles of shapeless mass", thus not allowing for open spaces to be provided for the passage of air, I had responded that this was in contradiction with eyewitness testimonies whereby the corpses were placed and arranged on the pyres by prisoner-workers after excavators had extracted them from the graves. Mattogno counters (pp. 440f) that "the testimonies are contradictory", and in support of this supposed contradiction presents a second hand testimony from Jan Piwónski whereby a Sobibór guard had told him about the bodies being placed on the grate with an excavator after the fire was burning, a statement by Treblinka witness Reichmann whereby corpses were placed on the grid "with the excavators from the pits" and a "similar statement" by Sobibór witness Kurt Thomas. Only one of these witnesses (Reichmann) ever got to see the grates with his own eyes, and his statement quoted by Mattogno doesn’t rule out the intervention of workers placing and arranging the bodies on the grates, moreover as this procedure, in which the carriers work according to instructions whereby "the first layer of corpses should consist of women, especially fat women, placed with their bellies on the rail" (after which "anything that arrives can be laid on top") and "grab the human body parts with their hands, throw them into the litters and quickly carry them to the ovens", and later a special commando is created for the purpose of "tossing the dead onto the carriers’ litters", is described in detail in Chil Rajchman’s memoirs[284].
I further argued that the corpses in the mass graves were not necessarily a shapeless mass of flesh and bone but may have looked like the decomposed corpses of civilians found by Soviet investigating commissions at many Nazi killing sites. On the pretext that Soviet investigations are "comparatively poorly documented", Mattogno changes the subject to his favorite Katyn and argues that there the corpses were extracted by hand "with great care and diligence" (which is irrelevant to the question what the corpses looked like prior to extraction) and were mostly in a state of corpse wax-fat formation. However, I wasn’t talking about Katyn, and if Mattogno doesn’t want to look at the images of people murdered by his Nazi heroes, that’s all the more a reason for showing him the following, which are among those mentioned in note 230 on p. 503 of the critique[285]:
Image 3.3 - "1.2.27 USHMM 85805 Soviet soldiers exhume a mass grave in Lvov"
Image 3.4 - "1.2.28 USHMM 86588 Soviets exhume a mass grave in Zloczow shortly after the liberation"
Image 3.5 - "2.3.20: Dorogobush/Smolensk region on 5.9.1943: women try to identify their relatives."
Image 3.6 - "2.3.21: Near the Ukrainian village of Petrikovo/by Tarnopol. Members of a Soviet investigation commission before the exhumed corpses of civilians shot."
Image 3.7 - "2.3.22: Soviet military medics examine exhumed corpses."
Image 3.8 - "2.3.23: Forensic medics from a Soviet investigation commission in the village of Polikovichi near Mogilev. Among the people murdered there are also babies and children. For comparison the corpse of an adult was placed in the foreground."
Image 3.9 - "2.5.2: Victims of the Gestapo in Oryol. The gorge where the civilians were shot."
Image 3.10 - "2.5.6: Taganrog. Soviet citizens tortured to death."While arranging decomposed or decomposing bodies on the grid must have been more unpleasant than doing so with bodies of freshly killed people, 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. The fragility of the bodies from the extermination camps’ graves, which were likely to become separated into several pieces in the hands of their handlers, might even have helped a cremation-friendly arrangement. Against the former of these arguments Mattogno protests that the arrangement of the bodies on the Dresden pyres was not "orderly" enough for his taste. The latter he ignores, instead producing a photo[286] supposed to demonstrate that corpses in putrefaction exhumed from mass graves with excavators could not be considered anything but an "indistinguishable mass of flesh and bone". However, the piglet shown on the photo, even though it has reached the stage of butyric fermentation, still has the distinguishable forms of a piglet, and this applies all the more to the piglet in the previous stage of black putrefaction[287], which I now consider most exhumed corpses to have reached.
Regarding Chełmno, one has to distinguish between the camp’s first phase (1942/43), in which about 150,000 people were murdered, and the second phase (mid-1944), in which the number of murdered deportees was 7,176. I start with the second phase, like I did in the critique, where I referred to my calculations in an earlier blog[288] regarding the capacity of the two chimneyless ovens described by witnesses Zurawski, Srebrnik and Bruno Israel, which Mattogno likens to the Feist apparatus for cremating carcasses. Regarding that apparatus, Mattogno quoted a technical description[289] containing the information he translates as follows:
The complete combustion required from 5 to 6 hours for the small animals and from 8 to 9 hours for the bigger ones which weighed from 250 to 500 kg, that is like 4-8 corpses of an average weight of 60 kg each.
Mattogno (p. 1443) wants this understood as meaning "that the 8-9 hours refer to carcasses from 250 to 500 kg and the 5-6 hours to carcasses weighing less than 250 kg", and attributes my different interpretation of this statement to "stupidity or bad faith". However, it is Mattogno’s interpretation that makes no sense. For if the author of this technical paper had wanted to distinguish between animals weighing more and such weighing less than 250 kg, why didn’t he simply say so? And what sense would it then make to point out that one carcass weighing 250 to 500 kg corresponds to "4-8 corpses of an average weight of 60 kg"? No, what the author of this technical paper obviously meant to say was that the cremation of 250-500 kg of carcass mass takes 8-9 hours if that mass consists of bigger animals (weighing 250 to 500 kg apiece) and 5-6 hours if that mass consists of smaller animals (weighing 60 kg apiece on average). In other words, smaller animals burn faster than bigger ones even if their number adds up to the same mass.
Human beings being akin to smaller animals, the cremation of up to (8 x 60 =) 480 kg of corpse mass consisting of human being would take 5 – 6 hours, which considering the area of the Feist ovens’ grid (0.6 m²) corresponds to a throughput of at least (480 ÷ 6 ÷ 0.6 =) 133 kg of corpse mass per hour and m² of grid area. The area of the Chełmno ovens’ grid, according to testimonies, was (1.5 x 2 =) 3 m² and could thus handle three times that number or 399 kg, corresponding to 10.5 corpses à 38 kg per hour and oven, or 21 corpses per hour for the two ovens. Burning the corpses of 7,176 ghettos deportees murdered in the camp’s second phase would thus take (7,176 ÷ 21 =) ca. 342 hours or 14.25 days. The killing period of the second phase lasted from 23 June to 14 July 1944, i.e. for 22 days, and cremation could have continued thereafter, so there’s no reason why the capacity of these two ovens should have been insufficient for the number of corpses they had to handle. And this is assuming that the corpses were completely cremated as they would be in a Feist oven according to Puntigam’s article referred to in Part 2, Section 2[290] and the technical paper quoted by Mattogno in his Chełmno book, whereby "everything is reduced completely, leaving an ash residue of 1 to 2.5 kg"[291]. An incomplete cremation requiring intensive post-cremation processing, such as was practiced at Chełmno and the other extermination camps, would require much less time. And also much less fuel, which is why Mattogno’s arguments based on the claimed fuel consumption of the Feist oven are as irrelevant as his calculation of how long the Chełmno ovens, according to his throughput assumptions, would have required to cremate "the 21,685 corpses of the alleged gassed in the first two weeks of September 1942, shortly before Höss’s alleged visit". The latter remark further suggests that Mattogno either has not yet been able to tell 1942 from 1944 and the camp’s first phase from the second one, or that he expects to continue fooling his readers by cheerfully mixing up the two.
As concerns the first phase of the camp’s operation, I had considered the 3 or 4 cremation pits described by Franz Schalling, in which I assumed the grids mentioned by Fritz Ismer to have been placed, to correspond to at least the objects 3/03, 4/03 and 5/03 identified during archaeological excavations in 2003/04. Given the discrepancies between the measurements given for the pits by Schalling (20 m² each, which would give three pits a total area of 60 m²) and the measurements of objects 3/03, 4/03 and 5/03 discovered in archaeological investigations in 2003/04, whose combined area is 142 m²[292], I had considered both possibilities for my cremation time calculations, reckoning that Schalling may have underestimated the areas of the pits or the same may have been enlarged after the time of his observation. As the descriptions of Ismer and Schalling together 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, I had for good measure considered that, like in these experiments, the grate area had been only half the pit area (30 m² and 71 m²) when applying the throughput of these experiments to the numbers and weights of corpses assumed to be cremated in Chełmno’s first phase facilities. The corresponding calculations with the throughput of burned corpses and wood according to Table 3.4 would be the following, considering the 95,510 category "B" corpses in Table 2.28 of Part 2, Section 5 (2,122,710 kg of corpse weight plus 1,270,721 kg of wood weight = 3,393,431 kg of solid mass to be burned):
We see that in any scenario the number of days required for cremation would have been well below the at least 5 months of the 1st phase during which corpses were cremated at Chełmno.
The remaining 54,490 corpses of the 1st phase could have been burned within about (54,490 ÷21 =) ca. 2,595 hours = ca. 108 days even with the two ovens used in the 2nd phase. If can be safely assumed that the crematorium or crematoria with chimneys used in the 1st phase had a higher capacity.
Mattogno’s objections to my arguments and calculations in the critique are quite pathetic.
The first (p. 1445) is that no "orthodox holocaust historian" takes the 3 or 4 pits mentioned by Schalling into consideration. To which the simple answer is: so what? I’m not bound by what historians did or did not take into consideration.
The second is that if I accept Shalling’s testimony, then I must also accept the findings of fact of the Bonn Jury Court’s judgment of 30 March 1963, which mention a single cremation pit with the measurements of 4 x 4 meters. This is utter nonsense, of course. Using a court’s findings of fact as a source is fine where it can be assumed that the court duly took all available evidence into account, but this is not the case here already because the archaeological evidence, which only came to light in 2003/04 and points to the existence of several cremation pits/field ovens, couldn’t possibly have been known to a court in 1963.
The third is that Schalling’s testimony contains an apparently inaccurate statement about the corpses having been "sprinkled with a powder" and should thus be thrown out of the window entirely. Maybe in "Revisionist" cloud-cuckoo-land, but in the real world inaccurate information about a certain detail in an eyewitness testimony does not mean that the testimony is wholly inaccurate. Mattogno moreover forgets that I didn’t use Schalling’s testimony in isolation, but in conjunction with the testimony of Fritz Ismer, who credibly testified about the burning of the corpses on grates (presumably placed over pits, though the witness didn’t mention this) [293].
The fourth is the argument that the objects identified and described by archaeologists cannot be reconciled with the cremation pits mentioned by Schalling and besides are "simple speculations" by the archaeologist. This has already been discussed in Part 1[294].
The fifth is patently idiotic, as Mattogno accuses me (p. 1447) of trying to "forcefully reduce to the dimensions indicated by Schalling (4 m × 4 m) the actual measurements of 8 m × 9 m (exhibit 3/03), 7 m × 8 m (exhibit 4/03) and 8 m × 8 m (exhibit 20/03)". Apparently Mattogno failed to notice that I a) considered objects 3/03, 4/03 and 5/03 (and not 3/03, 4/03 and 20/03) as corresponding to the pits mentioned by Schalling, and b) made my calculations with both Schalling’s estimate about the measurements of these pits and the measurements resulting from archaeological research.
After having thus made a fool of himself once more, Mattogno incurs in further disgrace with a "general observation", in which he postulates his ridiculously overblown calculations of wood requirements (which, as I pointed out in Part 2, Section 5, he obviously doesn’t believe in himself) and then calculates how awfully long it would have taken a lumbering detachment from the camp to procure these exorbitant amounts of wood. The latter exercise is particularly amusing as I had expressly mentioned in the critique (note 157 on page 483, quoted by Mattogno on p. 1406) that Chełmno had several external wood suppliers, including witnesses Michał Radoszewski and Heinrich May – and thus was not dependent on what wood its own labor detachments could procure. Heinrich May, in his capacity as forest superintendent for the Koło district, had been forced to eventually "cut down all the trees in some of the forest districts", according to his recollections. [295]
Notes
[271]Experten der Vernichtung, p. 191; the testimonies mentioned in note 11 on p. 540 are the following: Tauscher, 18.12.1963; Unverhau, 3.8.1970; Jührs, 11-13.10.1961; Michal Kusmierczak, 16.10.1945 u. 13.10.1966; Edward Luczyński, 15.10.1945; Fedor Korownitschenko, 13.8.1966; Ludwig Obalek, 10.10.1945; Stefan Kirsz, 15.10.1945; Gley, 8-10.5.1961; Taras Olejinik, 24.10.1966. Berger also refers to Michael Tregenza’s article "Bełżec – Das vergessene Lager des Holocaust", in Irmtrud Wojak/Peter Heyes (editors), »Arisierung« im Nationalsozialismus. Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis, Frankfurt am Main/New York 2000, pp. 241-267 (p. 253).
[272]Berger, Experten der Vernichtung, pp. 197f.
[273]With a slight mistake in that it reads "two weeks" where it should read "four weeks".
[274]See critique, p. 499 and note 5 on p. 441.
[275]Which may be too short, judging by at least one eyewitness testimony (Eustachy Ukraiński’s deposition before examining judge Godziszewski in Zamość on 11.10.194, BAL B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. VI, f. 1117-20, referred to in note 5 of p. 441 of the critique) whereby corpses were burned starting December 1942 and throughout the spring of 1943, with several fires burning at the same time.
[276]German translation in BAL (Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg = Federal Archives in Ludwigsburg, Germany) B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. II, f.258 ff (p. 286).
[277]See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Introduction and Part 1, Section 1)" ([link])
[278]Experten der Vernichtung, pp. 197 f.
[279]MGK, Sobibór, p. 120.
[280]Quoted in the blog mentioned in note 277, after Yoram Haimi, "Preliminary Report of Archaeological Excavations in the Sobibór Extermination Center November 2012 – May 2013" ([link]).
[281]See the blog mentioned in note 277.
[282]Regarding Treblinka, see note 131. Regarding Bełżec, see the above description of the grates and the burning process, translated from Experten der Vernichtung, p. 191.
[283]See the articles "Farmers rise from the ashes of foot and mouth" (The Telegraph, 19 Feb 2011, online under [link]), and "When foot-and-mouth disease stopped the UK in its tracks" (BBC News Magazine, 17 February 2016, online under [link]).
[284]The Last Jew, pp. 85-87. See also Sara Berger’s reconstruction of the procedure translated in note 131.
[285]Images and captions are from the blog "Photographic Documentation of Nazi Crimes" ([link]).
[286]From the Australian Museum webpage "Stage 5: Butyric fermentation - 20 to 50 days after death" ([link]).
[287]See the Australian Museum webpage "Stage 4: Black putrefaction - 10 to 20 days after death" ([link]).
[288]"Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 3)" ([link]).
[289]M. de Cristoforis, Elude pratique sur la crémafion. Imprimerie Treves Frères, Milano, 1890, pp. 125-128, quoted in Mattogno, Il Campo di Chelmno tra storia e propaganda, pp. 110-112.
[290]See note 147.
[291]Mattogno, Chelmno: A German Camp in History & Propaganda, p. 87.
[292]Object 3/03: 8x9 = 72 m²; object 4/03: 7x8 = 56 m²; object 5/03: 3.5x4 = 14 m². The measurements are stated in the sources mentioned in notes 68 and 69.
[293]See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 1, Section 2a)" ([link]).
[294]See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 1, Section 2b)" ([link]).
[295]See the blog "A Great Lie" ([link]).
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