In late December 2011, we received a long text entitled Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues. The authors are  Jonathan Harrison, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jason Myers, Sergey Romanov and Nicholas Terry. The object of their critique are the following three books:

• Mattogno, Carlo, Jürgen Graf, Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertation Press, Chicago 2004.
• Mattogno, Carlo, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research and History, Theses & Dissertation Press, Chicago 2004.
• Graf, Jürgen, Thomas Kues and Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, The Barnes Review, Washington DC 2010.

It stands to reason that we could not afford to ignore such a challenge because this would have been tantamount to surrender. Initially we considered contenting ourselves with a summary reply, pointing out the most glaring fallacies and idiocies in the arguments of our opponents, but we then decided to use the „steam roller method“ instead, discussing and refuting all major arguments our five adversaries adduce in their paper.

This means that our response will be extremely long (several hundreds of pages). The bulk of our rebuttal will be written by Carlo Mattogno. This is inevitable because Mattogno, being the most prolific of us, is the main target of our adversaries’ attacks. Since Mattogno’s part will have to be translated from Italian into English, this alone will inevitably delay the publication of our reply, not to mention the fact that the three of us will have to coordinate our texts in order to reduce the inevitable repetitions to a minimum.

Should Caroline Sturdy Colls publish her paper about her archeological research at Treblinka before we have finished our rebuttal, Thomas Kues will include an analysis of her results in his chapter on the excavations at Belzec and Sobibor.

For the aforementioned reasons, our response will probably not be ready before July or August. Much to our regret, this delays the beginning of our study upon the Einsatzgruppen. On the other hand, after the publication of our reply we will not have the slightest obligation to pay any further attention to anything MM. Harrison, Mühlenkamp, Myers, Romanov and Terry might publish in the future.

12 March 2012                    Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues

By Thomas Kues

In November 2010 I published a blog entry on an online video concerning the research activity of a young British archaeologist from the University of Birmingham, Caroline Sturdy Colls, who had set out to refute “Holocaust Deniers” by locating the mass graves at the Treblinka “extermination camp” using “the most up-to-date scientific techniques”.[1] Recently, a news report was published boldly stating that “mass graves at Nazi death camp Treblinka prove Holocaust deniers wrong”. In this we read that

“A British forensic archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka. Some 800,000 Jews were killed at the site, in north east Poland, during the Second World War but a lack of physical evidence at the site has been exploited by Holocaust deniers. Forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls has now undertaken the first co-ordinated scientific attempt to locate the graves.”[2]

It is worth recalling that the same triumphatory claim that the “Holocaust deniers” finally and once and for all had been “refuted” was heard in connection with Kola’s surveys at Belzec and Sobibór, which in reality turned out to refute the official version of events relating to these two camps.

The above quoted news item was more or less a push for a radio program, “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust”, featuring Sturdy Colls as well as Yitzhak Arad and former Treblinka inmate Kalman Taigman, which was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 23 January 2012, 20:00 GMT.[3] In anticipation of this radio program, on the same date, a podcast interview was uploaded by the University of Birmingham “Ideas Lab”.[4] In this we can listen to the following description of the methods employed by Sturdy Colls and her team, as well as some vague descriptions of their findings:

“Interviewer: What technology have you used to investigate the site?

 Sturdy Colls: I used a number of non-invasive techniques at Treblinka and what this means is, as you quite rightly pointed out, the ground wasn’t disturbed due to Jewish burial law so the methods used didn’t involve any form of ground disturbance or excavation and this allowed us to investigate the historic and scientific potential of Treblinka but obviously it was very important that we recognised its religious and commemorative significance as well. So the techniques that were used, there was a process of archival research which involved looking at documentary records, revisiting historical data if you like, looking at known data and assessing it with an archaeological eye, so looking for information about the landscape. Then there was a process of looking for aerial photographs of the site, any ground based photography, accounts by the witnesses, plans that had been created, etc, to build up a database of information so that when I did do the survey all of that could be corroborated against my results. So in the field this involved field walking, so assessing the landscape, topographic survey which used advanced GPS and total station surveying to demarcate features on a plan of the site allowed us to record micro-topographic change which may be indicative of buried features. And also to assess the visibility of other features such as a number of artefacts that were actually identified in quite a remote part of the site. Then moving on from that to look below the ground I used a number of geophysical techniques, so quite often mentioned is ground penetrating radar and this was one of the methods used but this was also corroborated with other methods that detect other physical properties in the soil. So I also used resistance survey and an extension of that which allows 3D imaging of buried remains as well, to ensure that all of the properties of the buried remains could be characterised accurately.

 Interviewer: And what have you discovered?

 Sturdy Colls: Well the survey results when corroborated with historical information have indicated that there are a number of surviving building foundations at Treblinka just below the surface and also a considerable amount of obviously structural debris which the Nazis would have been simply unable to have removed from the site, and this supports accounts written by post-war investigators which commented upon the visibility of artefactual remains, structural remains, at the camp. We’ve also identified a number of pits at the site. Again, all these pits have been mapped and corroborated with witness plans and this is indicative of a number of probable graves at the site. It is recognised as part of the survey that the history of Treblinka didn’t end with its abandonment by the Nazis. 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. So then all of this data was married up with historical information so we seem to have a situation here where it’s been commonly believed that all of the victims at Treblinka were cremated, they were destroyed without trace, however, the research has revealed a much more complex picture of the disposal patterns used by the Nazis. Looking at it from an offender profiling perspective, so a slightly more forensic point of view, the Nazis worked on, as do most offenders, this principle of least effort where they would actually have a burial method that very much matched the nature of their victims or their locations within the camp and there are a number of photographs and physical evidence that we observed on the ground at Treblinka that demonstrates that these bodies were not reduced to ash, that some survive as mass graves in the truest sense and that also the ashes of the victims were redeposited into the pits that they were originally exhumed from upon Himmler’s order in 1943. Also with the topographic survey we’ve demonstrated that the camp as it’s marked currently on the ground by the modern memorial was actually much larger, that the boundaries of the camp should have been 50 metres further north and this has a knock-on effect for a number of structures within the camp itself. So we can examine it from a spatial point of view and look at all of these features in relation to each other and hopefully eventually start to build up a more detailed map of the camp as it existed during its operation.

 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.”

Somewhat more on the findings of Sturdy-Coll could be gleaned from the BBC 4 radio documentary “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust”. Starting at the mark 23:20 minutes we hear:

“Caroline Sturdy Colls: All the history books states that Treblinka was destroyed by the Nazis, in summary, the survey demonstrated that this simply isn’t the case. I have identified a number of buried [sic] pits using geophysical techniques. These are considerable. One in particular is 26 meters by 17 meters.

 Jonathan Charles: That’s huge.

 Sturdy Colls: It is huge. We are talking about a considerable number of bodies [which] could have been contained within pits of that size.

 Charles: That could have contained hundreds, perhaps thousands of bodies, we don’t know deep it is, or do you know how deep it is?

 Sturdy Colls: Unfortunately no. The survey technology does not allow us to go to certain depths. I know that it is over 4 meters, that was the extent of this [inaudible]. It’s a considerable pit.

 Charles: There are quite a few pits that you have discovered?

 Sturdy Colls: Absolutely, there were a number of pits, in particular to the rear of what of what is now 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 cremative remains of the victims were also placed.

 Charles: It’s not just pits that you found, there’s also what look like buildings.

 Sturdy Colls: There are, and again, the Nazis claimed they destroyed Treblinka, they certainly levelled the site, but it’s not really possible when buildings have been on a site to actually sterilize the ground, so what I’ve identified is that solid structural remains, we’re talking building foundations, do survive, but in particular two sort of structures that I’ve identified are likely to be the old and new gas chambers at Treblinka.”

While here we learn virtually nothing about the supposed remains of the Treblinka “gas chambers” we are provided with some tantalizing information on the camp’s burial pits. Needless to say, a critical assessment of the findings made by Sturdy Colls can only be made after she has published at least a preliminary report or a detailed article on the same, but we may nonetheless with appropriate caution note down some preliminary observations on what has been revealed so far. The most interesting information, however, is not to be found in the radio interviews, but in a short article wrriten either by Sturdy Colls herself or by BBC editorial staff based on her verbal or written statements, which was published on the website of the BBC on 23 January.[5] In this we read:

“The existence of mass graves was known about from witness testimony, but the failure to provide persuasive physical evidence led some to question whether it could really be true that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed here.

 Although they lasted only a few days, those post-war investigations [in 1945-1946] remained the most complete studies of the camp until I began my work at Treblinka in 2010.

 This revealed the existence of a number of pits across the site.

 Some may be the result of post-war looting, prompted by myths of buried Jewish gold, but several larger pits were recorded in areas suggested by witnesses as the locations of mass graves and cremation sites.

 One is 26m long, 17m wide and at least four metres deep, with a ramp at the west end and a vertical edge to the east.

 Another five pits of varying sizes and also at least this deep are located nearby. Given their size and location, there is a strong case for arguing that they represent burial areas.

 [...].

 As well as the pits, the survey has located features that appear to be structural, and two of these are likely to be the remains of the gas chambers.

According to witnesses, these were the only structures in the death camp made of brick.”

Even more importantly, this article is illustrated with two composite maps on which the outlines of the findings made by Sturdy Colls have been superimposed on a modern-day aerial photograph of the former camp site and a 1944 aerial photograph of the same area respectively. In the figure below I have placed these two composite maps side by side, moved the main legend and the scale and slightly increased the picture size in order to allow for easier comparison of scale. On the map to the left I have also arbitrarily numbered the “probable burial/cremation pits” from 1 to 10 (click on the picture to view it in full size).

The information furnished by the two interviews, the article and the maps allow us to make the following observations:

1) The pit which Sturdy Colls mentions “in particular” and which is stated to have a surface area of “26 meters by 17 meters”, that is a total of 442 square meters, is, judging by the dimensions, most likely identical with the rather irregular pit #3, located some 25 m south of the large cenotaph. This is clearly the largest in surface of the 10 pits identified.

2) As far as the surface area is concerned, 2 of the 33 mass graves identified by Andrzej Kola at Belzec (pits #1 and 27) were larger (with 480 and 540 square meters respectively), whereas 2 more (#7 and 14) were almost of the same size (364.5 and 370 square meters respectively).[6] Of the 6 burial pits identified by Kola at Sobibór 2 (pit #2 and 4) were larger or even significantly larger (with surface areas of 500 and 1,575 square meters respectively), whereas 2 other graves were nearly of the same surface size (pits #1 and 6, with 400 and 375 square meters respectively).[7] Yet whereas at Belzec some 435,000 and at Sobibór some 80,000 corpses are alleged to have been interred,[8] the number of uncremated bodies buried at Treblinka is supposed to have amounted to at least some 700,000. Would it then not make sense for the Germans to use mass graves of a larger size at Treblinka than at the other two Reinhardt camps?

3) The eyewitnesses Eliahu Rosenberg and Chil Rajchman, who to the knowledge of this author are the only witnesses to have provided detailed statements on the dimensions of the mass graves in the “death camp proper”, claim pits of sizes vastly larger than the largest pit mapped by Sturdy Colls. Eliahu Rosenberg claimed in 1947 that the mass graves measured 120 m × 15 m × 6 m, giving a surface area of 1,800 square meters and a total volume 9,900 cubic meters.[9] Chil Rajchman, whose 1944 testimony [10] is prominently featured in the “Hidden Graves of the Holocaust” radio program – including a particularly bizarre passage from it concerning burning blood – states:

“The pits were enormous, about 50 metres long, about 30 wide and several storeys deep. I estimate that the pits could contain about four storeys.”[11] 

The burial pits thus measured 1,500 square meters according to the witness Rajchman and maybe as much as (1,500 x 12 =) 18,000 cubic meters in volume! How come that the largest of the pits discovered by Sturdy Colls corresponds to less than one third of the surface size claimed by Rajchman and to one fourth of the surface area claimed by Rosenberg?

4) It is indeed unfortunate that the top modern equipment used by Study-Colls for some reason or other was not able to detect depths exceeding 4 meters. Perhaps it would have been wise of her to dispense of some of the piety with regards to “Jewish burial laws” and utilize probe drillings to measure the depth of the pits, as was done by Kola at both Belzec and Sobibór. Of the pits identified by Kola in these two camps, the deepest pit (#3 at Sobibór) measured 5.80 m, whereas the depth of the remaining pits averaged some 4 m.

Generously assuming Rosenberg’s estimate of 6 meters (Rajchman’s estimate of some 12 meters can be safely dismissed as an exaggeration), and even more generously assuming (for the sake of argument) 6 meters to be the effective depth, with the pit walls being vertical instead of sloping (an obviously unrealistic assumption, which is moreover contradicted by Sturdy Colls statement that this pit had a “ramp” at the west end and a “vertical edge to the east”, implying that three out of four side walls were oblique – but again, for the sake of argument…) pit #3 would have a volume of (26 x 17 x 6 =) 2,652 cubic meters. Assuming an average capacity of 8 corpses per cubic meters,[12] this means that the pit in question could have contained in total (2,652 x 8 =) 21,216 corpses. Since the so-called Höfle document from an exterminationist viewpoint shows that nearly 713,555 were murdered at Treblinka up until the end of 1942 – in reality this document only proves that this number of Jews was deported to the camp up until that time – and since virtually all sources maintain that non-experimental cremations on a significant scale did not commence at Treblinka until 1943, at least 700,000 corpses would have had to have been interred in the camp, necessitating no less than (700,000 / 21,216 =) 33 pits of the same size as pit #3, with a total surface area of 14,586 square meter, or nearly 1.5 hectares. Needless to say the mass graves would have had to be separated by soil walls of considerable thickness, thereby increasing the surface area required by the graves.

 
Above: Montage of the 10 identified pits placed within a square 100 x 100 meters. Relative dimensions have been kept unchanged from the maps produced by Caroline Sturdy Colls.

5) Pits #1 and 2, which together appear to have a surface area of some 600-700 square meters, are located in the western part of the camp site, near the torn-up railroad sidespur, clearly outside of the “death camp proper”. These 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.[13]

 6) The four pits #5-8 are placed in a (not very straight) row. Sturdy Colls states in the radio documentary that there are “five” pits of “considerable size” “in a row” and in the area which witnesses state “was the main body disposal area, (…) behind the gas chambers”. Either Sturdy Colls mistakenly said five when she meant four, or it may be that one of the pits, perhaps #6, with its “neck” in the middle, is counted by her as two separate pits. Regardless of which, it is clear that the pits #5-8 cover a surface area which corresponds to roughly 175-200 % that of #3, that is, somewhere in the range of 750-900 square meters.

 7) 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). According to Yitzhak Arad some 312,500 Jews were murdered in Treblinka merely “during the first five weeks of the killing operation”.[17] According to the files of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, 251,545 Jews from the ghetto in that city were deported to Treblinka between 22 July 1942 and 12 September 1942.[18] And as already mentioned, the Höfle document states that 713,555 were deported to Treblinka up until the end of 1942. Judging by the information revealed, only a small fraction of this enormous number of people could have been buried in the identified “probable burial/cremation pits”, even taking into account the two pits in the reception camp, which could not have been used for any hypothetical “gas chamber” victims given the reported structure of the camp.

 8 ) Sturdy Colls’s statement that “the failure to provide persuasive physical evidence [of mass graves] led some to question whether it could really be true that hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed here” implies that the presence of mass graves itself would be enough to refute the “deniers”. However, it is clear that mass graves of considerable size must have existed at Treblinka, even if it was in fact only a transit camp. Holocaust historian Dieter Pohl estimates that up to 5 % of the deportees to the Reinhardt camps perished en route due to suffocation, dehydration, crushing caused by panicking deportees etc.[19] Considering that the reception of transports at Treblinka during the intense initial months of operation is claimed to have been grossly mismanaged by the first camp commandant, Dr. Irmfried Eberl (who, apparently because of this reason, was fired and replaced by Franz Stangl), leading to the delay of transports at way stations – and this in the summer heat of July and August – there is little reason to doubt that a certain number of Jews must haved died en route from Warsaw to Treblinka, but on the other hand the trip from Warsaw to Treblinka when following schedule lasted “only” 3 hours and 55 minutes, so that for this group of deportees (making up roughly one third of the total number of Treblinka deportees) the en route death ratio is unlikely to have reached that posited by Pohl.[20] The en route death ratio for transports originating from more distant parts of Poland and from other German-controlled countries was likely higher than that for the Warsaw deportees due to the longer travel time required. Since somewhere between 750,000 and 800,000 Jews in total were deported to Treblinka during the camp’s period of operation (July 1942 – August 1943), it seems reasonable to assume that the number of Jews who perished en route to this camp amounted to somewhere in the low tens of thousands. Moreover, there are reasons to assume that a smaller percentage of the deportees were subjected to “euthanasia” due to contageous or mental diseases, or for being too weak for further transport. To this should be added 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.

 9) The vague mention of a “more complex picture of the disposal patterns used by the Nazis” is interesting. Were uncremated corpses also detected by the survey, and if so, how many?

 10) Sturdy Colls label the pits “probable burial/cremation pits”, indicating that one or more of the pits may have been used for cremations and not for interment (at Sobibór Kola identified such a pit with an area of 10 x 3 m and a depth of up to 90 cm). In this context the smaller, more rectangular pits #4 and 5 may be the most likely candidates. The dimensions of an identified cremation pit could give important hints about the actual cremation capacity at Treblinka.

 11) It is noteworthy that none of the pits or structural remains are located under the stone/concrete covered memorial areas (cf. the map to the left, where these areas are visible as a bluish gray). Sturdy Colls’s statements does not mention whether or not she was able to map these area with her geophysics equipment.[21] This issue, like many others, will have to await further clarification. The covered area inside the “death camp proper” appears to correspond to roughly 1 hectare.

 12) It may be worth making a quick comparison of the maps of Study-Colls with the “reconstruction” of Treblinka proposed by exterminationist air-photo analyst Alex Bay.[22] Concerning the mass graves Bay writes:

“Unfortunately, the aerial photography does not contain enough information to delineate the boundaries of the graves. The May [1944] coverage is sufficient only for crudely identifying the places where deep disturbances in general are probable, but the exact boundaries cannot be established.

In Figure 42 aerial photography is presented in which nine 50 by 25 meter [164 x 82 feet] pits have been drawn to scale along the east and west sides. The positioning and size of these pits is purely speculative.”[23]

The dimensions of 50 x 25 m for the pits are taken from Bay’s number one eyewitness, Yankiel Wiernik, and his 1944 publication A Year in Treblinka. Wiernik writes indeed that “The dimensions of each ditch were 50 by 25 by 10 meters”[24] but this almost certainly refer to ditches located not in the “death camp proper”, but in the reception camp. The scene wherein Wiernik provides the abovementioned dimensions takes place on the second day after his arrival in the camp, and the following chapters imply that first visited the “death camp proper” or Camp II, as he calls it, only several days later.

In the figure below I have placed Bay’s Figure 42 side by side with the Sturdy Colls composite map based on the 1944 air photo. The scales of the two maps have been harmonized. To Bay’s map I have also added the letters A and B to indicate the solid black outlines drawn by Bay to mark out the two alleged gas chamber buildings. Even considering Bay’s admittal that the positioning and size of his mass graves “is purely speculative” it is clear that his vision of what the “death camp proper” might have looked like differ considerably from the Sturdy Colls map. As for the locations of the two alleged gas chamber buildings, which Bay goes to painstaking length to identify, based on the aerial photos and witness statements, the 4 structures marked out by Sturdy Colls (in blue) and designated “probable location of gas chambers” are located some 100 m south of the sites pinpointed by Bay. The alignment of these structures is also rather different from that asserted by Bay. Together with the considerable difference in surface size between the mass graves posited by Bay and the pits identified by Sturdy Colls, this says something of the competence of Bay as well as the reliability of his star witness Wiernik.   

 Above: Bay’s “reconstruction” of Treblinka compared with the 1944 air photo version of the Sturdy Colls map (click to enlarge)

13) As for the “probable location of gas chambers” we learn virtually nothing other than that Sturdy Colls has identified two brick structures. On the composite maps, however, four structures are marked out, of which the largest (near the eastern exit of the “Road to heaven”) is likely to be the one identified by Sturdy Colls as the “new gas chamber building”. The three other structures, two of which are relatively large, are located close to each other. One must suppose that one of the two larger structures has been identified by Sturdy Colls as the “old gas chamber building”. According to the most elaborate exterminationist effort to map Treblinka based on aerial photos and eyewitness testimony (and in this case one of the ground photos from the Kurt Franz “Schoene Zeiten” album interpreted by Bay and others as taken inside the “death camp proper”), the 2004 map of Peter Laponder,[25] the only structures located adjacent to the “old gas chamber building” were a water pump shelter, a tiny guardhouse, and a watchtower. Yet on the composite map we have two larger structures next to each other. We will have to wait and see if the geophysical survey has revealed anything about the layout of these structures. If that is not the case, we can only hope that Sturdy Colls soon returns to the camp site to excavate the detected structural remains. 

All in all, the information revealed by these interviews about the findings of the 2011 geophysical survey at Treblinka provides us with more questions than answers. We can only wait and hope that a preliminary report on the research results is not too long in coming. One thing is sure, however, namely that little indicates that the findings of Caroline Sturdy Colls have actually “proven Holocaust deniers wrong” with regard to Treblinka. On the contrary: the information revealed seems to hint that the findings of Caroline Sturdy Colls may well spell the doom of the official historiography on Treblinka.

_____________________________________________________________________

[1] Thomas Kues, “UK Forensic Archeologist Sets Out To Refute Treblinka ‘Deniers’”,  http://www.revblog.codoh.com/2010/11/uk-forensic-archeologist-sets-out-to-refute-treblinka-deniers/

[2] “Mass graves at Nazi death camp Treblinka prove Holocaust deniers wrong”, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/16/mass-graves-at-nazi-death-camp-treblinka-holocaust_n_1208814.html

[3] This radio program is temporarily available at  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b019rlns/The_Hidden_Graves_of_the_Holocaust/

[4] http://www.ideaslab.bham.ac.uk/MP3s/Caroline_Sturdy_Colls_Treblinka_podcast.mp3 A transcript of this podcast can be found at http://www.ideaslab.bham.ac.uk/MP3s/Transcript_Predictor_Podcast_40.doc

[5] “Treblinka: Revealing the hidden graves of the Holocaust”, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16657363 The article carries a heading which concludes with the words “…writes forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls” giving the clear impression that what follows is a piece written directly by Sturdy Colls herself; on the other hand the article isn’t signed. Nevertheless it is clear that the contents of the article are derived from Sturdy Colls together with the composite maps.

[6] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 73.

[7] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books 2010, p. 120.

[8] Cf. ibid., p. 117.

[9] Cf. Jürgen Graf, Carlo Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 138.

[10] Discussed in detail in my article Chil Rajchman’s Treblinka Memoirs, Inconvenient History, vol. 2, nr. 1, online: http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2010/volume_2/number_1/chil_rajchmans_treblinka_memoirs.php

[11] Chil Rajchman, Treblinka. A Survivor’s Memory 1942–1943, MacLehose Press, London 2011, p. 60.

[12] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp, section 4.1. http://www.codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvhcrm.html

[13] Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1987, p. 85.

[14] Judging by some of the early maps of the camp, pit #3 would have been located outside of this part of the camp, whereas some later exterminationist efforts to reconstruct the topography of the camp places it within the “death camp proper”, cf. Mapping Treblinka, http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/maps.html

[15] C. Mattogno, Belzec…, op.cit., p. 73.

[16] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór…, op.cit., p. 120.

[17] Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., p. 87.

[18] Ibid., pp. 275-276.

[19] Dieter Pohl, “Massentötungen durch Giftgas im Rahmen der ‘Aktion Reinhardt’: Aufgaben der Forschung” in: Günter Morsch, Betrand Perz (eds.), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Massentötungen durch Giftgas. Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisionistische Leugnung, Metropol, Berlin 2011, p. 194.

[20] Cf. Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, op.cit., pp. 87-88; J. Graf, C. Mattogno, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, op.cit., p. 107.

[21] According to the English-language Wikipedia article on Ground Penetrating Radar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar) “Good penetration is also achieved in dry sandy soils or massive dry materials such as granite, limestone, and concrete where the depth of penetration could be up to 15 m”, implying that the concrete slabs of the memorial in themselves should pose little problem for a GPR survey. There may of course be other, unrevealed hindering factors. 

[22] The Reconstruction of Treblinka, http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/

[23] http://www.holocaust-history.org/Treblinka/deathcampinternet/deathcampp7.shtml

[24] Y. Wiernik, A Year in Treblinka, chapter 3, online: http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm

[25] http://www.deathcamps.org/treblinka/pic/bmap9.jpg

By Thomas Kues

1. Introduction

According to orthodox holocaust historiography, carbon monoxide from engine exhaust was used to kill nearly 2 million Jews in Poland, Serbia and on occupied Soviet territory between late 1941 and the summer of 1944. The majority of these supposed victims were allegedly killed in stationary gas chambers located in three “pure extermination camps” in the Polish General Government – Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka – while the remainder is said to have been killed in mobile “gas vans” that were either stationed at the Chełmno (Kulmhof) camp in the Warthegau area of occupied Poland or employed by Einsatzgruppen or SD units operating in Serbia and on occupied Soviet territory. Below is listed the victim figures for each “killing center” as currently held by the orthodox historians.

Bełżec 434,501[1]

Sobibór 170,000[2]

Treblinka 750,000-900,000[3]

Chełmno (Kulmhof) 152,000-360,000[4]

Other “gas vans” 100,000 approx.

Total: 1,606,501-1,964,501

According to most eyewitness testimony, Diesel engines from captured Soviet tanks were used as killing agents Bełżec and Treblinka, while at Sobibór, the historians claim, a petrol (gasoline) engine of unclear origin was used to produce the lethal carbon monoxide gas. As for the “gas vans” supposedly employed at Chełmno, those are commonly held to have been modified Saurer or Diamond trucks.

The danger of Diesel exhaust has long been debated by revisionist scholars. Since the early 1980s, American revisionist writer and engineer F.P. Berg has published a number of articles dealing with this issue. Their conclusion: Because Diesel engines only generate small amounts of carbon monoxide, and since Diesel exhaust contains much oxygen, the use of diesel engines as killing agents in homicidal gas chambers is preposterous. Witness testimony claiming that Diesel engines were utilized for murderous purposes are thus objectively false. To those witnesses belongs Kurt Gerstein, a certified mining engineer.

This article will not further discuss the Diesel engine issue – it will suffice to say that a number of holocaust historians cling on to the notion that Diesel engines were used for killings,[5] at least at Treblinka, while others have tried to cautiously distance themselves from the Diesel claim.[6] Instead, I will for reason of argument follow the assumption that the (hypothetical) German perpetrators used engines capable of producing lethal amounts of carbon monoxide gas. Given this, I will pose a number of questions related to the physical effects of the poison gas. How would the carbon monoxide (CO) affect the bodies of the victims? What would they look like post mortem? And, most importantly: what does the eyewitnesses to the alleged carbon monoxide gas chambers have to say about the appearance of the corpses?

2. Previous research

The main revisionist study on the issue of skin discoloration caused by carbon monoxide consists of an online article by revisionist and engineer F.P. Berg, entitled “Blue Women on the Beach – and the False Toxicity of CO2 in Diesel Exhaust”. It was written as a rebuttal to an article by Charles D. Provan, “The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp – and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning”, which had previously appeared in the May 2004 issue of The Revisionist. Below I will provide a summary of the relevant articles written by Berg and Provan between 1983 and 2007.

2.1. Berg’s first articles on the issue of Diesel gas chambers

The first of F.P. Berg’s writings to deal with the issue of the alleged carbon monoxide gas chambers, and especially the claim that Diesel engines were used to generate the lethal gas, was an article originally presented at the 1983 International Revisionist Conference and later, in 1984, published in The Journal for Historical Review, “The Diesel Gas Chambers: Myth Within a Myth”. In it he among other things dissected the witness account of a supposed mass gassing at Bełżec in 1942 that was left by the former SS hygiene technician Kurt Gerstein in French prison in 1945. Referring to the text of one of Kurt Gerstein’s “reports”, Berg writes:

“According to the last sentence of the text quoted, ‘the bodies were tossed out blue, wet with sweat and urine.’ Here we have a flaw as far as the death-from-carbon-monoxide theory is concerned because victims of carbon monoxide poisoning are not blue at all. On the contrary, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning are a distinctive ‘cherry red,’ or ‘pink.’ This is clearly stated in most toxicology handbooks and is probably well known to every doctor and to most, if not all, emergency medical personnel. Carbon monoxide poisoning is actually very common because of the automobile and accounts for more incidents of poison gas injury than all other gases combined.”[7]

As sources Berg gave references to two standard works on toxicology.[8] The above argument was then reiterated in a revised and expanded version of the same article which originally appeared in the revisionist anthology Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte (1994) under the same title and later in translation (in Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, Theses & Dissertations Press 2003) as “Diesel Gas Chambers: Ideal for Torture – Absurd for Murder”. In this appearance the above quoted passage was complemented with a further reference to recently published specialist literature.[9]

2.2. The 2004 article by Charles D. Provan

In his article The Blue Color of the Jewish Victims at Belzec Death Camp – and Carbon Monoxide Poisoning[10] Provan asserts that bluish color or bluish tinge attributed to the Bełżec victims by Gerstein and later Pfannenstiel can be explained as cyanosis. “Blue”, Provan writes, “is a regular (and documented) color for carbon monoxide poisoning, especially when the victims are alive, but also when the victims are dead.” In regard to fatal cases of CO poisoning, Provan quotes a number of studies indicating that “in some cases” of fatal poisoning there is “no cherry-red coloring of the skin”, that in some cases the appearance of the victim is instead “cyanotic”, and that the cherry-red discoloration might be “slight” due to low saturation (i.e. low carboxyhemoglobinal level) and in some cases obscured because of “associated cyanosis”. Provan takes the above as evidence that what Gerstein and Pfannenstiel said in regards to the color of the corpses is “possible”, and that Berg in his previous articles had reached the wrong conclusions.

2.3. The rebuttal of F.P. Berg

Berg opens his rebuttal to Provan[11] stating that the assertion of blue corpses “is totally at odds with the claims (…) that the toxic ingredient [in the exhaust gas used as the killing agent] was carbon monoxide.” The texts on cyanosis referenced by Provan, Berg notes, “fail to use the words “blue” or even “bluish” at all”. “The simple fact”, Berg further contends, “is that the blue appearance of “cyanosis” does not correspond at all to the general “blue” appearance of the “blue corpses” that Gerstein or Pfannenstiel allegedly saw (…)”. Corpses may be multi-colored, and thus “blue” cyanosis may appear on one part of the body, while the rest of it displays a cherry-red color. Cyanosis occurring in connection with carbon monoxide poisoning is “associated” with the poisoning and not in itself a product of any reaction between carbon monoxide and the victim’s blood. Reactions of carbon monoxide with blood are more or less bright red, never blue. Provan is wrong in defining cyanosis as a “medical term for blue coloring occurring in a patient or corpse” since “cyanotis” is not simply the medical term for blue coloring, but only applies to some varieties of blue discoloration. One would not be able to conclude a case of CO poisoning from the mere presence of cyanosis; the color of the victim’s blood would also be examined.

While cyanosis may appear in some fatal cases, “the appearance of a generally “blue” corpse is extremely rare if it ever occurs at all” (Berg). Below a carboxyhemoglobin level of 30% a living body or corpse may indeed display cyanosis without accompanying bright red discoloration, but as the lethal level for most individuals lies around 60%, an overwhelming majority of corpses would definitely show some nuance of red. Variations and exceptions to this occur in only around 6% of all cases. Also, the reddish color when occurring “tends to be extremely intense and dramatic whereas cyanosis is an extremely subtle coloring in which most of the skin is merely pale” (Berg). A lay observer would thus have a hard time noticing any cyanotic cases, whereas the red discolored corpses would be immediately noticeable. “There is good reason to believe”, Berg writes, “that a cyanotic description in our context does not really mean blue at all — but merely blue by contrast or in comparison to other parts of the same or other bodies.” In regards to the Pfannenstiel testimony, Berg remarks that Pfannenstiel “noticed nothing special about the corpses” except for a bluish tinge to the face of some of them, and that no mention of any red discoloration is made, two things which combined speaks against the reliability of this witness. Berg also strongly criticizes Provan’s way of mixing fatal and non-fatal cases of poisoning, as well as “immediate” fatal cases with “delayed” ones. Living victims of CO poisoning may be partially cyanotic and partially red (with a “flushed” or pink appearance) or cyanotic with only negligible or unnoticeable red discolorations. Dead CO victims on the other hand are usually red or cherry-red. In the rare cases (around 9% of all cases) when cyanosis appears associated with fatal CO poisoning, it tends to be appear restricted to parts of the body where the skin is more translucent, such as the lips or nasal openings. The alleged observations of Gerstein and Pfannenstiel are thus not reconcilable with known medical facts.

3. The difference between fatal and non-fatal cases of CO poisoning

In discussing the issue of discolorations in the skin of CO gassing victims, it is important to note the difference between fatal and non-fatal (i.e. clinical) cases of CO poisoning. In the writings of anti-revisionists, we often find quotes from medical literature such as:

“The classic findings of cherry-red lips, cyanosis, and retinal hemorrhages occur rarely.”[12]

Or:

“The classic ‘cherry-red’ skin coloration is actually rare, and patients are more likely to appear pale or cyanotic.”[13]

As F.P. Berg points out, statements such those above appears to refer mainly to clinical cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, i.e. cases where the poisoned person was found alive and received treatment before he or she either survived, or died (therefore the word “patients” in the second quote). A statement similar to the ones quoted above can be found in the standard work A guide to general toxicology (1983):

“Carbon monoxide poisoning may result in blisters or bullae over pressure areas but the classic cherry red color of the skin is rare.”[14]

When, however, the text within which this quote appears is read more closely, it becomes evident that the author(s), without stating this explicitly, is referring mainly or even exclusively to clinical cases.[15] In fact, specialist literature on toxicology and emergency medicine by its very nature normally focus on clinical cases, while cases involving untreated fatal cases are normally treated in writings related to forensic medicine.[16] An article from 2007 authored by Nicholas Bateman, a professor in clinical toxicology, indirectly confirms that deep red or “cherry pink” discoloration is rare among surviving victims, but more common in fatal cases (emphasis added):

“Skin blistering may occur if the patient lies unconscious for some hours before being discovered, and the skin is more likely to be cyanosed than to have the cherry-pink colour that is described to be a classical feature of CO poisoning, but rarely seen in living patients.”[17]

The letter by Bruno Simini to The Lancet, often cited by anti-revisionists, in which it is stated that “cherry-red discoloration in CO poisoning is quite rare” and that “most doctors overestimate the frequency of cherry-red discoloration in CO poisoning” is also clearly referring to clinical cases of poisoning, since it only refers to “surveys of patients” i.e. treated victims of CO poisoning.[18]

The case reports and medical papers which I quote and refer to in the next section clearly proves that deep red or cherry red discoloration of the skin is virtually always present among fatal cases of CO poisoning. In the section after that I will contrast the contents of the medical case reports and findings with statements made by professed eyewitnesses to the alleged homicidal gas chambers and “gas vans”.

Illustration 1: Reddish flush in a non-fatal case of CO poisoning.[19]

Illustration 2: Typical red discoloration in victim of fatal CO poisoning.[20]

Illustration 3: A fatal case of CO poisoning displaying distinctive reddish-pink discoloration.[21]

Illustration 4: Bright red lividity in a victim of CO poisoning.[22]

4. Verified cases of discoloration resulting from carbon monoxide poisoning

Below I will provide brief summaries of a number of case reports and medical papers concerned with skin discoloration as an effect of CO poisoning.

Item 1: The man with the red face

The following case from mid-60’s America involved the suicide attempt of a 21-year old white male of Italian descent:[23]

“When seen on the morning following his admission the author was struck by the appearance of the patient’s cherry-red face. Additionally, he was thick-tongued in speech, lethargic and showed impairment of orientation as regards time and place. Confusion as to what had brought about his admission was noted.

The writer’s initial impression was acute brain syndrome but one whose etiology might involve carbon monoxide poisoning. Thus, the patient was questioned closely as regards the circumstances and details of his suicide attempt. Elicited from the patient were additional facts that he had fallen asleep in his car with the engine running and the windows closed. Twelve hours later, he awoke and returned home to tell his parents what he had done. At that time his clothes were covered by vomitus. It became apparent that a most important clinical sign and area of history had been over-looked previously.”

Thus it is apparent that cherry-red skin discoloration can be highly visible even among survivors of carbon monoxide poisoning. Red discoloration of the skin is thus not limited to the lividity of fresh corpses, but appears in the still living victim’s body as the mechanical result of carbon monoxide being absorbed by the bloodstream. This is because, as F.P. Berg writes in his rebuttal to Provan, “when carbon monoxide reacts with human blood, it forms carboxyhemoglobin which above concentrations of 30% is a bright red, becoming brighter and more intense as the concentration increases”, that is, the discoloration begins immediately with the reaction of the blood with the CO, and is then increased by the inflow of CO. Following death the discoloration is then concentrated by the pooling of blood that is livor mortis (post-mortem lividity).

Item 2: A dead girl in Italy

This case involved a 21 year old white female found dead in a country house owned by her family. It was later determined that her death had been unintentionally caused by a gas water heater. We are told by the authors of the case report that “[t]he pale cherry pink colour of the victim immediately suggested a carbon monoxide poisoning.” A spectrophotometric measurement of the blood showed a carboxyhemoglobin level of 60%. The report also mentions that among survivors of CO poisoning, the mean carboxyhemoglobin level is 28.1%, while among fatalities the mean level is 62.3%. At a level of 50%, the probability of survival is more or less 50%.[24]

Item 3: A German report on six “unusual” cases of fatal CO poisoning

This article[25] states that, despite the presence of indicative death scenes and/or characteristic findings of the external (coroners’) examination, about 40% of all unintentional fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning remain unrecognized until the autopsy. To illustrate possible reasons for this, the authors describe six individual cases. In case 1 and 2, involving a middle-aged couple, the bodies were found in a state of extreme putrefaction, so that the cause of death could only be recognized through spectrophotometrically analyzing the carboxyhemoglobin level of the oedema fluid that had gathered in the scalps of the victims. Case 3 involved a young truck driver, found dead in the closed cab of his vehicle and not displaying any clear external signs of CO poisoning, despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 83%. Case 4 involved a 19 year old male found dead in a flat. Despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 65% his body lacked “the bright pink coloration of livor mortis”. Case 5 involved a 27 year old male discovered dead in his flat with a carboxyhemoglobin level of 80%. His body was found in a state of advanced decomposition. Case 6 involved a 42 year old female found dead in the garage beside her car. The body did not show any clear external signs of CO poisoning despite a carboxyhemoglobin level of 46%. As stated already by the title of this article (“Unusual carbon monoxide poisoning”) these six cases (in particular cases 3, 4 and 6) are to be viewed as anomalous.

Item 4: An American case of CO poisoning without cherry-red discoloration

According to the authors of this article, carbon monoxide poisoning “typically causes so-called cherry-red livor of the skin and viscera.” They then report of a case of CO poisoning in which this cherry-red livor did not develop. It involved a 75 year old white male found dead in his car during a cold winter. His carboxyhemoglobin level was measured as 86%. The authors inform us that “the curious absence of cherry-red livor” was studied and the decedent’s tissue and blood specimens tested at various temperatures. The tests showed that neither the blood nor the tissue of the victim had a tendency to develop cherry-red color, regardless of temperature.[26]

Item 5: An optical study of discolorations

In this South African study of 10 fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, the skin color of the victims’ bodies was analyzed by the help of reflectance spectrophotometry, with the values converted to visual equivalents. It was found that several circumstances contribute to the difficulty of identifying the cherry-red color in the skin, among them low CO concentration in the blood, skin pigmentation, washing-out of previously high CO concentrations, and deep venous dilatation combined with superficial vasoconstriction (narrowing of the blood vessels), producing the impression of cyanosis. It was further found that the color of the altered blood “depends on the way the red cells are massed together, their depths below the surface, and the brightness of the background against which they are viewed.”[27]

Item 6: A study of 15 CO victims at an Indian hospital

This study, published in 2001, was carried out at a hospital in a provincial Indian city which is located on an altitude of 5000 ft above mean sea level. It involved findings in 40 cases of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, 25 of the clinical, 15 of them post mortem. The autopsy findings revealed “deep red discoloration of skin and serous membranes” in 12 of the 15 corpses.[28] This study is important for the topic of the present article, since it shows that deep red discoloration is displayed by a majority of victims of lethal carbon monoxide poisoning even when the skin of the victims are of a darker pigmentation than the average Caucasian’s.

Item 7: An Austrian study on 182 cases of fatal CO poisoning

This study[29] consists of an analysis of autopsy reports of postmortems performed at the Viennese Institute of Forensic Medicine between 1984 and 1993. The aim of this survey was to determine whether the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis[30] is a reliable finding for the coroner to suspect a carbon monoxide-related death immediately at the death scene. It involved 182 cases of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths: 92 females and 90 males. The authors found a strong association between the carboxyhemoglobin level (i.e. the level of CO concentration in the blood’s hemoglobin) and the cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis: “in 98.4% of unintentional carbon monoxide-related deaths livor mortis was clearly cherry-pink.”[31] It was determined that fresh corpses with carboxyhemoglobin levels greater than 31% show “a clear cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis.”[32] The survey further indicated that the Viennese coroners’ inability to recognize cases of unintentional carbon monoxide fatalities immediately at the death scene was correlated to the age of the victim: the older the victim, the worse the coroner’s recognition.

In conclusion, the authors of the article suggest that coroners should be recommended to examine naked corpses thoroughly, and especially the color of livor mortis. In this way, they write, a carbon monoxide-related death can be recognized immediately and the source of the gas release identified, thus protecting other people from the risk of poisoning.

Item 8: A survey of 388 car exhaust gas suicides in Denmark 1995-1999

This study[33] from 2005 consists of a survey of 388 cases of suicide by means of engine exhaust gas carried out in Denmark between 1995 and 1998. Of the suicides 343 were males and 45 females. It was found that in 11 cases (2.8%) putrefaction or burns were so extensive that livor mortis could not be found, while “the characteristic pink livor mortis” was found in 353 cases (91% of the total cases, 93.6% of those with livor mortis). Only in 9 cases (2.4% of those with livor mortis) did the victims show a normal-colored livor mortis. In 3 of those 9 cases the victim had survived more than a day after the poisoning, implying a positive correlation between the cherry-red discoloration of livor mortis and the carboxyhemoglobin level. In 15 cases the author of the autopsy report had neglected to write down the color of livor mortis.

Summary of the medical evidence

From the above summarized cases we may conclude that:

• Cherry-red discoloration sometimes appears in non-fatal cases of CO poisoning, i.e. it is visible also in ante-mortem states (Item 1). According to available medical literature, such cases are not the rule, but on the other hand not highly exceptional. Such discoloration would appear more or less directly after the blood cells had started absorbed the carbon monoxide. The visibility of the deep red discoloration is related to the concentrations of CO in the blood (i.e. the carboxyhemoglobin level), as well as other factors such as pigmentation (Item 5). In the case of the alleged gas chamber victims it is reasonable to assume that their carboxyhemoglobin level would be much higher than that of the average CO poisoning survivor (that is 28.1%, whereas in fatal cases the concentration averages 62.3%; cf. Item 2), thus greatly increasing the number of individual cases with cherry-red discoloration appearing already ante-mortem or prior to the onset of livor mortis.

• According to Item 7 fresh corpses with carboxyhemoglobin levels greater than 31% shows clear discoloration. This level is only 2.9% above that of the average survivor of CO poisoning (cf. Item 2).

• In cases of fatal CO poisoning, deep red discoloration of the livor mortis is visible in many cases even when the victim’s pigmentation is much darker than that of the average Caucasian (Item 6).

• In fatal cases of CO poisoning, absence of cherry-red lividity is regarded as “curious” or “unusual”. Individuals whose blood and tissue lacks the tendency to develop the cherry-red color are very much an exception (Item 4). In many of the fatal cases where discoloration could not be detected, this was due to the corpse having entered the stage of advanced decomposition, or from having suffered severe burns (Items 3, 8).

• Deep red/cherry-red discoloration of livor mortis is present in at least 95% of all fatal cases of carbon monoxide poisoning (Items 7 and 8).

5. Eyewitness descriptions of alleged carbon monoxide victims at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Chełmno

Witness 1: Kurt Gerstein

As a captive of Allied forces in France, former SS hygiene technician Kurt Gerstein wrote a number of reports in which he claimed to have witnessed a mass gassing at Bełżec in August 1942. In the two reports indisputably written by Gerstein in French on April 26, 1945, the bodies of the gassing victims are described in the following way:

“The blue bodies are thrown, damp with sweat and with urine, the legs full of excrement and menstrual blood.”[34]

In the German-language Gerstein reports which Henri Roques designate T III and T VI the word “blue” is not present. It is likewise not present in the French text T Va, dated to May 6, 1945. The German text T IV contains no corresponding passage.

Regarding the blueness of the Bełżec corpses and the issue of cyanosis, see Section 2 above.

Witness 2: Wilhelm Pfannenstiel

The professor of hygiene at the University of Marburg-Lahn Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel allegedly accompanied the aforementioned Kurt Gerstein on his trip to Bełżec in August 1942. After the war Pfannenstiel was arrested but never sentenced to prison. Instead he was on a number of occasions summoned as a witness for the prosecution in trials dealing with the alleged homicidal gas chambers at the Reinhardt camps. In 1950 he testified before a court in the German city of Darmstadt:

“I noticed nothing special about the corpses, except that some of them showed a bluish puffiness about the face. But this is not surprising since they had died of asphyxiation.”[35]

Since Pfannenstiel was without question familiar with the texts of the Gerstein reports, it is fully possible that he also derived his description of the corpses from one of the two French texts. As an alternative, it cannot be excluded that Pfannenstiel, with his thorough background in medicine and hygiene studies, was familiar with asphyxiation symptoms and thus also able to fabricate a vague description with the ring of authority. As for the Pfannenstiel testimony I once again refer to Berg’s article summarized above.

Witness 3: Karl Alfred Schluch

SS-Unterscharführer Karl Alfred Schluch was posted at Bełżec from June 1942 until early summer 1943. His work at the camp up until December 1942 supposedly involved accompanying the naked Jewish victims through the camouflaged “sluice” which led to the gas chambers. Schluch was acquitted at the trial of former Bełżec camp staff held in Munich in 1963. In connection with this trial the witness made the following statement regarding the bodies of the gas chamber victims:

“The corpses were at least partially besmirched with excrement and urine, others in part with saliva. The lips and nose tips of some of the corpses had turned blue. With some the eyes were closed, with others the eyes had rolled.”[36]

Now it is possible that the lips, and possibly also the nose tips, of carbon monoxide victims would look purple-bluish as a result of cyanosis. The problem is that this is the only kind of discoloration that the witness claims to have been aware of. Are we to believe that Schluch noticed a few purple-bluish lips, but completely missed the large red discolorations?

Witness 4: Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann testified during his trial in Jerusalem that he had visited three camps were carbon monoxide was allegedly used to exterminate Jews: Chełmno (Kulmhof), Treblinka, and an unidentified camp in the Lublin area commonly assumed to have been Bełżec. Only in regard to the first camp does Eichmann claim to have witnessed the bodies of the alleged victims. This is how Eichmann described the murder of Jews in “gas vans” at Chełmno:

“I went myself to a small wood and just as I got there the omnibus also arrived, it pulled up beside a pit which had been dug up, the doors were opened and out of them poured corpses, down into the pit. One upon the other. It was a ghastly inferno. No, a super-inferno. To me they looked as if they were still alive. But now each and all of them were dead.”[37]

Thus according to Eichmann the corpses of the victims looked the same way as when they had been alive. The vagueness of the description makes the testimony weak evidence in any case, but it might be safely assumed that Eichmann would have noticed and remembered large red discolorations on the corpses from the gas vans, if he had in fact seen any.

Witness 5: “Szlamek”

This key witness to the alleged gas van mass murders in Chełmno, who has been identified as either a certain Jakov Grojanowski or Szlojme Fajner, claims the following in his testimony, reportedly dating from February 1942:

”How did the corpses appear? They were not burned, not black. The complexion of their faces was unchanged. Almost all the dead were lying in their excrement.

[...].

It seemed that they had only been put to sleep; their cheeks were pale and they kept their natural skin color.”[38]

Thus the corpses displayed no skin discoloration whatsoever.

Witness 6: Rudolf Reder

The witness Rudolf Reder, born in 1881, is supposed to have spent a significant portion of his nearly four month long stay at Bełżec dragging corpses from the camp’s alleged gas chambers to massive burial pits. On December 29, 1945, Reder was interrogated by the Polish Judge Jan Sehn. Regarding the physical appearance of the gas chamber victims, the witness stated:

“I was often on the ramp at the moment the doors were opened, but I never smelled any odor, and on entering a chamber right after the doors were opened I never felt any ill effects on my health. The bodies in the chamber did not show any unnatural discoloration. They looked like live persons, most had their eyes open.”[39]

The Bełżec key witness Reder is thus clearly of the opinion that the gassing victims displayed no cherry-red discoloration.

Witness 7: Eliahu Rosenberg

The Jewish witness Eliahu (Elias) Rosenberg supposedly spent several months working in close proximity of the alleged Treblinka gas chambers,[40] dragging thousands of corpses from the “death chambers” to mass graves. In a 12-page typewritten deposition in German which Rosenberg left in Vienna on December 24, 1947, the appearance of the gas chamber victims is described thus:

“The corpses were very bloated, their skin looked gray-white and easily peeled off, so that it hung from them like shreds. Their eyes protruded and the tongues hung out of their mouths.”[41]

Rosenberg’s description of the hue of the corpses is clearly not consistent with the red discoloration resulting from carbon monoxide poisoning.

In addition to Rosenberg, the Jewish writer Rachel Auerbach states in her essay “In the Fields of Treblinka” from 1946 that “the bodies were naked; some of them were white, others were blue and bloated.”[42] Auerbach had not herself been interned at Treblinka, but visited the remains of the camp in 1945 as part of an official inspection tour. Her essay is reportedly based on written testimony and talks she had with former Treblinka inmates. Another secondary account derives from the writings of a certain Jacob Mittelberg, who spent only a few hours in Treblinka before being transferred to Majdanek. Mittelberg visited the site of the “death camp” after the war in the company of Rachel Auerbach and a number of former Treblinka inmates, who told him that “when the doors of the gas chambers were opened, the people were blue and so pressed together as to be unrecognizable.”[43] Soviet-Jewish propagandist Vasily Grossman wrote in 1945 after his visit to the former camp site that “People who were unloading the chambers told me that the faces of dead were very yellow”.[44]

Witness 8: Theodor Friedrich Leidig

As far as I have been able to determine the only eyewitness to an alleged mass murder with exhaust gas to have spoken of corpses with red or reddish coloring was a certain Dr. Theodor Friedrich Leidig of the Kriminaltechnisches Institut (KTI) of the RSHA. Dr. Leidig claimed to have witnessed the murder of Russian POW’s detained at Sachsenhausen using a “gas van”:[45]

“We then went to another place, where we once again encountered the van. It turned out that we were now at the crematorium. I still remember that one could look through a peephole or a small window [Scheibe] into the interior of the van, which was illuminated.

One could see that the people were dead. Then the van was opened. Some corpses fell out, the rest were unloaded by prisoners. The corpses had, as was determined by us chemists, the pinkish-red [rosa-rote] appearance which is typical for people who have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Regardless whether this testimony is reliable or not – and we have in fact not a single shred of documentary or technical evidence that supports it – the following observation is inevitable: Leidig clearly knew from his studies that humans who have died of CO poisoning ought to look “pinkish-red”, so in case he was forced or felt impelled to make up a false story, he would have little problem making it a plausible-sounding one. A testimony from a layman mentioning the presence of reddish-pink discoloration would clearly be of a higher evidentiary value, as the possibility that the witness had drawn from a priori knowledge to embellish his story would be much smaller.

6. Rebuttals to possible counter-arguments

Below I will discuss four possible counter-arguments which may be raised against the revisionist critique of the eye-witness testimony.

Argument 1: The studies cited by revisionists are irrelevant because they refer to livor mortis

As has been explained above, the cherry-red discoloration appears as a mechanical effect soon as the carbon monoxide has been absorbed by the blood cells and is thus visible on post-mortem bodies (especially pronounced in the livor mortis, as during this phase the blood is concentrated due to gravity-induced pooling) as well as in ante-mortem states (to a variable degree) and even in some cases where decomposition has already set in. The medical studies and case reports quoted in this article and others are therefore relevant, whether referring to livor mortis or ante-mortem appearances of red discoloration.

Argument 2: Most or all of the victims were deeply anemic, something which would have prevented visible discoloration from ocurring

Anemia is medically defined as a qualitative or quantitative deficiency of hemoglobin, the molecule found inside red blood cells which causes the blood to look red. Anemia results either from excessive blood loss (due to hemorrhage or chronic loss of smaller volumes of blood), excessive destruction of blood cells, or a deficient production of new red blood cell. The idea of the counter-argument is that severe anemia would prevent the red discoloration from appearing in the gassing victims.

In the case of the Jewish deportees, anemia might have been caused either by inadequate intake of vitamin B12 and/or folic acid (leading to macrocytic anemia), or by iron deficiency (causing microcytic anemia). While mild anemia caused by iron deficiency among women of childbearing age is not uncommon even in the western world of today, it is very rare among men and children.

How common then was anemia among the populations of the wartime Jewish ghettos of Poland, where malnutrition, starvation and epidemics indeed took a heavy toll on the inhabitants? This question is very difficult to give a definitive answer to, but a number of indications may be gleaned from the book Hunger Disease. Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, edited the former Director of the Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition, Dr. Myron Winnick.[46] In this volume, Winick presents a report on nutrition-related diseases prepared by a group of Jewish physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1942. The group, led by Dr. Israel Milejkowski, worked out the details of the study in secret meetings, had medical equipment smuggled into the ghetto, and later smuggled the finished manuscript out of it. The small team of 28 Jewish medical experts included Dr. Mieczyslaw Kocen, a specialist in blood diseases who himself was later allegedly exterminated at Treblinka. The manuscript of the report, which escaped the war tumult relatively unscathed, was published in limited Polish and French editions by the American Joint Distribution Committee. It remained most obscure however, until it surfaced in the United States in the late 1970s and was published in edited form by the abovementioned Winnick.[47]

Regarding the changes of blood characteristics in hunger disease victims the ghetto physicians noted the following:

“Red blood cells examined in 80 cases decreased from 3 million per cubic millimeter to between 1.5 and 1 million and in some cases even below. Hemoglobin decreased to 60 to 70% and in some cases ranged as low as 10%. Color index was usually 1 or less, and rarely reached 1.15. Examining a drop of fresh blood we noticed that the red blood cells do not aggregate normally into rolls but remain single or group into small clusters. Anisocytosis and even more often microcytosis are present, macrocytosis is rare, and there are no nucleated red blood cells. Often the red blood cells are colorless and irregularly shaped. These are symptoms of hypochromic anemia in the recovery phase as indicated by a high percentage of reticulocytes.”[48]

The Warsaw doctors pointed out that “hunger disease” does not result in a decrease of the blood volume of the victim:

“In cachexia and hunger edema there is no anemia in the strict sense because blood volume is not decreased in proportion to body weight. Since there is a low percentage of red blood cells in a drop of blood, this would be classified as normovolemic oligocytemia.”[49]

Rather than a decrease of the total number of red blood cells, “hunger disease” tends to cause a dilution of the blood through the increase of the water content:

“In normal specimens plasma contains 89 to 90% water and red blood cells contain 63 to 67% water. In our patients’ specimens plasma contained 93 to 94% water and red blood cells only 58%.

The changes described in the water content of the blood can produce a pseudoanemia in patients with cachexia or hunger edema. The dryness of the red blood cells explains the presence of microcytosis.”[50]

In a study of child victims of hunger disease it was observed:

“Anemia was usually mild (3 to 3.5 million red blood cells, but sometimes under 2 million, or color index about 1). Even in advanced anemia no young red blood cells were found. In evaluating the degree of anemia, we had to consider “blood dilution,” which was present in every case of severe malnutrition, even the dry form without edema. (…) Dr. Apfelbaum’s research on the volume of blood in adults suffering from hunger disease has demonstrated an increase in blood volume per kilogram of body weight. This factor must also be considered in evaluating the degree of anemia.”[51]

On the subject of child victims of malnutrition, Winnick comments:

“One might assume that since these children, especially the older ones, were reasonably well nourished before the war (unlike most children in developing countries) they had built up significant reserves of vitamin A prior to contracting hunger disease. (…). Finally, vitamin A requirements, like those for other vitamins, might decrease during semistarvation.”[52]

Winnick further notes:

“This results not only in hemodilution which, as we shall see, contributed to the anemia and leukopenia reported in the next chapter, but also in a reduction in the efficiency of the blood as a carrier of nutrients. Thus the vascular system is forced to supply more of the ‘poorly nourished’ blood to the ‘hungry’ tissues and organs. The absolute anemia (…) reduces the amount of oxygen carried by the blood and again increases the total blood requirements of the tissues even though they are consuming less oxygen.”[53]

Another study of the Warsaw physicians showed that some degree of anemia was common among patients of hunger disease but that

“of 32 cases only six had 4 to 5 million red blood cells. Thus anemia was prevalent. The largest group of people had 3 to 4 million blood cells. Therefore we consider this number as average for slightly advanced hunger disease.”[54]

However, according to the table following this paragraph 10 of the cases displayed a level of 3-4 million red blood cells per cubic millimeter, while 9 cases displayed a level of 2 million or less. Thus only a minority of the studied cases suffered from what could be defined as severe anemia. Further among the conclusions we read that

“Anemia is normochromic or hyperchromic and only very rarely hypochromic. There is anisocytosis with a predominance of macrocytes.”[55]

Winnick summarizes the post-mortem case studies performed as follows:

“They [the physicians] report on 492 autopsies performed in the 2 ½ years that preceded the deportations. These were cases of ‘pure’ hunger disease with no other complications. This represented about 15% of the total number of autopsies performed in their departments during the same period. They divided their material into four periods beginning in January 1940 and ending on July 22, 1942, and point out that the number of cases of hunger disease increased with time.”[56]

In a series of tables the Warsaw physicians list the following gross changes in the “hunger disease” victims:[57]

1. Pale cadaver-like skin in 82.5% of the cases. Dark brown-colored skin in 17.5%.

2. Edema in one third of the cases. Effusions were most frequent in the abdominal cavity when they occurred.

3. Edema was rare in cases of “brown skin,” whereas the pale skin group had either the edematous or the dry form of the disease.

4. Severe atrophy occurred in heart, liver, spleen, and kidney.

5. Brain weight remained unchanged (these were adult patients).

6. Marked skeletal muscle atrophy.

7. Edema of the small intestinal wall with swollen reddish discolored mucosa and mucus appeared in 27.2% of the cases.

8. Thin watery bile in 77.7% of the cases.

9. Reduced number of fat bodies in the adrenals in 50% of cases.

10. Jellylike consistency in bone marrow of certain cases.

11. Emphysema in 13.8% of cases.

12. Anemia in only 5.5% of cases.

13. Almost 50% of the cases had intestinal changes that could be classified as pseudodysentery. An equal number of these cases fell into the edematous and nonedematous groups.

The above can be taken as a strong indication that even among fatal cases of malnutrition, anemia was far from always present. Even if no definitive answers may found in regards to this question, it seems far-flung to assert that a majority of the Jewish deportees who arrived at Treblinka were afflicted with anemia severe enough to prevent the appearance of a visible livor mortis or other variants of skin discoloration.

Argument 3: The lighting may not have been adequate for the eye-witnesses to see the colors of the corpses properly

This argument is easily dismissed. Rosenberg and Reder claims to have worked not only with removing the corpses from the gas chambers, but also with transporting them to the mass graves. It is generally asserted by holocaust historians that this activity was mainly carried out during the day,[58] so that in most if not all cases the Arbeitsjuden engaged in the corpse-dragging must have been able to observe their macabre burden in full daylight.

Argument 4: The inmates working with transporting the corpses might not have noticed the color of the livor mortis since it would have appeared on the half of the bodied turned towards the ground

There are two obstacles to this argument. On its way from the gas chamber to its final place in one of the mass graves the corpse would have made at least two stops, first close to the gas chambers, where the “dentists” would check its teeth and pull out any gold present, the second at the edge of the burial pit, where it had to be arranged with the other bodies in some fashion. In order to efficiently arrange the huge number of bodies in the mass graves, a portion of them would most likely have had to be turned around. In any case it seems logical to assume that a great many of the hypothetical gassing victims would have been turned over at least once on their way to the burial pits. That the inmates who worked day after day with these routines would have managed to completely miss the large, brightly discoloured portions of skin is simply out of the question – unless we assume that the clever Nazis selected only colorblind Jews for these work commandos!

7. Conclusion

In a medical article from 2004 we find the following stated regarding the appearance of cherry red skin discoloration in cases of carbon monoxide poisoning:

“The classical cherry red appearance is not seen in all cases of acute poisoning, and may not be apparent even in cases of severe toxicity.”[59]

However, in the case of the alleged mass gassings at the Aktion Reinhardt camps and Chełmno, all of the (alleged) victims can safely be regarded as victims of acute poisoning, and since the witnesses to the alleged gassings supposedly observed – often at very closely distance – not only one or two corpses, but hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of corpses, it natural follows that witnesses such as Reder, “Szlamek” and Rosenberg would have observed a very large number of bodies showing cherry red discoloration. That not a single one of the alleged eye-witnesses to mass gassings at the above listed camps mention the highly eye-catching type of discoloration that most often accompany lethal carbon monoxide poisoning is in itself enough to throw doubt upon the alleged truthfulness of their statements.[60] The apparently isolated case of Theodor Friedrich Leidig , not only because of his background but also due to the fact that he describes something not part of the holocaust per se, namely the (alleged) murder of a group of Russian prisoners of war at an “ordinary” concentration camp. When key witnesses from the “extermination camps”, however, reports the corpses to have been blue, white, grayish, or even without any discoloration whatsoever, then we can be certain that something is not right with their gas chamber testimonies.

At the website of the University of Birmingham we find the following presentation of a young forensic archeologist named Caroline Sturdy Colls [1]:

“Caroline is part of a small specialist team in the UK who work in the area of forensic archaeology. Caroline has a strong stomach and she doesn’t mind getting muddy – which helps when she works with the British Police on ‘no body’ cases – apparently it’s not as glamorous as it appears on CSI or Waking the Dead!

Caroline was recently one of the very few people allowed inside the newly-discovered Egyptian tomb, KV63, in the Valley of the Kings and she’s currently working on a project to identify Holocaust victims buried in mass graves in Poland.“

The holocaust mass graves which Ms. Colls is currently working at identifying are in fact those of the “pure extermination camp” of Treblinka II. This is made clear by a movie which can be downloaded at the same webpage. Below I provide a transcript of Ms. Sturdy Colls’ own narration (emphasis added):

“Forensic archeology is the collection of evidence for use in a legal case. This can be anything from investigating a single murder to genocide or war crimes.

It’s hard to believe that there has been no systematic search for the six million victims who perished in the Holocaust.

800,000 people were murdered here at Treblinka and their bodies were never found. It’s time we started looking.

I’m a scientist and while I obviously feel the same emotions as everyone else when I read about the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, I need to be able to do my job objectively. So I need to shut out these emotions sometimes, and let the evidence speak for itself.

There are some very vocal Holocaust deniers who use spurious archeology to claim that the Holocaust never happened. That’s why it’s so important that we use the most up-to-date scientific techniques. This can be done, and it should be done.“

My comments:

1) For any rational observer it is indeed “hard to believe” that there has been “no systematic search” for the bodies of the alleged 6 million holocaust victims. Since it is a given in murder cases that crime investigators do their best to secure technical and forensic evidence, and most importantly the physical remains of the victim, one would think that such a systematic search for bodies – as well as the weapons of crime, the remains of the alleged homicidal gas chambers – would have been appropriate already in connection with the Nuremberg Trials. How come, Ms. Sturdy Colls, that no such elementary technical-forensic investigation was carried out in this case of (alleged) murder of 6 million people?

2) Ms. Sturdy Colls should also ask herself how it is possible that no-one has managed to locate the remains of 800,000 people allegedly buried within the area of a mere few hectares? [2]

3) If Ms. Sturdy Colls had bothered to actually read the holocaust revisionist literature on the Aktion Reinhardt camps published in the last ten years she would know that its critique of the orthodox holocaust historiography concerning the alleged “extermination centers” of Bełżec [3] and Sobibór [4] is based on the surveys conducted at these sites by the renowned Polish archeology professor Andrzej Kola. While Kola pays lipservice to the holocaust credo, his published results leaves no doubt that the orthodox historiographical picture of these camps is untenable, that the alleged gas chamber buildings never existed, and that the number of people who perished and are buried at these sites is much smaller than claimed by holocaust historians. The results of Kola’s research at Sobibór indeed proved so embarrassing to the defenders of the officially sanctioned historiography that the article in which they were presented (in 2001) has never been officially translated. It was only through the study on Sobibór which I co-authored with Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno that the non-Polish-speaking world finally learned about them in 2010. It is most revealing that the leading mainstream expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis (who currently is appearing as a joint plaintiff (Nebenkläger) at the Demjanjuk Trial in Munich), in all the revised editions of his – otherwise very thorough – Sobibór. A History of a Nazi Death Camp to have come out since 2001 [5] does not mention with so much as a word the research of Prof. Kola – this despite the fact that Schelvis, who maintains contact with several Polish holocaust museums and institutes [6], cannot possibly be unaware of it. Surely Ms. Sturdy Colls is not suggesting that Prof. Kola’s research is “spurious archeology”, or that he is somehow in league with evil “Holocaust Deniers”?

4) I really hope that Ms. Sturdy Colls is indeed able to do her job objectively, despite her à priori conclusion that 800,000 people were murdered at Treblinka. In this she should heed the words of the archeologists Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek:

“It is generally agreed that one of the challenges facing the historical archaeologist is the artifact/text dichotomy. […] If contradictions are apparent and real, we are talking about spaces between or within artifact and text, about dissonances, that may reveal additional aspects hitherto unknown […]. However, to establish if in a given case dissonances exist, the nature and quality of the evidence, of both the archaeological and the historical data, should be reexamined carefully.“[7]

Or in plain English: If established historiography is contradicted by hard archeological evidence it needs to be reexamined and then discarded or rewritten. Even if Ms. Sturdy Colls’ future results would happen to support the revisionist transit camp hypothesis rather than the orthodox “death camp” hypothesis it is her scientific duty to present them openly and without falsifications. A word of caution though: Ms. Sturdy Colls should be careful not to publicly announce any “inconvenient” results until she is safely returned to the UK, as Poland punishes “Holocaust Denial” with up to 3 years in prison.[8] Perhaps better then to proceed as Professor Kola: Pay the necessary lipservice and let the results speak for themselves.

In 2007-2008 the abovementioned three archeologists (Gilead, Haimi and Mazurek) attempted to do what Kola had not been able to do: to find the alleged gas chamber building at Sobibór. To their help they had experts in geophysics, high resolution metal detection, a magnetic gradiometer, a terrain conductivity meter, ground penetrating radar, aerial photography, and GPS mapping devices – exactly the “most up-to-date scientific techniques” which Ms. Sturdy Colls is talking about. Despite the fact that the team from the outset “knew roughly where the gas chamber was located“, and that the area they had to investigate amounted to less than 3 hectares, they had to conclude in 2009 that “the location of the gas chambers is a complex issue that has to be solved, an important objective for future archaeological research at Sobibór“! [9] In the August 2010 issue of Reader’s Digest Yoram Haimi put it even more bluntly: “we’re still looking for the gas chambers.” [10] Another word of caution: It is easy to make a fool of oneself if one clings to scientifically indefensible dogmas!

I can only wish Ms. Sturdy Colls good luck in her work, which is precisely the kind of effort that we holocaust revisionists welcome.
In the meantime I advise her to read Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf’s study Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?,[11] especially the chapters on previous forensic examinations and the alleged mass burials and cremations (pp. 77-110, 137-157).

After the publication of “Evidence for the Presence of ‘Gassed’ Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories, Part 1”¹ in the summer issue of Inconvenient History I have came across numerous pieces of information prompting additions to the same text, which were incorporated in a recently published online Swedish version of the article.² Since many of these additions need to be considered in the upcoming parts of this study, I have decided to publish all of them separately online in the form of an addendum. The additions are presented in order of the sections to which they belong.

Section 2.3.3. “The Jews of France”

Of the 878 Jews deported from Drancy to Kovno and Reval (Tallinn) on 15 May 1944 (convoy “73m”), at least 26 were later transferred from Estonia to the concentration camp Stutthof near Danzig. A transport list from the autumn of 1944 contains the following names identifiable as persons from this convoy:³

Aserman, Gean b. 25.10.98. (spelt “Jean Aserman” in the 73m transport list)
Biter, Child b. 05.06.99. (“Szydeour Bitter”)
Blaufuchs, Alfred b. 03.06.08
David, Ozias b. 23.12.99. (“Oryas David”)
Frydmann, Abraam b. 25.02.99. (“Abram Frydmann”)
Futeral, Simon b. 02.02.22. (“Sandel Futeral” b. 02.04.22 – likely a mistake; there is one other Futeral in the transport list, but the year of birth does not match)
Gusevicz, Paul b. 07.04.04. (“Paul Guzewicz”)
Grosswald, Moise b. 10.05.93
Gustin, David b. 10.10.02. (David Gustein)
Herclich, Zysia b. 22.06.09. (“Zygia Herclich”)
Jolles, Ferdinand b. 27.02.07.
Kuperman, Jacob b. 27.06.93.
Leviach, Paul b. 12.09.04.
Levy, René b. 07.05.97.
Levy, Roger b. 30.12.97.
Mager, Armand b. 13.10.95.
Mlynarsky, Achille b. 15.03.02.
Mizrahi, Albert b. 19.02.00.
Perachia, Albert b. 15.05.21. (“Albert Perahia”)
Schnek, Leon b. 06.12.02. (“Leon Schneck”)
Skosovsky, Jean b. 03.01.12. (“Jean Skosowsky”)
Tattelbaum, Maurice b. 22.08.97.
Toledano, Henry b. 18.02.26. ( no doubt identical with “Leon Toledano”, who has the same birthday; there is no other Toledano in the transport list)
Valigora, Narchman b. 01.01.97. (“Nachmann Walligora”)
Mayer, Guy b. 07.02.96.

2.4.1. Italy

In the bimonthly Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 7, no. 2 (April 1944), we find the following news item (p. 185):

“A report from Polish underground sources reaching official Polish circles in London on Feb. 13 revealed that 3,000 Italian Jews arrived at the Trawniki labor camp last Nov. 15. Their present whereabouts is unknown, stated the report, since the Trawniki camp has been liquidated.“

This implies that the deported Italian Jews did not reach the Occupied eastern territories, but were transited via Auschwitz to the Lublin District.

Section 2.4.9. “Luxembourg”

Some of the 334 Luxembourg Jews deported to the Łódź Ghetto in October 1941 were reportedly later sent to Chełmno. Also, many of the Luxembourg Jews who had fled to France in autumn 1941 were later deported from there.⁴

Section 3.1.2. “Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz”

In the quote from the issue of 27 November 1942 we read:

“The London-based newspaper ‘France’ carries a notice that 20,000 Jews deported from France have arrived in Bessarabia in a pitiful state. The trains went straight to Kischinev [Chisinau] and Calarisi to deliver the prisoners to the local ghettos there.”

There is a Calarasi in southern Romania, but since the text is speaking of Bessarabia (where Chisinau is located) it is clear that the town meant is Calarasi in Bessarabia, also known as Kalarash.⁵

The report summarized by Shechtman according to which “Jews from Germany and Bulgaria, as well as 700 Polish Jews, were reported among the deportees in Mogilev” derives, according the historian’s notes, from a report published in the 23 July 1943 issue of the JTA Bulletin. Since Schechtman’s article is dealing with Transnistria it is almost certain that the Mogilev mentioned is the city of Mogilev-Podolski (Mohyliv-Podilsky) in the Vinnitsa District of Ukraine, rather than the city of Mogilev in eastern Belarus. Mogilev-Podolski was occupied by German forces on 19 July 1941 but was later annexed by Romania as part of Transnistria. In December 1941 there lived 3700 local Jews in the city’s ghetto together with 15 000 Jews who had been deported there from Bessarabia and Bukovina. In June 1942 there was an outbreak of typhoid in the ghetto which prompted the transferral of Jews to ghettos in other cities.⁶

As explained in Section 2.4.3. no Jewish transports departed from Bulgaria proper. However, from the Bulgarian-annexed regions of Macedonia and Thrace a total of 11 343 Jews were deported during the period March-April 1943. It is likely that the reported “Bulgarian” Jews reached Mogilev-Podolski via either Sobibór or Treblinka at the end of March 1943. It is not impossible that the German (as well as the Polish) Jews reached the city during the same period and the same route. According to an exterminationist website two transports with German Jews were sent to Sobibór during the first half of 1943: one containing “hundreds” departing on 31 March and another with 938 deportees departing from Berlin on 21 April.⁷ However, the leading exterminationist expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis, knows nothing of these transports.⁸ Witnesses state that one or two transports with German Jews reached Treblinka during Franz Stangl’s time as commandant of that camp, most likely in late autumn 1942 or the first half of 1943.⁹

To this section could be added a diary entry penned by the Warsaw Jew Abraham Lewin on 10 May 1942:

“Today this same refugee [unnamed Jew from Aleksandrów Kujawski] told me that the Nieszawa Jews and all other Jews left there were believed to have been deported to Romania. This rumour is most probably close to the truth, as another Jew happened to remark to me that reports had arrived from Bessarabia from Lublin Jews who had been transported there by the Germans.”¹⁰

The Jews of Nieszawa had been deported to the Lublin District in 1939-1940.¹¹ It is likely that they were among the Jews evacuated from Lublin and surrounding towns to Bełżec between 17 March and 14 April 1942.¹²

Section 3.1.4. “New York Times”

Thomas Dalton has kindly provided the author of this article with five further relevant quotes from the New York Times:

Already on 28 October 1941 the daily noted that Jews were “sent to the General Government, chiefly to Litzmannstadt, although some also are being banished to Riga, occupied capital of Latvia, and Minsk, in occupied Russia”. This is of course in perfect accordance with mainstream historiography. During the following months and years, however, the reports came to diverge from it.

In the issue from 26 July 1942 (under the headline “Vichy and Berlin at odds on aliens”) we read: “the Netherlands Indies news agency reported that 60,000 Jews had been moved from Amsterdam since last Thursday in a mass deportation of Netherland ‘non-Aryans’ to Poland and German-occupied Russia.” The 60,000 figure most likely derives from the number of Jews sent to the collection camps within the Netherlands, since only some thousand Dutch Jews had actually been deported east by this point in time.

On 29 August 1942 (“$25,000 sent abroad to care for children”) Joseph Hyman, the executive vice chairman of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, was quoted as stating that “The recent deportation to Eastern Poland and occupied Russia of 12,000 Jews from Paris and other parts of occupied France has aroused terror in the hearts of the entire Jewish population.”

5 September 1942 (“Deportation of Jews near goal in Reich”): “Until recently only Jews under 60 years of age were deported. But now even older people are being sent to Poland or Eastern [sic] Russia. (…) It is practically impossible to get in touch with German Jews sent to different ghettos in Poland or occupied Russia.”

Finally, on 8 November 1943 (“Germans wipe out Jews of Austria”), it was reported that the remaining Austrian Jews were “taken in cattle cars or ancient unheated passenger coaches to the ghettos of eastern Poland, Latvia, or occupied Russia. Reports suggest that many die on the way or after arrival.” By this point in time, there had been no direct transports of German, Austrian and Czech Jews to Latvia for over a year.

Section 3.1.5. “Notre Voix”

The Radio Moscow report from April 1944 concerning the liberation of 8,000 Paris Jews in the Ukraine by the Red Army finds support in two other sources:

On 15 August 1942 the Romanian-Jewish Bucarest physician Emil Dorian entered into his diary:

”There are persistent rumors about trains passing through the northern part of Moldavia, carrying Jews from occupied France sent by the Germans to the east. It is known that 20,000 Jews in occupied France have been recently deported from there, but no one could guess where they were sent. There are details: Sealed cars, dreadful thirst, no food.”¹³

The 20,000 Jews from France which Dorian is speaking about are alleged by the exterminationists to have been murdered in Auschwitz. Trains from the west passing through “the northern part of Moldavia” would most likely have had some city in the Ukraine as their destination.

One and a half months prior to Dorian’s diary entry, on 29 June 1942, the papal ambassador in France, Valerio Valeri,wrote from Vichy to Cardinal Luigi Malone:

“Towards the 20th of this month the occupational administrations, using the French police, have arrested some 12,000 Jews. [...] The majority of them are non-Aryans of foreign origin, primarily Poles, Czechs etc., who are destined to be deported to the Ukraine.”¹⁴

To summarize:

1) On 29 June 1942 a top member of the Catholic church informed a fellow church leader that the Jews recently arrested in Paris were “destined to be deported to the Ukraine.”

2) On 15 August 1942 Emil Dorian wrote of “persistent rumors” according to which 20,000 Jews from occupied France were passing through northern Moldavia.

3) On 29 August 1942 a leader of the Joint Distribution Committee stated that 12,000 French Jews had been deported to “Eastern Poland and occupied Russia” (see addenda to Section 3.1.4. above).

4) In April 1944 Radio Moscow reported that 8,000 Paris Jews (Paris was located in the occupied part of France) had been liberated by advancing Soviet troups in the Ukraine.

Could this really be just coincidence?

By the end April 1944 the Red Army had already crossed the Dnepr River,¹⁵ which means that the liberated Paris Jews had likely been held prisoners somewhere in the western part of the Ukraine. A possible train route from Auschwitz to the Ukraine via “the nothern part of Moldavia” could have been Auschwitz-Cracow-Przemysl-Lvóv-Czernowitz-Shmerinka-Vinnitsa-Kasatin-Fastow-Kiev.¹⁶ Czernowitz, in Romanian Cernăuti, is the capital of the Bukovina region which was part of the historical principality of Moldavia.¹⁷

Edit [25 September 2010]:  While it’s correct that close to 20,000 Jews had been deported from France up to 15 August 1942, as Dorian wrote in his diary, most of the deportees during this period were registered in Auschwitz. Up until the same date, a total of 4,940 Jews deported from France had been “gassed” i.e. transited.

During 1942-1943 a total of 32,631 Jews deported from France were “gassed” at Auschwitz and Sobibór.

(Cf. Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported From France 1942-1944, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1987, p. xxvi; smaller corrections after J. Schelvis, Sobibor. A History of a Nazi Death Camp, Berg, Oxford/New York 2007, pp. 217-218).

Section 3.3.3. “Hersh Smolar”

In another book on his involvement in the Minsk ghetto underground, originally published in 1946, Hersh Smolar writes with regards to the first half of 1943:

“News leaked out that large parties of Jews from Warsaw, Paris and Prague were brought to the vicinity of Minsk and Trostenitz where they were annihilated.”¹⁸

Between 18 and 22 January 1943 some 6,000 Warsaw Jews were sent to be “gassed” at Treblinka.¹⁹ Also, between 4 and 25 March 1943, some 3,500 French Jews were sent from the collection camp Drancy outside Paris to the “gas chambers” of Sobibór.²⁰ A further thirteen transports with 13,569 French Jews were sent to Auschwitz during 1943.²¹

Section 3.3.4. “Heinz Rosenberg”

Where did the 23 000 arrivals in February-March 1942 come from, and how did they reach Minsk? Where they German Jews, or of another nationality? As we have seen Rosenberg knew from the labels on the trunks where the deportees came from, but apparently forgets to tell his readers about it.

The preserved documents does not seem to allow for “unknown” transports of German Jews to Belarus during the period in question; at least not of the magnitude spoken of here. Could the unknown deportees mentioned by Rosenberg have reached Minsk via a transit camp? During February-March 1942 three of the “extermination camps” were in operation: Chełmno, Bełżec and Auschwitz. Bełżec was opened on 17 March, so it seems unlikely that more than a smaller portion of the 23 000 Jews could have been transited via this camp to Minsk. In Auschwitz the first regular (as opposed to experimental) mass gassing is supposed to have taken place in January or February, but this is portrayed as a chronologically rather isolated event, and judging by the diary entry of Herman Kruk from 30 January 1942, the Jews from this first “gassing” were transported via Vilna to the Eastern Front (cf. Section 3.3.1.). There remains thus Chełmno as the likely alternative. As we have seen in Section 3.3.1., many of the Jews evacuated from the Łódź Ghetto to the “extermination camp” Chełmno during the first months of 1942 continued on to Lithuania. Considering that a total of (7025 + 24 687 =) 31,712 Jews were sent from Łódź to Chełmno during February and March, it is not at all impossible, however, that 23,000 of these were instead transported to Belarus via the railway line Poznań-Warsaw-Minsk. That Jews from Łódź were deportered to Minsk is also confirmed by an “Address of the citizens of Minsk to Stalin” published in Pravda in August 1944, which is found quoted in a 1951 study by the Jewish scholar Solomon M. Schwarz:

“The German fascist invaders had driven 50,000 people from Minsk and the surrounding districts into the so-called ghetto, in addition, over 40,000 Jews had been brought to the Minsk ghetto from Hamburg, Warsaw and Lodz.”²²

The mention here of Warsaw indicates that Minsk later also served as the destination for transports of Polish Jews via Treblinka, something which in turn is confirmed by the statements of H. Smolar (cf. Section 3.3.3.).

On 17 August 2010 the Zionist news site YNet published the following item:

“Israel will continue to support efforts to set up a memorial center at Sobibor, according to an agreement reached by the director general of the Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs Ronen Plot and the Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Avner Shalev, with Dr. Andzrej Konrat, who is in charge of Holocaust remembrance in Poland.

The agreement is in keeping with the statement of intentions agreed upon in 2008 by Israel, Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands.

Almost nothing remained of the Sobibor Nazi death camp in Poland at the end of the war. The creation of a memorial center is the result of cooperative research by Poland’s council for the memory of war victims, headed by Minister Konrat, and Israel’s Ministry of Information and Diaspora Affairs and Foreign Ministry, directed by Yad Vashem researchers and assisted by Slovakia and the Netherlands.

For this purpose, and international committee of experts was established, and digs were carried out at the site to determine the precise location of the gas chambers.

The memorial center project, estimated to cost some 6 million euros ($8 million), is currently in its first planning stages. Decisions about an international competition for planning the building and decisions on budget allocation will be made in a joint meeting next month in Warsaw, in which all participating countries will be present. The center is due to be completed by October 2013, the 70th anniversary of the prisoner’s uprising at the camp.

‘We see this as a sacred joint obligation to remember the past and the victims,’ said Konrat during the meeting.

‘I welcome Polish cooperation and the importance the minister gives to remembering the Holocaust,” the director-general of the Ministry of Information said. “The establishment of a center at the death camp in which some 250,000 Jews were killed is an important part in education… and a part of the struggle against all those who would deny it happened.’”^[1]

The above news notice is a sure sign that the guardians of the “Holocaust” feel a growing desperation confronted with the mass of revisionist criticism of the gas chamber mythos, and that they therefore are resorting to certain strategies in order to prevent further research at the former sites of the “pure extermination camps” of Belzec, Sobibór och Treblinka (together known as the Reinhardt camps), research which could only cause further damage to the orthodox historiography. In the case of Treblinka most of the former camp site was covered with slabs of concrete and large stones already in the 1960s.^[2] In Belzec, where an archeological survey was carried out in the late 1990s (with devastating results for the official historical picture of this “death camp” ^[3]) the whole of the former camp site was covered in the early 2000s with an enormous concrete “monument”.^[4] It would not exactly surprise if Sobibór is now headed for a similar fate.

The YNet item contain two passages of particular note. First, the Israeli minister Ronen Plot is quoted as speaking of 250,000 Sobibór victims. This figure may well be used still in new encyclopedias and the like, but it has in fact been untenable all since the discovery of the so-called Höfle document in 2000. This document shows that 101,370 Jews were deported to Sobibór up until the end of 1942.^[5] The camp was in use until October 1943, but all sources agree that the number of Jews deported to Sobibór during 1943 was much smaller than that of 1942. Thus the leading exterminationist expert on Sobibór, Jules Schelvis, states the victim figure as 170,000.^[6]

Secondly we read in the article that an “international committee of experts” has carried out a survey at the former camp site in order to “determine the precise location of the gas chambers”. In fact there have been carried not one but two ^[7] archeological surveys with this purpose: the first one in 2000-2001 headed by the Polish archeology professor Andrzej Kola (who also led the abovementioned survey at Belzec) and a second one in 2007-2008 conducted by the Israeli-Polish trio Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek.

Andrzej Kola surveyed the whole of “Lager III” – the fenced-off section of the camp wherein the alleged gas chamber building supposedly was located and which covers less than 4 hectares – with probe drillings and ssubsequently carried out archeological diggings at five identified building remains. Of these “Object E” was identified in the south-western corner of Lager III, exactly where the gas chamber building was located according to maps drawn by the eyewitnesses. The problem with this discovery is that “Object E” in no way corresponds with the descriptions of said building. The six gas chambers in the camp were allegedly arranged three and three alongside a central corridor inside a brick or concrete building measuring approximately 10 x 13-18 meter. “Object E” on the other hand consist of two barracks built completely out of wood, the smaller one measuring 14 x 4 m, the larger one no less than 60-80 x 6 m! Remarkably enough not a single eyewitness has spoken of this enormous wooden barrack, which dimensions as well as construction material makes it impossible to identify with the alleged gas chamber building (the same naturally goes for the smaller barrack). Also in “Object E” was discovered numerous remains of clothing and toilet articles, such as hairclips, perfume bottles, belts etc. The supposed gas chamber victims on the other hand are alleged to have entered the chambers of death already naked. These finds made Kola dismiss in his excavation report the hypothesis that “Object E” could have served as the gas chamber building. Instead he proposed the hypothesis – which has no support in eyewitness testimony – that the larger barrack served as a magazine for the confiscated clothing and belongings of the gas chamber victims.^[8]

None of the four other building remains identified by Kola in the former Lager III were even close to fit the description of the searched-for gas chamber building. Another remarkable find, however, was “Object A”, a small building with a cellar in which were found remains from an oven and a coal storage. Kola somewhat halfheartedly interpret this as the remains of a blacksmith’s workshop, despite the fact that there already existed a blacksmith in another part of the camp, and a small camp such as Sobibór hardly would need two blacksmiths. Besides, what would the use be of a blacksmith’s workshop in a camp section supposedly devoted only to the gassing, burial and cremation of the alleged victims?^[9] In our study of Sobibór I, Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno have interpreted “Object A” as an installation in which clothing and other items were deloused using heated air or steam (produced by the oven), and “Object E” as a delousing barrack in which the Jews deported to the camp were showered and deloused before being sent further east to the German-occupied part of the Soviet Union.^[10]

The archeological survey carried out at Sobibór 2007-2008 by the trio Gilead-Haimi-Mazurek has only been published in extreme brevity in an article published in the American journal Present Pasts in early 2009.^[11] In this article we read that the three archeologists “acting on the assumption” that they “knew roughly where the gas chamber was located (…) decided to dig first in the area bordering the west of Kola’s Building E”. In this area, however, one found no building remains whatsoever.^[12] Later, in summer 2008 the team was reinforced by American geophysicists equipped with among other things ground-penetrating radar. Despite the aid of advanced technology and the fact that Lager III had already been mapped out by Kola, one failed with miserably with detecting any remains of the fabled gas chambers, and in the 2009 article one had to grudgingly admit that “It is obvious that the location of the gas chambers is a complex issue that has to be solved, an important objective for future archaeological research at Sobibór.”^[13]

In other word: the “international committee of experts” spoken about in the YNet news notice has not found any trace of the alleged homicidal gas chambers of Sobibór, despite two surveys and a very limited area to search through. The explanation for this is of course simple: the alleged gas chambers never existed in the first place, and could therefore not leave any remains.

In our study, Mattogno, Graf and myself have presented a wide assortment of evidence which unequivocally shows that Sobibór in fact was a transit camp – which it was also designated as in classified internal communication between the SS leader Heinrich Himmler and the SS camp administrator Oswald Pohl from the summer of 1943 ^[14] – in which deported Jews were deloused and then sent on eastwards, for example to Lithuania.^[15] In the total absence of evidence supporting the Sobibór mass gassing allegations, the guardians of the extermination camp legend such as Avner Shalev and Andrzej Konrat have no other option than to resort to obfuscation of facts and prevention of further research, all disguised as “commemoration”.

^[1] “Sobibor death camp memorial center planned”, online: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3933561,00.html
^[2] http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/gallery/TREBLINK.htm
^[3] Cf. Carlo Mattogno, Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, pp. 71-96; C. Mattogno, “Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp”, online: http://www.codoh.com/gcgv/gcgvhcrm.html
^[4] http://www.deathcamps.org/belzec/buildingsite.html
^[5] Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, TBR Books, Washington DC 2010, p. 22, 46-47.
^[6] Ibid., pp. 49-50.
^[7] A travel journal written by “Holocaust” historian Martin Gilbert reveals that another excavation was carried out in the former Lager III already in 1996, but apparently the results of this excavation have never been published; cf. ibid., p. 109, note 298.
^[8] Ibid., pp. 157-162.
^[9] Ibid., pp. 153-155.
^[10] Ibid., pp. 286-287.
^[11] I. Gilead, Y. Haimi, W. Mazurek, “Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres,” Present Pasts, vol. 1, 2009.
^[12] Ibid., p. 27
^[13] Ibid., p. 33f.
^[14] Nuremberg document NO-482.
^[15] J. Graf, T. Kues, C. Mattogno, Sobibór. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, op.cit., cf. especially chapter 9 and 10.

1. The Alleged Second Phase Gas Chamber Building at Bełżec

According Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad [1] the first gas chamber building at Bełżec, a wooden barrack containing three chambers each measuring 4 x 8 meters, was torn down sometime in late June 1942 and replaced with a larger, more solid building measuring 24 x 10 meters and containing six separate gas chambers, each measuring 4 x 8 (or possibly 4 x 5 or 5 x 5) meters. As for the construction material, Arad quotes the Jewish key witness Rudolf Reder, who in 1946 stated that the building was made “of grey concrete”. The former SS-Untersturmführer Josef Oberhauser described it as “a massive new building” in his testimony.[2] The witness Wilhelm Pfannenstiel testified that “the building that housed the gas chambers was made of concrete”.[3] That the building was made of brick and/or concrete was accepted also by the verdict of the 1965 Bełżec trial in Munich[4], and has been adopted as a fact by various authoritative works on the Holocaust, such as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.[5]

2. Andrzej Kola’s Search for the Second Phase Gas Chamber Building

Between 1997 and 1998, Polish archaeologist Andrzej Kola conducted probe drillings and excavations at the former site of the Bełżec “death camp”. While the grave pits found by Kola’s team were only subject to drillings, building relicts found were excavated fully or in part. A primary object of the building excavations indeed appears to have been the search for the remains of the alleged gas chamber buildings.

In his survey report Kola writes [6]:

«The probing drills indicated undefined archaeological structures of a non-grave character in the northern part of the camp, in the north-western area of ha 16. The neighbouring excavations of different shape and size were located there (…). They revealed the existence of an undefined building negative, made completely of wood, partly buried in the ground, dismantled totally. In the bottom view the relicts had a shape of a regular rectangle with the sizes of about 3,5 x 15 m, which bottom was deposited horizontally to the depth of about 80 cm. The excavation contained dark sandy humus, clearly drawn on the background of sandy soil.
   The cultural contents consisted of fragments of tar paper, iron nails coming probably from the overground building construction. Moreover pieces of dentures, female combs and two Polish grosz coins were found. The wooden building served probably as a gas chamber in the second stage of the camp functioning, in autumn and winter 1942. Such an interpretation could be confirmed by its location in the camp plan. The probing drills from the north-eastern and eastern part of the building excavated only mass grave pits. Location of the gas chamber close to the burial places in the second stage of the camp existence was confirmed by some of the witness reports» (italics mine).

The witness which Kola is referring to here is none other than Rudolf Reder, as seen from the following footnote to the above cited passage:

«The witness informs that in the second stage of the camp functioning the gas chamber was located directly close to the graves. According to him, however, the chamber was made of concrete. The excavations carried out in that area did not prove any traces of brick or concrete buildings, which makes that report unreliable» (italics mine).

At the end of his discussion Kola nevertheless draws the following conclusion [7] :

«In the place of the biggest concentration of non grave structures the archaeological survey recognised the traces of [a] non-defined building with the size of about 15 x 3, 5 m (building G). It was a completely wooden building. They may have been relicts of the second gas chamber from the second stage of the camp existence. Such an interpretation is supported by planigraphy of the camp. Reder’s information, that the building was made of concrete, does not seem to be convincing, because no traces of concrete objects were spotted in the central part. The tar paper, mentioned by him, which was to cover the flat gas chamber roof, is archeologically proved in the relict layers of the building».

Italian revisionist Carlo Mattogno, who carefully scrutinizes Kola’s report in his study on the Bełżec camp () succinctly remarks on Kola’s fallacious chain of evidence [8]:

«Kola’s hypothesis contradicts the testimonies and the judicial findings not only as to the structure of the alleged gas chambers, but also regarding their surface area. (…) On the one hand, the archeological findings contradict the testimonies and the judicial findings, making them inadmissible; on the other hand, Kola’s hypotheses regarding the functions of “Building G” are in disagreement with the testimonies and the judicial findings. However, if we are to accept the official thesis, we cannot free ourselves from these sources: Either the gas chambers did exist the way the witnesses have described them, or they did not exist at all»

Indeed, as admitted by Bełżec expert Robin O’Neil, who had been involved in the excavations

«We found no trace of the gassing barracks dating from either the first or second phase of the camp’s construction»[9].

3. The Hypothesis of Alex Bay

In his online essay “The Reconstruction of Belzec“[10], air photo analyst Alex Bay (who also writes his name Charles A. Bay) devotes considerable effort to “explaining” the discrepancy between “Building G” and the eyewitness descriptions of the “gas chambers”. In the section on “Camp II: The Killing and Graves Area“[11] http://www.holocaust-history.org/belzec/deathcamp/index we read:

«One supposes that if the SS thoroughly razed the building, including footings, nothing should remain except disturbed soil horizons.The fact that Kola’s excavations revealed a small area with traces of rotted wood, and no masonry remains implies that the gas chamber was less substantial in material construction. However, countering the indications that led Kola to doubt that Reder was correct about a masonry gas chamber is Kola’s inventory of nearby gave pits in which he listed four graves excavated that contained brick rubble, and three of the four were within 50 to 60 meters of the chamber site (see Figure 4.6.3). This is an indication that when the building was torn down, part of it at least was made of brick which was dumped close by. It is possible that the method of construction was responsible for the absence of masonry. A case can be made for the building’s being erected on ephemeral foundations of wood – a system of piers and grade beams – to support brick walls which subsequently are easily pulled down and disposed of».

Bay then devotes an entire appendix[12] to this attempt at salvaging the identification of “Building G” with the homicidal gas chambers:

«A grade beam construction system is proposed because it meets the requirements for a cheap foundation made of readily available, local materials, for which permanence is of little concern. Certainly the SS would not be overly interested in building a structure for the ages, and rather knew that everything they built would be razed within a short span of months. (…) The grade beam method of construction is illustrated in Figure A-1. Grade beams are usually used for frame structures».

Bay next quotes what is apparently a personal communication from a Mr. Paul Fisette, who is stated to be the “Director Building Materials and Wood Technology 126 Holdsworth Natural Resources Center University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003″:

«Most light-frame construction projects follow a similar sequence of events: the perimeter of the planned structure is marked with stakes, soil within the defined area is excavated to a depth that is safely below the frost line (4’0″ minimum in my area), foundation walls are formed, concrete is poured, and then a wood-frame structure is erected on top of the poured foundation. Excavations live a short life. They are dug only to be filled, with thousands of dollars worth of concrete. This building practice is at times a necessary. But often, filling an excavated trench with concrete is nothing more than a bad habit. There are less costly alternatives. Using a wooden grade beam is one option that saves time, money, labor and resources» .

Bay then continues his argument:

«The advantages enumerated above must have been clear to Hackenholt, the SS jack-of-all-trades who was a skilled mason and who was intimately involved in the design and construction of the gas chambers at all three Reinhard death camps. It would also have been apparent to him that such a system would be quicker to complete than a conventional foundation of poured concrete or mortared brick, and in the event of tearing down the structure, there would not be any refractory, deep foundation requiring excavation and demolition before it could be disposed of.
   The major question facing one in implementing a grade beam footing is that of the size of the timber needed to support a masonry wall without deflection. Figure A2 presents a graph of the weight of an 8 inch thick brick wall, 6 feet high. The weights are plotted against varying lengths of wall. Each length represents a span of grade beam between piers (as illustrated previously in Figure A1). From Figure A2, a span of 6 or 7 feet weighs in the neighborhood of 1500 kilograms.
   The soils at Belzec were sandy and this type of soil has excellent load bearing characteristics: It will not expand when wetted and it has good friction and compression characteristics. All that is needed in building is a strong beam, and a safe span interval between the posts so that beam flexing is minimized when loaded with a wall. This can be achieved with squared logs of large cross section, a building material in abundant supply at Belzec.
  In Figure A3, one can readily see that it is possible to support an 8 inch thick brick wall, 6 feet high over a span of 6 or 7 feet if tripled fir or spruce headers with dimensions of 6 x 16 or 6 x 18 are used. At Belzec the construction of the new gas chamber could proceed quickly without the need for digging and making a concrete or brick footing. This would mean that after the building was torn down, all that would remain would be the small areas of disturbed soils where the posts had been».

But does this argument really hold water? In the next section I will discuss Bay’s statements and contrast them with what we know of the construction method suggested by him.

4. The Reality of Grade Beam Foundations

4.1. Different Types of Building Foundations

I will begin my critique of Bay’s hypothesis by taking a brief look at the various types of foundation systems. In the guide Building Construction Illustrated we read [13]:

«The foundation is the lowest division of a building – its substructure – constructed partly or wholly below the surface of the ground. Its primary function is to support and anchor the superstructure above and transmit its loads safely into the earth. Because it serves as a critical link in the distribution and resolution of building loads, the foundation system must be designed to both accommodate the form and layout of the superstructure above and respond to the varying conditions of soil, rock, and water below» (italics mine).

There exists four main types of building foundations used in ordinary houses (normal or small scale buildings). They are [14]:

«Foundations are normally made by one of the following methods:
1   a concrete strip with frost-resistant brick or block sub-walls up to DPC [damp-proof course] level; usually 150 mm above ground (figure 6.2);
2  a trench completely filled with concrete (figure 6.3);
3  a thin raft of reinforced concrete, used where ground conditions are unstable (figure 6.5); and
4  piles with a ground beam in exceptionally difficult ground (figure 6.4) [Illustration 1 below]»

As will be seen below, we are here dealing with a variant of the fourth method.

III. 1: Figure 6.4. from The Whole House Book

4.2. The Characteristics of Grade Beam Foundations

Building Construction Illustrated provides the following definition of the term grade beam [15]:

«A grade beam is a reinforced concrete beam supporting a bearing wall at or near ground level and transferring the load to isolated footings, piers, or piles» (italics mine).

Ill. 2: Schematic representation of grade beam foundation from Building Construction Illustrated

Bay’s example has wooden grade beams, but the function is the same. The wooden variant is known in literature (The Whole House Book mentions “timber (ground) beams spanning between timber piles or recycled brick piers [i.e. isolated wooden footings]“[16]) although it appears to be rarely used in other than small-scale, low-rise construction.

The crucial point here is that grade/ground beams support bearing walls, i.e. all outer walls of a building. In order to support the weight of the wall properly, the beam has to have at least the same width as the wall which is placed on top of it. The load of the wall is then transferred through the beam to “footings” or piles buried vertically in the soil. There has to be at least four such footings if the building is rectangular – one in each corner (to achieve minimum stability) – but usually there are additional footings to further distribute pressure. The placement of the beam under the bearing wall is clearly seen on figure 6.4 on page 66 of The Whole House Book as well as the figure showing a grade beam foundation on p. 3.09. of Building Construction Illustrated. Bay’s own Figure A1 also shows this, as well as a footing placed at the building’s corner. A figure found in the Swedish guide Grunder (“Foundations”) – reproduced below as Illustration 3 – shows a variant of grade beam construction, a small house with an “open footing” foundation.[17] This means simply that the footings are placed partly over ground, but the principle of grade/ground beams (“grundbalkar“) supporting the bearing walls is the same.

Ill. 3: Variant of grade beam construction with open footings. (Yttre plintrad = outer line of footings; inre plintrad = inner line of footings; bjälkar av konstruktionsvirke = beams of construction wood; plintavstånd = footing distance; bärlina/grundbalk = bearing line/ground beam).

Bay writes that “after the building was torn down, all that would remain would be the small areas of disturbed soils where the posts had been”. This would mean, of course, that one would be able to detect the former presence of footings along the outer walls of the torn down building. Let us recall here that the alleged second gas chamber building measured 24 x 10 meters, while Kola detected “an undefined building negative, made completely of wood” having the “shape of a regular rectangle with the sizes of about 3,5 x 15 m”, that is, a structure covering an area corresponding to merely 22% of that of the alleged gas chamber building, which according to the eyewitnesses was built of concrete and/or bricks. It therefore follows from Bay’s reasoning that Kola somehow managed to miss the major part of the building’s remains! But is this really plausible?

5. “Building G” in the Context of Kola’s Surveys and Excavations

5.1. Kola, O’Neil and Tregenza’s Descriptions of “Building G”

“Building G”, being the supposed remains of the “Hackenholt Foundation” gas chamber building, is without doubt the most important of the building remains detected. Despite this, Kola devotes to it merely half a page of text and a not very sharp photograph showing “The building relicts and the profile at the depth 60-70 cm”. In contrast, the loading platform is given two and half pages, “Building A”, the remains of a building with no ascribed relation to the alleged extermination process, three and a half pages, including two photos, and “Building D”, the camp garage, nearly four pages. Even more remarkable is the fact that together with “Building E”, the remains of a “medical point for the camp staff”, “Building G” is the only structure excavated for which no profile, outline, section or plan is provided. We therefore have very little data to go on when it comes to this most important building. This, however, did not stop Bełżec expert Michael Tregenza from writing in 1999 that:

«On the former premises of Lager II was found a concrete base, measuring 15 by 4 meters and divided into four large rooms of equal size. It is assumed that this is what remains of the “Stiftung Hackenholt” gas chambers».[18]

Tregenza is clearly stating untruths here, unless we are to believe that Kola for some inexplicable reason covered up the existence of remains much more consistent with the characteristics of the alleged gas chambers! Neither does Kola mention anything about a subdivision of the building.

In his online book Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide[19], which, judging from its introduction, was written in 2004, Robin O’Neil seems rather sure that “Building G” is the remains of the second phase gas chambers:

«The location of the gas chamber building during the second phase was probably in the central-eastern part of the former camp where exploratory drillings failed to locate evidence of any mass graves. Reder reports that on either side of the unloading platforms which extended along the length of the building there were burial pits filled with corpses, or empty graves prepared to receive them. The bodies were transported from the platform manually, which indicates the pits were in close proximity to the gas chambers. The investigators were unable to identify totally this structure as the second phase gas chamber: the traces of a wooden building in the central part of the camp can be hypothetically regarded as the remains of the 2nd stage gas chamber.
However, the author and other camp experts have concluded that the findings were in all probability traces of the second phase gas chambers. The tarpaper mentioned by Reder, which covered the flat roof of the gas chamber building in the second phase is archaeologically proved by substances found on-site, corroborating Reder’s testimony» (italics mine).

As seen above, however, Robin O’Neil publicly admitted in 1999 that no remains of either the first or the second gas chamber building had been detected, and in an online article from 2006, apparently written in collaboration with Tregenza, he writes [20]:

«The lack of any clear evidence to date locating the second gassing building is intriguing. It may well be the case that the SS deliberately destroyed and removed all evidence of the most incriminating structure in the camp. On examination of the arrangement of all the mass graves and camp structures located during the 1997‑98 investigations, one area stands out as the most likely site of this building: an area devoid of any graves or structures near the north eastern corner of the camp» (italics mine).

The foremost experts on Bełżec are thus still hesitant to identify “Building G” as “Stiftung Hackenholt”!

5.2. The Method of A. Kola

How did Kola proceed in his excavations of building remains at Bełżec? In his report we read [21]:

«The archaeological recognition of the camp area was thought to be carried out by the means of probing drills. Only in few cases, where while using that method non grave objects were stated, the recognition was completed by narrow and wide scope trying to explain the objects’ functions. During the autumn works in 1998 and 1999 those methods were given up and this time much bigger part of the western and central side of the camp was searched thoroughly. During the excavation the archaeologists tried to interpret the functions of objects recognised in the area by drilling in intensive archaeological structures, which were identified as remains of unidentified brick buildings (in its western part) and probably a wooden building (in its central part)».

The wooden building mentioned is evidently “Building G”. The net of probe drillings (called “basic drills” by Kola) covering the former camp area consisted of drillings made with 5 meter intervals, so that there was

«relatively little accuracy in defining the borderline shapes of the located objects (mass graves and non-grave objects)».[22]

As shown by Carlo Mattogno, “relatively little accuracy” is an understatement, as the mass grave borders outlined by Kola and O’Neil are in fact, to a certain degree, arbitrary. Finer drillings were only made at the site of structural remains [23]:

«Only in same cases, where the non-grave objects were stated in the layers (the remains of buildings) narrow scope survey was decided as more detailed, and the drills were dense (every 2 or 1 m). On the whole during the two excavation seasons of 1997 and 1998 years 2227 study drills were made, in which 404 drills in 1997 year and 1823 drills in the next one. The method was not used in 1999».

The alleged gas chamber building would, if it was real, inescapably leave at least certain amounts of debris (concrete or brick fragments, mortar etc.) spread over its “footprint”, and remains or negatives of footings as well as other kinds of soil disturbances would have been detectable within the supposedly 24 x 10 m large area. That an experienced archeologist like Professor Kola, while carrying out the additional drillings around the identified structural remains of “Building G” would have failed to detect such traces is preposterous, especially if one considers that Kola attempted to identify the building remain as the gas chamber building and that he was aware of the discrepancy between official historiography and the “Building G” remains. If in fact he had any evidence whatsoever to go on, we can be sure that he would at least have mentioned the possibility of “Building G” being larger than 3,5 x 15 m.

6. Bay’s Circumstantial Evidence for the Second Phase Gas Chamber Building

As demonstrated above, Bay’s grade beam hypothesis is devoid of any real value. What then of the circumstantial evidence invoked by him, namely the presence of brick rubble in adjacent mass graves and the supposed traces of the “tube” visible in air photos? Below I will discuss in brief this evidence, together with the tar paper found at the site of “Building G”, which Kola as well as O’Neil puts forth as corroborating evidence for “Building G” being the gas chambers.

6.1. The Presence of Brick Rubble

Bay asserts that

«countering the indications that led Kola to doubt that Reder was correct about a masonry gas chamber is Kola’s inventory of nearby gave pits in which he listed four graves excavated that contained brick rubble, and three of the four were within 50 to 60 meters of the chamber site (see Figure 4.6.3)».[24]

A comparison of Bay’s Figure 4.6.3 with the survey maps show that the three grave pits we are dealing with are the ones designated as no. 7, 8 and 12 by Kola.[25] The fact that these graves contained some brick rubble is indeed borne out by Kola’s report.[26] Graves no. 7 and 8 are situated some 20 to 30 meters away from “Building G”. As for grave no. 12, it is located approximately 65-70 m away from “Building G”, but it is also not far from the brick structure “Building B”[27], something which offers an alternative explanation for the brick rubble found in this grave. The findings of brick rubble in graves no. 7 and 8 could, as suggested, indicate the presence of bricks in the structure of “Building G”, but given the well-known large scale clandestine diggings carried out at the former camp site years and even decades after the end of the war – activities which could well have led to debris being transported several hundred meters – this indication is a weak one at best. It should of course not be excluded altogether that “Building G” in fact was a brick building resting on a wooden grade beam foundation, but in that case the structure measured 3,5 x 15 m, and could therefore not have been the gas chamber building alleged by the eyewitnesses.

6.2. The Alleged Traces of the “Tube”

Bay next serves up a piece of evidence that is even less convincing than the brick rubble:

«Aside from the material composition of the gas chamber, the available aerial photography strongly supports the reported dimensions. For example in Figure 4.6.4, the small copse of woods has an opening cut through it 10 meters wide. The second gas chamber was built just beyond the trees, at the end of this cut. The photography shows distinct traces of fencing in the form of dark lineations (see A, B, D), which are believed to be the traces of fencing. The lines would have been the result of the fall of needles and twigs from the evergreen branches woven into the wire as a screening device. Lines A-B measure to be about 5 meters apart. These are undoubtedly the remains of the tube which funneled the victims to the door of the gas chamber. At Treblinka, this feature was 5 meters wide»[28]

In the end the above argument boils down to the following question: If a 10-meter-wide fenced-in pathway existed at Bełżec, does this mean that there was a 10-meter-wide building with homicidal gas chambers at one end of it? The answer is emphatically no, since there exists no material or documentary evidence whatsoever for the existence of said gas chambers, and moreover, the existence of a 10-meter-wide pathway does not dictate that a hypothetical building placed at one end of it would also have to be 10 meters wide. It should further be noted that the existence of such a passage in itself does not prove that the mass gassing allegations are correct, only that there was a passage through which people passed. If Bay insists on pursuing a quest for the impossible, he could as well go search for the gold at the other end of the rainbow…

6.3. The Remains of Tar Paper and the Location of “Building G”

Bay further calls to his reader’s attention Kola’s argument that traces of tar paper at the site of “Building G”, as well as the very location of this object supports the hypothesis of it being identical with the alleged second phase gas chamber building. These supposed indications, however, are likewise disingenious, as even orthodox Holocaust historians have had to admit. In their article “Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres”, Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek discuss Kola’s identification of “Building G” as follows [29]:

«The suggestion that building G is the gas chamber of the second phase contradicts the historical evidence and therefore arouses reservations on methodological grounds. There is no doubt that building G was a wooden structure. However, historical sources indicate that the gas chamber of the second phase was built of concrete. (…) Kola, who is aware of Reder’s report, flatly rejects it in a footnote and labels it ‘unreliable’ (Kola, 2000: 61). In the summary (ibid: 69) he states that ‘Reder’s information, that the building was made of concrete, does not seem to be convincing, because no traces of concrete objects were spotted in the central part.’
   The downright rejection of Reder’s observation (and that of Pfannenstiel) is methodologically problematic, and it is profitable to discuss this point in the framework of historical archaeology. It is generally agreed that one of the challenges facing the historical archaeologist is the artefact/text dichotomy. When they are in accordance, reconstruction of past events is safer, but what about apparent (or alleged) contradictions? If contradictions are apparent and real, we are talking about spaces between or within artefact and text, about dissonances, that may reveal additional aspects hitherto unknown (Galloway, 2006: 42-44). However, to establish if in a given case dissonances exist, the nature and quality of the evidence, of both the archaeological and the historical data, should be re-examined carefully. Kola does not re-examine the credibility of Reder or Pfannensstiel, or the feasibility of their observations before rejecting them. (…)
   Kola’s interpretation is based on two arguments. The first one is the fact that building G is located near the mass graves. The distance is in the eye of the beholder, since a gas chamber could be found 20-30 m west or south to building G, and still be near the mass graves (Fig.8) (Kola, 2000: Fig. 17). The second argument concerns the tar paper. The fact that tar paper was found in building G is used by Kola to interpret it as a gas chamber, because tar paper was noticed by Reder on the roof of the new gas chamber (ibid: 69). We cannot find a reason not to trust Reder’s specific observation, but we are sure that this does not imply that the use of tar paper was restricted to the gas chamber only. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that tar paper was used intensively in Poland in the construction of barracks in general and wooden barracks of Nazi concentration and extermination centres in particular. In Treblinka, for example, the survivor Samuel Willenberg (1992: 139) notes that “Instead of having us clap a tar-covered roof on the new building, like those of the other buildings of the camp, the Germans ordered one of cast concrete.” That tar paper was brought to Bełżec and used to cover the roofs of wooden structures is highly probable, and thus building G is a remainder of such a structure. Since there were many wooden structures, covered, most likely, with tar paper, the claim that building G is a gassing installation cannot be substantiated» (italics mine).

As Gilead et al correctly observes, neither the presence of tar paper nor the location of “Building G” is evidence for it being the “Stiftung Hackenholt” gas chambers. Thus the historians have nothing left but their pious beliefs, in this case aided by the fact that the entire camp site is now covered with concrete, making further investigations impossible. It is worth noting in this context that Bay himself is a collaborator of Haimi and Gilead’s Sobibór Archeological Project, as seen from the quoted article of Gilead et al.[30]

7. Conclusion

Above I have shown that Alex Bay’s “reconstruction” of “Building G” as the alleged second phase homicidal gas chamber building of Bełżec is severely flawed, since it rests upon a misunderstanding of how a grade-beam foundation actually looks and works. The little circumstantial evidence that Bay can muster is of dubious value, and do not in any way strengthen the extermination camp hypothesis. In the end, one can only conclude that “Building G” cannot possibly be identical with the gassing building described by the witnesses. What Bay presents is therefore nothing more than a wild goose chase after the traces of a chimera, a rather half-hearted attempt at saving the face of orthodox historiography in the light of embarrasing hard evidence.

[1] Y. Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1987, p. 73.

[2] Quoted in E. Klee et al., ‘The Good Old Days’: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, The Free Press, New York 1988, p. 230.

[3] Quoted by Y. Arad, “‘Operation Reinhard’: gas chambers in eastern Poland”, in: Kogon, Langbein and Rückerl (Eds.), Nazi Mass Murder: a Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1993, p. 130.

[4] Cf. A Rückerl (ed.), NS-Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse, Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1979, p. 133.

[5] I Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, MacMillan, New York 1990, Vol I, p. 178.

[6] A. Kola, Bełżec: The Nazi camp for Jews in the light of archaeological sources: Excavations 1997-1999, The Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Warsaw/Washington 2000, p. 61.

[7] Ibid., p. 69.

[8] C. Mattogno, Bełżec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago 2004, p. 94.

[9] Quoted in ibid., p. 96.

[10] http://www.holocaust-history.org/belzec/

[11] http://www.holocaust-history.org/belzec/deathcamp/index

[12] http://www.holocaust-history.org/belzec/appendix/

[13] Francis D.K. Ching, Building Construction Illustrated, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken NJ, 4th edition 2008, chapter 3, page 2 (3.02) – this book lacks page numbers.

[14] Cindy Harris & Pat Borer, The Whole House Book. Ecological Building Design and Materials, 2nd edition, Centre for Alternative Technology Publications, Machynlleth 1998, p. 66.

[15] Francis D.K. Ching, Building Construction Illustrated, op.cit., chapter 3.09.

[16] Cindy Harris & Pat Borer, The Whole House Book, op.cit., p. 67.

[17] Tore Hansson, Holger Gross, Grunder (Träbyggnadshandbok 5), Trätek/Byggförlaget, Stockholm 1991, p. 23.

[18] M. Tregenza “Bełżec – Das vergessene Lager des Holocaust”, in: Wojak, Irmtrud, Peter Hayes (eds.), “Arisierung” im Nationalsozialismus, Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/Main, New York, p. 257.

[19] http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Belzec1/bel150.html

[20] http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ar/modern/archreview.html

[21] A. Kola, Bełżec, op.cit., p. 11.

[22] Ibid., pp. 13-14.

[23] Ibid., p. 14.

[24] http://www.holocaust-history.org/belzec/deathcamp/index

[25] A. Kola, Bełżec, op.cit., p. 19.

[26] Ibid., pp. 25-26, 28.

[27] On his published survey map, Kola marks out the building remains as black objects, but does not state their designations. By comparing the (often incomplete) grid data for the building remains with those of graves no. 12 and 10 it becomes clear that “Building B” is either the object directly south of grave no. 10 or the object 40-50 m south-west of the same grave.

[28] http://www.holocaust-history.org/belzec/deathcamp/index

[29] I. Gilead, Y. Haimi, W. Mazurek, “Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres”, Present Pasts, Vol. 1, 2009, pp. 22-23.

[30] Ibid., p. 35.

It is often stated that Rudolf Reder (who later took the name Roman Robak) was the only Jew to have survived the “pure extermination camp” at Belzec. This, however, is incorrect even from an exterminationist viewpoint, since according to orthodox historiography there were in all seven survivors: Reder, Chaim Hirszman, Sara Beer, Hirsz Birder, Mordechai Bracht, Samuel Velser and “Szpilke”. The last person appears only within Reader’s account. Although Reder claims to have met “Szpilke” in Lemberg after the war, and states that he later lived in Hungary, yet this mysterious witness to the last days of the camp has left no historical trace whatsoever. As for Sara Beer, Belzec expert Michael Tregenza informs us (“Belzec – Das vergessene Lager des Holocaust”, in I. Wojak, P. Hayes (eds.), “Arisierung” im Nationalsozialismus, Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2000, p. 260) that she was transferred from the “death camp” to Trawniki together with 20-25 unnamed other Jewesses, and that she survived also Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen to be liberated by British troops in April 1945; she appears to have left no testimony on her stay in Belzec. Birder, Bracht and Velser are basically unknowns. Further, two women named Mina Astman and Malka Talenfeld are reported to have escaped after spending only some hours in the camp, and their brief impressions seems to have been recorded only second-hand (see Y. Arad,Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.., p. 264). Only two of the survivors, Reder and Hirszman, left witness accounts. The former published the 74-page pamphlet Belzec in collaboration with Nella Rost in 1946, and also testified before a Polish investigative commission and in connection with the 1965 Munich Belzec trial. As for the latter, Carlo Mattogno informs us (Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History, p. 51):

“On March 19, 1946, Chaim Hirszman appeared before the regional historical commission of Lublin, but he was murdered the same day after his interrogation had been adjourned. Therefore, we have only a very laconic testimony from his side (Zydowski Instytut Historiczny (Jewish Historical Institute), Warsaw, Report No. 1476). As far as its content is concerned, it is so irrelevant that it does not even appear in the extract of testimonies on Belzec presented by Marian Muszkat in the official report of the Polish government on the German crimes against Poland.”

Yet, despite its extreme brevity, it is obviously of a certain importance as the only witness account left by a former Belzec prisoner besides those of Reder’s. The fact that it has gone virtually unmentioned and unquoted by Holocaust historians is likely foremost due to the aforementioned brevity and obscurity, but it cannot be wholly excluded that it also has to do with its contents, i.e. Hirszman’s statements about the alleged mass killings at Belzec.
Yitzhak Arad informs us that Hirszman and two other, unnamed prisoners escaped from the train which was taking them from the liquidated Belzec camp to Sobibor in July 1943, supposedly to be killed there (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka…, p. 265). The orthodox claim that the remaining Belzec inmates were taken to Sobibor to be executed there does not square well with the abovementioned fact that Sara Beer and other female detainees were sent to the Trawniki labor camp.
As for the ultimate fate of Hirszman, historian Martin Gilbert writes (The Holocaust. The Jewish Tragedy, Fontana Press, London 1987, p. 817) that:

“on March 9, one of only two survivors of the death camp at Belzec, Chaim Hirszman, gave evidence in Lublin of what he had witnessed in the death camp. He was asked to return on the following day to complete his evidence. But on his way home he was murdered, because he was a Jew.”

The Polish Historian Henryk Pajak states, however, that Hirszman was killed not because he was a Jew, but because he was an “active and dangerous functionary” of the new Communist regime (Konspiracja mlodziezy szkolnej 1945-1955, Lublin 1994, pp. 130-31, quoted in Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust, McFarland 1998, p. 341, note 306).

Chaim Hirszman’s testimony

According to his own testimony, Hirszman was deported from Zaklikow, which was in the District of Lublin, Janow county (Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 304). Arad informs us that a transport of 2,000 Jewish deportees departed from Zaklikow on November 3, 1942 (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka…, p. 383). Gilbert reproduces the apparently most relevant part of Hirszman’s testimony as follows:

“We were entrained and taken to Belzec. The train entered a small forest. Then, the entire crew of the train was changed. SS men from the death camp replaced the railroad employees. We were not aware of this at that time.
The train entered the camp. Other SS men took us off the train. They led us all together – women, men, children – to a barrack. We were told to undress before we go to the bath. I understood immediately what that meant. After undressing we were told to form two groups, one of men and the other of women with children. An SS man, with the strike of a horsewhip, sent the men to the right or to the left, to death – to work.
I was selected to death, I didn’t know it then. Anyway, I believed that both sides meant the same – death. But, when I jumped in the indicated direction, an SS man called me and said: ‘Du bist ein Militarmensch, dich konnen wir brauchen’ ['You have a military bearing, we could use you.']
We, who were selected for work, were told to dress.
I and some other men were appointed to take the people to the kiln. I was sent with the women. The Ukrainian Schmidt, an Ethnic German, was standing at the entrance to the gas-chamber and hitting with a knout [a knotted whip] every entering woman. Before the door was closed, he fired a few shots from his revolver and then the door closed automatically and forty minutes later we went in and carried the bodies out to a special ramp. We shaved the hair off the bodies, which were afterwards packed into sacks and taken away by Germans.
The children were thrown into the chamber simply on the women’s heads. In one of the ‘transports’ taken out of the gas chamber, I found the body of my wife and I had to shave her hair.
The bodies were not buried on the spot, the Germans waited until more bodies were gathered. So, that day we did not bury…” (Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 304)

We note here first and foremost that Hirszman speaks of “gas chamber” in singularis. In many eyewitness accounts, “gas chamber” is confusingly taken to mean a building containing one or more gas chambers, but judging from Hirszman’s very brief description we are in fact dealing with only one chamber: children are thrown into “the chamber” and “the door” closes automatically once the victims are inside. According to orthodox historiography, the gas chamber building used at Belzec during this period of time consisted of six chambers arranged three and three on either side of a central corridor. There is no reason why the entrance door to the building, a opposed to the doors of the individual chambers, would be “closed automatically” before the gassing. It is also noteworthy that Hirszman for some inexplicable reason uses “kiln” as synonymous with “the gas chamber”, while at the same time he implies that the building was disguised as a bath.

The claim that the hair of the victims being shaved off after their death goes completely against all other available eyewitness testimony. We may compare here with Kurt Gerstein’s statement that the women had their hair cut off and stuffed inside potato sacks before entering the gas chambers (cf. H. Roques, he ‘Confessions’ of Kurt Gerstein, IHR, Costa Mesa 1989, p. 30) or Rudolf Reder’s claim to the same effect (cf. Rudolf Reder, “Belzec” in: Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, volume 13 (2000), p. 274).

The assertion that at the day of Hirszman’s arrival “the bodies were not buried at the spot” but instead left lying on the ground and only buried once “more bodies were gathered” is spurious for two reasons. First, no other witness has attested to this procedure; rather most witnesses imply or state that the corpses were interred right after the gassing in the burial pit open for the moment, and then covered with a sand layer. Second, the archeological evidence furnished by Andrzej Kola contradicts it. Given a theoretical maximum of 8 corpses per cubic meter, the approximately 2,000 victims (if we are to trust Arad’s figure) would have occupied 250 cubic meters. Of the 33 grave pits identified by Kola at Belzec, 10 (in their present state) have a volume of 250 cubic meters or less. There is thus no reason to believe that the SS would wait for more corpses to accumulate before burying them. Besides, the idea of letting 2,000 corpses lie around in the open for a day or more seems odd. On the other hand, the procedure described by Rajchman might be realistic if the only victims from the transport were a small number of en route deaths.

The second-hand testimony of Pola Hirszman

The day after Chaim was shot, on March 20, 1946, Chaim’s wife Pola testified about what her husband had allegedly witnessed at Belzec. Her testimony is likewise kept in the archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Gilbert writes that “Chaim Hirszman’s experiences at Belzec were also set down in 1946 by his second wife, Pola, to whom he often retold them after the war” (ibid., p. 305). Needless to say, second-hand accounts are more or less worthless as evidence, but we will anyway take a look at some of her statements.

Mrs. Hirszman’s testimony starts out with a typical atrocity story about a transport consisting of small children – babies to three year olds – being murdered in a most unseemly manner:

“The workers were told to dig one big hole into which the children were thrown and buried alive.” (ibid., p. 305)

There is not really much to comment on here. The same goes for the next story, about a prisoner being hanged for a failed escape attempt; on the scaffold, the condemned man prophesize the fall of Hitler and his Reich. We are also told that typhus was prevailing in the camp, and that Chaim also contracted the disease but avoided being “murdered on the spot” by concealing his condition from the Germans. Pola also relates a story that is found with variations also in the Treblinka and Sobibor lore, about an Aryan (in this case a Ukrainian woman) arriving by mistake at the camp who is then gassed with the Jews, despite showing the SS men proper identification. Next we learn about the camp that

“Once you crossed the gate to the camp, there was no chance to get out of there alive. Not even any Germans, except for the camp staff, had access to the camp.” (ibid., p. 305)

This claim is contradicted by several eyewitness statements. The former camp staff member Heinrich Gley declared in 1961 that a Jewish work detail had been carrying tasks far outside the camp and Polish witness Maria D. affirmed in October 1945 that some Jews in the camp “had the right to leave the camp perimeter” (Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 44). According to orthodox Belzec expert Michael Tregenza, four Polish villagers were employed in the camp proper, while, most astoundingly, other villagers were allowed inside the camp to take photographs (ibid., p. 43).
One of the stories related by Pola concerns Jews employed outside of the camp:

“Two Czechoslovak Jewesses were working in the camp office [which was located outside of the camp]. They, too, had never entered the camp. They even enjoyed a certain freedom of movement. They often went with the SS men to town to arrange different matters. One day they were told that they would visit the camp. The SS men showed them around the camp and in a certain moment they led the women to the gas-chamber and when they were inside, the door closed behind them. They finished with them in spite of the promise that they would live.” (Gilbert, The Holocaust, pp. 305-306)

This story clearly does not make much sense. On one hand, we are told that the two Jewesses had been promised that they would live, and thus they must have known that the Jews were being exterminated at Belzec – and working at the camp office, they could hardly have escaped figuring out the “true nature” of the camp (especially since this was supposedly well-known in the Belzec community from the start; cf. Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 43). But why then would the women walk gullibly into the “gas chamber”? Furthermore, we again note the singular of “door” being used in the description of the “gas chamber”.

When not carrying out a wholesale mass murder, burying small children alive or tricking Jewish secretaries into gas chambers, the SS men in the camp spent time relaxing with their victims:

“The Germans ordered the prisoners to set up a football team and on Sundays games were being played. Jews played with SS men, the same ones who tortured and murdered them. The SS men treated this as a matter of sport, and when they lost a game, they had no complaints.” (Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 306).

On this point, at least, there is reason to believe that Pola is relating the truth. The SS man Werner Dubois mentioned during an interrogation in 1961: “It also happened that I organized a soccer match with 22 Jews on the sports ground” (quoted in Mattogno, Belzec…, p. 66). The soccer games are also confirmed by the Polish witness Tadeusz M., who further noted that the Germans had organized a string orchestra among the inmates (ibid., p. 44)

Conclusion

Chaim Hirszman’s Belzec testimony is indeed largely irrelevant due to its brevity and lack of detail, but is nonetheless illuminating. Within the space of only some paragraph our witness manages to include several statements contradicting the orthodox picture of the “death camp”. Further, the second-hand recollections of his wife do not exactly help his reliability. It is a shame that Hirszman did not survive to leave a more complete testimony, as it would undoubtedly have constituted another bullet in the foot of the Belzec story. However, the stuck splinter that is Hirszman’s Belzec statement should be enough to make the defenders of the pure Shoah faith cringe with embarassment.

«Sometimes the cause of death may result in striking changes to normal skin coloration. For example, deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning often result in a cherry red / pink coloration to the skin, lips and internal body organs (…) although if the body is not discovered until several hours after death the coloration may not be immediately apparent owing to the settling of the blood to the dependent regions [livor mortis].

Carbon monoxide gas forms during the combustion of many substances and poisoning is a common feature of accidental deaths in which people are exposed to fumes from a faulty gas boiler or during fires and suicides in which the victim breaths in vehicle exhaust fumes. (…) Carbon monoxide has much greater affinity than oxygen for the haeme molecule of haemoglobin and therefore, even at very low atmospheric concentrations it will rapidly replace it and thereby reduce the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. When carbon monoxide binds with haemoglobin in the blood or myoglobin in the muscles it forms carboxyhaemoglobin and carboxymyoglobin respectively and they are responsible for the pink coloration

There are cases in which carbon monoxide poisoning does not result in the formation of a cherry pink coloration (Carson & Esslinger, 2001) and it can be difficult to spot when the victim is dark skinned – though it may be apparent in the lighter regions such as the palms of the hands or inside the lips or the tongue. There are big difference in susceptibility to carbon monoxide poisoning and this is at least partly a consequence of age, size and general health. For example, children tend to be more susceptible owing to their higher respiration rate».

In my essay “Skin discoloration caused by carbon monoxide poisoning –
Reality vs. Holocaust eye-witness testimony” I have found, based on medical-forensic reports relating to a total of more than 600 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, that “a clear cherry-pink coloring of livor mortis” is present in 95-98% of all fatal cases of CO poisoning. That the Aktion Reinhardt key witnesses Rudolf Reder, Jankiel Wiernik and Eliahu Rosenberg  describes the supposed victims of carbon monoxide gassings – victims whose bodies they allegedly dragged from overcrowded gas chambers to mass graves, a work which must have taken several hours – as being without discoloration, yellow, or gray-white respectively, is enough to draw the veracity of those eyewitnesses into question.

In 2000, Kola published the book Belzec: The Nazi Camp for Jews in the Light of Archeological Sources. Excavations 1997-1999 (The Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom/USHMM) wherein he reported that he and his team through drillings had discovered 32 grave pits with a total surface area of 5,919 square meters and a total volume of 21,310 cubic meters. The news of Kola’s research was widely touted as the definite proof that Bełżec had served as an extermination camp where hundreds of thousands of European Jews had met their death.

However, this claim was challenged in 2004 when Italian revisionist researcher Carlo Mattogno published his study on the Bełżec camp, Bełżec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research, and History (Theses & Dissertations Press). In it, Mattogno scrutinized among other things the actual capacity of the reported mass graves, concluding that a theoretical maximum of 170,480 corpses could have been interred in them (p.85), with the reported physical evidence from the probe drillings indicating an actual number of Bełżec dead in the range of “several thousands, perhaps even some tens of thousands” (p.91). As it is uniformly alleged that practically all of the more than 400,000 Jews deported to the camp were killed there within a few hours of arrival, and that all victims were interred within the camp borders, this would by default obliterate the orthodox “extermination camp” hypothesis. The corpses actually buried at the camp site could readily be explained as dead Jewish deportees who had perished in transit – contemporary records document a catastrophic transport from Kolomea (Kolomyja) to Bełżec, during which 2,000 Jews died of various causes – or Bełżec inmates dead due to disease and other causes. As the tiny camp could not have contained even a small portion of the more than 430,000 Jews deported to the camp, it becomes obvious that the only viable alternative to the extermination camp hypothesis is that of a transit camp, wherefrom Jews were sent east to occupied USSR territory or to labor camps in the Lublin district.  

In 2009, Mattogno replied to an exterminationist critique of his study written by Roberto Muehlenkamp (available online at http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2006/05/carlo-mattogno-on-belzec.html), publishing the long article “Bełżec e le Controversie Olocaustiche di Roberto Muehlenkamp” online (http://ita.vho.org/BELZEC_RISPOSTA_A_MUEHLENKAMP.pdf). This important work is at the moment awaiting translation.

In his 2004 study, Mattogno points out the fact that the reported dimensions of the Bełżec grave pits hardly can be identical to the original ones dating from the operation of the “death camp”. As Kola himself admits, it is likely that clandestine “wildcat diggings” (carried out by locals searching for buried valuables) destroyed the walls between smaller neighbouring graves, creating bigger ones. According to Kola, “disturbances in archeological structures were made by intensive dig-ups directly after the war”. The diggings continued in fact into the early 1960s, when the first monument was erected at the former camp site. Mattogno writes (p.89):

«How many graves were dug up in those twenty years? The diggings took place in total disorder, without any regard for orientation, order, or symmetry, which explains the total lack of orientation, the confusion, and the irregularity of the graves identified by Kola. In the course of these diggings, the walls which had originally separated the graves were destroyed, deceptively enlarging the graves. Furthermore, as we see from Kozak’s testimony, the soil removed from the graves was spread across a large area of the camp, leaving ash and human remains exposed. When the graves were refilled, this mixture of soil, ash, and human remains ended up both in places which had originally been earthen walls separating the graves, and in holes where there were originally neither remains nor ash, thus creating the illusion of more numerous and more extensive mass graves».   

There also exists the possibility, suggested by Mattogno, that some of the pits detected by Kola derive not from the operation of the “death camp” in 1942-1943, but from just a few years earlier, in 1940, when a Jewish labor camp and (somewhat previously) a Gypsy camp was located in the immediate vicinity of the future “death camp”. This could possibly explain why some of the pits reportedly contained remains of uncremated corpses.

In his 2009 rebuttal to Roberto Muehlenkamp, Mattogno moreover stresses that the outlines of the grave pits mapped by are, to a certain degree,  arbitrary, since the graves were located using a grid of probe drillings, with no attempt made to determine the exact outlines. 

The above indications that the original mass graves of the Bełżec “corpse factory” had a total volume significantly smaller than the 21,310 cubic meters stated by Kola makes the extermination hypothesis even more untenable than it already is. Below I will suggest that there exists yet another possible cause of grave pit enlargement which has been overlooked by Mattogno (in both his original study and in his 2009 rebuttal to R. Muehlenkamp) as well as, quite naturally, his detractors, namely that of soil movement caused by rainfall.

In a brief article entitled “Covering the mass graves at the Belzec Death Camp, Poland; geotechnical perspectives” published in the anthology Geotechnical and Environmental Aspects of Waste Disposal Sites (Ed. R.W. Sarsby & A.J. Felton, CRC Press 2007), A. Klein, an independent geotechnical consult based in Haifa, Israel, recounts how he and a team carried out various geotechnical work in connection with the installation of the new memorial at the former Bełżec camp site in 2003-2004. In the article Klein describes the topography and soil conditions of the former camp site as follows (p.151):

«The Belzec death camp is situated on a slope that descends from north-east to south-west at an angle of between 5° to 10°. The site was formerly covered with trees planted for the most part in the period 1943 to 1944, after the camp was closed. Almost all the trees were removed and their roots killed as part of the building of the new memorial site in 2003/2004.

The soil profile across most of the site consists of a thick layer of yellow, fine to medium, sand. According to information supplied by the contractor’s project manager, a layer of loam or light clay was found at the southern corner of the site, next to the museum. This layer of clay was removed from the site in the framework of the works for the new memorial, and a layer of medium hard yellowish chalk, at least 3 meter thick, was found underneath. Groundwater was not found on site within the depth of the slurry walls excavated to construct the central concrete trench structure, i.e. it was at least 20 m below ground level».

According to the originally proposed construction design, the entire new memorial site, after having been leveled and freed of trees and other vegetation, was to be covered with a layer of thin perforated LDPE (Low-density polyethylene, a thermoplastic often used to create corrosion-resistant surfaces). On top of this a layer of blast furnace slag would be placed to prevent plant growth. It was realized, however, that rainwater run-off on the LDPE layer would make the slag move downhill in direction of the newly-built museum and also possibly cause flooding of the building. Klein writes (p.153):

«After the construction work had begun on site it was realised that there was a problem with the drainage across the site, and that in times of heavy rainfall the mass of sand and slag sitting on the perforated PVC might move down the slope towards the cemetery. In addition, the heavy rainfall could cause flooding in the museum area. The Client also became concerned that with the removal of most of the tree cover, human bone fragments and ash were working their way up through the sandy soil, out of the mass graves and moving across the site».

To solve these drainage-related problems Klein and his team were brought in at the end of 2003. They revised the construction, replacing the LDPE layer with a 10 to 20 cm thick leveling layer of sand. Next a layer of high strength woven geotextile was placed “above the approximate positions of the mass graves”. Its purpose was to a) “cover the mass graves so as to lessen possible settlements in the future”, and b) “to prevent the movement of human bone fragments and ash out of the mass graves and across the camp site”. On top of the geotextile in turn was placed a some 10 centimeter thick layer of sand, whereupon rested a part of the actual memorial in the shape of a 30 centimeter thick layer of blast furnace slag.

The most interesting part of Klein’s paper is the mention that absent a “tree cover” (or to be more precise, the roots of trees buried in the ground) there was an apparent risk at heavy rainfall of bone fragments as well as ashes moving not only to the surface, but also “across the site”. This risk was obviously considered very real, as Klein (p.153) speaks of “periods of heavy rainfall, such as occur in this area of Poland”. One should also not forget in this context Klein’s note that the former camp “is situated on a slope that descends from north-east to south-west at an angle of between 5° to 10°”. This is important, as a quick look at Kola’s excavation map will reveal that the mass graves are concentrated in the northern portion of the camp area, that is uphill. Rain pouring down on the side of the slope would thus naturally cause human remains to move in a south-west direction. It happens to be the case that a large number of Kola’s grave pits, especially those in the north-west quarter of the camp area, are more or less rectangular or elongated and aligned in roughly a west-south-western direction. Using Kola’s enumeration (cf. p.19, 70), they are grave pits number 5, 4, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23, 24 and 27.

According to Klein, who bases his description of the alleged death camp mainly on Kola’s book, the Germans after dismantling the camp “planted trees over the whole site, in an effort to hide their past activities”. If this was in fact true, then the resulting tree cover would have more or less effectively kept the bones and ashes in the soil from “moving across” the site in the years following the camp’s dismantling. The problem is that we have a panorama photo (or rather a panorama composed of two photographies of ordinary size) of the former camp site, taken likely in 1944 or 1945 by Polish or Soviet “investigators” and displayed by the Bełżec Museum on its website (http://www.belzec.org.pl/historia.php?site=likwidacja).

This photograph, taken from the south-western corner of the old camp perimeter and clearly displaying the north-eastward elevation of the camp site, shows no newly-planted trees in sight. In fact, the whole camp area, including the portion containing the grave pits, is bare, with the exception of small shrove of trees not too far from the camera. There are also what seems to be the traces of diggings visible in front of this shrove. There might be more traces of dug-up pits further back that are not visible due to the quality of the picture. The photo does not prove whether the Germans had actually planted trees at the site or not, but on the other hand it clearly demonstrates that were was virtually no “tree cover” present to keep the grave contents from moving, or rather spreading out, during the end period of the war, and possibly for several years following it. A number of heavy rainfalls might thus have caused the enlargement of the soil volume containing human remains, half a century later leading Kola’s drills to detect (yet) larger graves than were originally present at the site.

Finally, when reading Klein’s article, one is struck by the special reverence seemingly given only to Jewish victims of war crimes (real or alleged). In the conclusion we read (p.155):

«The site reported in this pape was the location of a former death camp (Belzec) in south-east Poland. Within the ground were mass graves (occupying about 50% of the total area of the site) containing the remains (after burning and crushing of the bodies) of up to 600,000 people. Consequently any construction work on this site needed to be carried sensitively and sympathetically with respect to the victims».

Aside from the fact that the total area of Kola’s grave pits covers 0.59 hectars, that is 9.5, not 50% of the camp site as Klein falsely claims, the above quote seems to imply that the necessary special respect given to the alleged gas chamber victims rules out any forensic investigation of the grave sites. Recently, a mass grave was found in Malbork, northern Poland. The discovery prompted a thorough excavation, which revealed that the grave contained the skeletal remains of 1,800 German men, women and children. Bullet holes found in many of the skulls suggested that a mass execution of German civilians had taken place at the end of the war. Several forensic tests were carried out by German and Polish experts before the remains were interred at two local cemetaries (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/13/mass-grave-poland-german-war). In sharp contrast to this, none of the mass graves detected at Bełżec was ever excavated, none of the saponified corpses were disinterred to be examined, and no attempt whatsoever was made to determine the actual amount of buried cremated human remains. Nowadays of course there is the thick layer of blast furnace slag covering the entire site, making further examinations virtually impossible. A similar protective layer disguised as someone’s idea of a momument has covered the “Totenlager” area of the Treblinka camp since the 1960s.

One might perhaps argue that there was no reason to excavate and examine the mass grave contents since one already the identity of the victims and their approximate number. This is however not true. While the Polish Cental Commission’s figure of 600,000 Bełżec victims still is the most repeated one, at the time of Kola’s excavations (1997-1999) as diverse figures as 1,000,000 (Michael Tregenza 1999), 800,555 (Robert O’Neil 1999) and 100,000-150,000 (Jean-Claude Pressac 2000) were offered by various exterminationist experts. It thus existed ample reason to conduct a forensic examination aimed at determining the approximate number of buried victims. However, not the slightest intention in that direction appears to have existed among the Polish archeologists in regards to Bełżec. Rather, the non-excavations of the graves were supervised by Jewish rabbis, while not a single photo of the drill cores was published. It appears that a number of institutions, including Polish academia, make a significant difference between Gentile and Jewish bodies.

It is readily acknowledged that the extent of the above described (likely rather than simply possible) kind of soil (or rather sand) movement of human remains is unknown, and that it might be not very significant, but it is any case worthy of notice.

 - Thomas Kues