Nature and Purpose of Archaeological Investigations

In the section of the critique’s chapter 7 dedicated to the nature and purpose of the archaeological investigations conducted at Bełżec in 1997-1999, I had addressed Mattogno’s attempt to present the archaeological investigations carried out in the area of that camp as a (failed) attempt to "furnish the ‘material proof’ of the alleged extermination at Bełżec."^[35], and refuted his contentions that the head of these investigations, Prof. Andrzej Kola, had been hired in order to obtain corroboration of eyewitness testimonies through physical evidence, and that the reason why he restricted his work on the mass graves to core drilling instead of excavating the graves and exhuming the corpses had been a concern – motivated by the core drilling results – that excavation would lead to conclusions incompatible with the historical record of Bełżec extermination camp.


After spending a whole paragraph castigating me for the "maniacal insistence" with which I "brooded" during the past years over this "question of absolutely no importance", Mattogno tries to make it look as if I had falsely attributed to Prof. Kola a statement in the foreword to Kola’s book about the Bełżec investigations^[36], authored by Miles Lerman, Chairman Emeritus of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, whereby the purpose of the archaeological investigation had been to "thoroughly examine the topography of the former camp, so as to exclude areas with human remnants" and avoid the disturbance of such areas during the building of the memorial, which was to cover the entire former camp area. Actually I had expressly mentioned Lerman as the author of this statement. ^[37]

Mattogno then tries to make the point that the purpose of Prof. Kola’s investigations essentially consisted in obtaining archaeological and historical information (and not in pinpointing mass grave areas so as to avoid their disturbance during museum construction) by quoting Prof. Kola to the effect that the general purpose of the project had been to "obtain the basic knowledge of how the camp had been planned, particularly to establish where the mass graves had been located". The quote is taken out of a context that, contrary to Mattogno’s argument, does not contradict the statement of Miles Lerman^[38]:

The architectural elements commemorating the camp in Bełżec, mainly as the enclosure and the monument require changes at present. The Council of Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom (Rada Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa - ROPWiM) in Warsaw together with the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington have decided to take up new actions to commemorate the camp. The general purpose, essential for the project works taken up already, is to obtain the basic knowledge of how the camp had been planned, particularly to establish where the mass graves had been located.

As one can see, Kola was referring to his employers and the commemoration purpose of their "new actions". Obtaining "basic knowledge of how the camp had been planned", and particularly to "establish where the mass graves had been located", served that commemoration purpose.

A later statement of Kola’s (whereby "The big number [of mass graves] contains mainly ashes of bodies, which make killing and burying hundreds of thousands of people in one place possible."^[39]) is interpreted by Mattogno (p. 1205) as an explicit statement "that the real purpose of the investigation was to deliver archeological ‘proofs’ to orthodox holocaust historiography". Chances are that Prof. Kola, who considered the mass extermination at Bełżec a proven historical fact, and not a mere possibility to be checked by archaeological research, would be as amused about this far-fetched interpretation as I am.

Further bolstering his theory, according to Mattogno, is the fact that "archaeological research at Chełmno and at Sobibór had nothing to do with the erection of monuments in these areas, but were part of a general project, exactly, of ’Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres.’". This happens to be the title of an article describing past and ongoing archaeological work at former Nazi extermination camps^[40], and there’s no such thing as a "general project" of "Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres" outside Mattogno’s wishful thinking. The Chełmno archaeological investigations "were carried out by Ł. Pawlicka-Nowak on behalf of the Konin Museum in three phases during the years 1986-1987, 1997-2002 and 2003-2004"^[41], which suggests a local initiative of the Konin museum, as do Pawlicka-Nowak statements whereby the museum, after 10 years of forced inactivity, obtained support from the Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw because it asked for such support^[42]. The Sobibór investigations in 2000-2001 were conducted at the behest of the Polish Board for the Protection of Monuments of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw^[43], whereas the Bełżec investigations were a joint initiative of this Board and the USHMM. Different initiators for each project, at different times.

Mattogno makes the point that Prof. Kola’s book "presents itself as an archeological book with historiographical claims", describing finds "which would have been completely unnecessary for mere museal purposes". This indeed suggests that – as already mentioned in the critique^[44]– a broader archaeological investigation eventually resulted from the initial purpose under a "as we’re at it, les us also …" perspective, as Prof. Kola expressly pointed out when writing that the archaeological works in the Bełżec camp area, which "had originally the only aim to locate the mass graves by probing drills", revealed structures that "opened a chance to widen the research programme" into one that involved reconstructing the camp buildings and establishing the function of located objects^[45]. However, as already pointed out^[46], this doesn’t validate Mattogno’s conjectures and insinuations. For independently of whether identifying the mass grave areas was Kola's only task or he was eventually also commissioned to attempt an archaeological reconstruction of the camp’s buildings (and independently of whether all information about the mass graves included in Prof. Kola’s report was necessary for the planning and construction of the memorial), the archaeologist was bound by his employers' religiously motivated concerns about disturbing the dead to keep physical contact with human remains to the minimum indispensable for identifying the areas containing such remains.

Mattogno therefore needs further arguments to substantiate what I appropriately called his conspiracy theory. Mattogno balks at the term ("This phantom ‘conspiracy theory’ is a real obsession for the ‘plagiarist bloggers.’" - p. 1207), apparently oblivious of his claims of a false pretext and un-confessed ulterior motives, quoted hereafter: ^[47]

This only confirms my assertion: that the primary goal was to locate the mass graves. The real issue here is the purpose behind the attempt to identify the mass graves. The official explanation, that of the new memorial, is clearly deceptive. [...] It is clear that the story of the memorial is merely a pretext, allowing for a thorough examination of the entire camp area in the hope of localizing mass graves (presumably able to contain 600,000 corpses) and archeological remains (of the alleged gassing installations) that would provide material evidence for the alleged exterminations at Bełżec, and thus silence historical revisionists. When the results of the surveys failed to meet these expectations, the team fell back on the official alibi of the memorial: human remains had not been searched for and the minor remains discovered could eventually not be exhumated for "moral" reasons.

(Emphases added.)

If the above-quoted conjectures don’t qualify as a conspiracy theory, I don’t know what does.

Always the cynic, Mattogno follows up his protestations against my characterization of his conjectures with another conspiracy theory, showing a photo of the current Bełżec memorial and musing on p. 1209 that

If the main goal was to prevent any future verification of the data referred to by Kola and to prevent any further research, one could not have done any better to achieve this than by what was done to the area of that former camp.

After that he tries to demonstrate that the religious-ethic objections against opening the Bełżec mass graves are questionable.

Mattogno argues that the rulings of Orthodox Jewish courts mentioned by Father Patrick Desbois^[48], whereby the remains of victims of the Nazi genocide should be left in peace, have not prevented Desbois from "opening a mass grave and to expose human bones (Illustration 11.11), and then to take a picture on its edge (Illustration 11.12)". The illustrations show Father Desbois by a mass execution site uncovered at Busk in the L’viv region of Ukraine, in which a layer of skeletons has been laid bare. Desbois described the Busk excavations in great detail, expressly mentioning the constraints due to Jewish religious laws under which his team was forced to work^[49]:

The challenge was doubly complex. On the one hand we had to respect Jewish laws and on the other hand we wanted to obtain scientific results as precise as possible in terms of the identity of the victims, their number, and the cause of death. The Jewish law, the Halakha, specifies that bodies must not be moved under any circumstances, particularly the victims of the Holocaust. According to Orthodox Jewish tradition, these victims are resting in the fullness of God, and any movement of the bodies would disturb that peace. Hence the archaeologist could only uncover the first layer of bodies, taking care not to move any bones. In addition, the bodies had to be covered up again as soon as the archaeologist finished working.

(Emphasis added.)

Mattogno either didn’t read Desbois’ book or omitted the above information on account of its inconvenience to his argument.

Why, one might ask, is excavation of human remains at extermination camp sites not allowed by Orthodox Jews although Father Desbois was allowed to conduct the excavations at Busk? A possible reason is that digging without dislocation of human remains (thus in compliance with Halakha) was possible at a place like Busk, which contained whole skeletons. At places where human remains mostly consist of ashes and smaller or larger bone fragments mixed with soil, on the other hand, every spade movement would imply dislocating human remains and thus violating Jewish law.

Mattogno presents several cases in which corpses of Jews murdered by the Nazis or their allies were exhumed – near Iaşi (Romania) on 12 September 1945, near Kerecsend and Budapest (Hungary) on 5 November 1957, near Lithuanian Jurbarkas in 1958, near Białystok (Poland) in November 1945, in concentration camps in Germany in 1958, in Popricani (Romania) in April 2011, and reburials of Jews killed in Czestochowa, Kurenets and Kozienice (Kozhnits) according to photographs featured in the Ghetto Fighters House Archives, Photo Archive section. With one possible exception^[50] , the exhumed corpses were reburied in a Jewish cemetery, according to the sources provided.

Mattogno argues (p. 1214) that, assuming the corpses (found in the Bełżec mass graves) belonged to Jews^[51]"the religious dictates would not have impeded the exhumation of corpses in a state of saponification and their re-burial in a Jewish cemetery".

This argument fails to take into account a source pointed out by Mattogno himself in an earlier publication^[52], namely the article "Exhuming the Dead" by Rabbi Myron S. Geller^[53]. Geller summarizes the applicable rules as follows:

From the perspective of halakhah, the removal of remains from a grave is generally barred because of concern for the dignity of the dead. Under certain circumstances, remains may be transferred:
A. to move the remains to a family burial plot;
B. to move the remains to Eretz Yisrael;
C. for the security of the remains against vandalism or natural catastrophe;
D. for public need; or,
E. if the remains were buried in a plot belonging to someone else.

Exception A - "to move the remains to a family burial plot" is obviously the reason why corpses of murdered Jews were exhumed from the mass graves into which their killers had buried them and transferred to the local Jewish cemetery. For Jews from a certain location murdered at or near that location, the location’s Jewish cemetery would be the "family burial plot", the place where their ancestors and other members of their extended family had been buried. But how was anyone to tell, from the partial remains saturating the soil of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, which remains belonged to what "family burial plot"? Impossible. And because it was impossible to determine what "family burial plots" the remains in the soil of the extermination camps should be transferred to (as concerns remains other than corpses in wax-fat transformation, it was even impossible to establish what specific human being these remains pertained to), exhumation under Exception A to the Halakhah rules (the only one that could have applied) was out of the question. Thus Mattogno’s examples don’t support his argument.

Mattogno refers to the complaints of Rabbi Weiss against the archaeological investigations at Bełżec and the construction of the memorial^[54], claiming (pp. 1214-15) that they show "that the Jewish political-cultural authorities in the whole matter of the museum of Bełżec kept an attitude of total indifference in respect of Jewish religious dictates" and that "Rabbi Weiss interpreted the museum project as a desecration "in the name of ‘archaeological research,’" confirming that this was the primary goal for the Jewish and Polish authorities involved in it". Actually what Rabbi Weiss did was express an understanding different from that of other Jewish religious leaders about what was and what was not allowed by Jewish religious rules about not disturbing the peace of the dead, and he expressly lamented this disagreement^[55], a fact that Mattogno conveniently omits. Considering that Rabbi Weiss’ concerns of "desecration" were obviously not shared at the time by other leading figures of the Jewish religious community, a reasonable person might conclude that there were differences in the Jewish religious community as to the interpretation of rules governing burial places and the exceptions of such rules, or at most that the archaeological research and subsequent construction work at Bełżec were indeed what Rabbi Weiss called them – a "monumental failure" under the aspect of respecting the dead and their burial places according to Jewish religious beliefs, a blunder due to insufficient care and diligence. Conspiracy theorists like Mattogno, needless to say, are not reasonable persons.

Moving from Bełżec to Sobibór, Mattogno accuses me on p. 1215 of dishonestly contorting the sense of a long slab of text from MGK’s Sobibór book^[56], without explaining what the claimed dishonest contortion is supposed to consist of. In said long slab of text, which Mattogno quotes in all its splendor, MGK complain about "persons not satisfied with mere belief in eye witness claims and fanciful interpretations of documents" being "equated with flat-earthers and simply not debated with", and about the supposed cardinal scientific sin of accepting "as an a priori fact" the Sobibór gas chambers "for which there exist only the weakest type of evidence, namely eye witness testimony". "If this is not ‘pseudoscience,’ then what is it?", Mattogno rhetorically asks.

Well, it’s a reasonable scientific approach, as reasonable as it was to accept the existence and destruction of Roman Pompeji based on contemporary eyewitness accounts independently of what archaeological research revealed. What Mattogno derides as "the weakest type of evidence, namely eye witness testimony" is an essential element for reconstructing all sorts of historical events, including mass crimes that Mattogno probably professes no doubt about because they were committed by people he doesn’t like or against people he likes. The "weakest type of evidence" has been the main source on the basis of which the criminal justice authorities of democratic states, acting according to defendant-friendly procedural rules that Mattogno cannot show to have been violated, reconstructed mass crimes like those committed at Bełżec and Sobibor. It has also been the main source for reconstructing a great many Soviet crimes. Would Mattogno, say, accuse the German Federal Archives, who in the 1970s reconstructed 3,300 sites of crimes committed by Red Army troops against the German civilian population, and attributed 24,500 victims to 2620 of these crimes sites^[57], essentially on the basis of eyewitness accounts, of having been "satisfied with mere belief in eye witness claims"? No, he would not, obviously aware of the importance of eyewitness testimony for reconstructing the majority of crimes committed by the Soviet Union, regarding which little or no assessments of physical evidence are available. And as to documents regarding the AR camps and deportations thereto, the only "fanciful" interpretations thereof are those of Mattogno et al, who to this day have not been able to provide a single name of a Jew supposedly transited to the Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union even though such names would be all over the place if such transit had occurred.^[58]

Notes

[35] Mattogno, Bełżec, p. 90.
[36] Andrzej Kola, Bełżec: the Nazi Camp for Jews in Light of Archaeological Sources: Excavations 1997-1999, Warsaw-Washington: The Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000.
[37]Critique, footnote 50 on page 401.
[38]Kola, Bełżec, pp. 8-9.
[39]As above, p. 40.
[40]Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek, "Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres" in Present Pasts, I, 2009, online under [link].
[41]Gilead et al, as above.
[42] Pawlicka-Nowak, Chelmno Witnesses Speak, p. 42; see also the Konin Museum’s website under [link].
[43] Andrzej Kola, ‘Badania archeologiczne terenu byłego obozu zagłady Żydów w Sobiborze w 2001 r’ (‘Archaeological Research of the Former Jew Extermination Camp at Sobibór in 2001’, Przeszłość i Pamięć. Biuletyn Rady Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa Nr. 4/21 z 2001 r, pp.115-123. Translated into English by Katarzyna Piotrowska. The translation is available on the thread "Archaeological Research of the Former Jew Extermination Camp at Sobibor in 2001" ([link]).
[44]P. 405.
[45]Kola, Bełżec, p.69.
[46]Critique, p. 406.
[47]From the paper "Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp" - [link].
[48]Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp.129-130.
[49]Desbois, as above p. 176.
[50]Illustrations 11.16 and 11.17 are from the Ghetto Fighters House Archives’ Catalog No. 105, whose caption reads as follows: "A proper burial for the victims of camps in Germany, whose remains were disinterred from mass graves. Attached: a report, prepared in 1958, explaining the activity in Germany and France of Miriam Novitch, who took part in this work. In French; a complete Hebrew translation is included." It is not stated that the skeletons unearthed from the soil of former concentration camps in Germany pertained to Jews let alone how it was established that they did.
[51]"… a probable fact but not a certain one; in 1940 the camp received some gypsies, among whom contagious diseases like typhus broke out, and it is likely that a certain number of gypsies died and were buried there," Mattogno is referring here to the Bełżec labor camp that operated in 1940, which is mentioned on the USHMM’s page about Bełżec ([link]).
[52]"LE ULTERIORI CONTROVERSIE OLOCAUSTICHE DI ROBERTO MUEHLENKAMP Parte I.", now under [link], commented in the article "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology - Continuation (1)" ([link]).
[53] Online under [link].
[54] Avi Weiss, "A Monumental Failure at Belzec", online under [link].
[55] Avi Weiss, "A Tribute That Desecrates Rather Than Sanctifies", online under [link]. Weiss writes that "The Belzec trench controversy has been particularly painful as it involves my disagreeing publicly with my cherished friend Rabbi Irving Greenberg as well as the American Jewish Committee, whose noble work under the leadership of David Harris has been exemplary. I know that their motives are pure. Still, with all my heart and soul, I believe the position they have taken is terribly misguided, so misguided that we at Amcha-The Coalition for Jewish Concerns have now been forced to go to the courts."
[56] MGK, Sobibór, pp. 166 f.
[57]Vertreibung und Vertreibungsverbrechen 1945-1948. Bericht des Bundesarchivs vom 28. May 1974, 1989 Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen, Bonn, pp. 38 and 55.
[58]See my "Challenge to Supporters of the Revisionist Transit Camp Theory" under [link], which remains without takers well over four years after it was published.

Human Remains Found

Belzec

Sobibor

Treblinka

The section of the critique’s chapter 7 about findings of human remains (in a restrictive sense including only whole corpses or larger human body parts not or only partially burned, to the exclusion of the human cremation remains like ashes and bone fragments) began with a deconstruction of Mattogno’s claim that of 137 (by Mattogno’s count) core drilling samples from mass at graves Bełżec visually represented in Kola’s book, "obviously the most significant ones of the 236 samples taken altogether" in such mass graves, only 5 out of 17 visualized samples from graves nos. 3, 10 and 20 contained human remains ^[59].




Belzec

I provided the following arguments against Mattogno’s assessment^[60]:
1. The samples mentioned by Mattogno (482/XV-30-60 and 486/XV-25-50 and 485/XV-30-50 from grave no. 10, 286/XVI-90-40 and 332/XVI-85-40 from grave no. 3 and 1042/XIV-45-80 from grave no. 20) add up to 6 and not 5.
2. A 7th sample visualized in Prof. Kola’s book^[61], 484/XV-30-55 in grave no. 10, shows the stylized "x" shapes designating "human bones and wax-fat mass", and mentions a "canine tooth" and a "blockade", the "blockade" being in all probability a spot where the drill couldn't go further because of bodies in wax-fat transformation.
3. Contrary to Mattogno’s claim, the core sample drawings shown in Figures 12 to 16 on pp. 14 to 18 of Kola’s book (which include samples showing corpse layers from only 3 out of 10 graves in which corpse layers were found, and samples from only 11 out of 33 graves altogether) were not "the most significant ones of the 236 samples taken altogether", but expressly stated to be "examples of graphic illustration of the results".
4. Also contrary to Mattogno’s claim, the aforementioned figures in Kola’s book do not show 137 core drilling samples from mass graves, but 77 samples from mass graves and 60 samples from areas other than mass graves.
5. By far not all drillings were so deep that they could even have hit layers of corpses, which as a rule were at the bottoms of the graves. This makes Mattogno’s juxtaposition of the claimed number of "positive results" (core drillings hitting corpses in wax fat transformation) vs. the total number of drillings in mass graves, a misleading and therefore dishonest comparison. Of those core drillings shown in Kola’s illustrations that went as deep as the bottom of the graves, all hit corpses in wax-fat transformation, i.e. the "positive" ratio in an appropriate juxtaposition was 100 %.

How does Mattogno reply to these arguments?

As concerns the first, Mattogno admits to a mistake in his writing.

As concerns the second, Mattogno points out (p. 1217) that sample 484/XV-30-55 from grave no. 10 «does not show at all "the stylized ‘x’ shapes designating ‘human bones and wax-fat mass,’" which are represented with a symbol similar to open scissors with the tips facing down, but a simple "x" describing "Burned human bones"». This is correct, but it doesn’t affect my main argument in this context, whereby it is unlikely that the blockade in sample 484/XV-30-55 was due to underground waters, because the adjacent drills came upon bodies in wax-fat transformation at a greater depth and only 485/XV-30-50 touched ground water (after passing at least two layers of bodies in wax-fat transformation), and an omission of the mention "human corpses" behind "blockade" in the drawing of sample 484/XV-30-55 is more probable. I might have added that samples 485/XV-30-50 and 485/XV-25-50, represented to the right of sample 484/XV-30-55 in Kola’s Fig. 13 show "human bones and wax-fat mass" (the symbol "similar to open scissors with the tips facing down") at about the same depth of the "blockade" in sample 484/XV-30-55, which further supports the likeliness of the "blockade" in that sample being due to "human bones and wax-fat mass".

In response to the third of my above-mentioned arguments, Mattogno regurgitates a quip from his "previous reply", in which he mused whether Kola may have wanted to "save paper" by not including in his book visual representations of all core drillings made in mass graves, and rhetorically asks the question (implying an accusation of the archaeologist’s dishonesty) why Prof. Kola did not publish the other mass grave samples "if they were not, in fact, irrelevant"^[62]. This argument of Mattogno’s is all the poorer (to put it politely) in view of the fact that only 77 of the 137 samples shown in Kola’s book (which refer to only 3 out of 10 graves in which corpse layers were found, and to only 11 out of 33 graves altogether) were from mass graves. Prof. Kola’s intention was obviously not that of showing "relevant" samples from mass graves but rather that of showing examples of what he had found both inside and outside mass graves, and Mattogno conveniently overlooked this fact, as well as the fact that the results of excavations in non-grave areas take up about as much of Kola’s 84-page book as do finds regarding mass graves, in his insinuative conjectures about Prof. Kola’s not having published drawings of all core drillings in mass grave areas.

How does Mattogno address the fact that, contrary to his claim, only 77 of the 137 core drilling samples of which drawings are included in Kola’s book are from mass graves, i.e. the fourth of my arguments mentioned above? Well, he simply ignores it and continues writing about 137 samples from mass graves, as if nothing had happened – which is understandable in a sense, considering that Mattogno was caught red-handed in trying to mislead his readers. Maybe this revelation of his dishonesty is what Mattogno refers to when mumbling about "insignificant subtleties" whereby I’m supposed to be "trying to distract the reader" in order to "dodge" the "fundamental question", regarding which he produces the following pearl (p. 1219):

Given that Kola identified some corpses in a state of saponification, what was their number? 15,000, as estimated by Tregenza? In this perspective, if the remaining 99 samples would have proven the presence of such corpses in great numbers, can one really believe that Kola would have refrained from publishing them in order to save three pages?

If we give Mattogno the benefit of not again trying to mislead his readers (whose intellectual capacities he apparently doesn’t think much of), what we have here is a showpiece of Mattogno’s ill-reasoning, considering that
a) Prof. Kola was obviously not concerned with estimating the number of corpses in wax-fat transformation, and
b) Neither the 77 mass grave core samples shown nor the (236-137 =) 159 core samples (not 99, as Mattogno would have it) not shown could conceivably prove the number of corpses contained in the respective mass graves, already for the reason that they were mere samples. The thickness of the samples and the area of corpse layers they suggested could merely provide indications for estimating the number of corpses in the mass graves – which was what Tregenza, independently of Prof. Kola, seems to have done based on these parameters.

The fifth of my above-mentioned arguments Mattogno characterizes as "stunning", on grounds that the discussion is not based on the corpses which could be found in the Bełżec soil, but on "those actually found by Kola with his drillings"– as if that were an argument against my demonstration of the fallacy and dishonesty of Mattogno’s "5 out of 236" juxtaposition. Actually what matters in the context of my discussion with Mattogno is the number of corpses that can be reasonably expected to be in the Bełżec mass graves based on Prof. Kola’s sampling, not "those actually found", which is why the discussion cannot be limited to how many corpses Prof. Kola’s team actually drilled into but must go on to establish what conclusions can reasonably be drawn from Kola’s sampling as concerns the amount of human remains in the graves in question. This assessment was obviously done by Tregenza, and I did a similar assessment with similar results.

Before addressing my estimate of the number of corpses that can be expected to be lying in the soil of Bełżec, Mattogno indulges in a bit of sophistry in connection with my observation^[63] that he had briefly mentioned the description of the contents of grave no. 27 but omitted those of mass graves nos. 1, 4, 13, 25, 28 and 32, thereby creating the impression that they contain no mention of corpse layers and thus contradict Kola’s assertion that corpses were found in these mass graves. He contests this observation by pointing to his previous quotes of Kola’s assertion, as if he had not earlier justified his omission by claiming that Kola’s description of grave no. 27 "is the only one providing quantitative data: a layer of saponified corpses measuring 1 meter in depth"^[64], and as if his above-quoted claim that "from all 236 drilling samples, we have only 5 ‘positive’ cases, that is, 2%!" were anything other than an accusation that the omitted descriptions contain unsubstantiated information.

Now to my estimates of the number of corpses lying in the 10 Bełżec mass graves where corpses were found by core drilling. Considering the thickness of corpse layers reported by Kola for the graves numbered 3, 13, 25, 27 and 32, and assuming that the spots where the drilling device hit corpses were part of layers with a below-ground area equal to the surface area of the mass graves, I had calculated that the corpse layers in these graves could have a total volume of 607.75 cubic meters, which would correspond to 4,862 corpses at a concentration of 8 corpses per cubic meter (the maximum considered possible by Mattogno) or 9,116 corpses at the concentration of 15 corpses per cubic meter I had considered in my first series of articles addressing Mattogno’s claims re the Bełżec mass graves^[65]. Assuming – despite information in Kola’s book suggesting thicker layers – that corpse layers in the graves numbered 1, 4, 10, 20 and 28 were no thicker than 40 cm (the thinnest layer found in the graves numbered 3, 13, 25, 27 and 32), these 5 graves would have corpse layers with a total volume of 527.60 cubic meters, corresponding to 4,221 corpses at a density of 8 corpses per cubic meter or 7,914 at a density of 15 corpses per cubic meter. All 10 graves would thus contain 9,083 to 17,030 corpses, the latter a higher figure than the estimate of Michael Tregenza that Mattogno decried as wildly exaggerated. ^[66]

Mattogno challenges these estimates by arguing that they are not supported by Kola’s descriptions of the mass graves in question or that these descriptions are based on arbitrary assumptions and/or a sloppy or even fraudulent handling of data by the archaeologist.

Starting out with Kola’s description of grave no. 3, Mattogno characterizes the archaeologist’s mention of a layer of bodies in wax-fat transformation at the bottom of that grave^[67] as "arbitrary, if not deceitful", on grounds that "exactly 2 samples of 9 (the 286/XVI-90-40 and the 332/XVI-85-40) refer to human remains" - a baseless accusation considering that only those two samples were from drills in that grave taken to a depth at which human remains could be found (it would be different if equally deep drills in between these two had not come upon human remains), and that it was entirely reasonable, for reasons I shall explain below, to assume that human remains were present not only at these two drill spots but also in between the same.

Mattogno laments that Kola "does not provide a scale for the columns representing the drillings", but doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion that the core sample drawings in Kola’s book^[68] were not meant to be on scale (unlike the plans and sections of the mass graves, for which a scale is provided). Instead he fabricates a scale, by assuming that "the longest column", representing sample 485/XV-30-50 in grave no. 10^[69], corresponds to the stated maximum depth of drills in grave no. 10, i.e. 5.20 meters^[70], and that, as the column is 70 mm high in the drawing, this suggests "a scale of (5.2 ÷ 0.07 =) approx. 1 : 75". Based on this scale, Mattogno then goes on to "calculate the thickness of the indicated layers of corpses based on the height of the segments marked as such by the corresponding symbol in the two relevant columns", and concludes that this thickness was ca. 30 cm in sample 286/XVI-90-40 from grave no. 3 and 70 cm in sample 332/XVI-85-40 from the same grave, and furthermore that "in the first drilling the layer of corpses starts at a depth of ca. 2.90 m, in the second at ca. 3.50 m". This in turn is supposed to prove that "there was not a uniform layer of corpses as big as the surface of the grave", and that Kola’s description suggesting otherwise "shows his great sloppiness with real data, from which he draws unfounded conclusions".

Hefty accusations, but unfortunately for Mattogno they are without foundation. First of all, the scale calculated by Mattogno would not be "approx. 1:75" but 1: 74.28571429 or approx. 1:74. Second, the column representing sample 485/X-30-50 is not 70 mm but 75 mm high, which would mean a scale of approx. 1:69. Third, the column representing sample 332/XVI-85-40 in grave 3 is 65 mm high, which would mean that the drill was taken down to 4.485 m (scale 1:69) or 4.810 meters (scale 1:74). However, in the plan and section of the grave on page 22 the scale bar is 180 mm long (corresponding to 5 meters), and the bar representing drill 332/XVI-85-40 is 200 mm long (180 mm until the end of the first pair of lines, after which there is a gap followed by another, very short pair of lines), suggesting that the depth of this drill exceeded five meters – as does the grave’s description whereby the grave (as established by core drills) had a depth of over 5 meters. Now, if in the core sample drawings on pp. 15 and 17 one drill going to a depth of over 5 meters is represented by a column 75 mm long whereas another drill going to a depth of over 5 meters is represented by a column 65 mm long, this means that Mattogno’s scaling considerations are just hollow conjectures devoid of any value. What is more, the bar representing drill 286/XVI-90-40 in Fig. 20 on page 22 is about 150 – 170 mm high, suggesting a depth over 4 meters, but the column representing this drill in Fig. 15 on page 17 is about 51 mm high, which would mean a depth of just 3.825 m according to Mattogno’s 1:75 scale and an even lower depth (3.519 m) according to the 1:69 scale resulting from my measurements. This means that it is not necessary to further discuss Mattogno’s considerations based on his artificial scaling of drawings obviously not meant to be true to scale.

His scaling exercise aside, Mattogno’s argues that the identified or presumable drills having encountered corpses (Mattogno complains that Kola didn’t tell how many of the drills whereby he identified a given grave were "positive" in this sense) were too few in number to sustain the assumption of a layer of corpses extending throughout the bottom of each grave in which corpses were found. Regarding graves 3, 13, 25, 27 and 32, Mattogno reaches the following conclusion (p. 1223):

The supposition that from the small number of performed drillings one can deduce that these five graves contained a continuous layer of corpses is completely arbitrary. All one can deduce with certainty is that two drillings encountered corpses; it can further be deduced that at most 20 more drillings were positive, which would determine the presence of corpses in 22 points of the five mass graves, that is 22 times 33 cm2 (the surface area of the drilling probe with 65 mm diameter) of a total surface area of the graves of 685.75 m2 according to Muehlenkamp. The drilling therefore hit upon 22 layers of corpses (2 certain and 20 supposed); even assuming 15 corpses for each drilling, Kola would have "ascertained" at maximum the presence of (22 × 15 =) 330 corpses.

Mattogno is making some progress here in a sense, for in his book about this extermination camp^[71] he had written that "the most probable interpretation" (considering both corpse layers drilled into and expectable corpse layers adjacent to those drilled into) was that "the graves contained at most several hundred corpses". Now he’s at least considering the possibility that several hundred corpses were positively identified by core drilling. On the other hand, Mattogno seems to have forgotten about his reasoning on the previous page of the same book^[72] whereby "one cannot exclude the presence of other layers of corpses near those identified by Kola; this is even probable". This assumption, while uncharacteristically reasonable for Mattogno, was something of an understatement if one considers the following aspects:
- Those drills made by Prof. Kola’s team that came upon human corpses in wax-fat transformation were the deepest among a series of drills, made in disturbed soil containing human cremation remains, on the basis of which the respective grave was identified. The corpses thus lay in soil whose structure and contents indicated a mass grave.
- The reason why there were whole corpses below layers of soil mixed with human remains at the bottom of a mass grave, suggested by both common sense and related eyewitness evidence, was that corpses at the bottom of that grave had not been extracted and cremated because the depth at which they lay made their extraction more difficult than that of corpses in the upper layers. The problem posed by the depth at which the corpses lay would be the same throughout the area of the grave’s bottom, making it unlikely that corpses would be extracted from some parts of that bottom but not from other parts.
- If corpses had only been lying around here and there at the bottom of a mass grave, drills going beyond a certain depth would not necessarily have hit corpses. On the contrary, drills hitting corpses would have been an improbable coincidence. Yet the core sample drawings in Prof. Kola’s book suggest that, in those mass graves in which whole corpses were found, every drill taken to a certain depth came upon corpses. ^[73]

If one takes these aspects into consideration, it seems altogether reasonable to assume – as Prof. Kola apparently did – that corpses found by core drilling at the bottom of soil whose structure and contents indicated a mass grave were not isolated corpses scattered here and there, but part of one or more layers covering the whole of that grave’s bottom area. Rather than exposing any fallacies on the part of Prof. Kola, Mattogno’s denigration of the archaeologist’s methodology and conclusions reveals Mattogno’s incapacity for sound reasoning that takes into account the historical context of the archaeological finds in question.

In his further attempts to discredit Prof. Kola’s archaeological research, Mattogno makes a fool of himself on several occasions.

In regard to grave no. 4 he takes issue with Kola’s statement that "The drilling was given up here at the depth of 2.30 m, because of a layer of bodies in wax-fat transformation."^[74], arguing that

The graphical representation of the 4 drillings (293/XVI/90-5, 294/XVI/90-0, 295/XVI/85-0 and 296/XVI-85-10)2744 does not at all show the symbol of the "bodies in wax-fat transformation," and therefore the related statement is either a mistake or a display of Kola’s excessive zeal.

Actually this grave, according to Kola’s description, was "estimated on the base of 4 deep drills (No 293, 294, 406, 407)". In Figure 15 on page 17 of Kola’s book, samples of only two of these four drills (293/XVI/90-5 and 294/XVI/90-0) are shown as pertaining to grave no. 4, whereas the other two samples mentioned by Mattogno (295/XVI/85-0 and 296/XVI-85-10) are samples from a non-grave area. There is nothing to rule out that core drillings "406" and "407" penetrated into human remains in wax-fat transformation whereas the other two core drillings (293 and 294) stopped short of that. So a mistake or a display of "excessive zeal" must be sought with Mattogno, not Kola.

As concerns grave no. 10, to which he even dedicates a drawing, Mattogno argues that drillings 485 and 499, among others, are "not even part of those used by Kola to determine the outline of the grave"– even though both are expressly mentioned in Kola’s description as having been used for the grave’s identification^[75], and drill 485/XV-30-50 it is also shown in Fig. 13 on p. 15 as pertaining to grave no. 10 (whether these drills were used to determine the grave’s shape is irrelevant in this context). Mattogno also argues that the term "blokada" = blockade marking drills 484, 487 and 488 "does not necessarily mean that they were interrupted by the presence of human corpses, because in such cases the term used is "blockade (human corpses) [blokada (ciała ludzkie)]," as for drillings 483 and 486.". But what, if not human corpses, could have caused the blockade of these drills, or at least of the deepest among them, drill 484/XV-30-55? A blockade by ground water, as was already pointed out^[76], is highly unlikely regarding this drill, because the drills shown next to it in Fig. 13 came upon bodies in wax-fat transformation at a greater depth and only 485/XV-30-50 touched ground water (after passing at least two layers of bodies in wax-fat transformation). An omission of the mention "human corpses" behind "blockade" in the drawing of sample 484/XV-30-55 (which goes almost as deep as 486/XV-25-50, in which human corpses are expressly mentioned) is more probable.

Another example of Mattogno’s reading skills is found in his claim (p. 1225) that grave no. 20 "did not contain corpses in a state of saponification". Mattogno somehow managed to overlook the part of Kola’s description of this grave whereby "The drill No 1042 in its sponge part 40 cm thick layer of bodies in wax-fat transformation covered with a layer of lime was reported."^[77]

Sagacious observations like the above are also directed at Mattogno’s opponent, who he accuses of, among other things having "invented" that the corpse layer in grave no. 32 was 40 cm thick. Mattogno should have been more attentive in reading the following part of this grave’s description^[78]:

In bottom view with the shape of a lengthened rectangle it reached the sizes of about 15,00 x 5,00 m, with the depth of over 4,00 m. The contents is mixed in structure; the bottom part contains bodies in wax-fat transformation, covered with lime at the depth of about 3,60 m.

He might have realized that deducting the depth of the lime layer covering the bodies in wax-fat transformation (3.60 meters) from the depth of the grave (4.00 meters) yields 0.40 meters as being the thickness of corpse layer.

Needless to say, the ill-reasoning and blunders (or shall we say falsehoods?) mentioned above are no refutation of my arguments and estimates, so Mattogno’s heavy-handed claim to have exposed "all the aberrations" of my "calculation" rings rather hollow.

The corpse layer in grave no. 32 (0.40 m) was the thinnest of corpse layers in those graves for which the thickness of corpse layers are stated in Kola’s book, so I conservatively assumed that the corpse layers in the other five graves containing whole corpses (graves nos. 1, 4, 10, 20 and 28), whose thickness is not stated in the respective description, was no more than 0.40 meters – even though, as I pointed out, the descriptions of the graves numbered 1, 4, 10 and 28 suggest thicker layers and Kola mentioned, in his description of the archaeological work done in the areas containing mass graves, that in some of the graves the layer of corpses reached a thickness of ca. 2 meters^[79]. Mattogno lamely criticizes my conservative assumption as "a simple supposition", acknowledges that there is information suggesting thicker layers in Kola’s book, takes issue with "the Polish archeologist’s usual uncertain statements", and asks why Kola "did not publish the complete documentation" of his archaeological work. The answer to Mattogno’s question is simple: the "complete documentation" was not published for the obvious reason that it is far too voluminous to fit into an 87-page report. Mattogno seems to have no idea of just how voluminous archaeological documentation tends to be. Kola expressly stated where all this voluminous documentation, of which the report is a mere short summary, can be found^[80]:

The result of the excavation works was a detailed archaeological documentation together with the basic report delivered to The Council of Protection of Memory of Struggle and Martyrdom as to the principal, together with the preliminary reports. The other, non archaeological documentation collected simultaneously were chemical analysis and microscope studies of samples taken during the probing works. They were made to verify the conclusions emerging from archaeological analysis.

Notwithstanding Kola’s clear statement as to where the complete documentation can be found, Kola’s not having included all of it in his publication "confirms that Kola’s working method is very approximate and lacks seriousness". What this conclusion confirms is how little Mattogno knows about archaeological work, namely the enormous amount of documentation it involves^[81], how eager he is to discredit evidence in support of his articles of faith, and how poor his arguments in support of this endeavor are.

It also shows how minds as divorced from reality as Mattogno’s are bound to suspect sinister machinations or manipulations – as does Mattogno’s subsequent theory whereby my "eccentric calculations" (against which, as we have seen, he produced no substantial arguments) "most likely parallel those presumably performed by Tregenza in estimating the presence of 15,000", which "would explain why Kola did not furnish any indication about the drillings containing corpses remains (with the exception of the few mentioned above) and why he did not investigate the issue in a more thorough way, for instance by drilling every meter or meter and a half into the graves containing corpses in a state of saponification." So, in Mattogno’s mind, Kola is supposed to have refrained from furnishing certain information and from investigating "in a more thorough way" so as to allow for or to avoid discrediting the estimate made by Tregenza – a researcher independent of Kola about whose estimate the archaeologist, who didn’t see it as his job to quantify the corpses contained in the graves’ bottom layers, didn’t care at all, as far as I know. But then, I’m not one of those ever-suspicious conspiracy theorists who hear the grass grow, unlike Mattogno. As to why he drilled every five meters and not at shorter intervals as would correspond to a "more thorough" investigation, Prof. Kola clearly explained this on page 14 of his book:

Because of the vast area of former camp in Bełżec, which required examining, the basic drills were located only in the knots of 5 m net, realising relatively little accuracy in defining the borderline shapes of the located objects (mass graves and non-grave objects)[Footnote 15: The acceptation for such a module of drills resulted from both general purpose of the expedition, concerning the establishing places free from mass graves at the camp area and time limit of the works defined and financed by the ROPWiM to commemorate the camp.]

In other words, Kola’s job was to establish what areas were free from mass graves, and for that job he had a certain time limit and budget. What information he gathered about the contents of the graves in the course of performing his task was secondary to this main purpose. There was neither time nor money available for the more time-consuming task of drilling at shorter intervals to confirm an assumption that was reasonable anyway given the historical context, namely that in graves containing layers of corpses these layers covered the whole bottom of the respective grave.


Sobibor

Human remains in wax-fat transformation were also found in the lower layers of graves nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6 at Sobibór, and I estimated, based on the area of these mass graves and a conservatively assumed corpse layer thickness of 0.40 meters, that these layers may contain as many as 7,392 to 13,860 corpses, considering the same densities (8 or 15 corpses per cubic meter) as were assumed regarding the Bełżec mass graves. ^[82] In their Sobibór book, MGK had argued that, as only 2 of 15 core samples taken during a preliminary survey in 2000 on the eastern side of the memorial mound had come upon remains of saponified corpses (besides another 4 that found human cremation remains), this meant that corpses in bottom layers were not distributed over the entire area of these mass graves. ^[83] I dismissed this reasoning as inconclusive on hand of various arguments, which Mattogno now attacks (again disgracing himself with his pathetic "plagiarist" accusation) as having been made in ignorance of Kola’s text not quoted in MGK’s book.
Quoting a longer excerpt from Prof. Kola’s "Report about the archeological research on the site of the former Jewish extermination camp in Sobibór in the year 2000", Mattogno argues that 8 of the 15 drills in the preliminary survey were made "in the area of the graves which Kola numbers as 3, 4, 5 and 6", and claims that the plan attached to Kola’s article, which is shown later in the same chapter, "although merely partly describing his activities, enables us nevertheless to ascertain that at least 5 of said drillings were performed by him in the area of grave no. 4". Not bothering to reveal which 5 drillings exactly he had in mind, Mattogno then concludes that "Since the odor of fat-wax was determined in only two samples, it is evident that the corpses in a state of saponification were not present everywhere in grave no. 4".
Like on several occasions before, Mattogno wasn’t very attentive in reading the text that is supposed to support his conclusions, the essential part of which reads as follows in Mattogno’s translation (p. 1227):

15 successive drillings were performed in hectare XVIII on the eastern part of the memorial. The drillings numbered 15/XVIII-40-60, 16/XVIII-40-70, 17/XVIII-40-80, 22/XVIII-30-60, 23/XVIII-20-60 and 24/XVIII-10-60 contained remains of burned human bones and of wooden charcoal and in two cases – 23/XVIII-20-60 and 24/XVIII-10-60 – even hair was found, and the peculiar corpses odor was determined typical for mass graves due to an incomplete putrefaction process, characteristic of corpses laying in a very humid soil due to the lack of oxygen (a state of corpses in the so-called transformation into wax-fat). In both surveys the drillings were stopped at a depth of 230 and 250 cm.

First of all, it doesn’t become clear from this text whether the "peculiar corpses odor" was noticed only in the two cases in which "even hair was found" or in all six drillings in hectare XVIII that came upon human remains. Second and perhaps more important, the drillings were stopped at a depth of 230 and 250 cm. If already at this depth the characteristic smell of wax-fat transformation was noticed, this can mean either of the following:
a) The samples in question were not from Grave no. 4, which was about 5 meters deep, but from the shallower Grave no. 6, which was only 3.05 meters deep.
b) The samples were from a part of Grave no. 4 exceptionally containing corpses closer to the surface, way above the layer of corpses lying at the bottom of the grave.
c) The samples collected soil that for some reason was imbued with the smell of decomposition from corpses somewhat below.

None of these possibilities supports Mattogno’s conclusion.

Mattogno’s conjectures about Prof. Kola’s preliminary survey of the Sobibór mass graves area are followed by a lengthy and somewhat confused tirade about an unidentified "subsequent objection" of mine, whose length is supposed to be out of proportion to the reduced importance of a certain "simple hypothesis" presented by MGK regarding the question "to whom the corpses in a state of saponification could be attributed and why they were not cremated". Readers are left wondering what "simple hypothesis" and related "subsequent objection" Mattogno might be talking about, and the obvious reason for Mattogno’s beating about the bush is that he and his associates have a major problem in that they cannot produce a plausible explanation, compatible with the “Revisionist” faith, for the presence of corpses in wax-fat transformation at the bottom of the Sobibór mass graves, covered by layers of soil mixed with cremation remains.

The explanation they attempted in their Sobibór book^[84] was that these corpses were of Jews executed in the aftermath of the Sobibór prisoner’s revolt on 14 October 1943, and that the SS had reopened the existing mass graves and dug to the very bottom of these graves in order to place the corpses of those executed Jews below the soil mixed with cremation remains of Sobibór’s other victims. This explanation was refuted by pointing out a) the absurdity of the hypothesized scenario, b) the absence of any parallel case in which the Nazis underwent such an effort just to conceal a few hundred corpses (on the contrary, documentary evidence suggests that they sometimes left civilian victims of anti-partisan operations unburied even when they numbered in the thousands), and c) the testimonies of former SS-men whereby the corpses of the Jews executed after the Sobibór uprising were not buried, but cremated^[85].

MGK’s lame explanation attempt having been thus cut to pieces, Mattogno now feebly mumbles that said attempt was made because he and his co-authors "deemed it necessary not to leave the question unanswered" but might as well have left it unanswered (note the contradiction) and could as well have proposed "other ones" (which presumably would have been no less far-fetched), but it seems that despite their protestations to the contrary MGK’s fantasy doesn’t go that far and they don’t have an explanation to take the place of the one that was soundly refuted.

After trying to cover up his inability to explain the corpses at the bottom of the Sobibór mass graves by arguing that this is an issue of reduced importance, Mattogno turns around his rhetoric in the very next paragraph and argues that the only "important fact" is my not giving "any explanation regarding the presence of corpses in a state of saponification in the abovementioned mass graves". Who they were and why they were not cremated is supposed to be "a problem from an exterminationist perspective, not from a revisionist one", because the non-cremation of some of the bodies (mind that whole bodies were found underneath layers of soil mixed with human cremation remains) is supposed to be at odds with the notion that Sobibór was an extermination camp whose victims were cremated to erase the traces of the crime. Thus Mattogno displays not only his propensity for arguing on both sides of his mouth, but also his incapacity for sound reasoning taking into account the known evidence. What this evidence suggests, without any evidence pointing in another direction, is that the corpses in question were of Jews deported to Sobibór and murdered there. As to why some of the corpses were left at the bottom of the graves, there are several possible explanations, the likeliest one being that these corpses were rather difficult to extract due to the great depth of the pits (for which Mattogno and his co-authors have no consistent explanation) and the SS decided to leave them there, reckoning that it was unlikely that investigators would dig to such depths. So the corpses in the graves are no problem whatsoever from the point of view of "exterminationism" (read: serious and objective historical research). On the other hand, the effort undertaken by the SS to cremate the overwhelming majority of the corpses – which is why the graves are mostly filled with cremation remains rather than whole corpses – is a serious problem for who claims that Sobibór was a mere transit camp with a comparatively reduced mortality (about 10,000 in total, according to MGK’s conjectures bereft of evidentiary support^[86]). For no effort was made to cremate the corpses in labor or concentration camps with a similar mortality (e.g. the Treblinka I labor camp), and neither in any of the Wehrmacht POW camps where tens of thousands of Soviet POWs died^[87]. So why did they cremate most of the corpses at Sobibór (and, for that matter, also at the other two AR camps)?


Treblinka

As concerns human remains on the grounds of Treblinka extermination camp, Mattogno again displays his utter incomprehension of the purpose and limitations of ground photography, already discussed in Part 1, with the claim that crime site investigation finds, whereby cremation remains as well as skulls, bones and other parts of human bodies covered an area of at least 1.8 hectares, are "in total contradiction to the related photographic documentation". That claim is nonsense, to put it politely. The aspect of the site that becomes apparent from photographic documentation^[88] is fully compatible with the description of the site in the site investigation report. To be sure, the photos show only a fraction of those 1.8 hectares and the human cremation remains covering them. But that is due to the limitations of the photographic medium, as even Mattogno (who might as well argue that the World War II claimed only a few thousand victims, judging by the number of war-related corpses that have been photographed) should understand. Photos are not meant to provide proof of large events, but to illustrate what other sources of evidence tell us about such events.

Mattogno’s claim implies that Judge Łukaszkiewicz, who described the aspect of the Treblinka extermination camp’s site in his crime site investigation reports dated 13 November and 29 December 1945^[89], did not report his finds in good faith – an insinuation that is as far-fetched as can be, considering that the judge honestly admitted to not having found the foundations of the Treblinka gas chamber building^[90] and to having found no human remains in what he believed had been the mass grave of the "Lazarett"^[91]. Moreover the judge’s observations are in line with those of others who inspected the site (e.g. Rachel Auerbach^[92]) and with what becomes apparent from all other known evidence about Treblinka extermination camp.

Following this baseless innuendo, Mattogno returns to his equally hollow theory that the area of Treblinka extermination camp was "intentionally" bombed by the Soviet military, with the sinister intent of giving that area the aspect of something it had not actually been. The supposed bombing, in Mattogno’s fantasies, would have "shattered and scattered the remains of an insignificant number of corpses (insignificant from an exterminationist perspective, that is), originally concentrated in single spots – real evidence– across a vastly wider surface, thus creating the false impression that extermination on a huge scale had indeed taken place at the site". This is supposed to be a realistic scenario in the mind of conspiracy theorist Carlo Mattogno, while on the other hand my "conjecture", whereby Soviet troops "joined the Polish peasants like vulgar marauders, bringing with them explosives" is supposed to be "far-fetched".

Mattogno doesn’t even try to demonstrate that it would have been possible to shatter and scatter through bomb explosions the remains of a comparatively reduced number of corpses (Mattogno doesn’t reveal what order of magnitude he has in mind) in such a manner that these remains (mostly ashes and other cremation remains, which also takes us to the question why the dead of "transit camp" Treblinka II were cremated whereas those of Treblinka I labor camp were not) covered an area of 18,000 square meters and were found in that area to a depth of 7.5 meters, as described by Judge Łukaszkiewicz.

Another problem with Mattogno’s speculation, apart from its being at odds with all known evidence about what happened at Treblinka extermination camp, is that there is no evidence whatsoever pointing to an organized Soviet operation of bombing the camp’s area. On the other hand, there is evidence to the use of explosives by robbery diggers. Rachel Auerbach^[93] expressly mentioned this phenomenon as follows:

All kinds of scavengers and marauders come here in droves, shovels in hand. They dig, search and ransack; they sift the sand, they drag parts of half-rotted corpses from the earth, bones and scattered refuse in the hope that they may come upon at least a coin or a gold tooth. These human jackals and hyenas bring along live artillery shells and unexploded bombs. They explode several of them at once, tearing huge craters into the desecrated, blood-drenched soil which is commingled with the ashes of Jews.

(Emphasis added.)

So did an inhabitant of Treblinka by the name of Dominik Kucharek^[94]:

Dominik Kucharek, a gleaner from Treblinka who had been served with an indictment for violating foreign-exchange laws—he tried to sell in Warsaw a diamond he found at Treblinka and purchase gold coins on a black market—explained in his deposition that “everybody” from his village went to dig there. "I didn’t know that looking for gold and valuables at the site of the former camp at Treblinka was forbidden, because Soviet soldiers also went there with us to search. And they detonated explosives in places where they expected to find something."

(Emphasis added.)

It is rather ironic to see Hitler’s willing defense attorney Mattogno defend the honor of the Red Army by considering "far-fetched" the "conjecture" that Soviet soldiers behaved like vulgar marauders at Treblinka. For it is well known that the Soviet armed forces in World War II, for all merit they deserve on account of their essential contribution to the demise of Nazi Germany, were not exactly the most disciplined of their kind, except for crack frontline units. In several countries of Eastern Europe^[95] and especially on German soil^[96], Soviet soldiers indulged in plunder, rape and other violence to an extent that makes robbery-digging at Treblinka seem trifling by comparison. Are we asked to believe that Mattogno never heard or read about these outrages?

Notes

[59] Mattogno, Bełżec, pp. 76-79; see also Controversy, section 3 "Corpses Found" ([link]).
[60]Critique, pp. 407 to 409.
[61]Kola, Bełżec, Fig. 13 on p. 15.
[62] Controversy, section 3 "Corpses Found" ([link].
[63] Critique, p. 409.
[64] Controversy, section 3.
[65]See the blog "Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research - Part 4 (1)" under [link].
[66] Critique, pp. 409-411.
[67]Kola, Bełżec, p. 23.
[68] As above, Fig. 12 to 16 on pp. 14 to 18.
[69] As above, Fig. 13 on page 15.
[70]As above, p. 27.
[71] Mattogno, Bełżec, p.79.
[72]Mattogno, Bełżec, p.78.
[73]As pointed out on pp. 408f. of the Critique, only 4 of the drills in grave # 10 visualized in Kola’s Figure 13 were taken to the bottom of this grave, and all of these hit layers of corpses, a "positive" ratio of 100 %. The same goes for the one drill in grave # 20 visualized in Figure 16 and the two drills in grave # 3, visualized in Figure 15.
[74]Kola, Bełżec, p. 23.
[75] As above, p. 27.
[76] Critique, p. 408.
[77] Kola, Bełżec, p. 33.
[78] As above, p. 38.
[79] Critique, pp. 410f.
[80]Kola, Bełżec, pp. 10f.
[81] In the summer of 2010 my eldest daughter and I spent a day watching an ongoing archaeological excavation in a small historical building in Lisbon, supervised by one of my daughter’s former schoolmates who is a student of archaeology. I distinctly recall having seen shoebox upon shoebox with finds from this small excavation in an apartment used by the archaeological team for storing their finds, and having wondered what part of these finds, if any, will ever be displayed to the public eye.
[82] Critique, p. 411.
[83] MGK, Sobibór, p. 121.
[84] As above.
[85] Critique, pp. 411-413.
[86] MGK, Sobibór, p. 169. The authors "find it probable that the number of Sobibór victims is in the vicinity of 10,000 dead".
[87] See Critique, pp. 515f.
[88] Which, besides the photos shown on pp. 396 f. of the critique and in the blog "Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes"[link], includes further photos that are part of Yad Vashem’s online photo archive [link].
[89] Partially quoted (after M&G, Treblinka, pp. 84-87) on pp. 394f. of the Critique.
[90] Report dated 13 November 1945, entry for 11 November 1945, quoted in M&G, Treblinka, p. 85.
[91] As above, entry for 9 November 1945.
[92]Quoted in M&G, Treblinka, pp. 83f., and (after Alexander Donat (ed), The Death Camp Treblinka. A Documentary, New York 1979) on p. 415 of the Critique.
[93] Quoted on p. 415 of the Critique after Donat, as above p. 71.
[94] Jan T. Gross, "The Treblinka Gold Rush", in: Tablet. A New Read on Jewish Life, May 12, 2012, online under [link]
[95]For example in Hungary. Regarding the behavior of Soviet troops in conquered Budapest, see Krisztián Ungváry, Battle for Budapest. 100 Days in World War II, translated by Ladislaus Löb, 2006 by I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., London, pp. 279-295.
[96] See Manfred Zeidler, "Die Tötungs- und Vergewaltigungsverbrechen der Roten Armee auf deutschem Boden 1944/45", in: Wette/Überschär, Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, Darmstadt 2001, pp. 418 to 432. My translation of this article is available under [link].

I. The Controversy Thus Far

Among the controversies inspired by the publication in 1977 of David Irving's Hitler's War was the reproduction in that volume of a page of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's telephone log. In particular, the page cited by Irving, among other content, listed a series of notes taken by Himmler during or pursuant to a telephone conversation with RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich. At the time of the call, Heydrich was in his office in Prague, while Himmler was at FHQ Wolfsschanze in occupied Poland, where Hitler was then spending a majority of his time.


The four lines in Himmler's telephone log pertaining to the conversation with Heydrich, at 1:30 p.m. on November 30, 1941, read thus:

Verhaftung Dr. Jekelius
Angebl Sohn Molotows.
Judentransport aus Berlin.
Keine Liquidierung.

Irving translated them as follows:

Arrest Dr. Jekelius
Alleged son of Molotov.
Jew-transport from Berlin.
No liquidation.

On the basis of this telephone note, Irving presumed that Hitler had interceded in the planned liquidation of a particular transport of Jews from Berlin. This, Irving claimed, proved that the extermination of Jews in areas under Nazi control was a project about which Hitler was perhaps ignorant, and upon learning of plans for wholesale extermination, he interceded to stop it.

Unsurprisingly, the response of historians to Irving's allegation has been uniformly negative. From initial responses from Martin Broszat and Gerald Fleming to later interpretations of the note from Christopher Browning, Richard Breitman, and others, the consensus has arisen, in contrast, that the note recorded a late attempt to prevent the shooting of a particular transport of Jews which, that day, was arriving in Riga, Latvia. On that same day in Riga, November 30, 1941, SS men and Latvian auxiliaries under the command of Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Jeckeln were undertaking the extermination of roughly half of the Jews residing in the Riga Ghetto, with the other half to follow on December 8. The best available evidence suggests that the roughly one thousand Jews from Berlin arrived in Riga either immediately before the "Action" or as it was under way and were shot with the Latvian Jews that same day.

Nevertheless, we are still left with several problems regarding this telephone note and its content and purpose. I.e., did the order originate, for whatever reason, from Hitler? Did it instead originate from Himmler or even from Heydrich? Regardless of the person from whom it originated, why was this order, presuming that it was a directive not to liquidate the Jewish transport from Berlin that had already arrived and been shot -- and I do think we must presume that (although perhaps, at a later date, I can address the alternate explanations) -- given in the first place?

Several scholars have offered plausible explanations of the latter point, not the least of which include conflicts of interest between the HSSPF and RSHA in Riga, specifically regarding the apportioning of some percentage of able-bodied Jewish men for labor, and ongoing protests, mainly from the civilian authorities in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, over the treatment of Jews in the east, including sometimes the raising of objections specifically over the matter of German Jews. However, explanations of who gave the order on November 30 have been less clear.

II. Enter Emil Finnberg

As far as I've been yet able to determine, the role of SS-Hauptsturmführer Emil Finnberg was first suggested to be essential to understanding the November 30 phone note by Peter Klein, in his essay "Die Erlaubnis zum grenzenlosen Massenmord," which was published in the 1999 volume Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität, edited by Rolf-Dieter Müller and Hans-Erich Volkmann. Finnberg was in Riga in 1941 as a member of Einsatzgruppe A, specifically as adjutant to the head of Einsatzgruppe A Walter Stahlecker and then as chief investigator for BdS Riga. Later, Finnberg served in the SD office in Breslau. He survived the war and went on to give several depositions and undergo several interrogations. Perhaps most famously, he testified at the 1965 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt.

To explain the November 30 phone note, Klein cites two statements from Finnberg -- one from 1960 an the other from 1961 -- in which Finnberg tells virtually identical stories about a disagreement between Jeckeln, who directed the liquidation of the Jews of the Riga Ghetto on November 30, 1941, and SS-Standartenführer Rudolf Lange of Einsatzkommando 2, who was with the SD in Riga.

The statement from 1960:

Im März 1942 hatte die damalige Oberführer Jeckeln in seiner Eigenschaft als [HSSPF] in Riga die Auflösung die Ghettos und die Beseitigung der Juden angeordnet. Dr. Lange, der damals Kommandeur der [Sipo] in Riga war, hat diesen Befehl abgelehnt. Daraufhin hat [Jeckeln] Judenschießungen durch die ihm unterstellten Polizeikräfte durchführen lassen. Ich weiß von dieser Angelegenheit, weil Dr. Lange eine entsprechende Unterstützung durch [Heydrich] haben wollte und über die Funkstation des BdS in Riga mit Berlin verkehrte. Da das Fernschreibnetz dem [HSSPF] unterstand konnte Dr. Lange ohne dessen Kenntnis keine Nachrichten nach Berlin durchgeben. Dr. Stahlecker war in diesem Zeitpunkt schon gefallen und ein Nachfolger nach nicht eingesetzt. (qtd. in Klein 933-34)

Translated:

In March 1942, the then Oberführer Jeckeln, in his capacity as HSSPF in Riga, ordered the dissolution of the ghetto and the elimination of the Jews. Dr. Lange, who was the then commander of the Security Police in Riga, rejected this order. Consequently, [Jeckeln] had the shootings of Jews carried out by his subordinate police forces. I know about this matter because Dr. Lange wanted appropriate support from [Heydrich] and communicated with Berlin via the radio station of the BdS in Riga. Since the telex network was under [Jeckeln], Dr. Lange could not get messages through to Berlin without his knowledge. Dr. Stahlecker had by this time already died, and a successor had not yet been appointed.

Next, the 1961 statement:

Finnberg's account, however, is not without its problems. For one, the Rumbula Action was long over by March 1942, so at the very least, the matter of the date must be worked out. Moreover, Stahlecker was, in fact, not dead in November or December 1941, although he was by the end of March 1942, which requires that Stahlecker's absence at the time of the incident between Lange and Jeckeln be explained. On the face of Finnberg's statement, all that we can be certain of is that there was a massacre of Jews going on; Lange, Jeckeln, and Finnberg were all currently serving in Riga; Stahlecker was not there (perhaps dead); and his replacement, Heinz Jost, had not yet arrived.

Jeckeln arrived in Riga sometime after November 12, 1941. We know that he met with Himmler in Berlin on that date. Andrew Ezergailis, in The Holocaust in Latvia, puts Jeckeln's arrival in Riga on "November 14 at the earliest" (p. 241). By August 1942, he is reported in Belarus, heading up the anti-partisan Operation Malaria.

Lange would have arrived in Riga with Einsatzkommando 2 in late June 1941. He is in Riga until moved to Reichsgau Wartheland in January 1945, where he presumably dies.

Stahlecker headed Einsatzgruppe A, which was headquartered at Riga in September 1941 but had moved onto Krasnogvardeysk by the first week of October. Stahlecker would have returned to Riga more or less permanently when named BdS Ostland on November 8. Beginning the first week of December, he concerned himself mainly with KZ Jungfernhof. Sometime between the last trainload arriving at Jungferhof on December 10 and his death, on March 23 of the following year, Stahlecker went to the front, but it is unclear exactly when, and it is also unclear whether he returned to Riga during this period or how often. Ezergailis places him at Rumbula on November 30 (p. 254), but he seems to be alone in doing so.

Finnberg was attached to Stahlecker as adjutant and moved with him until Finnberg himself was promoted to the position of chief investigator in October 1941. By 1943, however, he is stationed in Breslau, as noted above, although the time of his transfer is similarly unclear.

We can consider November 14 to be the earliest possible date on which the events that Finnberg describes took place. Continuing, if we take at face value Finnberg's statement that Stahlecker was not there and his replacement had not yet arrived, then we can determine the latest possible date on the basis of Jost's taking of Stahlecker's post.

Capacity of the Graves (1)

In Chapter 7 of the critique, I demonstrated that it would have been possible to bury the corpses of about 434,508 deportees to Bełżec documented in the Höfle message in the 33 mass graves identified in an archaeological investigation led by Prof. Andrzej Kola, assuming that these graves (whose total volume estimated by Kola was 21,310 cubic meters) were the only mass graves in that camp (a later study by Alex Bay suggests that this was not so and there were further graves in the camp not identified by Kola, which are visible on air photography^[97]). My calculation of the possible concentration of corpses in the Bełżec mass graves was based on the substantiated assumptions that a) the Jews of Poland killed at Bełżec were not very tall people (the average height being just 1.60 meters), and b) due to their having been exposed to prolonged malnutrition, their average weight was reduced to 43 kg for adults and 16 kg for children up to 14 years old, meaning that the average weight of a population consisting two thirds of adults and one third of children up to 14 would be (43+43+16)/3 = 34 kg.



What are Mattogno’s arguments against these assumptions?

As concerns the average height of Polish Jews, Mattogno just offers hollow rhetoric ("Muehlenkamp recurs as usual to the paraphernalia of sophistic details", p. 1234 of the MGK response). ^[98]

As concerns the weight, Mattogno asks (p. 1234): "if the average weight of an adult Jew deported to Bełżec was 43 kg, why were two persons necessary to carry a corpse to the mass graves, as Reder had stated?" The answer to this question is given by Reder himself in his report^[99]:

The soil was sandy. A corpse had to be dragged by two workers. For this purpose we had leather strips with clips, which we placed around the hands, the head frequently buried itself into the sand, and thus we pulled.

Reder was not saying here that a corpse had to be pulled by two handlers because it was too heavy to be pulled by one handler alone. He was describing a procedure that was adopted, probably at the orders of the SS overseers, in order to drag corpses to the graves as fast as possible despite the sandy soil and the fact that the corpses’ heads often buried themselves in this soil. Speed was of the essence in dragging the corpses to the graves, for obvious reasons. ^[100] So Mattogno’s argument is moot.

Next (pp. 1234-35) Mattogno invokes the testimony of Leon Weliczker, a member of the "Death Brigade" in charge of exhuming and cremating bodies at the Janowska concentration camp in Lemberg/Lwów, who claimed to have carried adult corpses weighing 70-80 kg each. Without prejudice to the essential accuracy of Weliczker’s description of the body disposal procedure, his claim about the weight of the corpses cannot possibly be correct. Considering the average height of Polish Jews that I established in the critique – and against which Mattogno, as mentioned before, presented no arguments – corpses weighing 70 kg would have been in between the lower and upper ranges of overweight according to the BMI table I used in the critique^[101], and corpses weighing 80 kg would already have been obese. Are we expected to believe that there were overweight or even obese people among the severely malnourished population of Polish ghettos? Even if the corpses had been as tall as what I considered to be the average height of German adults at the time – 1.68 meters – a corpse weighing more than 70 kg would be overweight. So Weliczker’s figures for the weight of the corpses transported by him and his fellow handlers must be considered grossly exaggerated. The reason for this exaggeration can only be guessed.

Mattogno’s argues that my "criticism" would affect also Robert Jan van Pelt, who is supposed to have "assumed an even higher average weight of 60 kg" for the victims of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Looking at the cited source^[102], one finds that Van Pelt a) mentioned an average weight of 60 kg in another context (the carrying capacity of the lift taking the corpses from the underground gas chambers of the Birkenau Krematorium II to the incineration hall), and that he considered that figure to be on the high side. Obviously an educated guess or a thumb calculation at best, the 60 kg figure is not too far from the 57 kg I calculated as the average weight of normally-fed deportees to Sobibór from places of origin outside the General Government or the occupied Soviet territories (Critique, p. 461, Table 8.2). However, in the population for which this average was calculated, about 84 % were adults weighing 62 kg on average, whereas only 16 % were children with an average weight of 31 kg. If the population had been two thirds adults and one third children, the average would have been ((62+62+31)÷3) = ca. 52 kg. So even for a normally-fed population a 60 kg average is too high.

On page 1236 Mattogno shows a picture of a group of male Jews and asks who can seriously believe that "25 of these persons could fit into one cubic meter, even assuming the presence of one third of children" (a straw-man because, as we shall see, I never made this claim, or then Mattogno is not a very attentive reader). He further expresses his incredulity at the notion that "their average weight would be 43 kg". This is another straw-man, as 43 kg would be the average for both male and female adults, the latter probably weighing a little less than the former, and male Jews taken to the Bełżec labor camps in 1940 – which are in all probability what Mattogno’s picture shows, as do a number of other photos in the collection of the Ghetto Fighters’ House^[103] to which this picture belongs – would be comparatively stronger and better-fed specimens, who after one year or less of ghetto existence might still have a normal or close to normal weight (whether they still had it in 1942, when the deportations to Bełżec took place, is another matter).

So much for Mattogno’s arguments regarding my assumptions and calculations whereby severely malnourished Jews from Polish ghettos (men, women and children) weighed 34 kg on average. ^[104]

As concerns my calculation of the possible concentration of corpses in the Bełżec mass graves identified by Prof. Kola’s team, Mattogno tells his readers (p. 1235) that «Based on these data, Muehlenkamp calculates 12 corpses for each cubic meter (p. 418). However, "[w]ith the more realistic weights for malnourished Polish ghetto Jews that the author established above, the average would be 663.4 ÷ 34 = 19.51 (20) corpses per cubic meter" (ibid.).». Readers are thus left without understanding my calculations, perhaps because Mattogno didn’t understand them himself. Or then, because he doesn’t want to acknowledge that my calculations are based on his own and that the calculation method I applied was exactly the one he proposed.

Mattogno had argued that a maximum of 6 adult bodies weighing 70 kg, that is 420 kg of human body mass, could fit into one cubic meter. He had then calculated, based on the assumption that children 14 years and under made up the same part of the mass graves’ "population" as they did in the general population (roughly one third), that an adult+adult+child group in which the adults weighed 70 kg each and the child 25.4 kg, would have an average weight of ((70+70+25.4)÷3) = 55.1 kg, meaning that 420÷55.1 = 7.6 corpses could fit into one cubic meter of mass grave space if two thirds of them were adults and one third were children 14 years and under.

I first challenged Mattogno’s weight assumptions, arguing that an adult weight of 70 kg was wildly unrealistic for the population of Jewish ghettos in Poland, who were not only of comparatively small stature according to contemporary anthropological studies (average height 1.60 meters) but also severely malnourished at the time deportations to Bełżec took place. The more realistic average weights I calculated, taking these circumstances into consideration, were 43 kg for adults and 16 kg for children. An adult+adult+child group would thus weigh (43+43+16)÷3) = 34 kg on average, meaning that 420÷34 = ca. 12 corpses could fit into one cubic meter of mass grave space if two thirds of them were adults and one third were children 14 years and under.

Next I challenged Mattogno’s argument that no more than 420 kg of human body mass could fit into one cubic meter, supporting my challenge with the calculations of Alex Bay^[105], whereby 91,000 corpses with the proportions of the "Vetruvian Man" and an assumed height of 68 inches (1.73 meters) could have fit into 8,502 cubic meters of grave space - 10.7 per cubic meter. The ideal weight of a person 1.73 meters high would be 66 kg for men and 62 kg for women. Taking the lower value, 10.7 human bodies with the measurements and weight of an ideal adult person 1.73 meters high would have a weight of 10.7 x 62 = 663.40 kg, instead of Mattogno's 420 kg. ^[106] These 663.40 kg being thus the amount of human body mass that could be made to fit into a mass grave, I divided it through the previously established average weight of 34 kg for a malnourished population of short-stature ghetto inhabitants of whom one third were children, the division yielding a possible concentration of 19.51 corpses per cubic meter. Multiplying this concentration with the volume of the identified Bełżec mass graves established by Prof. Andrzej Kola – 21.310 cubic meters – yielded that these mass graves could take in 415,758 corpses, i.e. the corpses of all but 18,750 of the 434,508 deportees mentioned in the Höfle message. The balance would easily be accounted for by the effects of decomposition (considering that the graves were filled not all at once but over a period of about 8 months) and the top-down burning practiced by the SS as early as August 1942, probably as a sanitation measure.

Mattogno continues (p. 1235):

Or rather, according to "Provan’s test group""19.95 (20)" persons would fit into one cubic meter. As if such fatuous nonsense were not enough, Muehlenkamp tops it off with something even sillier: by "applying Polish ghetto weights to Provan’s testgroup members" he arrives at the startling result of "25.39 corpses per cubic meter, " and therefore "the 21,310 cubic meters of grave space estimated by Kola could have taken in over 540,000 dead bodies" (footnote 107 on p. 418).

It should be duly noted not only that Mattogno is making a fuss about a mere footnote remark of mine, the figures in which I used nowhere in my calculations, but also that empty weasel-words like "fatuous nonsense", "even sillier" and "startling result" are Mattogno’s only "arguments", at least in this paragraph, against the figures he derides. This is not surprising, as these figures are well substantiated. The 19.95 results from dividing the human body mass that could fit into one mass grave (663.40 kg) by the average weight of a person in the test group that the late Charles Provan used for his experiment documented in Provan’s article "Kurt Gerstein and the Capacity of the Gas Chamber at Belzec"^[107]. That this average is not unrealistic follows from the fact that Provan indeed managed to pack 8 human figures (two young male adults weighing respectively 63 and 62 kg, and elderly female adult weighing 49 kg, four children weighing respectively 25, 26, 19 and 15 kg, and one baby doll representing an infant child, with a theoretical weight of 7 kg, total weight 266 kg) into a space of 0.44 cubic meters. This experiment proves that (266÷0.44 =) 604.55 kg of human mass, or a group of 18 persons consisting of adults and children as in Provan’s test group, could fit into one cubic meter. ^[108] And what is more, these were living people, and they were "able to breathe just fine" according to Provan, meaning that there was still some space left in the box not filled by their bodies. Provan's photos suggest that the box could have taken in one or two more bodies, at least of children, if the bodies had needed no breathing space because they were dead. Now, Provan’s test group was made up of normally fed adults and children. What if the adults and children had had the weights I established for malnourished ghetto inhabitants? Three adults weighing 43 kg each and 5 children weighing 16 kg each would have had a total weight of 209 kg and an average weight of 26.13 kg, instead of the 266 kg total and 33.25 kg average in Provan’s test group. If we take the human mass that could fit into a cubic meter according to my calculations (based on those of Alex Bay), i.e. 663.40 kg, this would mean that 663.4÷26.13 = 25.39 such corpses could fit into one cubic meter. If we take the aforementioned 604.55 kg of human mass in a cubic meter, physically proven by Charles Provan’s experiment, we get 23.14 such corpses per cubic meter.

However, as mentioned before, I didn’t consider that the people buried in the Bełżec mass graves were divided into adults and children in the same proportions as Provan’s test group, but instead used the division considered by Mattogno (roughly two thirds adults, one third children) ^[109].

The fill-at-once capacity of the Bełżec mass graves identified by Prof. Andrzej Kola, considering a concentration of 19.51 per cubic meter, would be the aforementioned 415,758 corpses, i.e. the corpses of all but 18,750 of the 434,508 deportees mentioned in the Höfle message. This calculation does not consider the volume-saving effects of the corpses’ decomposition. Neither does it factor in the presumably volume-reducing effect of incinerating the upper layer of corpses, reported as early as August 1942, as a (futile) measure against the stench of decomposition. And then there’s the evidence that the graves were filled not only to but above the rim. Reder’s report, my translation from the German translation^[110]:

The digging of a grave lasted one week, and the most horrible thing for me was that they had ordered to lay the corpses one meter high on the already filled grave and cover them with sand, the black, thick blood emerged from the graves and covered the whole surface like a sea.

In his interrogation on 29 December 1945 in Cracow^[111], Reder stated the following (my translation from the German translation):

The corpses were thrown without order into the graves, only the upper layers, which protruded 1 meter about the level of the soil surrounding the grave, were ordered systematically, i.e. the corpses were laid in parallel one next to the other. The mound of corpses thus piled up the inmates covered with sand. Before covering lime was poured over the bodies. In the first days a high wall of soil rose above such a grave. As time went by the soil sank and the level slowly became even.

Reder’s observation that the corpses were thrown "without order" into the graves does not contradict the evidence whereby, once inside the graves (and obviously outside the range of Reder’s observation), the corpses at Bełżec and the other Aktion Reinhard(t) camps were ordered systematically by a team created for that purpose in order to save space^[112]. His description of the "high wall of soil" is not contradicted, but rather confirmed, by depositions of several SS-men including Kurt Franz^[113], whereby at Bełżec a filled mass grave was topped off with a sand layer one and a half meters high.

One effect of laying the corpses "one meter high on the already filled grave", as mentioned by Reder, would be to enlarge the space available in each grave, by 1 m x the surface area of each grave shown in Table 7.1 on page 389 of the HC critique. The practical volume of the Bełżec mass graves would thus have been the following, assuming a concentration of 19.51 corpses per cubic meter:

Grave #_Volume (m3)_Corpses
1_1,980.00_38,630
2_254.00_4,956
3_1,200.00_23,412
4_346.00_6,750
5_1,670.00_32,582
6_1,500.00_29,265
7_1,964.50_38,327
8_1,130.00_22,046
9_360.00_7,024
10_2,532.00_49,399
11_125.00_2,439
12_499.00_9,735
13_1,119.75_21,846
14_2,220.00_43,312
15_487.75_9,516
16_875.75_17,086
17_627.50_12,243
18_714.00_13,930
19_644.00_12,564
20_1,436.00_28,016
21_60.00_1,171
22_267.50_5,219
23_686.00_13,384
24_630.00_12,291
25_310.00_6,048
26_411.00_8,019
27_561.00_10,945
28_95.00_1,853
29_1,125.00_21,949
30_105.00_2,049
31_126.00_2,458
32_475.00_9,267
33_165.00_3,219
TOTALS_26,701.75_520,950

We see that the procedure described by Reder led to the capacity of those 33 mass graves, at a concentration of 19.51 corpses per cubic meter, being well in excess of what was required to bury the corpses of the 434,508 deportees to Bełżec mentioned in the Höfle message.

Now let’s assume that the average weight of adult Jews in Polish ghettos at the time was not in between the upper and the lower value of what the BMI table considers underweight (i.e. 43 kg), but corresponded to the upper value, i.e. that malnourished adults were not all that malnourished but just one kg below what is still considered normal weight for their average body height of 1.60 m, i.e. 48 kg, and that the average weight of children 14 and under was not 16 kg but 17.4 kg. The average weight of an adult+adult+child group, and thus of a population made up two thirds of adults and one third of children 14 and under, would thus have been 37.8 kg. The possible concentration per cubic meter, established by dividing through this average weight the mathematically established amount of human mass that can fit into one cubic meter (663.40 kg), would thus have been 17.55 corpses. The capacity of the mass graves, enlarged by the procedure described by Reder, would thus have been the following:

Grave #_Corpses
1_34,749
2_4,458
3_21,060
4_6,072
5_29,309
6_26,325
7_34,477
8_19,832
9_6,318
10_44,437
11_2,194
12_8,757
13_19,652
14_38,961
15_8,560
16_15,369
17_11,013
18_12,531
19_11,302
20_25,202
21_1,053
22_4,695
23_12,039
24_11,057
25_5,441
26_7,213
27_9,846
28_1,667
29_19,744
30_1,843
31_2,211
32_8,336
33_2,896
TOTAL_468,619

The 33 mass graves’ capacity, without factoring in the stretching effects of decomposition and top-down burning, would still be well in excess of what was required for the 434,508 deportees mentioned by Höfle.

Now let’s go one step further and replace the mathematically established amount of human mass that can fit into one cubic meter (663.40 kg) with the amount physically proven by Charles Provan’s experiment, 604.55 kg. Dividing this number by 37.8 kg yields a concentration of 15.99 corpses per cubic meter, which with the enlarged mass grave space would mean the following occupation:

Grave #_Corpses
1_31,660
2_4,061
3_19,188
4_5,533
5_26,703
6_23,985
7_31,412
8_18,069
9_5,756
10_40,487
11_1,999
12_7,979
13_17,905
14_35,498
15_7,799
16_14,003
17_10,034
18_11,417
19_10,298
20_22,962
21_959
22_4,277
23_10,969
24_10,074
25_4,957
26_6,572
27_8,970
28_1,519
29_17,989
30_1,679
31_2,015
32_7,595
33_2,638
TOTAL_426,961

Not quite but almost there, and we haven’t yet factored in the stretching effects of decomposition and top-down burning. And this is assuming that all bodies of deportees killed at Bełżec were buried before being exhumed and cremated in the final phase of the camp’s operation. However, this was not the case, according to German historian Sara Berger (my translation) ^[114] :

In 1943 Belzec was on the whole no longer active as an extermination camp, first and foremost the corpses of the people killed before were burned there. While in early 1943 a few small groups of Jews still arrived, these were no longer killed with gas, but shot in Camp II. The burning of the corpses already began in November 1942, shortly before the end of deportations to Belzec. The corpses of these last transports were burned together with the human remains dug out. At the end of March 1943 the camp personnel declared the burnings to have been concluded.

In November 1942, shortly before the end of deportations to Bełżec – that could mean mid-November or the end of November. Let’s assume the latter. According to my list of deportations based on Berger’s book, which will be shown below, this would mean that 11,200 people killed between 30 November and 11 December 1942 were not first buried but cremated immediately after having been killed – 2.38 % of the total of 470,095 dead that this list adds up to. Applying this percentage to the 434,508 deportees mentioned in Höfle’s report, we get 10,352 deportees burned right after having been killed vs. 424,156 murdered deportees who were buried. This means we can round up the weight of deportees from 37.8 to 38 (and accordingly reduce the concentration from 15.99 to 15.91 corpses per cubic meter), ignore the stretching effects of decomposition and sanity top-down burning, and still have a little burial space left:

Grave #_Corpses
1_31,502
2_4,041
3_19,092
4_5,505
5_26,570
6_23,865
7_31,255
8_17,978
9_5,728
10_40,284
11_1,989
12_7,939
13_17,815
14_35,320
15_7,760
16_13,933
17_9,984
18_11,360
19_10,246
20_22,847
21_955
22_4,256
23_10,914
24_10,023
25_4,932
26_6,539
27_8,926
28_1,511
29_17,899
30_1,671
31_2,005
32_7,557
33_2,625
TOTALS_424,826

The above means that Mattogno’s subsequent considerations about decomposition times vs. Gerstein’s account are somewhat less than relevant, but I’ll have a look at them anyway, after addressing Mattogno’s further objections to my earlier calculations about the mass graves’ fill-at-once capacity.

Mattogno disputes that the corpses in the mass graves at Bełżec were systematically arranged in a space-saving fashion. Besides testimonies like Reder’s, whereby the bodies were thrown into the mass graves (what happened after they had reached the bottom the witnesses didn’t see or describe, so there’s no room for arguing that these testimonies contradict a systematic arrangement of the corpses inside the graves), Mattogno’s argument is that such arrangement would have been hindered by rigor mortis. He quotes (p. 1237) a source whereby a series of observations by one Mr. Niederkorn turned out that "rigor was complete in 14% of cases at 3 hours post mortem and this percentage had risen to 72% at 6 hours and to 90% at 9 hours". These data don’t help Mattogno’s argument as the corpses of each gassing would be in the mass graves earlier than 3 hours after a gassing. Mattogno also invokes another source^[115], which is supposed to show that "Very fast or instant onset (rigor mortis with the body remaining fixed in its last position) take place in muscles tired by physical labor or in cases where death is preceded by convulsions, and in particular in warm climates.". Mattogno argues that "Such would indeed apply to the description of the agony suffered by 750 victims inside a gas chamber measuring 25 square meters and 47.5 cubic meters.". However, a closer look at Mattogno’s source reveals that

i) the onset of rigor mortis tends to be fast in muscles fatigued by labor or if deaths are preceded by convulsions, but from onset to full body stiffness it takes some time, between 10 and 22 hours, which means that rigor mortis did not or not significantly hinder transporting the bodies to and accommodating them in the graves, unless that process took at least ten hours;
ii) in debilitated persons with muscular hypotrophy (loss or degeneration of muscle mass), which is what ghetto inhabitants having suffered from prolonged malnutrition and excruciating transport conditions would mostly be, rigor mortis would set in early but be tenuous and short-lived, thus not or not significantly hindering the transport of the bodies to the graves and their accommodation therein.

This means that Mattogno’s source does not support his argument, on the contrary. Mattogno either didn’t read his source carefully enough, or then he was trying to take his readers for a ride.

Mattogno argues that according to Reder it took up to two hours until all of the victims had entered the gas chambers, and contends that, considering the removal procedure described by the witness, it must have taken much longer than that to extract the corpses from the gas chambers and drag them to the graves. However, there is no reason why this should be so.

Filling the gas chambers must have taken a long time because each gas chamber had to be filled to bursting, with people entering from a narrow corridor and not necessarily compliant having to squeezed into the chamber until the doors could barely be closed, before the same was done with the next contingent in the next gas chamber. That must have been why the introduction process lasted up to two hours, if indeed it lasted that long^[116]. The process of removing the corpses and taking them to the mass graves need not have taken much longer, as it depended essentially on the size of the workforce (which could be expanded as required) and the speed with which they dragged the corpses to the mass graves (speed was of the essence, which was the reason why two handlers were required to drag one corpse). In connection with the removal process Reder mentioned that a transport had to be "finished" after two hours^[117]. What he meant thereby is not clear (even though his mention of the pulling of teeth on the way to the mass graves suggests that he considered it part of the "finishing" process), but it stands to reason that removing the corpses from the gas chambers to the mass graves was no more time-intensive than getting the living deportees into the chambers, for the reasons explained above. A transport would arguably be "finished" only when the gas chambers were ready for the next contingent, and that required moving all corpses out of the gas chambers and to the mass graves and reclosing the extraction openings.

So much for Mattogno’s "rigor mortis" gambit^[118].

Mattogno’s next argument has a certain amusement value, as Mattogno announces that "Muehlenkamp’s statements are even refuted by the evaluations of serious scholars and even by the Soviet investigation commissions". The serious scholar he refers to – because his research and Soviet investigation finds point to a density of 8 corpses per cubic meter at the Nazi mass killing site of Bronnaya Gora (Brona Gora) in Belorussia ("the same value assumed by us", Mattogno triumphantly proclaims) – is German historian Christian Gerlach, who made a name by, among other things, pinpointing 12 December 1941 as the date on which Hitler announced his decision to extend the anti-Jewish killing program – which had already claimed hundreds of thousands of victims, especially in the occupied Soviet territories – to all Jews under Nazi domain in Europe^[119]. Gerlach is also the author of Kalkulierte Morde, a groundbreaking, monumental study about the Nazi occupation of and crimes in Belorussia, from which Mattogno quotes. Serious scholars (unlike propagandistic charlatans like Mattogno) tend to do serious research and reach results that must be taken seriously, so what are we to make of Mattogno’s referring to Gerlach as a serious scholar? Is he accepting the results of Gerlach’s scholarship, especially his finds regarding the decision Hitler announced to high-ranking party officials on 12 December 1941, and his meticulous reconstruction of German crimes in occupied Belorussia, which according to Gerlach’s estimates claimed the lives of 1.6 to 1.7 million out of about nine million people who fell under German rule in Belorussia, thereof about 700,000 prisoners of war, 500,000 to 550,000 Jews, 345,000 victims of so-called anti-partisan fighting and about 100,000 victims of other population groups^[120]? Was the "serious scholar" a Freudian slip of Mattogno’s? Or does he expect his readers to believe that serious scholar Gerlach, in his exhaustive and painstakingly sourced studies, for some reason got it all wrong except where his finds seem to help Mattogno’s arguments?

Mattogno’s triumphant mention of the density of corpses buried at Bronnaya Gora is a non-sequitur. For if the Belarusian Jews murdered at Bronnaya Gora were buried at a concentration of 8 corpses per cubic meter, as the Soviet Extraordinary Commission seems to have assumed (with Mattogno’s blessing), this in no way rules out the possibility that in the Bełżec mass graves corpses were buried at a somewhat higher concentration. The mass graves at Bronnaya Gora may have been over-dimensioned in relation to the number of corpses buried therein, if compared to the mass graves at Bełżec. This would mean that there was no need to use the available burial space as sparingly as possible, the way it was done at Bełżec. There would be no need to have a detachment carefully laying out the bodies in rows head to foot so as to save space, as was done at Bełżec and the other AR camps. And the graves at Bronnaya Gora may not have been filled up to the maximum of their capacity, the way the mass graves at Bełżec are known to have been (even beyond the maximum of their capacity according to Reder, as quoted above).

What is also interesting about Mattogno’s otherwise pointless Bronnaya Gora argument – besides his acknowledgment of serious scholar Gerlach – is that nowhere in the main text about the mass graves at this Belorussian killing site Mattogno calls the same into question; the imbecilic "alleged" that usually accompanies "Revisionist" discussions of historical findings of fact is conspicuously missing. Only in a footnote (2772 on p. 1240), Mattogno (perhaps after having realized that his Bronnaya Gora argument might be misunderstood as his accepting the factuality of that massacre) challenges "the reliability of the [Soviet] claim that 50,000 Jews were killed and buried at Bronnaya Gora", and that with the rather feeble argument of the Soviets having reached the oh-so-unrealistic conclusion that "the interred corpses were exhumed by the Germans and incinerated on open-air pyres within a period of a mere fifteen days, that is, a rate of 3,333 corpses per day!" Why such rate would not be achievable (it’s all a matter of the number and size of fireplaces and available fuel and personnel) Mattogno doesn’t explain, and it neither occurred to him that, even if burning that many bodies within the time frame assumed by the Soviets were impracticable, this might just mean that the cremation of the corpses took longer than assumed by the Soviets.

Ever the resentful sensitive flower, Mattogno feels "reprimanded" by the following ironic remark about the incidental implications of some (quite unnecessary) math presented in Mattogno & Graf’s Treblinka book (critique, footnote 108 on p. 419):

Notwithstanding their claim that 8 bodies per cubic meter is a maximum, Mattogno & Graf seem to consider an even higher density plausible, for in another context they tell their readers that "3,000 bodies take up a volume of about (3,000×0.045 =) 135 m3" (M&G, Treblinka, p. 147). The concentration they are assuming here is 3,000 ÷ 135 = 22 bodies per cubic meter.

After hastening to add (p. 1240) that he was referring to the volume occupied by corpses "in a liquified state", Mattogno deals himself another incidental shot in the foot by arguing that he might have just as well highlighted the absurdity of Treblinka eyewitness Wiernik’s claim that an excavator extracted "about 3,000 corpses at one time."^[121] from the mass graves by pointing out what this would mean in terms of weight^[122], and informing his readers that "the excavators of Treblinka" bore a clamshell bucket which at maximum had a volume of 1.6 m³. In footnote 198 on page 493 of the critique I had mentioned Alex Bay’s photo analysis whereby some of Franz’s excavator photos were taken in what Mattogno et al claim to have been the Treblinka II "transit camp"^[123]. Apparently realizing that he was unable to either refute Bay’s photo analysis or explain what on earth excavators would have been needed for in a "transit camp", Mattogno chose to simply ignore this argument, which his lecture about the excavators’ bucket load capacity now brings to the fore. Mattogno’s apparent failure to realize the self-defeating implications of said lecture must have been due to his being overly concerned with (rather pointlessly) pointing out that "even if assuming Muehlenkamp’s absurd data, the Treblinka excavator could only extract (1.6 × 19.51 =) 31 corpses at one time with the weight of (31 × 21 =) 651 kg", and adding a supreme touch of idiocy by remarking that "Of course Muehlenkamp keeps silent about this!", as if anything in my writings suggested endorsement of the "3,000 corpses per bucket load" nonsense that Mattogno nonsensically accuses Wiernik of having claimed). ^[124]

Mattogno’s subsequent oversimplified calculation of the mass-grave-filling pace at Bełżec (including the notoriously mendacious misrepresentation whereby I believe, pursuant to Gerstein’s account, that 750 persons were killed in each of 4 to 6 gas chambers used in each and every gassing at Bełżec, and the deplorably feeble "then he must also believe" - conclusion derived from this misrepresentation) has already been addressed in a previous rebuttal^[125] (except for the considerations regarding my "new conjecture of 19.51 corpses") and needs not be discussed at this place, especially as I will show below that a part of the decomposition process underground in a closed grave must already have led to a considerable reduction of the corpses’ volume in the Bełżec mass graves (and the associated freeing of grave space for further use), making it a secondary issue as concerns the graves’ capacity how long they remained open prior to their (first) closure.

In our blog discussions Friedrich Jansson referred to two sources whereby buried carcasses release about a third of their mass into the soil as leachate within approximately two months, half thereof (i.e. one-sixth of their mass) in the first week after burial^[126]. This information allows for a modeling of corpse volume reduction and associated freeing of reusable grave space at Bełżec, for which I use a recent timetable of deportations to that camp put together by Sara Berger^[127].

Organized chronologically and by place of origin, this table mentions 95 deportation contingents which, like the contingents mentioned in Arad’s book, add up to a number higher than that mentioned in the Höfle report – minimum totals are 467,550 by Berger’s count, 470,095 by mine. Most of these contingents arrived over a period of several days (for instance, a contingent of at least 5,000 people from Kolomea and other towns in Kolomea county, Galicia district, arrived between 2 and 13 April 1942; a contingent of at least 38,000 from Lemberg arrived between 10 and 22 or 25 August 1942, etc.). So in order to model the number of arrivals per day from each contingent, I split the size of the contingent by the minimum duration of the period in which such contingent arrived, allocating roughly the same number of arrivals to each day of the period (e.g. 410-420 arrivals per day for the aforementioned contingent from Kolomea, 2,920-2,930 arrivals per day for the aforementioned contingent from Lemberg). The result of this calculation model is that of the 272 days on which Bełżec extermination camp received transports according to Berger’s table (15.03. to 11.12.1942), 185 were days on which deportees arrived and 87 were days on which no deportees arrived, the daily number of arriving deportees ranging from a mere 280 (on 08.05.1942) to as many as 10,550 (on 26.08.1942).

In my model I assume that corpses lying in the graves lost one-sixth of their mass in the first week after burial and another one-sixth after two months. As the filling of the graves sometimes took more than a week and in the case of one grave months (due to there being very few arrivals between mid-April and early July 1942), the mass loss was probably somewhat higher, so this assumption is conservative. Taking the aforementioned 26,701.75 m³ of grave space (including the topping mentioned by Reder), and assuming 15.91 corpses à 38 kg per cubic meter, there would have been enough burial space for 16,143,344 kg of human mass to start with. My calculations with this input^[128] show that, when they would have finished burying 470,095 people, the SS at Bełżec would still have had enough burial space left over to bury another 3,482,992 kg of human body mass, which at an average weight of 38 kg per corpse would correspond to 91,658 corpses, if they took proper advantage of the space-saving effects of leachate seeping into the soil from the bodies. They could have buried as many as 561,753 corpses in the same space.

Now let’s reduce concentration of corpses to 10.7 per cubic meter, which is the concentration calculated by Alex Bay for specimens with the measurements of Da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man^[129]. At this concentration, according to my calculations (using the above model and inserting 10.70 instead of 15.91 as the corpse concentration per cubic meter) the space of the 33 mass graves located by Prof. Kola^[130] would have run out at 422,726 corpses - 47,369 corpses short of my addition of Berger’s partial figures, but only 11,782 corpses short of Höfle’s figure (434,508). The latter difference could be easily accounted for by top-down burning for sanitary purposes before the general cleanup, or by assuming that cremation started before the end of November 1942 and the number of corpses cremated without prior burial was thus higher than the 10,352 calculated above. So we can conclude that, if proper advantage was taken of the buried corpses’ volume loss due to leachate seeping into the soil and the associated freeing of reusable grave space, burying corpses in those 33 mass graves at an initial concentration of 10.7 corpses per cubic meter would have been sufficient^[131].

Notes

[97] Alex Bay, The Reconstruction of Belzec, section 4.6 - "Camp II: The Killing and Graves Area" ([link]
[98] One of Mattogno’s acolytes, Friedrich Jansson (probably a pseudonym), made a bigger but fruitless effort to challenge my height assumption (or rather the amount of research that had led to this assumption), which is addressed in my blog "Friedrich Jansson tries to help Mattogno …" ([link]). As I demonstrated in this blog, one of the sources referred to in Jansson’s lecture ("Stature: Jews compared with Non-Jews", by Joseph Jacobs and Maurice Fishberg, in: Jewish Encylopedia: The unedited full-text of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, [link]) shows that my assumed average height of 1.60 meters is by no means off the mark. Jansson returned to the subject in a later blog, which is addressed in my blog "Just when I thought I had seen all of Jansson’s fits …" ([link]). There he raised inconclusive objections about the studies whose height data were used in the 1906 Jewish encyclopedia, professed "laughter" as his only "argument" against my use of a certain study about male heights in a European country in 1941, and reiterated that he had "not done the research necessary to take a position on the average height of the Polish Jews in the 1940s".
[99]German translation can be found in BAL (Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg = Federal Archives in Ludwigsburg, Germany) B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. II, f.258 ff.; quote translated from f. 274.
[100] Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung. Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka, 2013, Hamburger Edition, p. 113, my translation: "Whereas during the »Euthanasia« it had been necessary to consider the sensitivities of the »burners«, who had a hard time with the burdensome transport of the corpses without auxiliary means, such was not necessary in regard to the »working Jews«, who could simply be replaced when they were exhausted. What was important most of all was that things went fast."
[101]"Gewichtstabelle nach BMI", [link]
[102] Robert Jan Van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, pp. 470, 472.
[103] GFH Online Archives ([link], keyword "Belzec", photo under [link]; caption reads "Jews photographed upon their arrival at the Belzec camp").
[104] Again, Mattogno’s acolyte Friedrich Jansson went to greater lengths, invoking various sources supposed to demonstrate that the Body Mass Index (BMI) of 16.8 corresponding to my assumed 34 kg average weight cannot be realistic, including present-day studies about BMI in poorer countries and among worse-nourished subpopulations, present-day age and weight charts for children and a 1947 study about birth weights among children born during the siege of Leningrad in 1942. As demonstrated in several blogs ("Friedrich Jansson tries to help Mattogno …" - [link], "Just when I thought I had seen all of Jansson’s fits …" - [link], "Janssson on 1942 births in Leningrad" - [link]), Jansson’s sources and arguments do not show my average weight assumption for a starving small-statured population to be off the mark, and as concerns the Leningrad study Jansson got caught in several flagrant misrepresentations.
[105]"The Reconstruction of Treblinka" - "Appendix D - Ash Disposal and Burial Pits (Continued)" ([link])
[106] Friedrich Jansson went out of his way providing sources about carcass burials which are supposed to demonstrate that the possible mass-per-volume density I calculated (663.40 kg/m³) is widely exaggerated and cannot be achieved in practice. One of these sources (C.P. Young, P.A. Marsland and J.W.N. Smith, "Foot & Mouth Disease Epidemic. Disposal of culled stock by burial: Guidance and Reference Data for the protection of controlled waters", Draft R&D Technical Report: Version 7:20 June 2001 - [link]) shows that "typical burial volumes of about 0.6 m3 for cattle and between 0.04 and 0.05 m3 per sheep or pig" were considered possible. Considering the weights per type of animal given by the source (373 kg per head of beef cattle, 31.8 kg per sheep and 27.6 kg per pig), the volumes signify densities of 622 kg/m³ for beef cattle, 636 – 795 kg/m³ for sheep and 690 kg/m³ for pigs, as I pointed out in the blog "The more you scratch Friedrich Jansson…", section 3 ([link]). Regarding the reasons why densities achieved in practice were lower than these projections in some of the mass burial sites discussed in the aforementioned article (the authors attribute this "in part to carcass bloat, which effectively reduces the bulk density"), see the blog "Jansson thought of quitting our discussions …", section 2 ([link]).
[107] Mattogno calls this experiment "risible", referring to his "first rebuttal", which was deconstructed as concerns Provan’s experiment in the blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)" ([link]).
[108] This assertion was called a "lie" by Friedrich Jansson (one of those "Revisionists" whose discussion tactics include persistently throwing "lie" accusations at their opponents, in obvious self-projection), on grounds that Provan’s photographs show the heads of two adult test persons protruding about the top of the box. They do, but it also becomes apparent from the photos that these adults could have wholly fit inside the box if, instead of standing upright (as at least one of the test persons seem have been) they had crouched and/or bent their heads downwards. So my assertion is correct. For details see the blog ""Muehlenkamp lies about Provan"…"([link]).
[109] As Mattogno had referred to data from demographer Jakob Leszczynski whereby children aged 14 or under made up 29.6 % of the Jewish population of Poland in 1931 (i.e. less than one third), Jansson complained that I had introduced a bias in my favor by using Mattogno’s simplified one third vs. two thirds distribution. Doing the calculations the way Jansson thinks I should have done them yields an average weight of 35 kg instead of 34 kg, which is not exactly dramatic if one considers that, as will be seen below, my demonstration of mass grave space sufficiency at Bełżec also works with an average weight of 37.8 instead of 34 kg, and with a density borne out by Charles Provan’s experimental data (604.55 kg of human body mass per cubic meter) instead of the possible density I established mathematically (663.40 kg of human body mass per cubic meter). Besides, Jansson doesn’t take into account is that this slight bias in my favor is compensated or even outweighed, at least as concerns Bełżec, by the fact that the proportion of children among deportees to Bełżec from Galicia (where a considerable portion if not the majority of deportees to Bełżec came from) was considerably higher than would correspond to the proportion of children among that region’s Jewish population. See the blogs "Friedrich Jansson tries to help Mattogno …" ([link]) and "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1) " ([link]).
[110]BAL B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. II, f.258 ff. (f. 273)
[111] German translation in BAL B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. II, f. 1175 ff. (p. 1178)
[112] See Berger, EdV, pp. 66 (Sobibór), 113 (Bełżec), 148 (Treblinka) and 166 (Sobibór); judgment LG Düsseldorf vom 3.9.1965, 8 I Ks 2/64 (1st Düsseldorf Treblinka Trial), transcribed online ([link]); Claude Lanzmann’s interview with Franz Suchomel, online ([link]), where Suchomel mentions that, at Bełżec, Wirth ordered Franz, Oberhauser and Hackenholt to place corpses inside the pits "so that Wirth could see how much space he needed"; Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, p. 112.
[113] Berger, EdV, p. 53 and footnote 61 on pp. 470-471. Piling up the bodies about the rim of the mass graves was also practiced at other burial places where burial space was a rare commodity, like the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents in Paris, which is discussed in the blog Friedrich Jansson responded …( [link]).
[114]EdV, p. 190
[115]"LE MODIFICAZIONI TANATOLOGICHE DEL CADAVERE" ([link])
[116] The duration of a process is a detail that eyewitnesses rarely get right. (Rolf Bender/Armin Nack, Tatsachenfeststellung vor Gericht - Band I: Glaubwürdigkeits- und Beweislehre, marginal note 137 (excerpt translated in the HC forum thread "Guidelines for assessing eyewitness testimonies" ([link])
[117] BAL B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. II, f. 271
[118] Mattogno already tried the this gambit in his "first rebuttal", by the way. His arguments back then, which do not differ much from the current ones, were duly addressed in the blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)" ([link]).
[119] See the article "12 December 1941" by Götz Aly, translated by Gord McFee ([link])
[120]Kalkulierte Morde, p. 1158.
[121] If the expression "at one time" were to be understood as meaning "in one bucketful", the claim would be obviously absurd beyond measure, and any math aimed at highlighting this absurdity would be wholly superfluous. However, a reasonable interpretation of the expression "at one time" in this context would be that it referred to one workday or work shift. Mattogno’s self-congratulatory later remarks (p. 1416) about the original Polish text of Wiernik’s statement ("The Polish adverb “naraz” translates as “at the same time, together,” therefore I interpreted the meaning of the passage in blameless way. It was Wiernik who uttered a monstrous nonsense.") don’t change the fact that the only monstrous nonsense in this context is Mattogno’s understanding of "at the same time, together" as meaning "in one bucketful", rather than "in one workday" or "in one work shift", in the context of Wiernik’s testimony.
[122]"For Muehlenkamp the average weight of the corpses in Bełżec was 21 kg, therefore the excavator would have extracted (3,000 × 21 =) 63,000 kg or 63 metric tons of corpses at one time.", p. 1240).
[123] Alex Bay, "The Reconstruction of Treblinka" ([link])
[124] Incidentally, if 31 decomposed corpses could fit into an excavator bucket, and if one round trip of the excavator’s bucket took, say, five minutes, then in a 12 hour working day a single excavator could remove 12x12x31 = 4,464 corpses from the mass graves. Wiernik’s claim of 3,000 corpses removed "at the same time, together", if correctly interpreted, would be comparatively conservative.
[125] See the blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)" ([link]). Among other things I pointed out that my considering Gerstein's gas chamber capacity estimate to have been plausible (and hence a similar concentration of bodies in the Bełżec mass graves to have been physically possible, which was the contention in support of which I referred to Gerstein’s estimate in the first place) does not, of course, imply my assuming that the Bełżec gas chambers were filled according to this estimate in every single gassing.
[126] One of the sources is the 2004 report "Carcass Disposal: A Comprehensive Review", prepared by the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center Consortium - Carcass Disposal Working Group, for the USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service ([link]), page 7. The other source is the already mentioned paper "Foot & Mouth Disease Epidemic. Disposal of culled stock by burial: Guidance and Reference Data for the protection of controlled waters", by C.P. Young, P. A. Marsland and J.W.N. Smith ([link]), which on page 18 contains the following "Note on body fluid releases" (emphasis added): «The immediate release of body fluids has been a particular problem at carcass burial sites. The estimated quantity of liquid theoretically available for immediate release from the carcasses is 170 litres/cow and 16 litres/sheep. Approximately 50% of this is likely to be released within one week of deposition, with the majority of the remainder being released within 2 months. In total this represents approximately one-third of the mass of the carcass. On this basis leachate removal and disposal is likely to be the key issue at most burial sites, as management of this relatively rapid release is likely to deal with a significant proportion of the potential pollutant loading from the carcasses.»Agency, 2001b, p. 11).
[127] EdV, pp. 416-427
[128]Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5
[129] Treblinka, "Appendix D - Ash Disposal and Burial Pits (Continued)" ([link]. Bay calculated that 91,000 corpses with the size of the "ideal man" could fit into 8,502 cubic meters of grave space. 91,000 ÷ 8,502 = 10.70.
[130] Which, once again, were not the only mass graves in the Bełżec area according to Bay’s air photo assessment.
[131] Taking into account that the corpses at Treblinka included many women and children (who would not have the measurements of the Vetruvian Man) «a reasonable estimate for the contents of a mass grave 50 X 25 X 10 meters is at least 100,000 people». 100,000 corpses in 8,502 cubic meters of graves space imply a concentration of 100,000 ÷ 8,502 = 11.76 corpses per cubic meter. At this concentration, using the model based on Berger’s time table and my leachate loss assumptions, 450,940 corpses could be buried in the 33 Bełżec mass graves located by Prof. Kola – 16,432 more than the Höfle figure.

Capacity of the Graves (2)

The eyewitness whose testimony I invoked as supporting the possibility of grave space reuse is Kurt Gerstein. Accordingly Mattogno (pp. 1240 ff.) spends much time arguing against Gerstein’s testimony.



First, in order to argue that "we are dealing here with the brief period of a few days, contrasting with the slow decomposition process invoked by Muehlenkamp", he mistranslates as "after a few days" the highlighted passage in Gerstein’s pertinent statement, which correctly translates as follows (emphasis added): ^[132]

The naked corpses were carried on wooden stretchers only for a few meters into pits of 100 × 20 × 12 meters. After a few days the corpses fermented up, and then shortly thereafter they collapsed heavily so that it was possible to throw a new layer on top of them. Then 10 cm of sand was sprinkled above, so that only a few heads and arms were protruding.

Needless to say, "shortly thereafter" does not necessarily mean "after a few more days", but can also refer to a comparatively longer period.

Mattogno’s next argument is that Gerstein could not have witnessed the swelling and subsequent collapsing of the bodies himself, for he "states that he arrived to Lublin on 17 August 1942; "on the other day" he went to Bełżec and "on the other day – on 19 August 1942 [am anderen Tage – dem 19. August 1942]," he went to Treblinka and therefore he was in Bełżec one day only: 18 August.". Hence the above-quoted description is supposed to be "hearsay and thus devoid of any value".

Hearsay may be "devoid of any value" in Mattogno’s fantasy world, but it is not devoid of any value according to, for instance, the US Federal Rules of Evidence^[133] (which provide for a considerable number of exceptions from the rule against hearsay, in which hearsay is allowed as legal evidence) and certainly not to serious historians. Besides, Gerstein’s description was not necessarily hearsay, for (as already mentioned in a previous rebuttal^[134] and conveniently ignored by Mattogno) it is possible that Gerstein was at Bełżec more often than he admitted in his deposition. This was in fact suggested by Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, who in his deposition before the Darmstadt Court on June 6, 1950^[135] submitted the following:

As he tole[sic!] me himself on that occasion, he had been to Belzec a number of times. It is possible that[sic!] he may have witnessed scenes similar to those he describes and that, in his report of April 26, 1945, he was no longer differentiating between the visits, but giving a summary picture of them.

According to Mattogno, I’m also supposed to have misinterpreted the contents of Gerstein’s statement, in that he supposedly "does not say that the lowering of the “older” layer consisted in the reduction of the original volume, but that the corpses first swelled to a height of 2-3 meters before they deflated". Mattogno’s interpretation is contradicted, first of all, by Gerstein’s observation that another layer of corpses was placed on top of the previous layer after it had deflated, which suggests a reduction of the lower layer’s volume. A reduction of volume also becomes apparent from Reder’s above-quoted statement whereby a "high wall of soil" rose above a grave after it had been closed, and as time went by "the soil sank and the level slowly became even". This is what happens in decomposition, as can be seen on the Australian Museum’s "Stages of Decomposition" webpage^[136]. Bloating through the formation of gases in the putrefaction stage (4-10 days after death) is followed by the black putrefaction stage, in which the bloated corpse collapses into a flattened corpse as it not only releases the gases that caused it to bloat, but also loses a large volume of body fluid. Thus the corpse obviously becomes smaller at this stage than it was before bloating, and its size is further reduced as black putrefaction is followed by butyric fermentation and eventually dry decay.

Mattogno argues that "the bloating would not have subsided in the short time it would have taken to fill one of the mass graves", which may be true if a grave was filled in less than ten days (unlike the one that was filled between mid-April and early July 1942) but is irrelevant insofar as further layers of corpses may also have been added to an already filled (and even an already closed) grave as its surface sank in due to the corpses losing volume.

Next comes Mattogno’s sand-filling trick, already addressed in a previous rebuttal^[137]. Mattogno tries to fill the mass graves with as much sand as possible (one third or half of the grave filled with sand instead of bodies) by creatively reading into Gerstein’s and Pfannenstiel’s accounts the claim that a layer of sand 10 cm thick was placed on top of either every two layers (Gerstein) or every single layer (Pfannenstiel) of corpses. As I pointed out in the aforementioned rebuttal, Gerstein's account doesn't allow for concluding that a layer of sand 10 centimeters high was poured on top of every two layers of corpses; all that can be inferred from his description is that the final topmost layer of corpses in a mass grave was covered with a ten centimeter layer of sand. In what concerns the layers below, Gerstein's description might as well be interpreted as suggesting that no sand was poured on top of each of the lower layers, or at least not a layer of sand 10 centimeters thick. Being as they were in need of carefully managing their available grave space at a small place like Belzec, the last thing the SS would have done is to waste so much grave space on sand layers, which in turn means that, if sand was poured on top of every layer or every two layers of corpses, it can only have been very thin layers of sand and not layers ten centimeters thick. Accordingly judicial findings of fact based on eyewitness testimonies about procedures at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps speak of a "thin" layer of sand or quicklime poured over each layer of bodies. ^[138] This is not contradicted by the fact that, according to Sara Berger with reference to the depositions of several SS-men including Kurt Franz^[139], a filled mass grave was topped off with a sand layer one and a half meters high. For what the cited witnesses presumably referred to was the "high wall of soil" covering each mass grave according to Reder’s aforementioned deposition on 29 December 1945 in Cracow (German translation in BAL B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. II, f. 1175 ff. (p. 1178), which gradually sank until the grave’s surface looked even.

Following his sand-filling trick, Mattogno accuses me of "dishonesty" on account of having mentioned only Gerstein’s exaggeration as concerns the depths of the grave pits at Bełżec, while omitting Gerstein's also widely exaggerated claim about the surface area of those graves. Considering that my accepting the results of Prof. Kola’s archaeological finds as concerns the graves’ areas obviously rules out accepting Gerstein’s exaggerated claims in this respect, and that I in my earlier response to Mattogno^[140] I quoted verbatim Prof. Browning’s explanation of why Gerstein’s testimony, despite the several "grossly exaggerated claims" and other flaws contained therein, remains a useful source of evidence, Mattogno’s accusation can be called silly at best.

Browning explains that Gerstein’s testimony remains usable as a source of evidence despite those flaws because "in the essential issue, namely that he was in Belzec and witnessed the gassing of a transport of Jews from Lwow, his testimony is fully corroborated by Pfannenstiel" and also by "other categories of witnesses from Belzec"^[141]. While there is no such corroboration from Bełżec as concerns the topping-off of the mass graves (with additional corpses) after the volume of their contents had shrunk, there is at least one testimony suggesting such practice at Bełżec’s sister camp Treblinka. At the Demjanjuk trial in Jerusalem, Treblinka survivor Eliahu Rosenberg provided the following account^[142]:

The pits somehow rose up and this – as we had covered it – the whole thing would suddenly rise up and it served as a kind of volcano from which a thick, viscous sort of material rose-colored and it was bubbling. It was a sort of vulcanized type of matter and the pit and the earth on top of the pit would rise up and then would suddenly drop, would subside. I don’t understand anything about the chemistry of this, but this is how it happened. And in these pits, to the extent that it had subsided, it had sunk, well we would top it up again.

There is no evidence, as far as I know, that Rosenberg’s above-quoted account was in any way influenced by Gerstein’s testimony. Assuming that, as suggested by the context, Rosenberg was referring to the topping-up of a grave with additional corpses^[143], this would mean that there are at least two eyewitnesses (Gerstein and Rosenberg) who, independently of each other, described a proceeding that involved reusing mass grave space that had been freed by the buried corpses’ loss of volume due to the decomposition process.

In support of Gerstein’s testimony I had referred to that of Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl whereby he had witnessed corpses being pushed above the surface of the mass graves due to the decomposition process at Bełżec. Stangl wrongly attributed this phenomenon to the corpses having been pushed up by "the liquid gathering below", and Mattogno takes advantage of this mistake to attack Stangl’s account in the strongest terms^[144].

Mattogno is of course right in that what caused the pushing of the corpses outside the grave, as observed by Stangl, was the gasses forming inside the corpses and not the liquids emanating out of them. But does this mean that Stangl had not observed the "overflown" pits he described? No, it only means that Stangl was mistaken in his assessment of the causes of that "overflowing", wrongly assuming that what he observed had been due to liquid gathering below and pushing the corpses up, when actually the cause of that phenomenon had been the gasses forming inside the corpses. A witness’s mistaken assessment of the causes of a phenomenon he described as having observed, needless to say, does not mean that the witness did not observe the phenomenon he described.

Mattogno’s claims that the pressure generated by putrefaction gasses does not produce the effect described by Stangl, but his source Créteur^[145] doesn’t support this claim because he mentioned, in regard to mass graves from the 1870/71 Franco-Prussian War, that "with the ongoing decomposition, the corpses are lifted among each other and they overturn the soil covering them; often I found corpses with arms and legs protruding from the graves, half mauled by dogs and birds". This description actually resembles that of Stangl, except that Creteur had not found corpses lifted outside the mass graves he had described. However, that difference can be easily explained by that fact that the battlefield mass graves described by Créteur were not as tightly packed with corpses as the mass graves at Bełżec.

Regarding my description of the stages of human decomposition, Mattogno knows no better than to regurgitate arguments against one of my sources^[146] that have been addressed in the aforementioned previous rebuttal^[147]. He also reveals a problem in reading comprehension as he claims that I invoked "Casper’s dictum", according to which "one week of putrefaction in air is equivalent to two weeks in water, which is equivalent to eight weeks buried in soil, given the same environmental temperature". Actually this rule of thumb is not mentioned in the critique, unlike two other sources^[148] whereby decomposition is four(not eight) times slower in buried corpses than in corpses lying in the open. In my previous rebuttal^[149] I provided an explanation for the difference between "Casper’s dictum" and my sources, in the sense that the four to one time ratio refers to the time until the putrefactive juices have drained away and the soft tissues have shrunk (i.e. until the end of the black putrefaction or the butyric fermentation stage), after which the speed of decay is appreciably reduced. Mattogno ignores this explanation, which is supported by the speed at which buried corpses lose their body fluids – as we have seen in Section 1 of this Part 4, buried carcasses release about a third of their mass into the soil as leachate within approximately two months, half thereof (i.e. one-sixth of their mass) in the first week after burial.

Mattogno also misunderstands my argument derived from another article^[150], whose author, forensic anthropologist Arpad Vass, established a formula for human decomposition in the open (y=1285/x, where y is the number of days it takes to become skeletonized or mummified and x is the average temperature in Centigrade during the decomposition process). Vass provides an example of this formula (if the average temperature is 10 °C, then 1285/10 = 128.5 days for someone to become skeletonized), which Mattogno uses to argue that, since the corpses were buried, "the duration calculated in Vass’s example was eight times longer and therefore it would have taken (128,5 × 8 =) 1,028 days, hence almost three years". Now, the temperature at Bełżec in the late spring, summer and autumn of 1942 is likelier to have been in the order of 20 or 30º C, which would reduce the time for skeletonization in the open to 64 or 43 days for bodies exposed to air and insects^[151], and the time for corpses to lose their liquids and most of their volume underground would at most have been four times longer in each case (as borne out by my sources) and was probably shorter given that most corpses would already be in some stage of the decomposition process by the time a grave was closed.

Clinging to Vass’s caveat that his formula is "a rough estimate since many factors affect this rate", which is "typically used at a crime scene when investigators need some time frame from which to begin their investigation", Mattogno argues that "an essential question not even touched" by me is "the one about the corpses in wax-fat status". If I am "willing to believe"^[152] that "there are at this very moment in the soil under the Bełżec memorial some 17,000 corpses in a state of saponification", then I "must also believe that the phenomenon was huge and that it must have involved a far superior number of corpses, partially cremated and partially left in the pits". Mattogno contends that "for these latter ones the volume loss would have been negligible in respect to the decomposed corpses". Mattogno is partially right in that the number of corpses I estimate to possibly lie still lie in Bełżec’s mass graves ranges from 9,083 to 17,030 corpses. But he doesn’t explain a) why he expects corpses other than those left at the bottom of the graves to have undergone wax-fat transformation, b) how many corpses would in his opinion have undergone wax-fat transformation, and c) at what stage of the decomposition process he would expect wax-fat transformation to have set in and prevented further decomposition. As to volume loss, images of corpses in wax-fat transformation suggest that the "comparatively negligible" loss of volume as a result of wax-fat transformation could still be sufficient to free a significant amount of grave space. ^[153] At least the loss of fluid during the first two months after burial, which as demonstrated above would free enough grave space to considerably stretch burial capacity, doesn’t seem to be hindered by wax-fat transformation^[154].

The next "ally" that Mattogno seeks is lime, which is supposed to exert a "preservative action" on corpses. His source in this respect^[155] theorizes on this effect, which it attributes to the substance’s germicidal properties, adding that, if placed round a dead body, lime would "prevent, or partly prevent, the attacks of microorganisms and insects from without". However, the same source points out that neither lime nor chlorinated lime outside a body could "arrest the decomposition taking place from within", which is "one of the main factors in the putrefaction of the body". The same source refers to experiments on pigeon carcasses, which confirmed the preservative effect and also showed that "the act of slaking lime in contact with a dead body, whether the slaking is brought about gradually or done all at once, does not destroy the body". This suggests that, while not being destroyed, the body is nevertheless damaged by such slaking. Mattogno’s second source refers to experiments with pig carcasses in which the pig was "encased" in lime on its upper surface, the term "encased" suggesting the use of a considerable amount of the substance, presumably much larger in relation to the volume of the carcass than the thin layers of lime covering layers of corpses at the AR camps in relation to the volume of those corpses. While better preserved than in the other surfaces, the tissue on the surfaces covered with lime seems to have shown some degree of decomposition. While slowing down decomposition on the surfaces covered by it, lime also had a dessicating (and thus volume-reducing) effect on the tissue, though not to the extent expected by the rapid dessication of a cube of tissue in an earlier microcosm experiment. The source suggests that it takes relatively high amounts of lime to bring about these effects. The evidence does not suggest that such relatively high amounts were used on the corpses inside the mass graves at the AR camps. The judgment LG Düsseldorf vom 3.9.1965, 8 I Ks 2/64^[156] mentions a thin layer of sand or chlorinated lime poured on each layer of corpses, and further evidence shows that this was not enough to prevent the undesirable phenomena associated to the decomposition of the corpses. Based on various testimonies, Sara Berger describes the problem at Bełżec as follows^[157]:

Among the corpses chlorinated lime was put as a disinfectant and against the smell. The mass graves filled with bodies were covered with a layer of liquid lime and sandy soil. Like in the construction phase the putrefaction gases lifted the layer of soil, some days later the graves sank again due to the fermenting corpses and thick black blood and foul-smelling liquids came to the surface. Due to the lack of time and the incessant transports the camp staff had not yet found a solution for this problem. In order to counter the unpleasant consequences of decomposition, the men ignited the upper layer of corpses with gasoline or other flammable liquids, though due to the insufficient oxygen supply it only combusted insufficiently.

At Sobibór things were no better:

Since the hot summer of 1942 the T4-Reinhardt men clearly saw the hygienic problems of corpse removal. The corpse pit "exploded", the sandy soil lifted and swollen corpses came out of the mass graves. Corpse fluid and blood emanated. The decomposing corpses attracted vermin, a severe stench spread in the camp and its surroundings and the camp staff feared – after some cases of disease – that due to the contaminated drinking water in the wells epidemics would spread. Chlorinated lime for disinfection and dikes around the pit could not change the situation much.

Obviously there were just too many corpses for the available amount of chlorinated lime to have any appreciable effect, which flies in the face of Mattogno’s contention that "in Treblinka the chlorinated lime (Chlorkalk) was used in adequate quantities in the mass graves". The only evidence that Mattogno offers in support of this contention is a Wehrmacht letter (Wehrmacht-Brief) dated "Treblinka, 10 September 1943 [Treblinka, den 10, September 1943]" regarding the delivery of a railway car of chlorinated lime to the "SS-Arbeitslager Lublin". As the amount delivered to Lublin was "evidently the remnant of a previous delivery", Mattogno concludes that Treblinka must have had sufficient chlorinated lime to spare and give away. However, this is a non sequitur conclusion, considering that by September 1943 the process of exhuming the corpses interred in 1942 and burning them along with the (comparatively few) corpses from transports arriving in 1943 had been going on for months. Considering the aforementioned evidence to the insufficiency of the chlorinated lime’s deodorant effect, a likelier explanation is that the earlier shipment had arrived at Treblinka at a time when it was no longer needed as corpses were no longer being buried, and was therefore forwarded to Lublin in the course of the camp’s liquidation. This logical conclusion is not Mattogno’s, of course. He prefers to jump to his desired conclusion of "adequate quantities" by taking the mentioned Wehrmacht document out of context and ignoring the evidence that belies this conclusion. What is more, he claims that said conclusion further supports his crusade against a piece of documentary evidence so inconvenient to his articles of faith that he’s reduced to the deplorable last-resort argument of calling into question its authenticity – an entry for the date 24.10.1942 in the War Diary of the Wehrmacht Military Commandant in the General Government, whereby "OK Ostrow reports that the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air."^[158]. Earlier in the book, Mattogno tries to get rid of this inconvenient evidence in a lengthy section that has been addressed in a separate article^[159].

Mattogno’s next argument is borrowed from Friedrich Jansson, with whom I discussed the issue at length on the RODOH forum^[160]. The argument is that, under certain conditions, corpses in a mass grave (as opposed to corpses buried singly) may be relatively well preserved for a long period of time. In the aforementioned RODOH discussion I argued that conditions at the AR camps’ mass graves were not exactly favorable to preserving the corpses therein like had been observed in more recent mass grave at Ocvara near Vukovar, Croatia, under various aspects:
a) Except for those in the upper layers, the corpses in the AR mass graves would already have started decomposing by the time a mass grave was closed^[161].
b) The mass graves were dug in sandy soil, which facilitates drainage of fluids into the soil (whereas in the Ocvara mass grave, clay soil led to moisture being trapped inside the grave).
c) The Ocvara grave was covered by a thick and firmly compacted overburden, whereas the mass graves at the AR camps were covered with thin layers of sand.
d) Exposure of the corpses to sun and heat, especially in the upper layers, facilitated decomposition in the AR mass graves.
The far-reaching stench of decomposing corpses emanating from these corpses is borne out by various testimonies besides the above-mentioned entry in the War Diary of the Wehrmacht Military Commandant in the General Government, and was probably what led to early cremation attempts at Bełżec and Treblinka^[162] and to a change in the Sobibór camp’s body disposal method at a relatively early stage^[163].

The degree of decomposition in the AR camps’ mass graves may be further addressed in the context of cremation, when discussing chapter 12 of MGK’s magnum opus. For now it is sufficient to note that, just like mass-buried animal carcasses, the corpses in these graves are likely to have released one-third of their mass as leachate into the soil within the first two months after burial, half thereof within the first week. As demonstrated above, this alone means that it would have been sufficient, in order to accommodate the Bełżec death toll borne out by Höfle’s report, to bury corpses in the 33 mass graves identified by Prof. Andrzrej Kola’s team^[164] at a concentration of 10.7 corpses per cubic meter.

This, in turn, means that Mattogno’s subsequent argument – another milk-maid calculation meant to support the claim that the mass graves at Bełżec would have been filled within a relatively short time and decomposition therefore can have had no appreciable impact on the available grave space – can be safely ignored in this context, and we can move on to Mattogno’s arguments regarding early cremation activity in this extermination camp.

Regurgitating an argument that was already refuted in a previous rebuttal^[165], Mattogno claims there is a contradiction between Pfannenstiel’s testimony on 25 April 1960, which mentions the partial burning of corpses in the mass graves, and Gerstein’s account which mentions no such burning. As Pfannenstiel and Gerstein were at Bełżec together on the same day, Mattogno argues, it not possible that one of them should have noticed the burning and the other not. Mattogno accuses me of "bad faith" for having feigned not to notice this contradiction, and of lacking a "critical mind" for claiming that both the reduction of the corpse volume due to decomposition and the partial burning of the corpses mentioned by Pfannenstiel took place. Apparently Mattogno believes that these two phenomena are mutually exclusive, though he doesn’t explain why this should be so, and there is no reason why it should be unless all corpses in the graves were completely destroyed by burning. According to Pfannenstiel this was not the case, for he expressly stated that "the corpses burned just partly", and his testimony doesn’t allow for establishing to what extent it was attempted to burn buried corpses before the overall cleanup starting in November 1942. As to the "bad faith", Mattogno is projecting his own behavior, for he is aware that, according to historian Michael Tregenza, Gerstein must have been at Bełżec more often than his visit together with Pfannenstiel^[166]. A statement in this sense was made by Pfannenstiel himself during one of his depositions, when he surmised that the contradictions between his and Gerstein's account were due to Gerstein's having conflated what he saw during several visits to Bełżec into the description of a single gassing and body disposal procedure^[167]. Mattogno omits this important statement, for obvious reasons.

Forgetting his earlier remark about my lacking a "critical mind", Mattogno makes much of Pfannenstiel’s having mentioned that the corpses "combusted only partially", and interprets Pfannenstiel’s having stated that the burning happened when the pit was "rather full" as meaning that only the upper layer of bodies was charred, and that with "a very small reduction of volume", amply compensated by the layer of earth then thrown over the corpses. However, partial combustion doesn’t necessarily mean that the bodies were merely charred "with a very small reduction of volume". In fact the reduction may have been considerable, as in the case of the partially burned corpses photographed by Soviet cameramen at Klooga concentration camp^[168].

Pfannenstiel’s description is arguably corroborated by the diary entries of Wehrmacht non-commissioned officer Wilhelm Cornides, though Mattogno also disputes that. After bragging that I only know the source second hand whereas he relates to the original text, Mattognos refers to the very same source that I did^[169]. When passing the camp by train, Cornides noted a sweetish smell, which then became an acrid burning odor. Mattogno contends that this does not necessarily mean that the burning odor came from cremations, "moreover because in such cases eyewitnesses normally speak about the smell of burned hair or burned flesh". Do they? Not that I know, and it seems unlikely unless eyewitness have prior knowledge of what burned hair or burned flesh smell like. And assuming they do, this does not rule out the possibility that the smell-witnesses in question were noticing the smell of the body burning described by Pfannenstiel.

Cornides further talked to a policemen who mentioned the burning of the corpses. Because said policeman also provided an inaccurate description of the gassing process, Mattogno concludes that his account is hearsay and thus "devoid of any evidentiary value". Actually we are dealing with a second-hand witness as concerns the gassing process, that’s all. The same witness may well have witnessed (or at least smelled) the burning of corpses first hand. And as we’re at it, who other than Mattogno et al says that hearsay is "devoid of any evidentiary value"? Even in judicial procedures (where a hearsay rule exists to keep a party from being exposed to negative or incriminating statements by someone who is not present for the judge or jury to assess his or her credibility), there are many exceptions to the hearsay rule, in which hearsay is permitted as evidence. ^[170]

Moving on to Sobibór, Mattogno addresses my calculations in the critique whereby the burial density in the Sobibór mass graves had been about 9.1 corpses per mᶟ, somewhat less than the concentration I had calculated for Bełżec. In their Sobibór book, MGK had faultily calculated a density of only 5.8 corpses per cubic meter and remarked that, as the burial density at Bełżec "would have been (434,508 ÷ 19,654 =) 22.1 bodies per m³", the much lower density at Sobibór "contradicts the notion that the Sobibor camp staff did their best to utilize the available burial space as effectively as possible"^[171]. Now Mattogno argues that, as the corpses in all three AR camps were "declared" by me to have been layered inside the mass graves in a space-saving manner, and given the "diminutive nature of the Polish Jews’ corpses", the concentration of corpses inside the mass graves should have been equal at all three camps. The reasons for the apparent lower concentration at Sobibór that I mentioned – less deportee "traffic" to be handled than at Bełżec, Sobibor’s body disposal procedure having changed from burial to burning at a relatively early stage – Mattogno bluntly dismisses as "unsatisfying", but he fails to reveal the reasons for his verdict, which is no surprise.

The density of 22.1 corpses per cubic meter at Bełżec that MGK apparently consider possible is their figure, not mine. I started out with 19.51 corpses per cubic meter not factoring in the stretching effects of decomposition and "sanitary" top-down burning. Right now, considering that corpses were piled above the rim of the graves as described by Reder, and considering only the mass loss due to leachate in closed mass graves (i.e. without factoring in mass loss prior to the graves’ closure and the stretching effects of partially burning the corpses), I can do with an original burial concentration of 10.7 corpses per cubic meter, as demonstrated above.

As concerns the straw-men about "diminutive" Jewish corpses, Mattogno wouldn’t be who he is if he had not "forgotten" to consider that, unlike Bełżec, Sobibór handled a considerable number of deportees from outside Poland, people who had not yet seen their mass reduced by the rigors of ghetto life, and who were presumably also of larger stature than the Jews of Eastern Poland.

Mattogno notes that according to Prof. Kola the total surface of the burial pits he discovered at Bełżec was about 0.52 ha, which amounts to only 9 % of the camp’s territory in its present shape, and argues that this precludes the argument that grave space was a more precious commodity – and thus more efficiently used – at Bełżec than at Sobibór. However, this argument falls flat unless there was lot of idle space at Bełżec (i.e. camp space not needed for functions other than burial) that could have been used to make further graves. Interestingly, Mattogno’s contention that more of the Bełżec area than Kola’s 33 graves could have been used for mass burial matches Alex Bay’s air photo analysis^[172] whereby there were in fact mass graves not identified by Kola at Bełżec.

In order to reduce the concentration of corpses in the Sobibór mass graves as much as possible, Mattogno disputes my reading of Prof. Kola’s description of mass graves nos. 1 and 2 whereby these were pits used for burning corpses and not burial pits. After conceding that Kola’s professional colleague Wojczech Mazurek agrees in that these graves were "crematory in character", Mattogno indulges in a linguistic exercise meant to demonstrate that Kola described these graves as pits containing (only) cremation remains, but not (unlike he did in regard to grave no. 7) as places where cremation of corpses was conducted. He further argues that the depth of these graves (4 m and 4.30 meters respectively) belies the notion that cremation of the corpses was conducted therein insofar as grave no. 7, expressly referred to by Kola as a body burning site, was only 0.9 meters deep. This argument is rather moot in this context, for independently of whether graves nos. 1 and 2 were sites of cremation of merely dumping grounds for cremation remains, the fact is that, unlike graves nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6, they contained no unburned human remains, which in turn means that only the volume of the latter four graves must be taken into consideration in establishing burial density at Sobibór.

After belaboring that the concentration of 9.1 corpses per cubic meter I calculated for Sobibór would do little to remove the supposed contradiction in burial densities in regard to Bełżec, and accusing me of having deducted from the available Sobibór burial a 30 cm sand cover considered in MGK’s Sobibór book while not having done the same regarding Bełżec (Mattogno furiously hollers about my "hypocritical opportunism", but the difference is wholly justified in that there is no evidence to a 30 cm cover layer at Bełżec, on the contrary: Reder’s testimony suggests that the corpses were piled above the rim of the grave, see above), Mattogno further tries to expand Sobibór burial space by adding 250 mᶟ for a recently discovered eighth grave. In doing so, Mattogno conveniently omits the fact that this eighth grave, like graves nos. 1, 2 and 7 in Prof. Kola’s report, was found to contain only cremation remains^[173].

Mattogno amusingly closes this compendium of moot arguments and downright falsehood by triumphantly proclaiming that "The case of Sobibór denotes the total collapse of the exterminationist thesis", as one "cannot reconcile the irreconcilable values of 19.51 and 5.7 corpses per m³, and that "In this insurmountable contradiction lies all of Muehlenkamp’s tragic desperation". Yet for all of Mattogno’s creativity in rhetorical bluster, the fact remains that only the graves numbered 3, 4, 5 and 6 by Prof. Kola can be safely considered to have been burial graves, in which not only cremation remains but (also) whole bodies were deposited at some time during the camp’s operation. The total volume of these graves (corrected for sloping) I calculated as having been 9,525 cubic meters. If all these graves were filled to capacity, the density of corpses buried in them was the following, depending on how many corpses one assumes to have been buried in them^[174]. - Assuming 80,000 corpses: 8.40 corpses per cubic meter
- Assuming 90,000 corpses: 9.45 corpses per cubic meter
- Assuming 100,000 corpses: 10.50 corpses per cubic meter.
Now, were all these graves filled to capacity? The depositions of Bolender and Gomerski^[175] suggest that one mass grave was completely filled, another partially filled and a third one not used at all. It is thus entirely possible that the overwhelming majority of the corpses buried at Sobibór before the camp’s body disposal method was changed to cremation ended up in the first of these graves, whose burial volume I’ll conservatively assume to have been equal to the calculated volumes of Kola’s graves 3 and 4 together, 8,025.30 cubic meters. It is possible that 80,000 out of 90,000 buried bodies ended up in that grave, making for a concentration of about 10 corpses per cubic meter. It is also possible that 90,000 out of 100,000 buried bodies ended up in that grave, making for a concentration of about 11 corpses per cubic meter. The latter would correspond to the original concentration of corpses in the Bełżec mass graves, i.e. the concentration at which corpses were buried before loss of fluid (leachate) reduced their volume and made burial space available for reuse, or at which corpses were buried in such reused burial space.

If Mattogno’s rhetoric as concerns Sobibór was unduly triumphant already, he adds a further note by trumpeting that, as concerns Treblinka, my "desperation" is "even bigger", and that my "unfounded conjectures" regarding mass burial at this camp have been "swept away by Caroline Sturdy Colls’s investigation". Unfortunately for Mattogno, his braggadocio suggests that he didn’t even read (or failed to understand) the "examination by Thomas Kues in chapter 8" that he so proudly refers to.

Kues has essentially regurgitated what he wrote in an earlier article^[176], in which he acted as if the 10 "probable burial/cremation pits" outside the memorial area whose discovery forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls had published in January 2012^[177] had been claimed to be the only burial or cremation pits at Treblinka extermination camp, or as if there were a reason to expect no further pits. Both is of course utter nonsense, as I demonstrated in my in my commentary of Kues article^[178]; what all available evidence and Sturdy Colls’ own statements about the status of her fieldwork lead to conclude is that the mentioned pits are only some out of many more pits in the Treblinka extermination camp’s area, or parts of much larger pits. In chapter 8 of the MGK’s magnum opus Kues qualified a bit on the euphoria of his earlier article, commendably citing (p. 1059) an interview with Sturdy Colls appearing in a Dutch newspaper in 2012, wherein she expresses her belief that "most of the mass graves are located under the granite stones" of the memorial^[179]. Not so commendably, but still not supporting Mattogno’s aforementioned "swept away" fantasy, Kues then muses (with more wishful thinking than logic) about what it would imply if "only a few additional pits of the same size as the hitherto detected ones" or "none at all" are found "under the covered part of the memorial" in the course of future archaeological investigation.

Besides not backing up Mattogno’s heavy-handed "swept away" claim^[180], Kues redoes the calculations of the so far discovered pits' size and possible occupancy a little. Previously he claimed the area of these pits to be 1,800 + 6-700 = 2,400 to 2,500 square meters. Now he states (p. 1057) that the 10 pits "cover a surface hardly exceeding 3,500 m²", before postulating a depth of no more than 4 meters, which requires him to ignore the 7.5 meters depth established by Judge Łukaszkiewicz and mentioned in his report of 13 November 1945^[181]. If the pits were 7.5 meters instead of 4 meters deep, as Łukaszkiewicz’ forensic examination (which Kues is aware of and mentions in support of one of his arguments, p. 1062) suggests, the volume assuming vertical walls would be 26,250 m³, instead of the 14,000 m³ postulated by Kues. Assuming that the walls would have to be sloped at such enormous depth to prevent them from collapsing, the volume would be about 68 % of that according to Alex Bay’s calculations^[182] - 17,850 cubic meters. Even assuming only 8 corpses per cubic meter, this volume could take in 142,800 corpses. At the more probable density estimated by Bay (at least 100,000 corpses in a "useful" pit volume of 8,502 m³ = ca. 12 corpses per cubic meter), the possible contents would be 214,200 corpses. But even the lower number is far in excess of what Kues’ musings about the "en route death ratio" for transports to Treblinka and the subjection to "euthanasia" of "a smaller percentage of the deportees afflicted with contagious or mental diseases or being too weak for further transport" (p. 1058) can explain.

So much for Kues, now back to his elder (and more hysterical) co-author.

Said co-author is not content with referring to Kues’ supposed accomplishments. In the critique I had argued that burying 721,555 corpses at Treblinka would have required 34,360 cubic meters if they had been buried with a density corresponding to the Bełżec model of grave space usage (factoring in decomposition) referred to in the critique, i.e. (434,508 ÷ 20,670 =) ca. 21 corpses per cubic meter. Though I didn’t consider this to have been the burial density at Treblinka^[183], Mattogno jumped on this argument, furiously ranting against the "unacceptable supposition of 21 corpses per m³" and my showing "notorious hypocrisy" by assuming the hypothesis more favorable to me, rather than considering the possibility that burial density at Treblinka was like at Sobibór (5.8 corpses per m³ according to Mattogno’s faulty calculations addressed above, 8.40 or 9.45 or 10.50 corpses per m³ according to my above calculations) and not like at Bełżec. Had Mattogno paused to think before firing away, he might have realized that there’s nothing wrong with assuming a possibility favorable to one’s argument when the assumption is not based on convenience alone but on objective criteria. The criteria that render Treblinka more comparable to Bełżec than to Sobibór as concerns corpse concentration are the following:

a) the number of deportees to Treblinka was somewhat higher than that of deportees to Bełżec, whereas Sobibór took far less deportees than Bełżec;
b) deportees to both Bełżec and Treblinka, during the phase in which these camps’ essential body disposal method was burial, consisted almost exclusively of malnourished Jews from ghettos in the General Government, whereas a considerable proportion of deportees to Sobibór during that camp’s burial phase came from outside the GG^[184] and were comparatively better fed and accordingly larger in volume;
c) whereas Sobibór changed its body disposal method from burial to cremation before taking in a substantial part or even the majority of its deportees, Treblinka used burial as its essential body disposal method during the period that saw by far the largest influx of deportees, while cremating bodies right away only in a 1943 period of comparatively little "traffic"– much like Bełżec, where burial was the (main) disposal method during almost the entire period of killing operations.

That said, I could humor Mattogno and apply the currently calculated original burial density at Bełżec (10.7 corpses per cubic meter, arguably the same as at Sobibór) to Treblinka. Based on Alex Bay’s reconstruction of Treblinka^[185], I had calculated that 721,555 corpses (the 713,555 in 1942 mentioned in the Höfle report, plus 8,000 deportees from Theresienstadt) could have been buried in mass graves with a volume of ca. 60,130 mᶟ (concentration: 12 corpses per cubic meter) covering an area of 8,841 m². The aforementioned concentration of 10.7 corpses per cubic meter would imply a volume of 67,435 mᶟ, i.e. increased by a factor of ca. 1.12, and an area increased by the same factor, i.e. (8,841 x 1.12 =) ca. 9,902 m². The corresponding volume and area with the aforementioned concentrations for Sobibór extermination camp would be the following:

At 10.50 corpses per mᶟ: 68,720 mᶟ, 10,079 m²
At 9.45 corpses per mᶟ: 76,355 mᶟ, 11,228 m²
At 8.40 corpses per mᶟ: 85,899 mᶟ, 12,643 m².
The above values don’t take into account grave space recovery due to the corpses’ decomposition or early cremation attempts. Depending on whether one considers the area of Treblinka’s extermination sector (the "Upper Camp" or "Death Camp") to have been 41,880 m² or 41,390 m²^[186], the largest of the above areas (12,643 m²) would correspond to ca. 30.2 % - 30.6 % of the extermination sector’s total area, if all corpses had been buried in that sector.
Projecting his own tendency for convenient omissions, Mattogno accuses me of having "perpetrated" a "stupid ruse" in not counting among the bodies buried in the extermination sector those of deportees killed in January and February of 1943. The total number of deportees to Treblinka I considered is 721,555 in 1942 and 67,308 documented deportees in 1943, according to Polish historian Młynarczyk^[187]. Out of these 1943 deportees, 43,120 arrived in January 1943. Adding these to the 721,555 deportees in 1942 would yield 764,675 buried deportees. Should I have done this addition? Insofar as the burial of corpses accruing in January 1943 required the opening of new graves as opposed to using existing graves still open, it would have been a rather hard undertaking as the ground would have been frozen solid. Besides, there is evidence suggesting that these new arrivals were burned right after they were killed, instead of being buried. ^[188] And even if they had all been buried, this would not mean that 764,675 deportees were buried in the extermination sector of Treblinka extermination camp. For there is conclusive evidence – conveniently omitted by the very same gentlemen who accused me of perpetrating a "stupid ruse"– that a considerable number of corpses, especially of deportees who had died en route to Treblinka, were buried not in the extermination sector, but in the camp’s receiving sector. ^[189] How many of the deportees were buried outside the extermination sector cannot be established, but an estimate whereby about 5 % of the deportees to Treblinka arrived there already dead^[190] and were buried in the camp’s receiving area is arguably conservative^[191]. So in the following I’ll assume that about 95 % of the buried deportees, 726,441 out of 764,675, ended up in pits in the extermination sector. The corresponding volume and area of mass graves with the aforementioned concentrations for Sobibór extermination camp would be the following:
At 10.50 corpses per mᶟ: 69,185 mᶟ, 10,167 m²
At 9.45 corpses per mᶟ: 76,872 mᶟ, 11,316 m²
At 8.40 corpses per mᶟ: 86,481 mᶟ, 12.731 m².

The largest of these areas would correspond to ca. 30.4 % - 30.8 % of the extermination sector’s total area, and to ca. 71 % of the 1.8 ha area called the "area of cremation" on a survey map related to Judge Łukaszkiewicz investigation of the Treblinka crime site in November 1945^[192]. The more realistic smaller area with a concentration of 10.5 corpses per cubic meter, which is lower than the concentration calculated by Alex Bay for corpses with the measurements of Da Vinci’s "Vetruvian Man"^[193], would correspond to ca. 24.3 % - 24.6 % of the extermination sector’s total area, and to ca. 56 % of the "area of cremation". Mattogno has presented no arguments whereby any of these percentages would be implausible and imply that grave space in the extermination sector was insufficient, at least without factoring in the presumable recovery of grave space due to the corpses’ loss of volume as they released leachate into the soil, which hasn’t been considered in the above calculations. And even if he had, he would still have to reckon with the possibility of grave space recovery due to release of leachate and evidence whereby at least a part of the corpses were burned prior to the overall exhumation and cremation procedure^[194], thus freeing grave space for further corpses or otherwise reducing the amount of grave space required.

However, and just like Bełżec, the original burial concentration at Treblinka was probably higher than either the highest concentration considered above for Sobibór or the concentration corresponding to Bay’s "Vetruvian Man" calculations, due to the above-mentioned differences between Sobibór on the one hand and Bełżec and Treblinka on the other. Considering only that the corpses buried at Treblinka included a large proportion of women and children, i.e. persons with a body volume lower than that of the "Vetruvian Man" (who he assumed to be normally fed and not malnourished), Bay concluded that at least 100,000 corpses could fit into a mass grave with an area of 1,250 m² and a volume (corrected for sloping) of 8,502 mᶟ, a concentration of 11.76 corpses per cubic meter. At this concentration, the burial of 726,441 corpses in Treblinka’s extermination sector would have required a volume of ca. 61,762 mᶟ and an area of ca. 9.081 m², corresponding to 21.7 – 21.9 % of the extermination sector’s total area and little more than half of the "area of cremation".

Mattogno disputes my assumption that the 1.8 ha "area of cremation" in the extermination sector was the area containing the mass graves, contending that nothing can be deduced about the surface of the mass graves from the size of this area. First of all because "this area is calculated approximately on the basis of the plan of Treblinka attached by Eugeniusz Szrojt", he argues – a weak argument as an approximation may be quite accurate, and the approximation here seems to be the "about 2 hectares" mentioned in Judge Łukaszkiewicz’ report dd. 29 December 1945 as having been covered by ashes and larger human remains, not the 1.8 hectares "area of cremation" shown in the survey plan. Mattogno’s second argument is that "Szrojt’s plan of Bełżec shows a mass grave area along the eastern part of the camp of ca. 65 × 155 meters, equal to a surface of approx. 10,075 m²". If so, the area covered by the mass graves proper (considering only those graves that were identified by Prof. Kola), 5,490 m² according to Mattogno or 5,391.75 m² according to my calculations^[195], made up ca. 54 % of the area(s) dedicated to mass burial. The equivalent part of Treblinka’s "area of cremation" would be 9,720 m², which is a little less than the areas calculated above for a concentration of 10.5 corpses per cubic meter and somewhat higher than the area calculated for a concentration of 11.76 corpses per cubic meter. No banana here for Mattogno, who then quotes from Judge Godziszewski’s report of 10 October 1945 part of a graphic description of the area churned up by robbery diggers^[196] and information about the camp’s measurements from a report dated 11 April 1946 by the assistant prosecutor of the Zamość Court. Together these sources suggest that judge Godziszewski considered an area of ca.(285 × [205 ÷ 2] = 26,137.50 m² to be the burial area of Bełżec, i.e. the area of and around the mass graves. This area being larger than the 1.8 ha "area of cremation" at Treblinka, there are the following possibilities:
a) The mass graves at Treblinka were closer together whereas at Bełżec they were more scattered, which is also suggested by their placement as established by Prof. Kola^[197]. Accordingly remains were scattered over a larger area at Bełżec than they were at Treblinka.
b) The "area of cremation" shown on the Treblinka survey plan was not the only part of the extermination area that contained mass graves, but merely that part of the area(s) containing mass graves which had been turned over by robbery diggers by the time of Łukaszkiewicz’ investigation in November 1945.

If the Bełżec area containing mass graves and thus covered by human remains was about 2.6 ha, this also further supports the observations of Alex Bay whereby there were mass graves in the Bełżec mass extermination camp area not discovered by Kola. Mark that Kola found graves only in the camp’s north and north-east, whereas Godziszewski, according to Mattogno’s understanding, mentions graves along the camp’s whole eastern border.

Mattogno further argues that "the explosions caused by the Soviets at Treblinka shattered and scattered over a very large area the human remains which previously lay in single points of the camp", and that "this confirms that no relation exists between the alleged surface in which the human remains were scattered and the surface of the mass graves". The argument is not conclusive as it is also possible that the explosions would throw up the remains inside the graves, after which they would again fall down in more or less the same area. Even assuming wider scattering, this wouldn’t mean that "no relation exists" between the area covered by human remains and the area containing mass graves. It would only mean that the area over which human remains were scattered is but a rough indication of mass grave area’s size.

Mattogno also has a problem with the depth of the Treblinka mass graves that is suggested by the results of Judge Łukaszkiewicz’ investigation in November 1945^[198] - 7.5 meters, i.e. the depth at which excavation reached untouched soil in a crater obviously blown into one of the Treblinka mass graves. His argument is that the 7 mass graves identified by Prof. Kola at Sobibór "had an average depth of about 4.15 m, the deepest of them measuring 5.80 m". Why this should rule out deeper graves at Treblinka (which didn’t have the problems encountered at Sobibór, where proximity to underground waters required replacing burial by burning as a body disposal method), Mattogno doesn’t explain.

The rest of Mattogno’s considerations about grave space at the AR camps includes calling Alex Bay’s projection and Peter Laponder’s Treblinka map mere "conjectures" and making a lengthy fuss about how they have been "swept away" by the finds of Caroline Sturdy Colls. The comparatively reduced area of the grave pits identified by this forensic archaeologist, Mattogno triumphantly concludes, would imply that "the Jews deported to Treblinka were descendants of the lost tribe of Lilliput". Given that no one (other than Mattogno) claimed that CSC conducted a complete survey of the Treblinka burial area and identified all graves contained therein (as mentioned by Mattogno’s colleague Thomas Kues, see above, CSC herself holds that "most of the mass graves are located under the granite stones" of the memorial and have not yet been identified by her), remarks like this are of no interest except for what they reveal about Mattogno’s infantile mind. The "conjectures" of Bay and Laponder, on the other hand, are based on evidence^[199] and common sense^[200] and stand head and shoulders above Mattogno’s baseless fantasy whereby the deportees to the AR camps were "transited" through these camps to the occupied Soviet territories without said "transit" and the subsequent resettlement leaving any evidence whatsoever, and then mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Mattogno should get used to the idea that, where all known evidence points to a certain conclusion the way all known evidence related to the AR camps points to systematic mass murder on an enormous scale, there is nothing wrong in filling with reasonable suppositions the gaps in evidence regarding certain particulars, whereas demanding that these particulars be wholly proven by evidence is not only unreasonable, but also dishonest.

Desperately clutching at any straw that might support his claim of insufficient burial space at Bełżec and Treblinka, Mattogno not only invokes mass burial at Sobibór in a manner that implies his accepting the burial of at least 80,000 corpses at that place, a proposition hardly compatible with his contention that the place was a mere transit camp. He does the same regarding Chełmno (p. 1262):

"Muehlenkamp states that in this camp, to which he attributes 157,000 victims, four mass graves were present with a total surface of 5,393 m2 and a volume of 16,179 m3 (see point 15). It is known that the corpses were buried in the mass graves until spring of 1942 and by the end of June of that year there were ca. 101,000 corpses according to orthodox holocaust historiography, therefore this is the maximum number of buried corpses. The author from which I take this number calculates a total of 172,230 deportees, however, in contrast to the 157,000 generally believed (which is 91.16% of the former total), and therefore it can be assumed that the above-mentioned number should be reduced by 8.84%, which results in 92,500. The density was therefore (92,500 ÷ 16,179 =) 5.7 corpses per m³, practically identical with that of Sobibór (5.8)."

The "5.8" claim regarding Sobibór has been duly deconstructed above. As concerns Chełmno, a lower burial density at that camp must logically be factual if it is to contradict a higher burial density at Bełżec and Treblinka. This means that the above-quoted argument (notwithstanding the feeble "orthodox holocaust historiography" caveat) amounts to a concession that at least 92,500 corpses were buried in the Chełmno mass graves, and thus wreaks havoc with one of Mattogno’s favorite pet theories. Even worse for Mattogno, the argument doesn’t even serve its intended purpose, for a lower burial density at Chełmno may just as well mean that the perpetrators at that place were not as zealous about economizing mass grave space as their colleagues at the AR camps (or at least at Bełżec and Treblinka), it being furthermore possible that they didn’t fill the graves or all of them to capacity. The comparatively lower depth of the graves at Chełmno, which were no more than 3 meters deep whereas the depth of the AR camps’ graves reached 5.2 meters at Bełżec, 5.8 meters at Sobibór and 7.5 meters at Treblinka, is an indication that at Chelmno the killers were not as pressed to save space as they were at the AR camps. Where Mattogno would like to see "a series of insuperable contradictions", what is actually hard to beat is the nonsensicality of Mattogno’s self-defeating arguments.

Mattogno accuses me of evading what he calls an "important problem", namely "the comparison between the archeological surveys and the testimonies". However, Mattogno does not compare these two sources of evidence to establish what matches there are between them, as a serious historian would. What he calls a "comparison" is nothing other than a tirade against eyewitness claims about measurements and other numbers, meant to wholly discredit the eyewitnesses in question as a source of evidence. Of course no serious historian takes at face value the often preposterous claims of eyewitnesses like Gerstein and Reder about measurements they could only estimate and were not good at estimating, like eyewitnesses in general tend to be mistaken about magnitudes and quantities^[201]. But no serious historian would on account of such claims throw the testimonies of these witnesses out of the window and refrain from using them altogether. Mattogno babbles excitedly about the "notorious hypocrisy" of his opponent, who supposedly "looks the other way when facing these absurdities, which taken by themselves already undermine his witnesses’ credibility". Considering that eyewitness testimonies may be inaccurate (even egregiously so) regarding certain aspects but accurate regarding others (namely where they are independently corroborated by other eyewitness testimonies, documents or other sources of evidence) is not hypocrisy. It is the sound reasoning of historians, as exemplified by Prof. Browning’s assessment of Gerstein’s testimonies^[202]:

Many aspects of Gerstein's testimony are unquestionably problematic. Several statements he attributes to Globocnik are clearly exaggerated or false, and it is not clear whether Gerstein or Globocnik was the faulty source. In other statements, such as the height of the piles of shoes and clothing at Belzec and Treblinka, Gerstein himself is clearly the source of exaggeration. Gerstein also added grossly exaggerated claims about matters to which he was not an eyewitness, such as that a total of 25 million Jews and others were gassed. But in the essential issue, namely that he was in Belzec and witnessed the gassing of a transport of Jews from Lwow, his testimony is fully corroborated by Pfannenstiel. It is also corroborated by other categories of witnesses from Belzec.

Independently of whether you soberly call Gestein’s obviously exaggerated measurement data an exaggeration (as Browning does) or hysterically scream about a "ridiculous lie" as Mattogno does (a deliberate exaggeration is a lie, by the way), they don’t change the fact that Gerstain was right about other aspects regarding which his testimony is corroborated by evidence independent of it, and may thus also have been right regarding aspects not independently corroborated that, unlike his measurement exaggerations, are not preposterous but something that the witness could very well have observed and rendered accurately. What applies to Gerstein also applies to Reder. This witness’s claims about the size of mass graves and the number of victims at Bełżec are obviously off the mark and not to be taken seriously, but there’s no reason why Reder should have been mistaken about the type of fuel he carried, a deliberate falsehood being improbable as Reder was not aware of the "controversial" relevance of this detail in (i.e. of the fuel being gasoline and not diesel), and at least one Bełżec eyewitness independent of Reder^[203] and several knowledgeable eyewitnesses from Sobibór and Treblinka also described the gassing engine as a gasoline engine. As shown by independent corroboration, Reder was also right about a certain aspect of the gassing process regarding which his testimony has been abundantly pooh-poohed by "Revisionists", the assertion that "the exhaust gases of his gasoline engine were vented not into the gas chambers, but into the open air!" (Mattogno) ^[204]. There is also no reason why Reder’s above-quoted description of the burial procedure, in which corpses were placed above the rim of the mass graves, should be mistaken.

Hypocrisy is not accepting or dismissing parts of eyewitness testimonies based on objective criteria, on plausibility and independent corroboration or the absence thereof. Hypocrisy is something else. Hypocrisy is when you use in support of "Revisionist" arguments, based on no criterion other than convenience, certain parts of a testimony that you otherwise dismiss (based on no criterion other than inconvenience, with certain actual or alleged inaccuracies as a pretext) as a collection of lies or lunatic ravings from start to finish. That’s the kind of hypocrisy that charlatans like Mattogno excel in. The "bad faith" that Mattogno accuses his opponents of is actually to be found in who, like Mattogno and his associates, perversely cherry-picks in support of his arguments convenient snippets of testimony otherwise unreasonably pooh-poohed as wholly unreliable.


Soil Removed from the Graves

In the critique (pp. 427-28) I calculated that the sand extracted from the mass graves in Treblinka’s extermination sector, assuming these had a volume of 60,130 m³, would (considering the maximum dilation factor of 1.25) have made one or several piles 6 meters high and 10 meters wide, narrowing towards the top in the same manner as a pit with sloped walls narrows towards the bottom, with a length of 1,842 meters in total – a far cry from the 4.4 kilometers postulated by Mattogno, and thus not presenting the space problem that Mattogno had claimed. With the currently assumed volume of 61,762 mᶟ for 726,441 corpses buried in Treblinka’s extermination sector (which, once again, does not factor in possible grave space recovery due to leachate released by the decomposing corpses and partial cremation), the total length would increase by 50 meters to 1,892 meters.

Mattogno’s only argument against this calculation (pp. 1263f.) is to restate his higher volume claims based on an unrealistically low concentration of corpses ("If 760,424 corpses had been buried in Treblinka, then a mass grave volume of (760,424 ÷ 8 =) 95,053 m³ would have been necessary"), so he swiftly turns to making a speech about my side remark that what sand was not used for the embankments could be left by the mass graves, or it could be taken out of the extermination sector or out of Treblinka extermination camp altogether. As concerns the latter possibility I had referred to a Soviet army report of August 1944, quoted in Mattogno & Graf’s Treblinka book, whereby the trains bringing the victims left the camp "either loaded with sand or empty". Mattogno contends that the sand loaded on the trains might just as well have come from the quarry between Treblinka I and Treblinka II, and relishes in a calculation, based on documented figures about sand shipments from Treblinka, of how many freight trains it would have taken to ship away even half the minimum amount of sand I had considered in my calculations. As I had not claimed that all or even a substantial part of the sand excavated from the Treblinka mass graves was shipped out of the camp, this calculation serves no purpose other than to impress gullible fellow "Revisionists". By mentioning the gravel quarry as the possible source of sand filling the railway cars leaving Treblinka after unloading the deportees, on the other hand, Mattogno unwittingly points out that quarry (from which sand would thus have been brought to the extermination camp, and to which sand may accordingly have been taken from there) as a possible place where sand not stored inside the extermination camp may have been deposited. A part of this sand may have been shipped out together with sand from the quarry, while another part – if necessary together with additional sand from the quarry – would have later been used to backfill the graves after they had been emptied and the bodies cremated.

Regarding Bełżec, Mattogno responds to my calculations about the amount of sand removed from the mass graves discovered by Prof. Kola and the related transportation requirements by claiming a much higher amount of sand corresponding to the mass grave space that his much lower burial densities would have required. Ironically the maximum amount of sand he now postulates – 75,652 m³, or 83,217 m³ considering a dilation factor of 10 % – is not much higher than the 82,500 m³ he had claimed in his book about Bełżec. In the critique (p. 429) I had pointed out that even this amount could have been removed within 100 days, which was much less than the gassing operations at Bełżec lasted, with no more than 24 trucks. Mattogno conveniently ignored this demonstration that his overestimate was irrelevant.


Notes

[132] The original German text, which Mattogno (quite pointlessly, as the text is identical in both sources) brags to have quoted after the original document instead of H. Rothfels’ transcription in Heft 2, April 1953 of the Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, reads as follows (emphasis added): «Die nackten Leichen wurden auf Holztragen nur wenige Meter weit in Gruben von 100 × 20 × 12 Meter geschleppt. Nach einigen Tagen gärten die Leichen hoch und fielen alsdann kurze Zeit spatter stark zusammen, so daß man eine neue Schicht auf dieselben draufwerfen konnte. Dann wurde 10 Zentimeter Sand darüber gestreut, so daß nur noch vereinzelte Köpfe und Arme herausragten.»
[133]Available online under [link].
[134]"Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)" ([link])
[135] Translation online under [link]
[136]Online under [link].
[137]"Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)" ([link])
[138]See, for instance, the judgment LG Düsseldorf vom 3.9.1965, 8 I Ks 2/64: "Zur Aufnahme der aus den Gaskammern kommenden Leichen der getöteten Juden dienten riesige Gruben, in denen die Leichname reihenweise abgelegt und jeweils mit einer dünnen Sand- oder Chlorkalkschicht abgedeckt wurden. " - "For taking in the corpses of the killed Jews coming from the gas chambers there were gigantic pits, in which the corpses were layered in rows and each layer was covered with a thin layer of sand or chlorinated lime."
[139] EdV, p. 53 and footnote 61 on pp. 470-471.
[140]"Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)" ([link])
[141]"Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution: Electronic Edition", by Browning, Christopher R. ([link]), section 5.4.1.2.
[142] Quoted after Friedrich Jansson’s blog "Memo for the controversial bloggers, part Va: The sum of all errors: Roberto Muehlenkamp – burial space and decomposition" ([link], which refers to Demjanjuk trial, 25.2.87, pp. 1008-1009. For discussion of this blog see my blog "On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (4)"
([link]). The source of Jansson’s quote seems to be a collection of excerpts from transcripts available under [link], where Rosenberg’s quoted account is recorded under "T001008 - T0001009; February 25, 1987". Thanks to my fellow HC blogger Hans for pointing out this link.
[143]In chapter forty-one of his book Useful Enemies: America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals, Richard Raschke rendered the pertinent part of Rosenberg’s deposition as follows: "There was a thick, viscous material, almost like lava from a volcano, which bubbled on the top of the pits. The earth would rise and then subside. As it fell, we would be ordered to throw in another layer of corpses." Thanks to Jonathan Harrison for providing this quote.
[144]"How can the idiocies allegedly reported by Stangl be taken seriously? " Note that Mattogno, apparently aware of how weak his arguments against Stangl’s descriptions are, tries to play it extra safe by insinuating – without any support – that Stangl may not have made the statement in question. Said statement is rendered on p. 169 of Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl et al (editors), Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, after Gitta Sereny’s rendering in Into that Darkness of her conversations with Stangl.
[145]A chemist "assigned to the bonification of the battlefields of Sédan of the German-French war of 1870/71" (Extermination Camps, p. 1246. The chemist’s quoted observations are referred to M. Créteur, "La pratique de la crémation des cadavres sur les champs de bataille de Sédan en 1871," in: Revue d’Hygiène et de Police Sanitaire, XXXVII, 1915, p. 561.).
[146]The Australian Museum’s webpage "Stages of Decomposition" ([link]). The stages mentioned by this source are "putrefaction" (4 to 10 days after death in the open), in which the body becomes bloated due to gasses forming inside, "black putrefaction" (10 to 20 days after death), in which the bloated corpse collapses and a large volume of body fluids drain from the body and seep into the surrounding soil, "butyric fermentation" (20 to 50 days after death), in which the body dries out and forms butyric acid, and "dry decay" (50 to 365 days after death), in which the body is reduced to just bone and hair.
[147]See the blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,2)" ([link]).
[148]Webpage "How long does it bring for a human body to completely disintegrate after it's be embalm?" ([link]): "Decomposition in the atmosphere is twice as fast as when the body is lower than water and four times as hastily as underground.", and Alan Gunn, Essential Forensic Biology, Chichester: Wiley, 2009, p.30: "Buried corpses decay approximately four times slower than those left on the surface, and the deeper they are buried, the slower they decay (Dent et al., 2004)."
[149]See the blogs "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)" ([link]) and "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,2)" ([link]).
[150]Arpad A. Vass, "Beyond the grave – understanding human decomposition" ([link])
[151]Friedrich Jansson argued that Vass was referring to the average of temperatures throughout a 24-hour period as opposed to maximum or average daytime temperatures, but in doing so forgot to read the caption of a photograph in Vass’s article, which points to the latter (maximum or average daytime temperatures). See the blog "On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (4)" ([link]).
[152]The wording illustrates the "Revisionist" mindset that Mattogno exemplifies. For him and others of his persuasion, historiography is not about what can or must reasonably be accepted as a historical fact based on the available evidence, but about what one is or not "willing to believe".
[153]See, for example, the images in the blog article "A Bit of Soap" ([link]) and in the video "Archäologie: Die Klostermumien von Sizilien" ([link])
[154]For discussion of Mattogno’s earlier considerations about wax-fat transformation, see the blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,2)" ([link]).
[155]A. Lucas, Forensic Chemistry. Edward Arnold & Co., London, 1921, p. 227
[156]See note 138.
[157]EdV, p, 113, my translation.
[158]Quoted in Browning, Evidence, section C – "Documentary Evidence concerning the Camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka".
[159]"A document that forced Mattogno to claim "forgery"" ([link])
[160] See the thread "Now that Mr. Jansson is with us ... " ([link])
[161] According to Knight's Forensic Pathology, quoted by Jansson: If the body is rotting before burial then, although the process slows down, it will still severely damage the corpse, as enzymatic and bacterial growth have had initial encouragement from a higher ambient temperature and free access of air, thereby producing conditions in which secondary invaders (including anaerobes) can continue their work in a good culture medium that is already partly liquefied by the earlier stages.. At Treblinka extermination camp during the command of Dr. Eberl, many corpses were already in a state of decomposition before they were thrown into the mass graves, as becomes apparent from former SS-man Franz Suchomel’s account to his interviewer Claude Lanzmann (translation under [link], film record of the interview under [link]) and the report of Treblinka inmate escapee Abraham Krzepicki ("Eighteen Days in Treblinka", in: The Death Camp Treblinka. A Documentary, edited by Alexander Donat, New York 1979, pages 77 to 144, available online under [link]).
[162] See the blog "The Clueless Duo and early corpse incineration in Treblinka and Belzec" ([link])
[163] As mentioned in the judgment LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64. See the translated excerpt from that judgment under [link].
[164] Which, again, were not the only mass graves in the camp according to Alex Bay’s air photo analysis.
[165]"Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)" ([link]
[166] Mattogno, Bełżec, pages 51/52
[167] Deposition of Pfannenstiel before the Darmstadt Court on June 6, 1950, translation in Friedländer, Saul, Counterfeit Nazi, New York: Knopf, 1969, online transcription under [link]: "As he told me himself on that occasion, he had been to Belzec a number of times. It is possible that he may have witnessed scenes similar to those he describes and that, in his report of April 26, 1945, he was no longer differentiating between the visits, but giving a summary picture of them. "
[168] Photos shown in the blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)" ([link].
[169] H. Rothfels "Zur ‘Umsiedlung’ der Juden im Generalgouvernement", Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1959, Heft 3, pp.333-6. I just forgot to mention the volume of the VfZ collection, which to Mattogno means that I’m "unable to furnish the page on which the quoted passage appears".
[170] See, for instance, the US Federal Rules of Evidence ([link]), Rules 801 to 807.
[171] MGK, Sobibór, p.125.
[172]"The Reconstruction of Belzec" ([link]).
[173] See W. Mazurek’s Spring 2011 report ([link]), emphases added: "To the south of the grave no. 7 encountered and reconnoitered in the excavations with the use of boreholes range of the another mass grave (object 882). It has a rectangular shape with dimensions about 25 x 5m, the longer axis lies on the axis of the W-E. Depth of the object is about 190- 210 cm, in floor layers there were found 3 layers of the burned bones of about 10-15 cm thickness, separated by layers of clean, light gray sand." Layers of burned bones separated by layers of "clean, light gray sand" are no indication that the grave was used for anything other than to deposit cremation remains. The fill of burned bones is also mentioned on p. 127 of Bern/Mazurek’s publication quoted by Mattogno ([link]): "In its foot-wall, the excavators found 3 layers of burnt bones, with the bone thickness of 10-15 cm, interlaced with layers of clear, light grey sand." For some reason, honest-as-ever Mattogno thought it convenient to leave that sentence out of his quote.
[174] As mentioned on p. 422 of the critique, the number of people killed in the first phase of the camp’s operation is given by Yitzhak Arad as "90,000 to 100,000" or as "one third of the 250,000 victims in this camp".
[175] See critique, footnote 30 on p. 394.
[176]"Comments on Treblinka Statements by Caroline Sturdy Colls" ([link])
[177]"Treblinka: Revealing the hidden graves of the Holocaust", BBC news, 23 January 2012 ([link])
[178]"Thomas Kues on recent archaeological finds at Treblinka" ([link])
[179]"Most" does not mean "all", which dovetails with CSC’s mention, in the BBC Radio 4 broadcast "Hidden Graves of the Holocaust" on 23 January 2012, 20:00 GMT ([link]), transcribed in my aforementioned blog, of a wooded area outside the memorial, regarding which her team had been "urged by a few visitors who’ve come here to look in the forest and not just be drawn to the open area there".
[180] As long as it has not been definitely established that the area of Treblinka extermination camp contains no graves large enough to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of deportees allegedly "transited" to the occupied Soviet territories via Treblinka - without the name of even one of the "transited" deportees having become known to date, see the blog "Challenge to Supporters of the Revisionist Transit Camp Theory" ([link]), among other absurdities of this pathetic "theory" - , nothing has been "swept away").
[181] See critique, pp. 394-395.
[182]"The Reconstruction of Treblinka" ([link]). 68 % is the quotient between the volume available for burial in a pit sloped pit 50 meters long, 25 meters wide and 10 meters deep and the volume that would be available if the walls were vertical.
[183]"The grave space accordingly required to bury the ca. 721,555 Jews murdered at Treblinka in 1942, with the density of ca. 12 corpses per cubic meter assumed by Bay, was somewhat smaller: 721,555 ÷ 12 = 60,130 cubic meters, corresponding to a surface area of 60,130 ÷ 76,518 x 11,250 = 8,841 m² (roughly 21-22 % of the "Death Camp" sector’s entire area)." (critique, p. 427).
[184] See Table 8.1 of the critique, which mentions the following deportations to Sobibór in 1942: 24,378 from Slovakia, 6,000 from the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia and 10,000 from the Reich and Austria.
[185] Appendix 2 ([link])
[186] AutoCad calculations by Sergey Romanov, the former on Alex Bay’s air photo analysis, the latter on a map by Peter Laponder (see critique, pp. 424-427).
[187] Młynarczyk, Jacek Andrzej, "Treblinka – ein Todeslager der "Aktion Reinhard"", in: "Aktion Reinhardt". Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement 1941-1944, edited by von Bogdan Musial. – Osnabrück: fibre Verlag, 2004, pp.257-281.
[188] Sara Berger (EdV, p. 210) mentions that the SS attempted to burn the corpses of deportees arriving in January 1943, because the grave pits were overfilled. To what extent these attempts were successful is not known. According to survivor eyewitness Richard Glazar (Trap with a Green Fence, pp. 29f., see excerpt transcribed under [link])
, cremation of corpses started in November 1942.
[189] Eyewitnesses Abraham Krzepicki ("Eighteen Days in Treblinka", Donat, The Death Camp Treblinka. A Documentary, pages 77 to 144) and Jankel Wiernik ("One Year in Treblinka", Donat, pp. 147-188) mention huge pits in what was obviously the camp’s receiving area. English translations of these witnesses’ accounts are transcribed under [link]. Shapes of such graves were identified by Peter Laponder on a September 1944 air photograph of the camp’s area (see critique, pp. 398f.).
[190] 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.
[191] Abraham Krzepicki stated that there were 10,000 corpses lying around in the lower camp. He also stated that a transport of 6,000 from Międzyrzec came after his arrival and that almost all of its occupants were dead. Krzepicki was in Treblinka for only 18 days. Considering this and what other evidence suggests about the death toll en route to Treblinka during its chaotic initial period under the command of Dr. Irmfried Eberl (e.g. Hubert Pfoch’s account of quoted in Sereny, Into that Darkness, pp. 158-59, which mentions lots of deportees shot at one station from a transport to Treblinka encountered by this German soldier on his way to the Eastern Front on 21 August 1942 - "at least fifty dead, women, men and children, some of them totally naked, lie along the track corpses on both sides of the track", further corpses thrown off that transport as it approached Treblinka, and at Treblinka station "there is such an awful smell of decompsoing corpses in the station, some of us vomit") - it doesn’t seem far-fetched to assume that the 16,000 corpses mentioned by Krzepicki were less than a third of those who died on transports during the Eberl period. The death toll on transports in the Stangl period was less, but Glazar still mentioned trains with corpses on them. Additionally, a high number of deportees arrived alive but were shot and buried at the "Lazarett", which was also outside the extermination sector proper.
[192] See critique, pp. 395 and 397.
[193] 91,000 corpses in 8,502 cubic meters = 10.7 corpses per cubic meter.
[194] Sergey Romanov, "The Clueless Duo and early corpse incineration in Treblinka and Belzec" ([link])
[195] Critique, Table 7.1 on p. 389
[196]"Along the camp’s northern border, from about the middle until the point where it touches the eastern border, the camp area is churned up and plowed through in a width of about 100 meters. Also a strip along the whole eastern border is dug up and churned up in a width reaching up to the middle of the whole camp area. According to information from the assisting public servants of the citizen’s militia from the militia post in Bełżec, the described churning-up of the camp area is the act of the neighboring population, which was searching for gold and jewels left behind by the murdered Jews. In the churned-up area there lie huge amounts of scattered human bones, skulls, vertebrae, ribs, shinbones, jawbones, tooth implants made of rubber, hair (mainly female and often braided), furthermore pieces of decomposed human flesh like hands and lower limbs of little children. Furthermore there lie on the whole area described above huge amounts of ashes from the burned victims as well as remains of the burned human bones. From the deeply dug-up holes there comes the smell of decomposing human bodies. All this proves that the camp area along the northern and eastern border is a continuous common grave of the people murdered in the camp." See critique, p. 385.
[197] Kola identified two clusters of mass graves, 21 in "the area of the northern camp corner" and 12 in "the north-eastern area of the camp" (Kola, Bełżec, p. 39).
[198]Report of 13 November 1945, quoted after Mattogno & Graf, Treblinka, on pp. 395-95 of the critique.
[199] Air photo assessment and testimonies, namely that of Jankel Wiernik. Laponder considered Wiernik "the most reliable witnesses as he was a year in the camp and was a master carpenter, being used to sizing up distances and measurements" (e-mail message to the author, 14.12.2006).
[200]Laponder "took the most logical way of placing" the graves (e-mail message to the author, 14.12.2006).
[201]Bender and Nack, Tatsachenfeststellung vor Gericht - Band I: Glaubwürdigkeits- und Beweislehre, marginal note 137 (translation under [link]).
[202]"Evidence for the Implementation of the Final Solution", section 5.4.1.2 (translation under [link])
[203] Polish mechanic Kasimierz Czerniak, see p. 319 of the critique.
[204] See the blog "The oh-so-unreliable Rudolf Reder" ([link])

Groundwater Pollution

Mattogno’s arguments in this section start with an instructive self-portrayal of Mattogno.



In the critique (page 429) I had pointed out that MGK had, in a German-language publication^[205] preceding their later book about Sobibór, misrepresented an excerpt from Kola’s report about his Sobibor investigation to claim that excavations in a well "not far from the graves" supposedly had to be stopped at a depth of 3.60 meters because of a ground water stream. What MGK had specifically done, as explained in detail in an earlier blog^[206], was to omit (replacing it by "[…]") the highlighted passage in the following excerpt from Prof. Andrzej Kola’s report about archaeological excavations at Sobibór in 2001^[207]:

Object C
(Hectare XXV, acre 35. Dig 3/01)
In the depth of around 40-45 cm below the asphalt, where the cement well was located, there was started an archaeological dig, measuring horizontally 2.3 x 2.1 m. The dig was being excavated until the depth of 95 – 100 m, uncovering – at the depth of 50 m – the upper part of the first remaining cement CEMBROWINA of the well. It was noticed that while building the well, only the sand from its interior was taken out. Hence the following exploration was taken only in its interior not in the area of the dig. The depth of 5.00 – 5.10 m was reached. The exploration had to be stopped here because of the sudden leak of ground waters, of which traces started appearing at the depth of around 3.60 m. They didn’t make it till the end of the well then.

Based on this omission, MGK had then expressly claimed – in order to discredit Prof. Kola’s finds about the depth of the graves, of which one (grave n.º 4) was found to be "around 5m" deep while another (grave n.º 3) was found to be "up to 5.80 m deep"– that Prof. Kola’s excavations in a well "not far from the graves""had to be stopped at a depth of 3.60 meters due to an intense ground water stream"^[208]. In other words, they had deliberately transmitted to their readers the false information that Prof. Kola had not been able to dig below 3.60 meters because of intense ground water, when in fact Prof. Kola had reported that only "traces" of ground water had been encountered at this depth of 3.60 meters and it had been possible to continue digging until, at a depth of 5.00 to 5.10 meters, the ground water stream had become so strong that digging had to be stopped. Or, to put in more bluntly, MGK had blatantly lied to their readers, and that about an issue of major importance in the context of their writing, namely whether mass graves at Sobibór extermination camp could have a depth of 5 meters or more as reported by Kola regarding two of these graves.

In their later Sobibór book^[209], MGK had not repeated this falsehood – perhaps because they had read my aforementioned blog and were aware that their lie had been discovered –, but instead provided an essentially accurate rendering of Kola’s description whereby "ground water was encountered already at a depth of 3.60 m, and the work had to be halted at a depth of 5 m because of the steady inflow of ground water". They had further mentioned a 1933 map whereby the ground water level in the Sobibór camp’s extermination sector was 6 m below the surface, merely qualifying this inconvenient information (in that it implied that mass graves with the depth reported by Prof. Kola for graves nos. 3 and 4 were possible) by adding that "the ground water level varies with the seasons and rainfall (or the thawing of snow)" and that the average groundwater level may have been different in 1942/43 from what it had been in 1933.

However, after I had rubbed MGK’s nose in their earlier falsehood, Mattogno now feels compelled to justify the same. He starts out by amusingly accusing me of dwelling "on insignificant details" while omitting "the essence". It is duly noted that Mattogno considers a deliberate falsehood in which he got flagrantly caught to be an insignificant detail. This warrants the suspicion that he is prone to such falsehoods and will indulge in them whenever it serves his argument and he expects to get away with it. And as if eager to prove this suspicion right, Mattogno produces the following blatant falsehood as he explains what he considers to be "the essence" (p. 1266):

The important data is that groundwater was located at a depth of 3.60 m from the surface. What importance does it have that Kola continued to dig in a shaft until he reached a depth of 5.10 m? This means that he merely found (5.1 – 3.6 =) 1.5 m of groundwater. And then? The problem Muehlenkamp dodges is in fact this: How could Kola drill up to 5.80 meters without running into water in an area where the groundwater level was 3.6 meters?

Mattogno adds that a Polish map whereby the groundwater level was 6 meters in 1933 "does not change anything with regard to the abovementioned problem: how could Kola drill down to 5.80 meters without running into water in an area where the groundwater level was at 3.6 meters?"

This reads like Prof. Kola’s team was shoveling nothing but water after 3.60 meters, for a further 1.50 meters. I don’t know how one can remove 1.50 meters of water by shoveling (especially after having reached the water table), but Mattogno apparently believes that this is possible, or then expects his readers to accept this possibility. Worse than that, Mattogno is rather unintelligently returning to the original claim that he and his co-authors had had enough sense to abandon in their Sobibór book, namely that the groundwater level (i.e. the "underground surface below which the ground is wholly saturated with water"^[210]) in the area of Prof. Kola’s excavation was 3.60 meters. Actually at that depth, according to Prof. Kola, only traces of ground water "started appearing". Only at a depth of 5 to 5.10 meters, according to Kola’s description, did the ground become wholly saturated with water (Kola wrote about a "sudden leak of ground waters"), making further digging impossible. So the groundwater level or water table in this area was 5 to 5.10 meters, not 3.60 meters.

After having thus made a fool of himself by emphatically reiterating a previous lie, Mattogno provides the useful information that according to a "Planimetric and altimetric map with the displacement of the graves in Sobibór" published by Kola "the area of his archeological survey lies comprised between the isohypses of 169 and of 179 meters above sea level". To Mattogno (or to the readers uncritical enough to fall for his falsehoods) this means that "If the groundwater level was at 3.6 meters on a location 169 m above sea level, at level 170 [read: 179] m it was 4.6 m deep, and an excavation down to 5.8 m would have run into groundwater for the last 1.2 m." To the reader who has Prof. Kola’s description in mind and knows that the groundwater level is the place where the soil is wholly saturated with water (and not the place where first traces of groundwater appear), it means that, if at the location 169 m above sea level the groundwater level was 5 to 5.10 meters, then at a location 179 meters above sea level it was 6 to 6.10 meters (corresponding to the water table mentioned in the 1933 Polish), and that a mass grave 5.8 meters deep was still 0.20 – 0.30 meters above the water table. Mattogno’s renewed (and rather desperate) attempt to discredit Prof. Kola’s reported finds has failed disastrously, and Mattogno has added a stupid lie to his record of falsehoods.

This instructive self-portrait is followed by Mattogno’s reiterating yet another showpiece of "Revisionist" ill-reasoning. After complaining about my having forgotten to mention that, in arguing that Sobibór was a poor choice of location for an extermination camp, MGK had limited themselves "to the exposition of what important exterminationist sources have stated in this regard" (historian Jules Schelvis and judgment LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64), Mattogno contradicts this "limitation" claim by proclaiming that "choosing Sobibór as an extermination camp was not just “wrong,” as Schelvis says, but idiotic". The latter he does after presenting the "most reasonable conclusion" that, as one "cannot believe" that Hitler (via the Führer chancellery and Wirth) and Himmler (via Globocnik and Höfle) would have chosen a swampy area with potential groundwater pollution problems as a place to bury "tens or hundreds of thousands of corpses", they didn’t do so (and thus Sobibór was not an extermination camp). In other words, what passes as a "most reasonable conclusion" in Mattogno’s world is an appeal to incredulity based on Mattogno’s personal conviction that Hitler and/or Himmler and/or whoever they put in charge of organizing the particulars of an extermination program would never ever have made "idiotic" decisions in carrying out what Mattogno seems to consider a most reasonable and rational task. Apart from it being moot to argue on the basis of what would or not have been "reasonable" when there’s evidence to what was done ("reasonably" or not), it’s not like Mattogno’s apparent idols had never made decisions that were perfectly idiotic^[211].

That said, was the choice of Sobibór as a site of mass extermination really as "idiotic" as Mattogno claims it to be? In fact, as I pointed out on p. 430 of the critique, there was concern among the Sobibor camp staff that their drinking water might be polluted by leachate from the corpses, and indeed this seems to have been the reason, or one of the reasons, why Sobibor changed its body disposal procedure from burial to burning at a relatively early stage. In support of their claim that this situation was entirely predictable, MGK quoted a 1904 source whereby "it is entirely possible for wells on the cemetery itself or close to it to have good water, free from organic substances, whereas the secretions of the graves may be carried away by underground currents to reach wells or other types of usable water and then exercise their harmful potential", regarding which I pointed out that it belied rather than supported the notion that groundwater pollution on site (as opposed to wherever underground currents carried the leachate) could have been predicted when choosing Sobibór as an extermination camp location. In response to this argument, Mattogno thunders that in a marshy area like that of Sobibór there would be no underground currents as "the water was by definition stagnant". Coming after MGK’s earlier remarks about "an intense ground water stream" stopping one of Prof. Kola’s excavations in 2001, this argument comes across as somewhat contradictory. While it is true that most freshwater marshes intercept groundwater^[212], it is not like all of Sobibór extermination camp, especially the extermination sector known as "Camp III", had been set up in or near a marshy area. In his map of Sobibór included in the judgment LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64^[213], former Sobibór staff member Erich Bauer recalled a marshy area near the Vorlager and Lager I, which were as far away from the extermination area (which he recalled as having been forested and surrounded by forest) as the camp permitted. As becomes apparent from a topographical map shown by MGK^[214], the extermination area was also the highest part of the camp. So it’s by no means a given that whoever was put in charge of choosing the camp’s location need have been aware of the possibility of groundwater pollution issues, assuming he had the corresponding knowledge that Mattogno attributes to such person or persons (which was also not necessarily the case). Mattogno also doesn’t seem too convinced of his "marshy area" claim, for in the next paragraph he turns around to claim that, as according to Bauer there was a well in the Vorlager, it was entirely possible that "any existing undercurrents would have brought corpse poisons" to that well. Needless to say, Mattogno expects the SS officers who chose Sobibór as an extermination site to have been sufficiently versed in hydrology to predict that problem as well.

After chronologically displacing the camp command’s concern about the safety of the water consumed by its personnel to make it look like it had been present before the camp started operating (actually that concern arose only months later, presumably because it had been noted that the water had a foul taste and/or cases of water-borne disease had occurred) and postulating that the SS organizers of Sobibór would not have been indifferent to polluted groundwater carried by underground streams affecting the Polish population "because sooner or later it would also have affected some Germans" (Mattogno surely demands a lot of foresight and care from his defendants), Mattogno dismisses my argument that good railway connections to Sobibór were an argument in favor of its location by pointing out that the rail line to the camp was prone to subsidence as it ran through marshland. In fact the line did subside after two months of the camp’s operation^[215] and had to be repaired before deportation trains could again run to Sobibór^[216]. But how does this change the fact that Sobibor combined a remoteness at least matching that of the other two camps with railway connections so good that they eventually allowed even for bringing in railway transports from the Westerbork collection camp in the Netherlands^[217]? Not at all, I would say.

The benefit of sandy soil that was easy to dig into Mattogno also doesn’t consider significant enough to offset the possibility of groundwater pollution, because "the soil of Eastern Poland is sandy pretty much everywhere". What Mattogno doesn’t do, however, is offer an alternative to Sobibór that the SS should have chosen. Unless there was another place in Eastern Poland (besides Bełżec and Treblinka) that combined remoteness, sandy soil and good railway connections the way Sobibór did, Mattogno has no basis for calling his defendants’ choice of location "idiotic".

As concerns Treblinka, Mattogno sticks with his only indication that huge mass graves filled by mass extermination would have led to groundwater pollution, the fact that the mass graves pertaining to the Treblinka I labor camp were located in the forest of Maliszewa, about 500 m away from the camp. If this was not done for hygienic reasons, he asks, then "what other reason were there"? One might as well ask what advantage – under the aspect of avoiding groundwater pollution – the commandant of Treblinka I could have hoped to gain by burying the camp’s mortality a mere 500 meters away from the camp. As the answer to this is "none" (while on the other hand one reason for the choice of burial location could have been concealment of huge mortality from potential visitors – after all Treblinka I was a labor camp, not an extermination site), Mattogno’s argument is moot.

Notes

[205] MGK, Die Akte Sobibor ([link], p.81
[206]"Mass Graves at Nazi Extermination Camps" ([link]; the section about Sobibór is under [link])
[207] Prof. Andrzej Kola, "I Badania archeologiczne terenu byłego obozu zagłady Żydów w Sobiborze w 2001 r" ("1st Archaeological Research of the Former Jew Extermination Camp at Sobibor in 2001"), in: Przeszłość i Pamięć. Biuletyn Rady Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa Nr. 4 (21) z 2001 r, pages 115 to 123; descriptions of mass graves on pages 116/117. Translated into English by Katarzyna Piotrowska. The translation and a scan of the Polish original are available under [link].
[208]"In diesem Zusammenhang sei darauf hingewiesen, dass beim Ausgraben eines unweit der Gräber befindlichen Brunnens die Arbeiten in einer Tiefe von 3.60 m aufgrund eines heftigen Grundwasserstroms eingestellt werden mussten." - "In this context it should be pointed out that when excavating a well nearby the graves the works had to be stopped at a depth of 3.60 meters due to an intense ground water stream." (Die Akte Sobibor, p. 81).
[209] MGK, Sobibór, p. 127.
[210] Definition of "groundwater level" under [link]. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (online under [link]), "groundwater level" means "the depth or elevation above or below sea level at which the surface of groundwater stands" and is synonymous with the "water table", i.e. "the highest underground level at which the rocks and soil in a particular area are completely wet with water" (online under [link])
[211] Among other examples of idiotic mistakes made by Hitler, there are the "Top 10 Mistakes by Hitler Proving He Was An Idiot" presented in a Youtube video ([link]). Also of interest in this context: "Top 10 Greatest Military Blunders of World War II" ([link]) In the World’s Greatest Mistakes (Odham Books, 1969), Charles Franklin counts "The Eagle that Failed" and "Barbarossa" among history’s greatest blunders. And here’s how German frontline surgeon Peter Bamm characterized they notoriously hysterical Führer:"The motives of the primitive man at the top became ever less transparent. It is part of the clinical picture of hysterics, especially of the schizoid fanatics among them, that they are unable to admit errors. Whereas female hysteria is a comparatively harmless enrichment of existence, male hysteria often becomes the bloody motive of history. The fact that most people don’t know that there is hysteria in men only makes the disturbance all the more dangerous. After the primitive man had for ten years exercised terror in the land dominated by him, he complained that the terror had created resistance. After he had made himself enemies for ten years, he complained that he had them. He was no politician. " (see the blog "Peter Bamm on male hysteria" ([link]).
[212] See the online article "Wetland classifications" ([link])
[213]See translated excerpt under [link]
[214] MGK, Sobibór, Document 6 on p. 405
[215] Sara Berger (EdV, p. 254) mentions 38,000 – 52,800 deportees to Sobibór in May 1942 and 31,600 – 40,300 in June of that year, followed by no deportees at all in July, only 3,000 deportees in August and none in September, then 21,800 – 44,300 deportees in October and 9,900 – 14,200 in November and December 1942.
[216] The repair works are expressly mentioned in Ganzenmüller’s letter to Wolff dated 28 July 1942, quoted in the judgment Judgment LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64: "Gedob steht in ständiger Fühlung mit dem Sicherheitsdienst in Krakau. Dieser ist damit einverstanden, dass die Transporte von Warschau über Lublin nach Sobibor (bei Lublin) solange ruhen, wie die Umbauarbeiten auf dieser Strecke diese Transporte unmöglich machen (ungefähr Oktober 1942)" - "Gedob [Generaldirektion der Ostbahnen = General Directorate of the Eastern Railways] is constantly in touch with the Security Service in Krakow. This service agrees that the transports from Warsaw via Lublin to Sobibor (near Lublin) be interrupted for as long as conversion works on this route make transports impossible (about October 1942)".
[217]For a list of such transports in the period from 2 April to 23 July 1943, see the translated excerpts from the judgment Landgericht München II Gz.: 1 Ks 115 Js 2496/08 dated 12.05.2011 ([link]). The names of all deportees from the Netherlands – over 34,000 in 19 transports of which the first arrived on 5 March 1943 – are known from transport lists shown online by the Dutch Archives ([link]). Only 19 of the deportees, who had been selected for forced labor, came back alive (Wolfgang Benz et al, Dimensionen des Völkermords, May 1996 Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich, p. 153).

The "Actual" Surface of the Graves

Following some of the notoriously dishonest and instructively self-projecting accusations that his rhetoric is spiked with ("Muehlenkamp, with his usual dishonesty,[…]", "Muehlenkamp misrepresents or hides my arguments and avoids providing the answers he owes,[…]") Mattogno (pp. 1270f.) quotes the arguments presented in his Bełżec book^[218] in support of his claim that "the layout" Prof. Kola gives for the graves "is completely random, as is their surface area, their volume, and even their number".


Then he quotes my counterarguments on pp. 432f. of the critique, as follows:

[a] Contrary to Mattogno’s accusations, Kola’s team was well aware of the difficulties created by postwar robbery digs in identifying the mass graves at Bełżec, and can thus be assumed to have duly considered the possibility of a modification of the original shape and/or size of the graves due to robbery digs. Thus the observed damages to the original grave structure in the area between graves 12, 13, 14 and 24 are expressly mentioned in the description of grave # 13.
[b] Moreover 26 out of the 33 graves identified by Kola have a regular geometrical shape, which can hardly have been the work of robbery diggers, and in six irregularly shaped graves the original regular shape that was later modified can be made out.
[c] As to the bottoms of the graves, the only ones in which the author could make out ‘bumps and holes’ are graves nos. 8, 14 and 20, which are expressly mentioned by Kola as having resulted from a connection between previously neighboring graves.
[d] The bottoms of all other graves, as the author sees them, are shaped either like a tub with a fairly regular bottom or like a swimming pool progressively deepening towards a certain spot. These shapes may be related to the composition of the soil at Bełżec, which was made of sand or sandy loam and would thus make steep rectangular walls unadvisable as these would more easily cave in.

Regarding counterargument [a], Mattogno quotes Kola’s statement that in the zone between the graves No. 12, 13, 14, 24, "in surface layers the drills showed numerous damages of grave structures, probably caused by levelling works or robbery digs."^[219], and accuses me of omitting the mention of levelling works "in order to pretend that Kola was referring exclusively to "robbery digs."". Mattogno doesn’t reveal what benefit for my argument I’m supposed to have derived from this omission, which was obviously related to Mattogno’s argument having been all about the presumed impact of postwar digging in the area (also by criminal investigators, but mainly by robbery diggers) on the accuracy of Prof. Kola’s finds.

Regarding counterargument [c], Mattogno limits himself to claiming that "the graves nos. 1, 3-9, 11-18, 20, 22-24, 26-29, 32 and 33 are all pits with a very irregular bottom", whatever it is that Mattogno considers a "very irregular bottom". Rather than belabor this point, I suggest our readers look at the plans and sections of these graves^[220] and decide for themselves just how "very irregular" they find the bottoms of these graves to be. Mattogno presents the two pictorial examples reproduced below (Prof. Kola’s sections from graves no. 3 and no. 13):





and asks what "idiot" would have dug mass graves like these. Mattogno doesn’t tell what’s supposed to be so "idiotic", obviously hoping for readers who will take their guru’s word at face value instead of thinking. For the only thing "wrong" about the grave drawn in the lower section is that it is somewhat deeper at drill 563/XV-0-35 than at drill 577/XV-5-35, as it was not dug evenly to the bottom. This suggests the work of people without much experience in grave digging, which is what SS personnel of Aktion Reinhard(t) certainly were at least at the beginning of their "work" - not military trained specialists in grave digging, but predominantly non-military supervisors who had previously worked in the Aktion T4 murder program, as I had pointed out on p. 433 of the critique. It is also possible, of course, that this grave was originally two graves of different depths, the separating walls of which were destroyed by postwar robbery digging. The latter possibility would affect Kola’s conclusion about the area of this specific grave, but the combined areas of all graves identified by Kola would remain unchanged. The upper section, on the other hand, shows a grave dug in a fairly even manner on both sides, with sloped walls such as would be recommendable in sandy soil to prevent them from caving in. Quite professionally done rather than "idiotic", this grave suggests that the Bełżec staff learned to make more proper graves as they went along, or then obtained assistance from people who knew how to dig graves.

As concerns counterargument [d], Mattogno accuses me of making "mere conjectures", before producing his own conjecture about the contour of the graves’ bottoms having resulted from factors "such as wild diggings by Polish villagers and blending of distinct smaller pits of different depths" (the latter, as mentioned before, wouldn’t help Mattogno’s argument as concerns the combined area of the graves identified by Prof. Kola, but merely affect the archaeologist’s conclusions as concerns the area of a specific grave). Mattogno doesn’t explain why my conjectures (of which he left out the part regarding the initial inexperience of the AR camps’ staff in digging graves) should be less valid than his.

Regarding counterargument [b], Mattogno repeats the dot-connecting exercise shown below, whereby he created 21 areas "quite unrelated to Kola’s numbers and shapes, as is apparent from a comparison with O’Neil’s map of the graves (see Illustration 11.33 a & b)".



This dot-connecting exercise was addressed in an earlier blog, in which I demonstrated that, taking into account the number of drills that were used to estimate the shape and size of a mass grave in each case, it is possible to group (to the extent permitted by the accuracy of Kola's map of core drillings on page 70 and my poor drawing skills) the dots presumably corresponding to drills on the basis of which Kola estimated the shape and size of each mass grave, into units that a) bear some resemblance to the mass grave shapes shown on page 19 of Kola's book and b) match the number of these shapes (33), as shown in the figure below:



This forced Mattogno to do some further gymnastics in order to uphold his claim that Prof. Kola's estimating the shapes and sizes of the mass graves on the basis of his core drilling finds was "arbitrary".

Regarding Bełżec grave no. 1, Prof. Kola wrote the following^[221]:

The grave pit No 1 was situated in the north-western part of ha XXII basing on 13 deep drills (No 2, 3, 11, 18, 19, 23, 24, 37, 38, 44, 56, 65, 66). The most probably, in bottom view, it had a shape of an irregular rectangle with the size of 40,00 x 12,00 m and the depth of 4,80 m.[…]

The above description is followed by the following plan and section:



Mattogno (p. 1276) provides the following figure:



which he characterizes as follows:

In Illustration 11.35 I present my elaboration of the drawing into which I inserted the 5 m × 5 m grid used by Kola, the positions of the positive drillings (1-13) and those of negative drillings (01-07). From this drawing it results that Kola’s delimitation of the grave would have required drillings 01, 02, 03, 05, 06 and 07 to be positive, and for this very reason Kola’s conjecture is arbitrary and inadmissible.

It’s not clear where Mattogno got the arrangement of the "positive" and "negative" drillings from. Neither correlates with the map of drillings on p. 70 of Kola’s book, where the arrangement of drills configuring the contours of grave no. 1 looks as follows:



Note that only 12 "positive" drills are identified, whereas Kola’s text mentions 13 such drills. This means that one of the white dots on the picture should be a red dot. The likeliest candidate is the one to the right of the 3rd dot (counted from above) in the second row of four dots from left to right. If we assume that this white dot is the missing 13th red one, then Mattogno’s grid needs to be rearranged as follows (red circles mark "positive" drills:



The next image shows how Prof. Kola presumably arrived at the "irregular rectangle" shape he mentioned, based on the 13 "positive" drills:



And here we see the same exercise done with the dots in the map on p. 70 of Kola’s book, assuming that the missing 13th red dot is where I presumed it to be above:



This renders moot Mattogno’s further considerations regarding mass grave no. 1, namely the conjecture that it was actually three smaller graves placed next to each other.

Mattogno also has a beef with Kola’s information regarding grave no. 4, which the archaeologist described as follows^[222]:

The pit was registered at the borderline of ha XV and XVI in their southern part. It was estimated on the base of 4 deep drills (No 293, 294, 406, 407). A small amount of crematory remains scattered around reported. The grave was in a shape of a rectangle with the size of about 16.00 x 6.00 m.

The related figure is the following:



Mattogno produces the following figure (p. 1278):



and claims that "Kola identified a simple rhombus (A-B-C-D) with a surface of 30 m² as a grave of 16 m x 6 m = 96 m²". However, the "simple rhombus", as outlined by Mattogno himself in Illustration 11.38 on p. 1277:



doesn’t look like its area is only 30 m², for its long sides are at least 10 meters and its short sides at least 5 meters long. Kola may have assumed that the grave extended beyond the "positive" drill points, which is not unreasonable considering the relatively long distance (5 meters) between drills, especially where an adjacent drill is marked blue for "soil disruptions – unidentified camp objects or disruptions next to graves". Mattogno may yell that such probability considerations are "arbitrary", but unless he can demonstrate that the exact limit of a grave was a "positive" drill point and there were not and could not have been any human remains beyond that drill point (which is a rather improbable proposition), his yelling is moot.

Mattogno’s next bone of contention is grave no. 11, described by Prof. Kola as follows^[223] :

The grave of a relatively small volume located in the north-eastern corner of ha XV estimated on the base of only 1 deep drill (No 529) and two neighbouring ones, shallow (No 510, 528). The size is 9,00 x 5,00 m with the depth up to 1,90 m.

Mattogno’s complaints are the following:

How could Kola identify a grave of 9 m × 5 m based on two drillings made 5 m apart? The drilling map confirms this arbitrary act (Illustrations 11.41). Here only one drilling appears (the second is the one I have indicated with the letter "B"). The blue circles around it designate "Soil disruptions – Unidentified camp objects or disruptions next to the graves." Kola has therefore prolonged in an arbitrary way by 2 m the limits of the grave on both sides (2 + 5 + 2 = 9 m) while fixing its width in the same arbitrary way to 5 m.

Contrary to what Mattogno claims, the grave was identified on the basis of not two but three drills ("1 deep drill (No 529) and two neighbouring ones"), so there are three instead of two dots that should be red, and considering that these were "neighbouring" drills, the missing ones are in all probability the drill marked with the letter "B" by Mattogno and the drill above that one. The farthest distance between drill points would thus be 10 meters, whereas Kola’s estimate of the grave’s length is 9 meters. As to the width, Kola apparently assumed that the grave extended 2.5 meters beyond the drill points on each direction, an assumption certainly more reasonable than assuming that the grave was a 9 meter strip no wider than the drill points.

Mattogno lists further graves whose dimensions, as he claims, are "arbitrary and much bigger than one can deduce from the drillings". He doesn’t provide particulars about why he considers these graves to have been estimated too big, so his claims cannot be checked. Probably what Mattogno decries as "arbitrary", like in the case of grave no. 11 (and also grave no. 4, see above) amounts to no more than reasonable assumptions about how far a grave extended on either side (or on either of two sides) of a drill point. With drill points are far as 5 meters apart, Kola had to make such assumptions, and as it was his task to identify burial areas so that they wouldn’t be disturbed by construction work on the site, it is not unlikely that Kola preferred to err on the side of caution. This, of course, wouldn’t necessarily mean that his estimates are wrong and the graves he identified were much smaller in area than he estimated them to be.

The above rationale applies to grave no. 21, which Mattogno gleefully decries as Kola’s "biggest abuse" because "based on a single drilling Kola manages to "ascertain" that around the drilling point there was a grave of 5 m × 5 m!".

First of all, let’s look at how Kola described this grave^[224], and the plan and section he presented:

The grave of a relatively small surface, with the size of probably not bigger than 5,00 x 5,00 m, separated in the central part of ha XVI basing only on one, rather shallow drill (No 1140), with the depth of 1,70 m. The contents of the grave consists of crematory ashes, which were reported at the depth of 70 cm. The estimated volume of the grave amounts about 35 m3.

We see that Kola didn’t claim to have "ascertained" the size of this grave, but merely to have estimated it. We further see that Kola made no secret of his methodology, which consisted in assuming that the grave extended 2.5 meters (half the distance to the next drilling point) in every direction. This frankness makes Mattogno’s accusations of deceptiveness on Kola’s part come across as rather idiotic. To be sure, Kola didn’t make sure that there were human remains 2.5 meters in every direction from the drilling point. What he did, considering the contents he drilled into, was to take the midpoint between assuming that the grave extended up to the next drilling point in all directions (which would have been exaggerated as the surrounding drilling points included "natural strata"^[225]) and unreasonably assuming that there were cremation remains at the drilling point only and nowhere around it. Indications like crematory remains above ground (mentioned in connection with grave no. 4) may have supported Kola’s midpoint assumption. Mattogno may thus argue that Kola didn’t prove the area of this grave beyond doubt, but he cannot argue that Kola’s estimate is unreasonable and the presence of a grave 5 m by 5 m grave in this section of the camp can be ruled out. And his accusation of deceptiveness (or, as he puts it here, "abuse") is just plain silly.

Having grown enthusiastic with his exercise of decrying assumptions and estimates complementing drill point finds as "arbitrary" and "deceptive", Mattogno next attacks grave no. 10, which Kola described as follows^[226]:

One of the biggest graves, in bottom view of a rectangular shape with the size of about 24,00 x 18,00 m. Situated in the north-central part of ha XV, basing on 16 deep drills (No 482-490, 494, 496-499, 501, 520); in some neighbourhood, much more shallow drills (with the ground bottom of about 1,50 m) crematory remains were reported. The grave was very deep (the drills in particular places were stopped at the depth of 4,25 to 5,20 m, because of bodies in wax-fat transformation and underground waters presence).[…]

Mattogno presents another illustration, which is supposed to show that "connecting the single positive drilling points (A-B-C-D-E-F-GA)", i.e. the drilling points outlining the grave’s contours, "results in a surface of approx. 237 m²", as opposed to the 24 x 18 meters that Kola determined on the basis of 16 drills. The map on p. 70 – Mattogno’s only possible source in Kola’s book for his grid exercise – shows 11 such connection points outlining the grave’s shape. The map also shows 17 drill points in total instead of the 16 mentioned by Kola, so let’s assume, for the sake of coherence, that one of the red dots should be a blue or white dot. Leaving one red dot out, the outline of grave no. 10 would be this:



The area of the inner rectangle, judging by the distance (5 meters) between drill points, is 10 x 15 = 150 m². Additionally there are the two semi-hexagons on either side of the rectangle, so the grave’s area is well above 150 m², though as visible in the above image it’s not 24 x 18 meters. The length of the grave along its longer axis is 20 meters at the longest part according to the distance between drill points, so in order to reach an estimated 24 meters Kola must have assumed that the grave extended 2 centimeters beyond the last drill point in each direction. Along its shorter axis the grave is 15 meters long at the longest part as the distance between drill points goes, so in order to reach an estimated 18 meters Kola must have assumed that the grave extended 1.5 centimeters beyond the last drill point in each direction. Either estimate is not unreasonable and supported by the additional "much more shallow drills (with the ground bottom of about 1,50 m)" in the neighborhood that Kola mentioned, in which "crematory remains were reported". However, the drills map doesn’t bear out the grave’s rectangular shape claimed by Kola, as the edges of the rectangle are missing.

The last grave to "benefit" from a Mattognian grid exercise is grave no. 7, regarding which Mattogno claims that its geometric figure resulting from the drillings "is defined by the letters A-B-C-D-E and has a surface of ca. 180 m²"(as opposed to "a claimed size of 364.50 m²". According to Prof. Kola, this pit "was estimated on the base of 12 deep drills (No 402, 1495-1498, 1513- 1515,1517-1519, 1525 )" as being "in shape close to a high trapezoid with the base sizes 13,00 and 14,00 m and the height of about 27 m"^[227]. The grave’s shape, judging by the map on p. 70 of Kola’s book, is outlined by eight of the twelve drill points and looks as follows:



The distances visible on this image suggest that also here Kola projected the grave’s measurements beyond the drill points. On the other hand, Mattogno’s accusation that Kola "abusively determined the contours of the grave" is misplaced insofar as Kola described the grave’s shape as being "close to a high trapezoid", which is the shape that Mattogno, in his Illustration 11.43, drew into the rectangle shown in Prof. Kola’s section of grave no. 7:



Mattogno concludes that in graves nos. 1, 4, 7 and 10 alone, Kola "abusively increased their surface by approx. 680 m²". As we have seen, Kola indeed projected the lengths and/or widths of these graves beyond their farthest drill points (and accordingly increased their areas beyond those that result from connecting the drill points in the map on page 70 of his book), but this would only be "abusive" if it were unreasonable, and one can hardly speak of unreasonableness where Kola assumed, for instance, that a grave extended 1.5 or 2.5 meters beyond a drill point, especially where such assumption is – as in the case of grave no. 10 – supported by additional drills in which crematory remains were reported. As Kola made no secret of his methodology – measurements were given as estimates, not as certain values^[228], and the plans and sections of each grave as well as the map of drills are made available were available for checking the reasonability of estimates made – Mattogno’s accusation that Kola’s procedure is "arbitrary and deceptive as to the number, shape and dimensions of the mass graves" is misplaced at least as concerns the "deceptive". As to the further accusation that "Kola did not explain which of the actual pits – those really resulting from the drillings – were dug by the inspecting judge of Zamość (9 graves) and which and how many resulted from the wild diggings carried out for two decades by the [l]ocal population", it is questionable not only whether and how Kola could have established this information, but also what its relevance would be. For insofar as the pits dug by criminal investigators or robbery diggers turned up human remains, any changes they may have made to the original grave structure would only impact the pinpointing of individual graves, but not the finds as concerns the combined area of all graves identified by Prof. Kola.

The major shortcoming of Prof. Kola’s work, however, is none of those decried by Mattogno, but one that Mattogno preferred to keep silent about: Prof. Kola in all probability failed to identify all mass graves in the area of Bełżec extermination camp. Mattogno tried in vain to discredit Alex Bay’s air photo analysis pointing to additional apparent grave structures not detected by Kola, in an article that was refuted in an earlier blog^[229]. Mattogno doesn’t seem to have found any additional arguments against Bay’s analysis, judging by his having kept silent about this issue in MGK’s magnum opus.

Mattogno prefers to follow up his attack on Kola’s plans and section with some rambling about my "silly argument" which refuted Mattogno’s earlier dot-connecting exercise by demonstrating that, by taking into account Kola’s information about the number of drills that were used to estimate the shape and size of a mass grave in each case, it was possible to group the dots in the map of drills on p. 70 of Kola’s book into units that a) bear some resemblance to the mass grave shapes shown on page 19 of the same book and b) match the number (33) of these shapes. In an obvious attempt to reverse the chronology of argumentation, Mattogno falsely claims that he had "in fact" taken into account Kola’s information about the number of drills that were used to estimate the shape and size of a mass grave in each case – something he only did in the magnum opus, after his earlier dot-connecting exercise had been refuted. In what is either a display of serious difficulties in reading comprehension or a most primitive lie, he then incredibly claims that it is clear that I "did not even understand that the drillings indicated by red circles in Kola’s map correspond to those effectively performed and registered in each grave’s drawing". Utterances of such fathomless stupidity only cause a yawn of utter boredom.

Following this release of steam, Mattogno again displays his somewhat-less-than-honest (and somewhat-less-than-logical) approach to eyewitness testimonies, which he tries to use to his advantage where they fit his argument though he dismisses them as wholly unreliable where they are not. He presents the testimonies and drawings of two former members of the Bełżec SS-staff, Robert Jührs and Heinrich Gley, whose rough sketches and depositions suggest that there was a single field of graves (Gräberfeld) in the northwestern area of the camp. From these testimonies and drawings Mattogno boldly concludes that those of the graves identified by Kola that are not in the area corresponding to the field of graves (Gräberfeld) described by the mentioned witnesses – nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 15, 18, 19 and half of grave no. 14, with a total volume of 7,775 cubic meters, according to Mattogno – were not graves made to bury corpses during camp times but holes that subsequently came into being and into which cremation remains somehow made their way from the original graves^[230].

The first problem with Mattogno’s reasoning is that it is non sequitur, insofar as the existence of a Gräberfeld in a certain part of the camp’s area does not exclude the possibility of further graves having been dug outside that Gräberfeld as more grave space became necessary (or of those graves having been dug in an initial phase of the camp’s operation, before the Gräberfeld mentioned by Jührs and Gley was created). The second problem is that there would have been no reason for dumping cremation remains in pits other than those that had contained the corpses prior to cremation – not to mention whole corpses, for in the graves numbered 1, 3 and 4 the core drilling performed by Prof. Kola’s team also discovered whole corpses in wax-fat transformation. So while Mattogno congratulates himself by boasting that "Muehlenkamp’s "critique" has thus only served to strengthen my argument on this issue", the fact is that his argument doesn’t hold any more water with a i>Gräberfeld mentioned/drawn by Jührs and Gley than it does with a i>Gräberfeld mentioned/drawn by Jührs alone. Mattogno’s invoking Gley’s testimony in his favor is quite amusing if one considers that Gley also provided a most vivid description of the exhumation and burning of the corpses from the mass graves. ^[231] One wonders how Mattogno might justify his cherry-picking of convenient snippets from testimonies he otherwise dismisses as wholly unreliable.

Regarding Sobibór, I objected to MGK’s attempt to blame the size of the graves identified by Prof. Kola in 2001 by pointing out that the size of these graves is in line with what becomes apparent from eyewitness testimonies, such as led the Hagen District Court to conclude that in the camp’s first extermination phase the corpses were buried in large pits, each of them with a length of about 50-60 meters, 10-15 meters wide and about 5-7 meters deep. Mattogno quotes the pertinent parts of the judgment LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64^[232], then claims that the court’s findings of fact as concerns the graves are wholly based on testimonies provided by defendant Kurt Bolender prior to the main proceedings, which is unlikely as there is no indication to this effect in the judgment, and the measurements of the graves given in the judgment’s findings of fact are also not the same (according to Bolender, "A mass grave may have been approx. 60 m long, 20 m wide and 6-7 m deep"). Mattogno refers to Bolender in order to play his old trick, which is to cherry-pick snippets from a testimony he otherwise dismisses as unreliable in order to support one of his arguments. Bolender mentioned a second pit into which corpses were placed even before it had been completely finished, as the first pit was completely full. Mattogno sharply reasons that if "the other two graves" each had the dimensions 60 m × 20 m × 6-7 m, then there were would have been three mass graves with a total volume of 23,400 m³ before the exhumation and cremation of the corpses started, and if "the above-mentioned 80,000 corpses" were buried in 23,400 m³, this would mean a density of "3.4 corpses per cubic meter, even though they are said to have been buried in layers with the utmost care to maximize their packing density". This, so Mattogno cheers, "inflicts yet another decisive blow" to my "fantasies about the 19.51 corpses per cubic meter of Bełżec".

In thus harking back to a previously discussed issue^[233], Mattogno reveals (besides his dishonest cherry-picking trickery) his eagerness to jump to convenient conclusions not borne out by his cherry-picked snippets. For Bolender said nothing about a third grave, nor did he say anything about the extent to which the second grave was eventually filled. As previously pointed out^[234], it is entirely possible that the overwhelming majority of the corpses buried at Sobibór before the camp’s body disposal method was changed to cremation (between 80,000 and 100,000) ended up in the first mass grave mentioned by Bolender.

With no argument against the coinciding sizes of mass graves as described by who handled them and as established by archaeologists, Mattogno is reduced to insinuating that Prof. Kola "may have forced his conclusions", and to casting doubts on his finds based not on the actual drillings that led to identifying the graves (unlike his book about Bełżec, Kola’s report about his 2001 investigations at Sobibór contains no map of drillings), but on preliminary drillings that show "negative" results in the area later identified as pertaining to graves numbers 3 and 4, and "positive" drills arranged in a manner incompatible with the shape of the graves as identified by the final drillings. All fairly interesting, but preliminary drillings are one thing and final drillings are the ones that count, and the shapes of graves nos. 3 and 4 as outlined by Prof. Kola are corroborated by the coincidence of these shapes with greener areas clearly visible on a satellite photograph of the Sobibor memorial area, and with air photos published by archaeologists Isaac Gilead, Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek^[235].

Mattogno’s other argument against the accuracy of Prof. Kola’s finds is that they may have been influenced by the removal of trees from the area of the memorial in the 1960s, due to which Kola’s subsequent survey "must have encountered right from the start countless craters from the eradication of the trees". Maybe so, but how is this supposed to affect the accuracy of mapping mass graves based on core drills that encountered human remains in the subsoil, moreover where such mapping is, as mentioned above, corroborated by air and satellite photography?

In the critique I had dismissed Mattogno’s far-fetched suggestion that postwar excavation had expanded a 300 m² lime pit (conveniently misplaced by MGK for the purpose of their argument) into a grave with a surface area of 1,575 m² and an estimated volume of 6,819.80 m³. Mattogno admits that the argument is wrong, though not for the "stupid" reason adduced by me (an enlargement of the mentioned lime pit to more than five times its original area apparently is within the realm of possibilities for Mattogno) but because the lime pit is located "along the eastern border of the camp, near the train station of Sobibór, which is far away from the mass graves area" - as I had also mentioned when pointing out that MGK had swiftly converted what the 1947 Central Commission Report described as a pit filled with chloride of lime "close to the eastern limit of the camp" into a lime pit close to the eastern limit of the camp’s burial area^[236]. Mattogno’s owning up to his and/or his co-authors’ misplacement of said lime pit is duly noted.

As concerns Chełmno, Mattogno’s argumentation is equally amusing. I had taken issue with his claim that archaeological investigations carried out by the Koniń District Museum in 2003/2004 to establish the location and size of the camp’s mass graves had "confirmed the three earlier arbitrarily-defined pits, and it could not be otherwise". By this statement Mattogno had bluntly accused the Koniń District Museum’s archaeologists of having manipulated their findings to vindicate a predetermined result, moreover one that been defined "arbitrarily" and not based on archaeological investigation. Actually, as I had shown in detail in an earlier blog^[237], the 2003/04 survey had led to major corrections in regard to the previously assumed boundaries of two graves, furthermore established that one previously assumed grave area contained no grave, and discovered 11 ash disposal pits that had not been previously marked. To speak of an expectable ("it could not be otherwise") confirmation of "earlier arbitrarily defined pits"" in the face of these survey finds is the height of chutzpah, and Mattogno would have done himself a favor if he had at least kept silent about yet another occasion on which he had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, proclaiming a blatant falsehood. Yet what he does on pp. 1290-91 of the magnum opus is to call my observations "completely silly" (now, that’s an argument!) and to quote at length the passages from his book that culminate in his embarrassing false accusation against the Koniń District Museum. Perhaps Mattogno hopes that an uncritical reader – which the "Revisionist" community is full of – will mistake for an argument what amounts to a spiteful brat’s yelling like, "yes I stole the cookies, and so what?". For further amusement he adds, as "Illustration 11.51" on p. 1294, the very same map I had used to expose his false accusation, albeit without the colored marks identifying the differences between the 2003/2004 survey results (red lines) and earlier assumptions regarding the number and size of graves in the camp’s Plot IV (green lines), which can be seen below.



Following this lamentable performance, Mattogno indulges in a further attempt to discredit the Koniń District Museum, which regarding the line of 11 pits filled with ashes discovered in 2003/2004 (seen on the map on the left side of the larger of the two graves mapped in Plot IV) considered the possibility that these pits had been examined in 1945 by Judge W. Bednarz. Mattogno quotes a statement by Bednarz whereby until the spring of 1942 "the corpses were buried in big common graves, of which a single grave was 270 m long, 8-10 m wide and approx. 6 m deep", which is meant to prove wrong the Koniń District Museum’s conjecture (how so, Mattogno doesn’t explain). Ironically Mattogno had himself quoted, in his book about Chełmno, what is obviously the description of these ash pits by Bednarz that the Koniń District Museum had in mind^[238]:

When the pits into which the ashes and crushed bones had been dumped were reopened in the course of the investigation, ashes, hair, traces of chlorine – apparently thrown in for the purpose of disinfection – bones and bone fragments as well as small objects were found, such as combs, buttons, purses, etc. (document of the protocol of investigations, card 530). It should also be noted that, because of soil fertilization with human ashes, the vegetation in this area is much more lush and green in color.

Another of Mattogno’s falsehoods has thus been exposed, moreover on hand of an earlier quote produced by the accuser himself.

As if he these blunders had not already been humiliating enough, Mattogno adds another by claiming that "it is certain" that these 11 ash-filled pits "are also considered as mass graves" - in the sense of pits that were at one time filled with whole bodies. He then adds the assumed volume of these supposed mass graves to that of the other four graves in the Chełmno camp area to arrive at a total burial volume of 23,481 m³ and trumpet away as follows (p. 1292):

It results that the 92,500 corpses alleged buried there would have had an average density of (92,500 ÷ 23,481 =) 3.9 corpses per cubic meter!
Here as well, the alleged mass graves of Chełmno contradict Muehlenkamp’s fantasies about the claimed mass graves of Bełżec.

Unfortunately for Mattogno – who apparently didn’t notice that his argument implies acknowledging that 92,500 corpses were not "alleged" but actually buried at Chełmno, and whose earlier arguments regarding burial density at Chełmno have already been addressed^[239]– his own quote of Bednarz’s finds shows that the judge didn’t consider these 11 pits as graves that had contained whole corpses at any time, but as "pits into which the ashes and crushed bones had been dumped", i.e. as mere disposal pits for cremation remains. There is also no indication in the Koniń District Museum’s report about the 2003/2004 survey, authored by archaeologist Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak, that the archaeologist disagreed with judge Bednarz’s assessment as to the nature of these 11 pits – on the contrary^[240]. After this series of embarrassing blunders, Mattogno moves on to discuss the last section of the critique’s chapter 7.

Density of Corpses in the Graves

In the last section of the critique’s Chapter 7, I argued that the enormous size of the mass graves at the AR camps as described by eyewitnesses and/or identified by archaeologists, especially their depth, and the effort put into digging such huge mass graves, is in itself evidence that these mass graves were required to bury an enormous number of mass murder victims. Mattogno reacts to this argument with rather incoherent objections, quoting but failing to answer the question why a grave as big as Sobibór grave n.º 4 (for which I had calculated a volume of 6,819.80 m³) was needed when a few much smaller and more shallow graves would have been sufficient to dispose of the camp’s mortality. He ignores the footnote to this question, in which I point out that MGK’s estimate of 10,000 dead at Sobibór over a period of 16 months, assuming the minimum density of 3 corpses per cubic meter estimated by medical expert Mieczysław Piotrowski in an investigation of the Treblinka I labor camp’s mass graves in August 1946, would have required a mere 200 m³ per month, while grave n.º 4 alone (which according to SS witness Bolender was full after the first months of the camp’s operation) was 36 times larger. To bury 10,000 corpses at this low density a mere 3,333 m³ of burial space would have been required, which is less than half the burial space of grave nr. 4 alone and little more than one-third of the volume available for burial (9,525 m³) that I had calculated for mass graves nos. 3, 4, 5 and 6, i.e. the graves that Prof. Kola considered to have been burial graves that had contained (and still did contain) some whole corpses, as opposed to graves no. 1 and 2 where the archaeologist had found only cremation remains.

Rather than consider this information, Mattogno argues – based on the fact that in some small graves found by the Soviets in the Treblinka I area the density was no more than 1-2 corpses per cubic meter – that this may have been the burial density throughout the Bełżec and Sobibór camps. Sobibór grave # 4 could, according to his calculations, have accommodated 12,694 corpses at a density of 2 per cubic meter. As to Bełżec, the 21,310 m³ of grave space estimated by Prof. Kola would have barely sufficed, at a concentration of 1 corpse per cubic meter, to accommodate the 21,750 deportees dead on arrival according to German historian Dieter Pohl’s estimate whereby about 5 % of the deportees died "already during the deportation trip due to the extreme conditions in the railway freight cars" (obviously it didn’t occur to Mattogno, who seems inclined to accept this estimate insofar as he uses it to support his argument, that having deportees travel under conditions so murderous that 5 % of them died during a relatively short trip already says a lot about German intentions towards the deportees). None of these frankly ridiculous postulations addresses my key argument, which was the following (emphasis added) ^[241]:

People may make relatively small graves in order to toss a relatively small number of bodies inside, but who would expend the time, effort and resources required to dig five meters below ground and make a grave with a volume of 6,819.80 m³, only to then squander the grave space so laboriously created by burying corpses at a density of no more than 1-2 corpses per cubic meter? According to Alex Bay, a pit 50 by 25 meters with a volume of 8,500 cubic meters would "require weeks or months to dig by manual methods using picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows, depending on the number of laborers available"; even with mechanical excavators "the time needed to complete these large pits would have been on the order of a two or three weeks." The time required for the 6,819.80 m³ of Sobibor grave # 4 would be a little but not much less.
One might think that Mattogno, Graf & Kues would like their readers to believe that the SS made graves big enough for a house to comfortably fit in because they liked to keep their Jewish labor force digging all the time, or because they enjoyed the healthy exercise themselves or were so fond of handling excavators that they made enormous graves just for the fun of it.

The point stands. Mattogno did nothing to refute it. Worse than that, he did not even address it.

Thus we come to the end of Mattogno’s response to Chapter 7 of the critique. The remaining paragraphs are mere rhetorical pep-talk saturated with invective ("Muehlenkamp’s arguments are absurd, incoherent, stupid, hypocritical and deceptive, and by posing them he has showed all the desperation of a person trying to defend the indefensible."), which is without interest except for what it reveals about the contents of Mattogno’s mind.

Notes

[218] Mattogno, Bełżec, pp. 88-90
[219] Kola, Bełżec, p. 28
[220] Excerpts from Kola, Bełżec in the HC thread "Archaeological investigation of Belzec mass graves" ([link])
[221] Kola, Bełżec, p. 21.
[222]Kola, Bełżec, p. 23.
[223]Kola, Bełżec, p. 27.
[224]Kola, Bełżec, p. 33.
[225]That is, undisturbed soil. There are also drill points in blue signaling "soil disruptions – unidentified camp objects or disruptions next to graves". Disruptions "next to graves" are distinct from "graves" in that no human remains (cremation remains or larger remains) were found in the drills. Nevertheless, they may be parts of graves consisting of soil layered over cremation remains, the latter not having been touched by the drill due to its shallowness or to the uneven nature of a former grave’s backfilling.
[226]Kola, Bełżec, p. 27.
[227]Kola, Bełżec, p. 25.
[228]On pp. 13-14 of his book, Kola wrote the following: "Because of the vast area of former camp in Bełżec, which required examining, the basic drills were located only in the knots of 5 m net, realising relatively little accuracy in defining the borderline shapes of the located objects (mass graves and non-grave objects."
[229]"Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology - Continuation (2)" ([link]).
[230]Always the delicate flower, Mattogno attacks this writer in the strongest terms for having dared to challenge his conclusion, furiously accusing me of "stupidity and hypocrisy" in response to my having called his reasoning "somewhat less than logical".
[231]Gley’s account is quoted on p. 441 of the critique.
[232]See excerpts transcribed under [link] and translated under [link]
[233]Regarding Mattogno’s other "decisive blows" (and this writer’s counterblows) see Part 4 (Section 2) of this series.
[234]As previous note.
[235]See critique, p. 392-93, and the "Sobibór" section of the blog "Mass Graves at Nazi Extermination Camps" ([link]).
[236]See critique, p. 436.
[237]"Mattogno on Chełmno Mass Graves" ([link])
[238]Carlo Mattogno, Chełmno. A German Camp in History and Propaganda, The Barnes Review November 2011. See also the blog "Mattogno on Chełmno Mass Graves" ([link]), where I translated the same passage from the Italian edition of Mattogno’s Chełmno book.
[239]See Part 4 (Section 2) of this series.
[240]See the blog "Mattogno on Chełmno Mass Graves" ([link]), where I show that Pawlicka-Nowak considers these pits to have been used only for burying human ashes and crushed human bones but not as mass graves for the burial of whole human bodies.
[241]Critique, pp. 438-39.

On April 3, 1942, Arthur Roedl, commandant of Gross-Rosen, wrote that the "the special treatment of 127 prisoners has been completed on 2 April 1942." Proof that this meant 'killed' can be derived from the same author's message of March 26, 1942, collected in 1234-PS. This notes that 214 arrestees were "mustered out" on 19-20 January, of whom 36 had died by March 17th and 51 had been declared capable of work. The 127 remaining were killed at Bernburg in batches of 70 and 57: the transfer of the first 70 is shown here.

The process of selection for Sonderbehandlung 14f13 is documented in 1151-PS [scans], summarized in the Staff Evidence Analysis here. Liebensehel wrote on December 10, 1941, that a Doctors Commission would visit nine camps to make selections. The selections at Gross Rosen on 19-20 January were discussed in a letter by Mennecke to his wife (NO-907). The euthanasia centre Bernburg wrote to Gross Rosen on March 3rd to arrange the transfers, noting that "inmates from other concentration camps will arrive" and thus "an interim is necessary for us in order to be able to carry out all this work."

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



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

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

which Mattogno comments in the following erudite manner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Introduction

Chapter 8 of the HC critique of Mattogno, Graf and Kues^[1], about the burning of the corpses at the Aktion Reinhard(t) extermination camps Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka and at Chełmno extermination camp, is 76 pages long (pp. 440 – 516) and has about 24,000 words including footnotes. Mattogno’s response to this chapter stretches over a full 177 pages (1296 – 1473) of MGK’s magnum opus^[2] and has a word count of well over 71,000, i.e. it is almost three times as long as the chapter it refers to.


But then, it’s expectable that an interested amateur like myself^[3] should have much less to write about the subject of cremation than someone who prides himself (p. 1296) on "studies on this issue, lasting more than two decades and culminating in the two-volume, 1211-page opus I forni crematori di Auschwitz" and who, according to his co-writer Jürgen Graf^[4], has an "encyclopedic knowledge of all problems related to cremation". Graf’s bragging that includes this period is part of the magnum opus’s presentation by the editor of this "Holocaust Handbook", suggesting that MGK are particularly proud of Mattogno’s "encyclopedic" cremation lecture, which certainly deserves the name as concerns its volume. Whether the same applies as concerns its content will be examined in this series^[5].

Cremation Devices, Methods and Times

Belzec

Sobibor

Treblinka

Chapter 8 of the critique began with a presentation of what is known from evidence about the cremation devices and methods applied as well as the duration of cremations at each of the four extermination camps. Mattogno’s response begins with the aforementioned self-congratulation, followed by a torrent of invective ("…this chapter by Muehlenkamp is certainly the most ludicrous among all the rubbish I have read about this issue. As stupidity goes, it exceeds even …"; "Beyond being “farcical,” Muehlenkamp’s exposition is also false, hypocritical, misleading and inconsequential."; "This is such a huge stupidity that eventually even Muehlenkamp became aware of it, ……"; etc.) that I welcome as yet another of Mattogno’s self-presentations, especially as it expresses the fit of rage that the critique’s chapter 8 must have thrown "Revisionist" icon Mattogno into.

Belzec


Following this self-illustrating introduction, Mattogno reiterates his attack against Dr. Pfannenstiel’s accounts of early cremation attempts at Bełżec^[6], adding two arguments to his previous ones. The first argument (p. 1297) is that "the key witness Reder never mentions cremations as having taken place at Bełżec during his stay in the camp (17 August to the end of November 1942)". Interestingly there is no qualification to the term "key witness", suggesting that Mattogno considers Reder to have indeed been a key witness to mass extermination at this camp. Otherwise the argument is without interest as witnesses tend to recall and recollect what impressed them and thus stuck in their memory, and what that is varies from person to person. So if early corpse cremation attempts were not mentioned by Reder, this may simply be because he didn’t take an interest in such attempts, unlike the hygienist Dr. Pfannenstiel and the policeman interviewed by Wehrmacht officer Wilhelm Cornides^[7]. Mattogno’s other additional argument is a telegram sent by the head of Aktion Reinhard(t), Odilo Globocnik, on 4 September 1942 to Himmler’s adjutant Grothmann, complaining about his fuel allowance having been reduced and requesting to be allotted a special fuel contingent for this operation. According to Mattogno, this rules out that "gasoline would have been wasted in Bełżec on the burning of corpses" - a non sequitur as one might as well argue that the liquid fuel requirements of Aktion Reinhard(t) became more pressing precisely because such fuel was meant by the staff of one or more camps to be used not just to fuel the gassing engines and generators (the amounts required for that must have been comparatively reduced) but also to burn corpses.

As concerns the "chronological limits" of the "alleged" mass cremation at Bełżec in the final phase of the camp’s operation, Mattogno takes issue with my having considered the possibility that this cremation, which according to eyewitness testimonies started in November of 1942, extended beyond March 1943. One of the sources I had invoked in support of this possibility was Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution, where it is mentioned that a witness noticed the stench of exhumed corpses as late as April 1943. In an endeavor to (quite pointlessly, as I had written nothing to the contrary) highlight the fact that said witness had not mentioned cremation, Mattogno provides a comprehensive quote of the witness’s account^[8], which he had earlier^[9] presented as "horrifying propaganda stories"– including the following information, matching Cornides’ account, about what it was like to pass by the place that Mattogno claims was a mere transit camp:

Travelers on the railway line Zawada-Rawa Ruska close the windows, for this awful stench penetrates into the compartments and causes the people to vomit. I myself had to travel along this line on several occasions and have thus been able to convince myself of this state of affairs. As late as April 10, 1943, I passed through there one last time. The Christian population of Belzec has left this place for the only reason of this stench.

The other source, which Mattogno keeps silent about, is local inhabitant Eustachy Ukraiński, who stated that cremation at Bełżec lasted throughout the spring of 1943^[10]. Another local inhabitant, Jan Gląb, recalled after the war that the burning of the corpses had ended in April 1943^[11].

Regarding the device used at Bełżec to crush the victims’ bones after cremation, Mattogno amusingly accuses me of having omitted "the fact that Reder is not an eyewitness to the use of this machine", after quoting at length the footnote on pp. 442f. of the critique, in which I mentioned a Hungarian Jew named Szpilke, or Szpilka, "who told Belzec survivor Rudolf Reder about having set up and operated this machine, as mentioned by Reder in his report about Belzec". It should be clear to everyone other than Mattogno that if Reder learned about the device from this Szpilke, or Szpilka, this means that Reder did not witness the device himself. Referring to earlier depositions of Reder’s that mention neither this acquaintance nor the information he provided to Reder, Mattogno argues that "the tale of the grinder of Bełżec is not only without any proof, but also evolved rather late". Yes, the "tale" presumably "evolved" after Reder met the man he referred to as "an acquaintance, the technician Scharf-Szpilka, who assembled the grinder for grinding the bones", but this means not that the "tale" is without any proof, but that the proof consists of or includes Reder’s second-hand testimony. Commenting on a photo I showed on p. 443 of the critique ("Heinrich Chamaides, David Manuschewitz and Moische Korn (f.l.t.r.) on the platform of the bone mill in the Janowska camp in Lwow"), Mattogno mentions that such machine "was found in Lwów and was the object of a Soviet technical report dated 29 September 1944", concedes the possibility that "this machine was also used to grind burned human bones", but then hastens to add that "there is no documentary evidence of it, and neither is there any documentary proof that this machine was ever transferred to Bełżec". That may be so, but it’s not Mattogno who gets to set the rules of evidence, and in historiography and criminal investigation proof may also be provided by oral testimony. As concerns a bone grinding machine from Janowska, Reder’s reference to Scharf-Szpilka may be the only evidence, but local inhabitant Edward Łuczyński mentioned an additional device, a grain mill that had been confiscated from local peasants^[12].

Sobibor

Regarding Sobibór, Mattogno (p. 1302) takes issue with my statement (p. 443) that Sobibór "was the first of the three camps of Aktion Reinhard to change its body disposal procedure from burial to cremation, the main reason being probably a concern that the camp’s water supply might be polluted by leachate from the graves due to the camp area’s relatively high groundwater level." This is supposed to be irreconcilable with an earlier statement whereby the SS "could hope that groundwater pollution by leachate from the corpses would not occur at the site of the graves because underground currents carried such leachate away". Mattogno’s reading problems obviously kept him from realizing that the earlier statement referred to the time when Sobibór was chosen as an extermination site, while the later one referred to developments after the camp had already been conducting killing operations for several months. Mattogno’s attempt to present the choice of Sobibór as "idiotic" on account of the leachate problem that eventually materialized, which Mattogno harks back to here for the sake of cheap ad hominem ("Accordingly, one must believe that the SS, being completely unable to foresee a more than obvious danger of groundwater poisoning due to leachate, were as inept as Muehlenkamp."), has already been addressed^[13]. My next statement regarding Sobibór:

The corpses of the victims killed after the camp resumed operation in October 1942 following a two-month interruption were taken directly from the gas chambers to places of cremation, while the corpses of the victims killed and buried until the end of July/early August 1942 were disinterred with a mechanical excavator for this purpose.

also gets prominent attention from Mattogno, who refers to a statement by Jakób Biskubicz whereby the excavator (which extracted previously buried bodies from the mass graves for burial) arrived at Sobibór (only) in December 1942. As I said nothing about when the burning of the interred corpses (as opposed to that of newly killed arrivals, which started in October 1942) commenced, Mattogno’s objection is quite pointless, and his subsequent criticism ("Muehlenkamp does not explain why the camp SS did not take advantage of these two months of respite in order to start the cremations, which were supposedly begun only later in connection with the resumption of the deportations.") must be dismissed as a showpiece of Mattognian silliness as its author does not explain what relevance the missing explanation is supposed to have. Rather than that he produces a quote from Jules Schelvis’ book about Sobibór, followed by a quote from a November 1965 statement by Jakób Biskubicz, which is apparently supposed to belie the conclusions that Schelvis derived from it (how it so does Mattogno doesn’t explain; Schelvis’ statement that "an excavator used to excavate the decomposing bodies from the two existing graves and to haul them over to the new pit" arrived in the autumn of 1942 is in line with Biskubicz’s recalling that the excavator "arrived the beginning of December 1942, perhaps even in November".

As I had referred to survivor eyewitness Leon Feldhendler’s description of the Sobibór cremation device after Mattogno’s black beast Yitzhak Arad, Mattogno then proceeds to demonstrate that Arad’s translation of Feldhendler’s account is "defective and inaccurate", providing the correct translation from Arad’s source and arguing that Feldhendler’s testimony "not only ignores the excavator completely"^[14], but "also contains a description of the cremation method which differs radically from that given by Schelvis". Mattogno doesn’t explain wherein the "radical" differences between both descriptions are supposed to consist, and it is hard to see such difference as Schelvis mentions rails crisscrossed over the top of a pit, forming a rudimentary grid, whereas Feldhendler, as quoted by Mattogno, recalled that what he called the "crematorium" consisted "of a big pit, and above it some grids were put and above those rail tracks"

Ever eager to accuse his opponent of wrongdoing, Mattogno then attacks the following statement on pp. 443f.:

SS-Sturmbannführer Streibel, who visited Sobibor in 1942, recalled a roaster made of railway lines, supported by a stone base; he mentioned having seen ‘the cremation sites,’ which suggests that there was more than one of them. The Judgment LG Hagen vom 20.12.1966, 11 Ks 1/64 mentions (several) huge grids inside a pit.

The reference to Streibel is supposed to show my "bad faith" because the pertinent passage from Arad’s book^[15]"mentions “the roaster” twice in singular form" which is supposed to be in contradiction with Streibel’s reference in the same paragraph to (several) cremation sites (apparently it didn’t occur to Mattogno that Streibel may have described the roaster of each cremation site he saw, which was "made from the railway lines" and "supported by a stone base").

Providing a further example of his reading abilities, Mattogno then claims that the Hagen Court’s verdict on Sobibór^[16]"refers to the installation of a single cremation structure", though the quote and translation he provides clearly mention several grates:

The already decomposed corpses were lifted out of the pits with the help of the excavator and burned on large grates in an already dug but as yet empty pit. The grates consisted of old railway rails which had been placed over concrete foundations.

I considered this description to have been confirmed by archaeological research, on grounds that graves nos. 1 and 2 had been described as body-burning graves by Prof. Kola in his report about his 2001 survey of the camp^[17]. In chapter 11 (p. 1256), Mattogno argued that Prof. Kola’s term "grób ciałopalny", which my translator had rendered as "body burning grave", is more correctly translated as "grave accommodating remains of cremation". If so, this means that Prof. Kola didn’t consider these graves to have been places where bodies were burned, but merely dumping sites for cremation remains. It doesn’t, however, rule out that cremation took place at these sites. Neither does the depth of the graves (4.30 m and 4 m respectively), which may have been due to their having originally been intended for burying corpses before it was decided to burn rather than bury further corpses, and to accordingly set up cremation grates inside these pits. In the cremation chapter, Mattogno additionally argues (p. 1306) that the areas of mass graves 1 and 2 are far too large for cremation grates, quite pointlessly so as I had not claimed that the area of the graves had been equal to the area of the grates (I had merely written that the graves were large enough for grates of considerable size to fit into them, p. 444). More pertinent is Mattogno’s argument against my considering the possibility that graves nos. 1 and 2 had originally been a single pit as only one such pit had been described by eyewitnesses: Mattogno argues that the probes made between these two graves (must have) turned up negative, otherwise Kola would not have concluded on two separate pits instead of one. However, an originally single pit remains a possibility if the depth to which cremation remains were buried in that pit was not uniform and Prof. Kola’s negative probes were negative only because he didn’t drill deep enough to come upon human remains in certain places. Alternatively it is possible that one of the two pits was a cremation pit, while the other was merely a pit where cremation remains were dumped.

Were the cremation grates set up above a pit as assumed by Schelvis and described by Feldhendler (see above), were they set up inside such a pit as per the Hagen court’s findings of fact, or were both methods used at one or the other time? In support of the second of these possibilities, considering my reading of Prof. Kola’s archaeological investigation results, I had referred to several witnesses (p. 444, footnote 18): former SS-man Erich Bauer, who mentioned that the corpses were burned in pits on grids made of railway rails ("In den Gruben wurden die Leichen auf Rosten, die aus Eisenbahnschienen hergestellt waren, verbrannt."); inmate Chaim Engel, who mentioned a deep pit containing burning grids; inmate Kurt Thomas, who in various depositions had mentioned a "Krematoriumsschacht" (crematorium shaft), a "Verbrennungsschacht" (burning shaft) and a "Kremationsgrube" (cremation pit); Jan Piwonski, turnout setter at Sobibor train station, who learned about the burning of corpses in a pit from a non-German camp guard. It speaks volumes of Mattogno’s methodology that he addresses only the last of these witnesses, who provided quite a detailed description (quoted by Mattogno, pp. 1310f.) of what he had been told about the cremation method by a guard named Waska:

The guard told me that in the vicinity of the mass graves a pit around two meter deep was dug, that in this pit a kind of grate was constructed from railway tracks, and that on this grate the root stumps previously doused with some liquid were put. When this [fire] burned well, the excavator is said to have put the corpses on top of it.

Mattogno remarks that according to this second-hand witness the cremation is stated to have taken place in one single pit (no problem with that) on one single grate (which doesn’t preclude the setting up of one or more further grates at a later stage). Deliberately conflating the time when Sobibór changed its body disposal procedure from burial to cremation (October 1942) and the time when cremation was extended to the previously interred corpses (which happened in the second half of November or in early December 1942, according to Piwonski), Mattogno further remarks that "According to the witness, the cremations commenced in December 1942, not in October as stated by Muehlenkamp" (who, as we have seen, didn’t state that cremation of exhumed corpses, as opposed to corpses of freshly killed deportees, started in October 1942).

Before Piwonski, Mattogno attacks the testimonies of several witnesses I had referred to not as concerns whether the burning was carried out above or inside a pit, but regarding the cremation pyres having been doused with gasoline or another flammable liquid: Berisch Freiberg (inmate), Jan Krzowski (inhabitant of Wlodawa), and Bronislaw Lobejko (railway worker).

Freiberg is quoted at length by Mattogno so he can make a fuss about my having omitted this witness's "nonsense" about the corpses having fallen through the gas chamber floor after the gassing, as if this obviously inaccurate description (or, for that matter, the subsequent, equally inaccurate description of the burning process) ruled out the possibility that the witness was right about the cremation pyres having been doused with gasoline. Mattogno obviously hasn’t understood yet that a witness, especially one that, like any surviving Sobibór inmate, didn’t witness the killing and body disposal process first hand, may be dead wrong about certain details but right about others, and that a witness who is either right or wrong about everything he recalls is a rarity in real life. His rambling against Freiberg’s "nonsense", on the other hand, doesn’t keep Mattogno from using Freiberg’s testimony to his advantage, as he points out that the cremation system described by this witness "is in total contradiction to the one evoked by Muehlenkamp" (which is irrelevant as I didn’t refer to the witness as concerns the cremation system).

Regarding Jan Krzowski, Mattogno yells "hearsay" as if that ruled out using the testimony in question as evidence (that may be so in Mattogno’s world, but in the real world hearsay can also be a source of historical evidence). Again, Mattogno proposes the non sequitur conclusion that the information gathered by Krzowski from Sobibór camp guards about the fuel used for burning the corpses must be inaccurate because the guards also told him about the gas chamber having an automatically lowered floor and the victims having been poisoned with lead oxide from a combustion motor. Krzowski’s sources were obviously not direct witnesses to and had inaccurate notions about the killing process and how the corpses were removed from the gas chambers, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they were wrong about the cremation being done on "car frames or railway tracks" using "root stumps and wood" that were "doused with some liquid".

According to the same Mattognian logic, Lobejko’s mention of having smelled burning petroleum from the pyres is supposed to be wrong because Lobejko mentioned a widely exaggerated (800,000) estimate of the number of victims. Obviously logical thinking is not Mattogno’s strength, or then he expects a readership gullible enough to be impressed by such flagrant non-sequiturs. Never shy to use what parts of an oh-so-unreliable witness’s testimony seem to serve his argument, Mattogno then quotes Lobejko’s claim that "only one mass grave was utilized in Sobibór", thereby shooting himself in the foot as this claim supports my assumption, based on Bolender’s testimony, that only one grave was completely filled and the concentration of corpses in that grave was thus somewhat higher than postulated by Mattogno. ^[18] Ukrainian guard Daniltsjenko, as Mattogno correctly points out on p. 1311, was referred to in the critique to document the statement that Ukrainian guards in their watchtowers found it hard to breathe when the wind blew in their direction from the burning grids – and not as concerns the number or makeup of cremation sites. This, however, doesn’t keep Mattogno from quoting a part of Daniltsjenko’s testimony whereby there was a single cremation "ramp", and baselessly accusing me on the very same page of having transformed that one "ramp" into several. Mattogno must think very little of his readers’ intellect if he expects them to swallow such blatant falsehoods hook, line and sinker.

So much for Mattogno’s attack on my rendering of evidence about cremation at Sobibór. Before I move to what Mattogno has to say about my rendering of cremation evidence regarding Treblinka, it is worth mentioning recent archaeological finds in the context of cremation at Sobibór, which have progressed somewhat since Prof. Kola’s 2001 archaeological investigation. Archaeologists Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek have expanded on Prof. Kola’s finds regarding graves nos. 1 and 2, and the grave pinpointed as a cremation site by Prof. Kola, grave nr. 7:

A third grave, Grave 7, is located in Hectare XVIII (Fig 2). Eleven excavation squares covering an area of 275 square meters were opened over Grave 7. The area was found to be heavily disturbed and contained the remains of human bones, artifacts and ash to a depth of 0.5 meters. Below these remains was found a dark brownish-red line, three meters wide and 15 meters in length and oriented east to west (Fig 15). We believe that this layer constitutes the site of the crematorium in Camp III. A section, three meters wide and three meters deep was excavated north to south across part of this line. The section revealed very hard, reddish soil that extended down to the level of the ground water and exuded a strong, unpleasant odor (Fig 16 and 17). This appears to have been deposits of fluids and fat of the victims that settled below the crematorium and soaked into the sandy ground. Soil samples from these deposits were collected for chemical analysis.[…]
Graves 1 and 2 are not mass graves, however the remains of humans bones found in the deposits suggest that they were used to some extent for the burial of victims in the camp. Again, further research is required to determine the precise use of these pits.
An important question is the exact size of the crematorium revealed in Grave 7. We need to continue to excavate in this area in order to determine its size. ^[19]

The aim of the excavation was to reveal the perimeter of the mass graves and to better understand the connection between the crematoria discovered in the spring of 2013 and the mass graves.[…]
In the winter season, over 3,500 square meters were excavated, revealing remains of the crematoria, mass graves and remains of double fence that encircled Camp 3. Fragments of human bone and hair were uncovered in the excavation.[…]
Most of the murders were carried out in Camp 3 where burnt and unburnt bone fragments were found scattered. This area is not flat and it is heavily disturbed. Following the removal of upper layer of grass, we were able to discern perimeter f the mass graves of the camp and the crematoria. The southernmost grave is Grave No. 8, uncovered in the Spring 2011 excavation. In the Spring 2013 excavation part of Grave No. 15 was also uncovered. In the winter excavation, it became apparent that Graves Nos. 8 and 15 were interconnected and actually form 'L' shaped grave (Fig. 6 – marked in blue). The northern part of the grave is deeper: 2.5 meters in depth and it lacks the remains of bones. The soil in the grave is gray and mixed with sand. The southern part of the grave (Grave No. 8, uncovered in Spring 2011) is 1.80 meters in depth. It contained three layers of human bones. This grave cancels out the two crematoria (Objects 2486 and 2469). Thus it appears that this was the latest grave created in the camp and that it was not put to use for these crematoria (Fig. 7). The northern part of Grave No. 8/15 produced a metal shovel (Fig. 8).[…]
Grave No. 7 cancelled out the crematorium, Object 2119, as can be seen in Fig. 4. An additional grave, Grave No. 14, was discovered over this crematorium in Spring 2013.[…]
A number of crematoria were uncovered during the Winter 2013 excavation (Fig. 12). These were open crematoria where bodies were burnt on iron rails like those discovered in Spring 2013. Wood logs were used as fuel under the iron rails. An example of this method of disposal was recorded in the Ohrdruf concentration camp when it was liberated by the Americans in April 1945 (Fig. 13).
The crematorium, Object 2597, is located in the southeast corner of Grave No. 4. It was also damaged during the mechanical work in the 1990s (Fig. 14). As noted here above, Grave No. 8/15 cancelled up a number of crematoria: Objects 2469, 2486, 2517, 2520, and 2535. ^[20]

So Haimi and Mazurek a) found that the cremation site of grave nr. 7 was larger than had been established by Prof. Kola, exact size yet to be determined, and b) identified further cremation sites in the former area of Sobibór’s "Camp 3".

Treblinka

As concerns Treblinka, Mattogno starts out (p. 1311) by referring to his earlier exploits in commenting my statements regarding corpse burning in August and September as well as October, November and December 1942. These have been commented in another blog^[21], in which I distinguished three phases of cremation at Treblinka that I consider probable:

- 1st phase, beginning in late August 1942 and lasting until October of that year: not very successful attempts to burn the upper layers of corpses in the graves for hygienic purposes (especially in order to combat the smell of decomposition emanating from the corpses), burning of deportees murdered in the Lazarett;
- 2nd phase, beginning in November or December 1942: not very successful attempts (see e.g. Rajchman’s account quoted above) to burn all the corpses, (also) motivated by at least one complaint about the stench emanating from insufficiently buried corpses as the graves in camp’s extermination sector were filled to or beyond capacity;
- 3rd phase, after an efficient cremation procedure had been implemented, in which the corpses were systematically removed from the mass graves with excavators and burned on pyres made of concrete bases and railway rails.

When did the 3rd phase commence? In the Critique I had assumed with Arad^[22] that this had happened after "Himmler’s visit to the camp at the end of February/beginning of March 1943". Mattogno claims that the beginning of wholesale cremation at that time is "one of the pivotal points of the orthodox exterminationist account of the cremations in Treblinka", but actually it just happens to be the timing assumed by a historian who wrote the first comprehensive account of the Aktion Reinhard(t) camp, and there are reasons to call that timing into question. Mattogno would like wholesale cremation to have started later, so he refers to Wiernik, who links Himmler’s visit to the discovery of the Katyn mass graves first publicized by the Germans on 13 April 1943. However, it is possible that Wiernik misdated Himmler’s visit, and there are sources suggesting that the aforementioned 3rd phase started earlier than February 1943. One of these sources is Chil Rajchman, who dated the arrival of a cremation specialist nicknamed the "Artist" by the inmates to January 1943, though his account of how the new procedure was put into practice suggests that it took some time before the "Artist" succeeded in implementing an efficient cremation system^[23]. Camp commandant Stangl recalled "the beginning of 1943" as the time when "excavators were brought in", "the corpses were removed from the huge ditches which had been used until then", and the "old" corpses "were burned on the roasters, along with the new bodies".^[24] The verdict of the 2nd Düsseldorf Treblinka trial^[25] mentions that around the turn of the year 1942/1943, following instructions from higher up, the bodies started being burned, which suggests that if there was a Himmler order for the burning of the bodies, it was given at that time and not in late February or early March 1943. The judgment mentions that there were difficulties with the installation used (a grid made first of trolley rails, then of railway rails placed on concrete foundations, with a pit underneath in which a wood fire was maintained) until "an Unterführer by the name of Floss" managed to bring the grid into the right position. On the other hand, German historian Sara Berger reconstructs the history of cremations at Treblinka as follows: until early 1943 cremation had been limited to the corpses of those murdered in the "Lazarett" and to sporadic attempts, e.g. during cleanup works in September 1942. In January 1943 it had been attempted to burn the corpses of newly arrived deportees, because the burial pits were overfilled. Only after Himmler gave the order to remove the corpses, a wholesale exhumation and cremation operation began in late February 1943. ^[26]

Based on this judgment, the judgment at the 1st Treblinka trial^[27] and the testimony of camp guard Pavel Vladimirovich Leleko^[28], I had in an earlier blog^[29]attempted a reconstruction of a Treblinka cremation roaster. As Leleko had mentioned a "cement pit about one meter deep and 20 meters long" with a "series of furnaces covered on the top with four rows of rails", while according to the 1st Düsseldorf judgment the installation consisted of "concrete bases about 70 cm high, on which 5 to 6 railway rails about 25 to 30 meters long lay in small intervals", I had matched both sources by assuming that Leleko’s "furnaces" were subdivisions of the cement pit by the concrete blocks on top of which the rails were placed, and that these were either blocks 1.70 meters high placed inside the pit and protruding from the pit for 70 cm, or blocks 70 cm high placed on the rims of the pit, the distance between the bottom of the rails and the bottom of the pit being, in any case, 1.70 meters. I had also assumed that the rails were 25 meters long (the middle value between Leleko’s 20 meters and the higher length of 30 meters mentioned in the Düsseldorf judgment), and that the width of the structure was 2 meters, 2.625 meters or 3.25 meters, depending on whether the grill consisted of four, five or six rails. Taking the middle of these three values, 2.625 meters, I had calculated that the average area of one roaster at Treblinka would be 65.625 square meters, and the volume of space underneath the same about 112 cubic meters.

Such attempts to reconcile various sources of evidence into a narrative or the description of a device are the daily bread of who researches historical events, but Mattogno doesn’t think much of what is one of the tasks of historiography. He prefers to stomp his feet and holler that such "desperate efforts to reconcile what is irreconcilable" are "pathetic". As a fellow blogger once remarked^[30], this behavior resembles that of "a child that stands before a heap of puzzle parts, decides after a brief glance that nothing fits together, angrily throws the whole stuff out of the window and tells Mommy, who asks for the puzzle, that there had never been one". Why exactly are the sources I reconciled supposed to be irreconcilable, according to Mattogno? The reasons he gives are truly pathetic:

Leleko speaks of a pit 20 meters long and 1 meter deep, 4 "rows of rails" and 1,000 corpses cremated at a time. The verdict of 3 September 1965 on the other hand mentions concrete blocks (unknown to Leleko) upon which 5-6 rail tracks (25-30 meters long) were put (well exceeding the length of Leleko’s pit) with a capacity of 2,000- 3,000 corpses at a time. The verdict completely ignores the pit underneath the railway tracks.

So what? The 1st Düsseldorf judgment may not have mentioned a pit underneath the railway tracks, but the 2nd Düsseldorf judgment did. Leleko mentions no concrete blocks but he mentions "furnaces" in a concrete pit, and it seems reasonable to assume that the subdivisions of that pit by the concrete blocks on which the rails were placed would have appeared as "furnaces" to the witness^[31]. Information about the length of the rails varies, but that may be due to rails of different lengths having been used at different times or in different devices, and besides measurements and other numbers are data that eyewitnesses usually can only estimate and are not necessarily good at estimating^[32]. This also applies as concerns the number of corpses that were piled on a grate at one time, Leleko’s more conservative number possibly being the more realistic one. The differences between Leleko’s number of rails and those of the witness or witnesses on whose testimony the data in the 1st Düsseldorf judgment are based may be due to the fact that the several structures of this kind in operation at Treblinka had different sizes. So why should one not try to put together a description, based on plausibility considerations, that reconciles these various sources as much as possible?

Mattogno mumbles that doing so depends on assuming a priori that all testimonies are truthful, which I would qualify in the sense that there’s no reason (certainly not one provided by Mattogno) for assuming that various testimonies independent of each other, which coincide in their essential aspects but differ as concerns certain particulars, are not essentially accurate, even if one or more (or even all) of the witnesses didn’t get certain particulars right.

Mattogno should bear in mind that my suppositions are in line with a narrative based on all available evidence, which means that they are sustainable as long as they are plausible and compatible with the narrative. In order to refute my suppositions, Mattogno must demonstrate that either or both criteria are missing; simply calling them "imaginary" or "without any value" won’t do. Neither is it sufficient to state that according to Leleko the rails were "inside the pit, close to one of its walls", without explaining what this is supposed to imply (pp. 1315f). Or to read into the 1st Düsseldorf judgment the statement that all cremation facilities were identical in size at all times, which is not to be found in that judgment (p. 1316) Or to postulate that the space of 50 cm between rails I considered would be "still too wide to allow the railroad rails to hold the corpses in their state of decomposition", without backing up this claim (same page). Or to proclaim (still on the same page) that "Because the Treblinka trial verdict speaks of concrete blocks with a height of some 70 cm, the only valid data is this, and the volume underneath would accordingly be (0.7 × 65.625 =) approx. 46 m³" - thereby ignoring the 2nd Treblinka trial verdict, whereby there was a pit underneath the rails. ^[33] Or (same page again) to set up a straw-man^[34] in order to discredit what is the reasonable assumption of the middle of three possible values regarding the width of the pyre. Or argue (p. 1317) that SS Oberscharführer Heinrich Matthes mentioned no pit when describing the facility (neither did he state that there was none, and his description does not exactly go into great detail, so Matthes’ not mentioning the pit means nothing either way). In this context it should be pointed out again that the pyre area I considered is more conservative than that considered by Mattogno himself^[35].

The next paragraph of Mattogno’s wisdom (p. 1317) deserves to be quoted in all it’s splendor:

The subsequent quotation is a passage from a statement by Yechiel Reichman, again taken from Arad, but its very beginning destroys all of Muehlenkamp’s mental guesswork about weights and measures of the Polish Jews (see point 36): “The SS ‘expert’ on body burning ordered us to put women, particularly fat women, on the first layer of the grill, face down.” (p. 448). Therefore in the “extermination camps” there were even fat women!

First of all, there were not only Polish Jews in the extermination camps of Aktion Reinhard(t). Treblinka also received 8,000 deportees directly from Theresienstadt and 14,159 deportees on long-range transports from Saloniki, Macedonia and Thessaloniki^[36]. These deportees had not previously gone through the rigors of ghetto life and were thus not malnourished. Second, even among malnourished populations like that of Polish ghettos there are some who are better off than the average^[37] (just like there are many who are worse off), so the existence of women that could be called "fat" among the deportees doesn’t contradict my assumptions about the average height and weight of Polish ghetto Jews.

In his eagerness to find contradictions between eyewitness testimonies, Mattogno argues that the witness Leleko speaks of only one cremation installation and claims that the corpses were put on it when the fire was already burning (p. 1319). The latter is indeed improbable and may be a mistranslation, or then what the witness was describing an early procedure later replaced by a more expedient one. As to the former, Leleko was describing one specific "incinerator" that was "situated about 10 meters beyond the large gas chamber building"– which doesn’t rule out the existence of further such incinerators. It is also possible that each of the "furnaces covered on the top with four rows of rails" was a grate consisting of four rails, and that the witness recalled several such grates placed next to each other.

Mattogno seems to harbor a special grudge for Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad, for he misses no opportunity to accuse the man of indulging in "speculations" and proclaiming what "can only be regarded as his personal opinion". Yet the examples that are most thickly decorated with Mattogno’s rhetoric rather reveal Mattogno’s ignorance of what is obviously the source of Arad’s description. Take, for instance, the following information on p. 448 of the Critique ("This incessant referring to Arad’s speculations, as if they were a sacred truth, shows all of Muehlenkamp’s childish gullibility"):

Arad writes that round wooden sticks were then used to break the remaining bones into small fragments, which were then run through a tightly woven screen made of metal wire; those bone fragments which did not pass through the screen were then returned for further smashing. Unburned bones which proved too difficult to fragment were returned to the roaster and re-ignited with a new pile of bodies.

What Mattogno calls "Arad’s speculations" was described by inmate witness Chil Rajchman, as follows^[38]:

The body parts of the corpses that had been incinerated in the ovens often kept their shape. It was not uncommon to take out whole charred heads, feet, bones etc. The workers of the ash commando then had to break up these body parts with special wooden mallets, which recalled the iron mallets used to pound gravel on motorways. Other instruments also resembled the tools used when working with sand and stone. Near the heaps of ash stood thick, dense wire meshes, through which the broken-up ashes were sifted, just as sand is sifted from gravel. Whatever did not pass through was beaten once more. The beating took place on sheet metal, which lay nearby. The carriers were not allowed to bring bones from the grills that had not been completely incinerated. They remained lying next to the furnaces and were thrown on top of the next layer of corpses that were brought in. The definitive "finished" ash had to be free of the least bit of bone and as fine as cigarette ash.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, postwar photos showing the soil of Treblinka littered with bone fragments and larger bones suggest that the "fine as cigarette ash" principle was at least not always adhered to. Yet the above quote shows that every word of what Mattogno decries as "Arad’ speculations" is in line with first-hand eyewitness evidence. The same applies to the following statement of Arad’s in another publication^[39]:

The bones were ground with rounded wooden stakes and afterwards they were shaken through a fine-meshed metal sieve; what got stuck therein was ground one more time. Unburned bones which were difficult to crush were thrown into the fire a second time.

regarding which Mattogno embarrasses himself by claiming (p. 1320) that "the Israeli historian merely took the Düsseldorf Court verdict and added his personal speculations".

Then there is the following supposedly unsupported statement in Arad’s book^[40]:

Other efficiency measures introduced included increasing the number of cremation sites to six – thus enabling the workers to burn up to 12,000 corpses simultaneously – and placing the cremating roasters nearer the mass graves to save time in transferring the bodies.

which happens to be in line with the testimonies of Rajchman (as concerns the number of ovens) and Wiernik (as concerns the number of corpses). Rajchman wrote the following^[41]:

It turns out that the corpses dug out of the pits burn even better than those of recently gassed people. Every day new ovens are constructed, more and more of them. After a few days there are six ovens. Each oven is served by several workers who load it with fodder.

Wiernik wrote the following^[42]:

The cremation of the corpses proved an unqualified success. Because they were in a hurry, the Germans built additional fire grates and augmented the crews serving them, so that from 10,000 to 12,000 corpses were cremated at one time.

Regarding the wooden sticks or stakes used to grind the bones – Rachjman, see above, described them as "wooden mallets, which recalled the iron mallets used to pound gravel on motorways"– , Mattogno presents one of those "the Germans wouldn’t have done it that way"– arguments that are a staple of "Revisionist" rhetoric:

Muehlenkamp completely lacks any critical sense, since he does not even notice the fierce contrast between his descriptions of the treatment of the cremation remains at Bełżec and Treblinka respectively. Even though the SS were able to arrange machines such as that shown in Illustration 12.2, they are said to have preferred to execute this task manually at Treblinka, using makeshift tools to crush the bones from 789,000 corpses!

What actually takes a lack of any critical sense, among other Mattogno blunders, is assuming that the propaganda storytellers of Mattogno’s fantasies would not have avoided such "fierce contrast", whereas real life events are full of apparent incoherence. And is there really such a "fierce contrast"? A mechanical ball mill might have certain advantages over makeshift tools operated by manual laborers, but it also had the great disadvantage of being subject to mechanical failures and breakdowns. So why should the SS not complement it with manual labor or use manual labor instead, when they had no restrictions as concerns the size of the labor force? I say "complement" because Leleko mentioned a "special mortar" in which body parts that had preserved their natural shape were "pounded into flour", and Rachjman mentioned instruments that "resembled the tools used when working with sand and stone".

Mattogno never had a problem with arguing on both sides of his mouth, and he does it here again when, right after expressing his contempt for "makeshift tools" as opposed to mechanical devices, he postulates that, if the SS had used "massive tampers" to crush the bones like they did at Auschwitz according to Filip Müller (the term fits the "wooden mallets" mentioned by Rachjman and the tools portrayed on David Olère’s picture below), they would have done so perfect a job that crime site investigations would have found no larger human remains.



The job was not perfectly done as Judge Łukaszkiewicz found the Treblinka area strewn over "with cremation remains as well as skulls, bones and other parts of human bodies covering an area of at least 1.8 hectares" (Critique, p. 414), so by Mattogno’s amazing "logic" it was not done at all. And for extra amusement Mattogno calls it "naive" to point out that, as shown by physical evidence, his idols’ effort to destroy the traces of their crimes was as imperfect and incomplete as any human endeavor.

That’s about what Mattogno has got to say regarding my narrative of cremation devices and procedures at Treblinka, except for pointing out another supposed contradiction ("the cremation installations at Chełmno are said to have been shielded even during the day for fear of observation by enemy airplanes, while at Treblinka the cremations proceeded safely even at night": the supposed contradiction can be explained by the fact that a) Chełmno was close to the large city of Łódź on territory annexed to the Reich whereas Treblinka was in the boondocks of the Generalgouvernement and/or b) Bednarz was referring to the ovens built in 1944 as suggested by a later quote of Mattogno’s^[43], i.e. to ovens built at a time when there was considerable enemy air activity over the area, whereas there was no such activity in 1942/43, when Treblinka was in operation) and producing the pearl quoted hereafter:

The reference to “cremation remains” is distinctly comical. He refers to the same sentence quoted in our study on Treblinka: “Dozens of witnesses attest to have seen how up to three transports of Jews, with 60 cars each, arrived in the camp on a daily basis. The trains left the camp either loaded with sand or empty.” This is quoted by Muehlenkamp on pp. 428f., where he espouses his deceptive argument concerning the “sand removed from the mass graves” during their excavation. In point 43 of chapter 11 I explained that this sand in reality came from the sand quarry at theTreblinka I labor camp. Muehlenkamp now hypocritically wants us to believe that the sand allegedly removed during the excavation of the future mass graves contained “cremation remains” even before the cremations had begun!

This in the context of my having mentioned that "Some of the cremation remains were taken away from the camp area, as is mentioned in the Soviet investigation report about Treblinka I and Treblinka II dated August 24, 1944.". Of course I was referring not to sand taken out of the camp by rail but to the following parts of the Soviet report quoted by Mattogno & Graf on pp. 78-80 of their Treblinka book^[44]:

A huge area of the camp was covered with cinders and ashes. The road, which connected the two camps and is three kilometers long, was covered with cinders and ashes to a height of 7 - 10 cm. One could recognize the presence of lime in large pieces of cinder with the naked eye. It is well known that lime is a product of burning bones. There were no production sites in the camp, but cinders and ashes were brought out of the camp every day by the ton. This freight was loaded onto railroad cars, and 20 to 30 peasant carts distributed them and poured them onto the road. (Witness testimony of Lucjan Puchała, Kazimierz Skarzinski. Stanisław Krym inter alia).

Mattogno again forgot to read (and think) before writing.

Notes

[1] Jonathan Harrison, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jason Myers, Sergey Romanov, Nicholas Terry, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard. A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues, A Holocaust Controversies White Paper, First Edition, December 2011, online i.a. under [link], hereinafter "Critique".
[2]The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers, 2013 Castle Hill Publishers, UK, online under [link], hereinafter "Extermination Camps".
[3]Notwithstanding Mattogno’s claim to the contrary (Extermination Camps, p. 1296), I have made no statement that would justify assuming that I believe myself to be an expert on the subject of cremation, and such cannot be simply inferred from my having tackled the subject.
[4]See the blog "Jürgen Graf at his best" ([link])
[5]Some weak spots of Mattogno’s cremation chapter, especially as concerns the cremations on the Dresden Altmarkt following the allied bombing attacks on 13/14 February 1945, have already been pointed out in discussions with Mattogno’s acolyte Friedrich Jansson – see, among others, the articles collected under the label "Dresden" ([link]).
[6]Addressed in the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 2)" ([link])
[7] H. Rothfels "Zur ‘Umsiedlung’ der Juden im Generalgouvernement", Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1959, Heft 3, pp.333-6. Cornides himself noticed an acrid burning odor when passing the camp by train.
[8] A. Silberschein, “Die Hölle von Belzec,” in: idem, Die Judenausrottung in Polen, vol. V, Geneva, 1944, p. 22.
[9]Mattogno, Bełżec in Propaganda, Testimonies, Archeological Research and History (online under [link]), pp. 14f.
[10]Deposition before examining judge Godziszewski in Zamość on 11.10.1945, BAL B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. VI, f. 1117-20, referred to in critique, note 5 on p. 441.
[11]Deposition of Jan Gląb on 16.10.1945, quoted in Robert Kuwałek, Das Vernichtungslager Bełżec, p. 235.
[12]Deposition of Edward Łuczyński, referred to in Kuwałek, Bełżec, p. 233. At Bełżec Father Patrick Desbois met the son of a man who "had seen the ash mills operating in the camp, old agricultural machines that were used to sort wheat from other grains. The Nazis used them to ventilate the ashes from the bodies, and to find dental gold." (Father Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets, p. 24).
[13]See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 5, Section 1)" ([link])
[14]So what? Every witness recalls what caught his interest, as already explained.
[15]Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, p. 172.
[16]See translated excerpt under [link].
[17]Andrzej Kola, ‘Badania archeologiczne terenu byłego obozu zagłady Żydów w Sobiborze w 2001 r’ (‘Archaeological Research of the Former Jew Extermination Camp at Sobibór in 2001’, Przeszłość i Pamięć. Biuletyn Rady Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa Nr. 4/21 z 2001 r, pp.115-123; descriptions of mass graves on pages 116/117. Translated into English by Katarzyna Piotrowska. The translation is available on the thread "Archaeological Research of the Former Jew Extermination Camp at Sobibor in 2001" ([link])
[18]See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 2)" ([link])
[19]Yoram Haimi, "Preliminary Report of Archaeological Excavations in the Sobibór Extermination Center November 2012 – May 2013" ([link])
[20]Yoram Haimi, "Sobibór Excavations Preliminary Report: Winter 2013 Season" ([link])
[21]"Mattogno on early cremation at Treblinka" ([link])
[22]Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, pp. 173f.
[23]Chil Rajchman, The Last Jew of Treblinka, translated from Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld, 2009 Pegasus Books, New York, pp. 85-88.
[24]Stangl is quoted in Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, pp. 173f.
[25]Justiz und NS Verbrechen (JuNSV), Bd. XXXIV (Urteil LG Düsseldorf vom 22.12.1970, 8 Ks 1/69; Lfd.Nr.746).
[26]Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung. Das T4-Reinhardt-Netzwerk in den Lagern Belzec, Sobibor und Treblinka, 2013 Hamburger Edition, pp. 210/211. Berger’s reconstruction of events is based on the following evidence, according to footnote 110 on pp. 548-549: testimonies of Elias Rosenberg, 24.12.1947, Franz Suchomel 14.9.1967, Sholomo Hellmann, 21.12.1959, Jakob Wiernik, 1./2.10.1964, Szyja Warszawski, 9.10.1945, Stanislaw Kohn, 7.10.1945, Heniek Sperling, August 1950, Gustav Münzberger, 14.5.1964 and 24.6.1970; Rajchman, Ich bin der letzte Jude (German edition of Rajchman’s The last Jew of Treblinka, p. 113.
[27]JuNSV, Bd. XXII (Urteil LG Düsseldorf vom 3.9.1965, 8 I Ks 2/64; Lfd.Nr.596).
[28]Deposition of former Ukrainian guard Pavel Vladimirovich Leleko on 20.02.1945, English translation online under [link] and [link]. Leleko’s description of the facility reads as follows: "An incinerator from the burning of bodies was situated about 10 meters beyond the large gas chamber building. It had the shape of a cement pit about one meter deep and 20 meters long. A series of furnaces covered on the top with four rows of rails extended along the entire length of one of the walls of the pit. The bodies were laid on the rails, caught fire from the flames burning in the furnaces and burned. About 1000 bodies were burned simultaneously. The burning process lasted up to five hours."
[29]"Incinerating corpses on a grid is a rather inefficient method" ([link])
[30]See the blog "Dr. Joachim Neander responds to Carlo Mattogno regarding the September 1941 gassing in Block 11 of Auschwitz" ([link])
[31]Mattogno’s attack on this reasoning (or better, his ad hominem against who proposed it) deserves to be quoted because its puerility is extraordinary even by Mattogno’s standards: "only Muehlenkamp could have confused some “furnaces,” which could have been such only if they were single structures closed from three sides like the Fuel Efficient Crematorium (see Illustration 12.11), with simple “subdivisions of the pit by concrete blocks placed at certain intervals across the pit.”". The issue here is not any "confusion", but that the guard Leleko, presumably a simple fellow, could well have used the term "furnaces" for the subdivisions of the pit because that’s what they looked like to him, rather than sticking with Mattogno’s strict definition of what constitutes a furnace.
[32]See Rolf Bender and Armin Nack, Tatsachenfeststellung vor Gericht - Band I: Glaubwürdigkeits- und Beweislehre, marginal note (Randnummer) 137 (translated as Excerpt 2 in the HC reference library thread "Guidelines for assessing eyewitness testimonies" ([link])
[33]The existence of a shallow pit (eine flache Grube) underneath the rails is also assumed by Sara Berger (Experten der Vernichtung, p. 212). Berger describes the cremation facilities as up to 30 meters long and one and a half to two meters wide, and states that there were four to six such facilities on which more than 5,000 corpses were burned every day. At this pace, the burning of about 800,000 corpses, which Berger estimates to have been lying in the mass graves at the beginning of 1943 (p. 210) was nearly completed between late February and August of 1943.
[34]"Here Muehlenkamp offers another example of his shrewd method: If “extermination camp” witness testimonies present numerical contradictions, one can find the truth simply by calculating the arithmetic average of the different values. According to this logic – for instance – if Gerstein speaks of gas chambers filled with 750 people and Pfannenstiel for the same alleged event indicates a maximum number of 125, one can deduct that a “gas chamber” contained [(750 + 125) ÷ 2] ca. 437 persons!"
[35]See Critique, note 36 on p. 447.
[36]See Critique, p. 480.
[37]A case in point is the normally fed minority of Leningrad inhabitants during the German siege, see the blogs "On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (5.1)" ([link]) and "Jansson on 1942 births in Leningrad" ([link]).
[38]The Last Jew, p. 77.
[39]Yitzhak Arad, "Die ‘Aktion Reinhard’: Gaskammern in Ostpolen," in: Eugen Kogon et al. (eds.), Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, pp. 189f.
[40]Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, p. 174.
[41]The Last Jew, p. 87.
[42]Jankiel Wiernik "One Year in Treblinka", in: The Death Camp Treblinka. A Documentary, edited by Alexander Donat, New York 1979, pages 147 to 188.
[43]On p. 1358 Mattogno provides the following quote of Bednarz, regarding the 1944 ovens: "When the ovens were not in function, they were camouflaged in order to hide them from above for fear of aerial attacks. Over the funnel of the ovens (“ponad lejem pieców”) railway tracks of ca. 15 meters were put and above them iron sheets and foliage (Bruno Israel – 394)".
[44]Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf, Treblinka – Vernichtungslager oder Durchgangslager?, Castle Hill Publishers, Hastings 2002. English version: Treblinka – Extermination Camp or Transit Camp, Theses & Dissertation Press, Chicago 2003. Online: [link].

Cremation Devices, Methods and TimesChełmno – Documents and Eyewitness Testimonies

From the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps we move to Chełmno extermination camp, regarding which Mattogno starts (p. 1322) by congratulating himself on the fact that the critique did not dispute his "demonstration" that 7,176 Jews deported from Łódź to Chełmno and killed there between June 23 and July 14, 1944 did not actually arrive at Chełmno. I’ll take that as a reminder for a future blog and/or the critique’s second edition.



Then he addresses my narrative of cremation procedures at Chełmno. On pp. 450-51 of the critique I had mentioned two failed cremation experiments at that camp by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel within the context of Aktion 1005, one with a device having the aspect of a round coal furnace (Kohlenmeiler) and another with a with a flamethrower-like apparatus. I had also deducted from accounts by former Chełmno staff member Fritz Ismer and former police officer Frank Sch., as well as references to accounts about burning corpses in bonfires by archaeologist Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak, that a procedure for burning corpses on grids inside pits had eventually been adopted, with or without Blobel’s contribution.

Mattogno focuses on Blobel’s failed cremation experiments, providing a detailed description and large illustration of the functioning of a charcoal kiln, and arguing that as the structure of this device "prohibited continuous cremation", it is unlikely that it would have been tested by the SS for the purpose of mass cremation. He adds a claim that Dejaco’s testimony describing this device contradicts his travel report of 17 September 1942, which suggests a different "special facility" (Sonderanlage). Then he quotes and translates parts of Ismer’s testimony, including the description of another device that Blobel unsuccessfully experimented with (a device comparable to an "enlarged soldering lamp"), and culminating with what I consider Ismer’s key statement, the one that the Chełmno staff eventually "developed a certain technique for the corpse cremation on the grates". Mattogno tries to detract the reader’s attention from this statement by making a fuss about how ridiculous Blobel’s device described by Ismer was (p. 1325) ^[45] and accusing me of having deliberately omitted Ismer’s supposed statement whereby "this was the only device ever tested by Blobel in Chełmno" (as if I had tried to make a case that Blobel conducted more than one failed cremation experiment at Chełmno, or as if a contradiction between various descriptions of failed cremation experiments that I spent a single sentence on were detrimental to my argument). As Mattogno brought this up, his own reading of Ismer’s quoted testimony leaves much to be desired, for Ismer merely stated that he had not heard of further cremation experiments by Blobel, which does not exclude the possibility that such experiments took place; it might just mean that Ismer didn’t hear of them or didn’t attribute them to Blobel.

Mattogno’s accusation is followed by some of his "the Germans wouldn’t have done it that way"– rhetoric, as he professes his incredulity about Blobel not having heard about those wonderful cremation ovens installed by or ordered from J.A. Topf & Söhne at or for Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Maybe Mattogno should bear in mind that Blobel was in charge of an operation that involved opening mass graves and cremating corpses at a large number of Nazi killing sites, and that building cremation ovens by J.A. Topf & Söhne at each such site would hardly have been an expedient let alone a cost-efficient solution, hence the preference for improvised open-air cremation devices.

Following this showpiece of ill-reasoning and some further irrelevant mumblings, Mattogno again projects one of his favorite activities as he accuses me (pp. 1326f.) of having "lied again", this time by distorting the testimony of Franz Sch(alling), "which in fact reads as follows: […]“Shortly afterwards the graves had to be opened by the Jewish commando. In the meantime three or four pits with the dimensions of 5 m in length, 4 m in width and 3 m in depth had already been dug. In these pits the corpses extracted from the mass graves were placed in layers, sprinkled over with a powder and set on fire. Later some craftsmen additionally constructed a big furnace with a 4 to 5 m high chimney, and further corpses were burned therein. The pits and the furnace burned day and night.”"

This is supposed to show that "the cremation pits had no grids" according to Schalling, to whom I am supposed to have falsely attributed a statement that they did. Actually what I did (as becomes clear from what I wrote on p. 450 of the critique^[46]) was put two and two together, which Mattogno seems incapable of doing or unwilling to do. Ismer mentioned cremation on grids. Schalling mentioned cremation in pits. He didn’t mention grids, but neither does his above-quoted statement rule out that the corpses were placed in layers on grids inside the pits. As it is improbable that both methods (cremation on grids and cremation in pits) were applied simultaneously or subsequently, I concluded that the method must have been burning on grids (as described by Ismer) placed inside pits (as described by Schalling). In his instructive eagerness to smear his opponent, Mattogno again made a fool of himself.

As if he enjoyed such exercise, Mattogno then incomprehensibly accuses me of "again" altering the contents of my quoted sources (here I’m at loss about what the poet might be trying to tell us) and with a lecturing finger raised high provides a quote of what Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak "in fact" wrote, including the key passage mentioning "repetitive accounts about burning corpses in bonfires, which took place in the initial phase of opening the mass graves and was aimed at quick liquidation of the decomposing bodies", which I had already quoted myself, to then ask from what one could deduce that these "bonfires" were equipped with roasters. Simple answer to an unintelligent question: from the testimony of Fritz Ismer, also quoted by Mattogno himself.

On page 450 of the critique, I had incidentally remarked that Blobel seems to have claimed credit for the method of cremating corpses on roasters (mentioned by Ismer, who didn’t attribute it to Blobel), judging by Treblinka commandant Stangl’s recalling to have been told about the experience of a Standartenführer whereby "corpses could be burned on a roaster, and it would work marvelously". I had added that said Standartenführer must have been Blobel, "as is further corroborated by the fact that the method of burning on roasters was adopted not only at the Aktion Reinhard camps but also by Blobel himself at places like Babi Yar, where the corpses were cremated on funeral pyres built on iron rails". Mattogno makes a major issue out of these remarks, arguing that Blobel would have "had already on his track record two dysfunctional cremation systems", that the only innovation introduced by Blobel in relation to the method already in use at Treblinka would have been the use of railway rails instead of trolley rails, and that at the Einsatzgruppen killing site in Paneriai (Ponar) near Vilnius, according to the witnesses Motke Zaidl and Itzhak Dugin, the cremation on pyres lasted for seven to eight days, as opposed to the 10 to 14 that was "supposedly" the duration of one pyre in Bełżec. If Zaidl and Dugin were referring to the time it took for a single pyre of corpses to burn down, as opposed to the duration of the whole cremation operation, the structure of the pyres at Paneriai must indeed have been different from that at Bełżec and the other camps of Aktion Reinhard(t) - but then, contrary to what Mattogno tries to make believe, I didn’t claim that the structure was identical. There is more than one way of burning corpses on roasters. What is noteworthy about Mattogno’s comparison is that he seems to have no reservations as concerns the factuality of the Einsatzgruppen killing site in Paneriai, for the moronic "alleged" qualifier is conspicuously missing in regard thereto.

Besides the pits (in which I assumed that corpses had been burned, pursuant to Ismer’s testimony), Franz Schalling mentioned "a big furnace with a 4 to 5 m high chimney". As to the start of cremations at Chełmno, I had written (p. 450) that they had started in the summer of 1942 and been extended to corpses previously buried in mass graves in the autumn of that year^[47]. Along with some wisecracking about my labeling of the source as "Central Commission, Chełmno" (small things worry small people’s minds), Mattogno points out that this timing is contradicted by Judge Bednarz, who in a article about the camp published by the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland^[48] had written that in the spring of 1942 two crematoria had been built, about which it had not been possible to establish details because those who lived near the camp "had only noticed two constantly smoking chimneys within the enclosure". This in turn is supposed to be contradicted by German author Jens Hoffmann, who in his book about Aktion 1005^[49] mentioned that in the summer of 1942 camp commandant Bothmann had with Blobel’s support ordered the construction of a field furnace, described as a pit about 4 meters long and wide and 2 meters deep with iron rails^[50]. The description brings to mind Ismer’s statement about burning of corpses on grids and refers to a device different from the crematoria with chimneys mentioned by Bednarz, matching Schalling’s testimony whereby corpses were burned both in pits and in a crematorium with a chimney, except that Schalling mentioned several pits (instead of the one field oven described by Hoffmann) and only one crematorium with a chimney (as opposed to the two mentioned by Bednarz). The latter, according to Bednarz as quoted by Mattogno, were blown up by the camp authorities on April 7, 1943, and replaced by two new ones in 1944, when the camp activities were resumed. These two new ovens, whose description, according to Mattogno, shows that they were "actually based on the principle of the Feist oven", bear no relation whatsoever to the field furnace described by Hoffmann, and nobody claimed that Blobel had anything to do with their construction. Mattogno, who apparently failed to notice this, embarrasses himself by asking (p. 1331) yet another of his not-so-bright questions:

If this crematory oven was invented as a consequence of Blobel’s "cremation tests, " why then, in contrast to "the method of burning on roasters," was it not adopted at the Aktion Reinhard camps or at places like Babi Yar?

Summarizing a previous blog^[51], I had on page 453 of the critique referred to Mattogno’s attempt to make believe that two incriminating documents, Dejaco’s report of 17 September 1942 and the corresponding travel authorization of 15 September 1942, were not related to Chełmno. I had further pointed out the falsity of Mattogno’s claims that Auschwitz-Birkenau commandant Rudolf Höss’s account of his trip to Kulmhof (Chełmno), written in Polish captivity, was the only evidence about Blobel’s activities at Chełmno (there are also other witnesses mentioning Blobel’s presence), and must be false because Höss is supposed to have incorrectly stated that Kulmhof was no longer in operation (the statement was correct in the sense that deportations to Kulmhof had ceased prior to Höss’s visit on 16 September 1942). Incredibly, Mattogno responds to these assertions by claiming (p. 1331) that "The whole quoted passage does not refer to any of my texts.". This statement is stunning because the statements I attributed to Mattogno can be clearly identified on page 76 and on pp. 78-79 of the English version of Mattogno’s book about Chełmno^[52] (the aforementioned blog referred to the Italian version^[53]). If Mattogno just wished to express that his vanity was hurt because I referred to the Italian version of the above-quoted passages not directly but via a blog in which the same was discussed in detail, his statement is at least deliberately misleading. If he meant to say that he never produced these claims and arguments, that’s a brazen (and rather unintelligent) lie.

Following this inauspicious beginning, Mattogno goes into a long exercise of beating about the bush. He begins by quoting or referring to three statements by Judge Bednarz, one that dates the building of two cremation ovens to the spring of 1942, a second whereby cremation started in the summer of 1942 (due to a typhus epidemic caused by the "large amount of rotting corpses") and two crematoria with chimneys that "towered above the forest" were built at that time, and a third that "again with certainty placed the commencement of cremations in the spring of 1942" (Mattogno). Mattogno asks on what basis on can make the choice "between these two contradicting dates" (spring or summer of 1942), a question that is not as hard to answer as Mattogno tries to make believe. First of all, the various versions produced by Judge Bednarz suggest that the witnesses he interrogated were uncertain about whether the cremations had started in the spring or in the summer, or then some recalled spring whereas others recalled summer. Second, there would have been no need for replacing burial by cremation in the spring, considering that the hygienic problems associated to rotting corpses would arise in hot rather than in cold weather. Third, there is independent corroboration for the summer timing by witnesses not interrogated by Bednarz, such as Fritz Ismer and Frank Schalling. Ismer dated Blobel’s visit to the late summer of 1942, and his account suggests that the successful method of burning corpses on grids was implemented at that time or later. Schalling was also very clear in this respect: he stated that the opening of the mass graves began in the summer of 1942, vividly recalling that in the summer months of 1942 he had seen blood or a similar liquid emanate from one of the graves during guard duty, that shortly thereafter the graves were opened by the Jewish inmates and the corpses had been burned in pits, later also in a huge oven with a chimney 4 to 5 meters high^[54]. So the summer 1942 dating stands by far the better chances of being the correct time, the only remaining contradiction being the number of ovens with chimneys: was there only one of them as recalled by Schalling, or were there two as recalled by the witnesses interrogated by Judge Bednarz?

Another contradiction, "far more serious" and "insurmountable" to Mattogno’s mind, is supposed to exist as concerns the purpose of cremations: were they carried out for hygienic-sanitary reasons, as assumed by Bednarz, or were they part of an "alleged" project aimed at the erasure of criminal traces, as is maintained by "today’s orthodox historians" like Shmuel Krakowski, quoted by Mattogno? Where Mattogno sees an "insurmountable" contradiction, a reasonable person will ask: why not both? And while Mattogno will dismiss such reasoning as "childish" without further ado, the fact remains that a killing site where large numbers of corpses had to be burned for hygienic reasons already was an ideal experimentation ground, moreover close to a major city on territory of the Reich, for the man who had been entrusted with removing the traces of the Nazis’ murder operations throughout Eastern Europe, SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel. Here he could establish and test the methods he would later apply elsewhere, and help the Chełmno staff solve their problem as he was at it. That answers Mattogno’s question about what the purpose of Blobel’s experiments was. As to why they were entrusted to him, the answer is that they probably weren’t. What had been entrusted to Blobel was Aktion 1005, for which he had chosen Chełmno as his testing ground.

The next page or so of Mattogno’s wisdom is dedicated to a lecture about the history of devices for the "problem of mass cremations for hygienic-sanitary reasons", from a "Field Oven for the cremation of corpses System Friedrich Siemens" to the "Continuously operating corpse cremation furnace for mass operation" conceived by "the head engineer of the Topf company Fritz Sander". Rather than indulge in such techno-babble, Mattogno should try to explain why there was a hygienic-sanitary problem requiring mass cremations at a place called Chełmno. What kind of a place was this, which produced so many corpses that their burial caused hygienic-sanitary problems and therefore mass cremation had to be resorted to? Needless to say, Mattogno is not interested in answering relevant questions like this one, but prefers to ask pointless questions of the "the Germans wouldn’t have done it that way"– variety, in this case the question why the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, entrusted "the task of performing mass cremation tests" to Blobel, "whose only professional experience was that of a mason and architect", and not to engineer Kurt Prüfer of the J.A. Topf & Söhne company of Erfurt, "who at that time supervised the construction of the cremation ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was among the leading German specialists with regard to cremations".

Well, first of all Blobel was Müller’s subordinate, whereas Prüfer wasn’t. Second, Blobel had not been tasked with performing mass cremation tests, but with performing mass cremations at a large number of killing sites throughout Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Prüfer was a specialist in building cremation ovens, but (as mentioned before) it would have been hardly expedient, let alone cost-effective, to set up cremation ovens built by Topf & Söhne at all the sites where Aktion 1005 was meant to be carried out. When large numbers of corpses or carcasses have to be disposed of within a short time, makeshift open-air incineration methods (which can be set up on site rather quickly and using easy to procure materials) produce better results than specially built cremation ovens (especially when such don’t exist already but have to be ordered, engineered and built first), which is why the former and not the latter were used to dispose of mass mortality during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Epidemic in the UK.

The next paragraph of Mattogno’s writing (p. 1334):

The only fact certain is that Blobel’s alleged activity in Chełmno is not corroborated by any document, but only by mere testimonies, namely those of Rudolf Höss, the tortured commander of Auschwitz (“confirmed,” considerably later, by Walter Dejaco), Franz Schalling and Fritz Ismer.

is a slight improvement over Mattogno’s earlier writings, which only mentioned Höss and Dejaco^[55]. But only a slight improvement. Mattogno omitted at least two other witnesses to Blobel’s activities at Chełmno: Franz Halle, a former member of Sonderkommando 4a requisitioned by Blobel to assist him, and Blobel’s driver Julius Bauer^[56]. And "mere" testimonies provided by various witnesses independently of each other are solid evidence in the real world, as opposed to Mattogno’s fantasy world where only a document counts as proof. Documentary evidence is not missing either, unless one shuts down logical thinking when looking at SS - Untersturmführer Walter Dejaco’s travel report dated 17 September 1942. And as to the "tortured" commandant of Auschwitz, it is true that Höss was tortured by his British captors in March 1946, but his writings quoted by Mattogno in this context were written in Polish captivity, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that Höss was tortured there. Quite the contrary, Höss’s Polish interrogators seems to have allowed him to state and write what he saw fit, even to challenge Soviet and Polish estimates about the number of people killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau^[57].

Mattogno goes on to do one of the rare useful things he does in MGK’s magnum opus (or in his writings in general, for that matter), which is to quote at length Dejaco’s "Report on the Mission to Łódź" (Reisebericht über die Dienstfahrt nach Litzmannstadt) dated 17 September 1942 and a travel permit for a trip from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Łódź dated 15 September 1942. The former document mentions as purpose of the trip the "inspection of a special installation" (Besichtigung einer Sonderanlage). The key passage of the report reads as follows: "Es erfolgte eine Besichtigung des Gettos, anschließend Fahrt zur Sonderanlage. Besichtigung der Sonderanlage und Besprechung mit SS-Standartenführer Blobel über die Ausführung einer derartigen Anlage." ("A visit to the ghetto took place, followed by a trip to the special installation. Inspection of the special installation and discussion with SS-Standartenführer Blobel about the design of such an installation."). It follows from this passage that SS-Standartenführer Blobel was somehow related to the design of this "special installation". Contrary to what one would expect from a report about a service trip (presumably meant to inform superiors about events during and/or the results of such trip), the "special installation" is nowhere described or identified in the report, which means that the nature of the "special installation" was a matter of secrecy. The only hint at what the "special installation" was comes from the aforementioned travel permit, which was granted for the inspection of "the experimental station for field ovens Aktion Reinhard" (Besichtigung der Versuchstation für Feldöfen Aktion Reinhard). So the "special installation" was a) a matter of secrecy and b) an experimental station for certain field ovens, i.e. for cremation devices. Now, why on earth would an experimental station for field ovens be a matter of secrecy? It can hardly have been a military secret, and besides neither of the participants in the trip and the inspection was involved in military matters. It must thus have been something that, if it became known to the enemy, could be detrimental to the reputation of the German Reich and used for enemy propaganda against the same. And what could that possibly be, other than an experimental station for field ovens meant to dispose of the bodies of mass murder victims?

Add to the above the fact that several witnesses (Rudolf Höss and the "belated" Dejaco, Fritz Ismer, Franz Halle, Julius Bauer) independently of each other (except for Dejaco’s confirming Höss’s account) linked SS-Standartenführer Blobel to experiments regarding the cremation of mass murder victims at Chełmno extermination camp, and that there is ample other evidence to mass murder and the cremation of mass murder victims at that camp but no evidence whatsoever whereby Chełmno was anything other than an extermination camp or there was a "special installation" that would have been of interest to people like Höss and Dejaco and linked to Standartenführer Blobel anywhere else in the Łódź area, and the conclusion is inescapable that the aforementioned documents referred to the inspection at Chełmno of some sort of experimental device for the mass cremation of murdered human beings. It takes a lot of mental gymnastics and willful blindness to not reach this conclusion, but of course Mattogno is a specialist in both.

So, rather than ask the pertinent question what, other than a cremation device related to mass murder, the "special installation" could possibly have been, Mattogno asks questions that are either false dilemmas or irrelevant to the essential matter at hand. Abundantly making use of rhetoric, he dresses up these questions (p. 1337) as being "a pivotal historical problem of crucial importance" which has "devastating consequences for the orthodox exterminationist version of events". Much ado about nothing. The oh-so-"pivotal" questions, by which Mattogno tries to obfuscate the obvious conclusions about the aforementioned documents, are the following: "if the “Feldöfen Aktion Reinhard” were really built at Chełmno and if they were cremation facilities built by Blobel: a) Why were they tested and built in Chełmno instead of Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka or Majdanek, that is in the actual camps of “Aktion Reinhardt”? b) What relation exists between these facilities and Auschwitz?"

First of all, Mattogno’s "pivotal" questions are based on a false assumption: nobody has to my knowledge claimed that the cremation installations used at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps were built at Chełmno, or that they were cremation facilities built by Blobel. The cremation roasters used at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka were built on site, according to a method that may first have been tested by Blobel at Chełmno, that’s all. Accordingly the travel permit dated 15 September 1942 wasn’t for the inspection of "field ovens Aktion Reinhard", but for the inspection of an "experimental station for field ovens Aktion Reinhard" (emphasis added). Big difference. Chełmno was not a place where devices to be used elsewhere were built, but a place where devices to be set up elsewhere were meant to be tested. Why Chełmno? We don’t know and probably never will, but a possible reason is that Chełmno was the first camp where a) mass extermination on a large scale had been practiced and b) the need to dispose of a large number of buried human bodies by cremation, moreover within a short time that didn’t allow the wait for industrial cremation installations that had to be ordered from civilian companies and designed and built by them, had arisen. Additionally it was close to the big city of Łódź on territory of the Reich, which may have meant more expedient solving of administrative and logistical problems than could be achieved in the Generalgouvernement, where the camps of Aktion Reinhard(t) were located. As to the relation between the Chełmno facilities and Auschwitz, that is also easily explained: just like at Chełmno, though starting somewhat later, large numbers of human beings had been murdered there, thus creating a body disposal problem that the murderers first tried to solve by burying the corpses in mass graves, only to be confronted with the hygienic-sanitary problems that the decomposition of these corpses in the summer heat generated. The problem had to be solved quickly and couldn’t wait for what solutions to increase crematoria capacity the ingenious engineers of J. Topf & Söhne might come up with, negotiate with the Auschwitz-Birkenau construction office, design and build – a process that could and did take months, which is why Mattogno’s asking (p. 1338) why Höss went to look how Blobel was doing at Chełmno, instead of turning "to the most important German cremation company (Topf) and an undisputed cremation expert (Prüfer)", is pretty stupid and further evidence that Mattogno doesn’t live in the real world.

So Höss was looking for a procedure that would allow him to quickly get rid of the tens of thousands of stinking bodies in the mass graves at Birkenau, a problem that couldn’t be solved within the required short time by increasing the number of the camp’s cremation muffles let alone by waiting for the design of novel mass cremation solutions proposed by Topf and Söhne. Mattogno even mentions the dates on which the projects for these novel solutions were submitted ("This is proven by at least three projects for field ovens elaborated by Topf for Auschwitz: the “Circular incineration oven [Ring-Einäscherungs-Ofen]” (5 February 1943), “crematorium VI” (12 February 1943), and the already mentioned oven referred to in the cost estimate of 1 April 1943"), without drawing the obvious conclusion that the corpses in the Birkenau mass graves, which started creating hygienic-sanitary problems in the summer of 1942, couldn’t be left creating such problems until Prüfer’s fantastic "circular incineration oven" started operating sometime in late 1943 or even 1944 (it was actually never ordered, and even the comparatively makeshift solution of the 46 Birkenau muffles wasn’t fully operational before mid-1943).

The need for a quick fix to the problem of the Birkenau pits was one of the reasons why Höss went to Chełmno, in order to benefit from Blobel’s presumed experience in mass cremation facilities that could be set up and put to work with the required speed. As suggested by passages of Dejaco’s report about the delivery to Auschwitz of a Kugelmühle für Substanzen, i.e. a "ball mill for substances", Höss was also interested in a device for the further reduction of cremation remains. Whether what he saw at Chełmno convinced him that Blobel had what met the needs of Auschwitz-Birkenau, or whether Höss eventually decided that he could do better with methods of his own, is another matter. The latter seems to have been the case, and it would not be the first time that an official makes a trip to see whether the methods applied by a colleague serve his needs, only to then decide that they don’t and apply methods of his own. Such hindsight doesn’t make the official’s prospection trip into a "tourist trip", contrary to yet another of Mattogno’s unworldly remarks (p. 1340).

Not content with his mental gymnastics so far, Mattogno asks further pointless questions (p. 1340):

If Blobel had tested the “field furnaces Aktion Reinhard” at Chełmno with success, as follows from that fact that they were, as stated in the Dejaco report, immediately ordered also for Auschwitz, then why was this method of cremation not introduced in the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps? Why did the choice instead fall on “the method of burning on roasters” allegedly adopted “not only at the Aktion Reinhard camps but also by Blobel himself at places like Babi Yar”?

Well, if Höss eventually changed his mind about the suitability of Blobel’s "experimental station" for his mass cremation needs, it stands to reason that others might not consider it suitable as well. The method that proved successful after some experience had been gained, according to Fritz Ismer, was one of burning corpses on grids or grates. It is therefore no surprise that this method was later applied at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps. Mattogno’s next pointless question:

Furthermore, since Blobel claims to have obtained his order from Heinrich Müller in June 1942, why was the method of cremating the victims adopted only much later and in addition also at different periods of time for all the three main camps of the “Aktion Reinhardt”?

is also easy to answer: because it takes some time after the giving of an order before a suitable method is a) worked out and b) brought home to all who have a problem calling for application of such method. An additional reason may have been that digging up decomposing corpses from mass graves is not a pleasant task for the supervisors even if they have slave laborers to do the job, so they will postpone this unpleasantness unless there is a pressing need to get rid of decomposing bodies, like there was at Chełmno and at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Yet another possible reason, from the point of view of the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps’ staff, is offered by Sara Berger^[58]:

Maybe the sense of the operation – hygienic considerations aside – was also not clear to the men. While there were doubts about the Third Reich’s superiority and victory after the defeat at Stalingrad, it was more than questionable whether the murder of millions of Jews, in which thousands of perpetrators had participated and which large parts of the population were informed about, could even be concealed by burning the corpses. The fact alone that corpses were being burned in Belzec was widely known: the flames could be seen as far as far as Tomaszów Lubelski and Rawa Ruska, and the mordant smoke went over the villages.

Skipping a remark that was already addressed before (the need to cremate corpses of murder victims for hygienic-sanitary reasons made Chełmno a suitable testing ground for Blobel’s experiments in the context of Aktion 1005), I move to Mattogno’s concluding statement in this section of his utterances, which reads as follows:

Partly due to his ineptitude, and partly due to his desperation, poor Muehlenkamp does not even attempt to raise these pivotal questions. He merely settles for a superficial and childish discussion.

It would rather be appropriate to say that, partly due to his ineptitude and quixotic worldview, and partly due to his desperation in the face of inconvenient evidence, Mattogno tries to sell as "pivotal" a number of rather pointless questions, in order to obfuscate the questions he should answer but prefers to avoid – especially the question why on earth a cremation device was a secret matter that could not be described more precisely in Dejaco’s travel report of 17 September 1942.

Yet the beating-about-the-bush considerations discussed above, which take up a full 9 pages (1332 to 1340) of MGK’s magnum opus, are merely "indispensable preliminary remarks" according to Mattogno. The discussion of my critique is supposed to follow.
Mattogno commences the discussion referring to remarks in his Chełmno book whereby "no document proves that a “special facility [Sonderanlage]” corresponding to the “field furnaces Aktion Reinhard” existed at Chełmno". That is true insofar as the Sonderanlage described by Dejaco in his travel report of 17 September 1942 was but an "experimental station" for the "field furnaces Aktion Reinhard", as mentioned above. Mattogno claims that "this" (the nonexistence of a document proving a "special facility" corresponding to the "field furnaces Aktion Reinhard") already follows from Höss’s notes written in Polish captivity, whereby Blobel "had ordered various makeshift ovens to be built and used wood and petroleum refinery byproducts for the incineration". Why these makeshift ovens could not have been the "field furnaces Aktion Reinhard" (or better, the experimental station for these field furnaces), Mattogno doesn’t explain. He then quotes another statement of Höss whereby the commandant of Auschwitz saw "the extermination installations with the trucks, which were adapted for killing with engine exhaust gases", and yet another whereby Culmhof (Chełmno) "was no longer in operation" at the time of Höss’s visit.

The last of these statements gets Mattogno’s special attention because I had argued, on p. 454 of the critique, that transports to Chełmno stopped following the deportation of 15,700 Jews from the Łódź ghetto between September 1-2 and September 7-12, 1942, and a final deportation from the Zelów ghetto on 14 September 1942, after which the camp was dedicated to removing the bodies. Mattogno objects that according to Krakowski the transports to Chełmno ceased in March 1943, and that according to the Bonn Jury Court there were "only a few transports" from the end of 1942 until spring 1943. If so, this doesn’t change the fact that major deportations to Chełmno ceased before Höss arrived at the camp, and doesn’t preclude the possibility of Höss having gained the impression that Chełmno had ceased killing operations, or having been told by his Chełmno interlocutors that they expected no further transports to arrive.

Mattogno’s next objection is that, as 6,000 Jews were deported to Chełmno on 14 September 1942, Höss could only have failed to notice killing operations if 3,000 deportees had been killed on each of the days preceding his arrival, 14 and 15 September 1942. This Mattogno considers improbable (p. 1342):

Adopting Judge Bednarz’s verdict that the “gas vans [Gaswagen]” had a capacity of 150 persons for the bigger model and 100 for the smaller, 2962 one trip using both vehicles would have handled a total of 250 persons, and thus 6,000 victims would have required a total of ([6,000 ÷250] × 2 =) 48 such trips or 24 each on 14 and 15 September.

However, Chełmno extermination camp didn’t only have two gas vans at its disposal. Just’s letter to Rauff of 5 June 1942^[59], which refers to operations at Chełmno^[60], mentions three and not two vans. Gas van driver Walter Burmeister mentioned two medium-size Renault trucks with Otto engines and a third heavy van that was added temporarily^[61]. If the larger truck had a capacity of 150 persons and the two smaller ones could carry 100 persons each, then a total of 350 persons could be "processed" in one trip, and to handle 3,000 deportees each van had to make about nine round trips in one day (if only one large and one small van carrying 250 deportees had been available, 12 round trips per van each day would have been required). This means that wiping out 6,000 people on 14 and 15 September 1942, so that a visitor on 16 September would not notice any killing operations, was well within the camp’s possibilities.

Yet Mattogno considers 3,000 killed per day excessive, and to support this claim he invokes the fact that "the 70,000 Łódź Jews allegedly scheduled for extermination in August 1944 were sent to Auschwitz because “the possibilities of Kulmhof would not have been sufficient for the killing of tens of thousands within a very short period of time", which he argues would not have been the case if Chełmno had had a capacity of 3,000 killed per day. What Mattogno doesn’t tell his readers is that the Chełmno camp had been dismantled in April 1943 and briefly reopened on a smaller scale in June 1944, and that during this second phase it never handled more than 700 deportees per day^[62].

Mattogno refers to his calculations, which are based on the false postulate that Chełmno had the same cremation capacity in the 1st phase of its operation (1942/43) as in the 2nd phase (1944/45), when cremation facilities consisted only of two ovens described by witnesses Zurawski and Srebrnik. For the 2nd phase ovens I had calculated a capacity of 576 corpses within 24 hours, considerably lower than the cremation capacity during the 1st phase (Critique, pp. 503f.). Mattogno argues that even with the "absurd" capacity I had calculated for the 2nd phase ovens (mind that we’re talking about the 1st phase here), burning 6,000 corpses would have taken ca. 10.5 days, so Höss arriving on 16 September 1942 would have seen cremation "in full swing" and not assumed that the camp was no longer in operation. The argument is moot as corpse cremation was precisely what Höss had come to Chełmno to witness, and his statement whereby the camp was no longer in operation can therefore only refer to killing operations having ceased.

Mattogno argues that Höss could have learned about the end of killing operations at Chełmno only from the camp’s commandant, who could not look into the future. Certainly not, but he could have been informed by his superiors that the limited task that Chełmno had been created for – liquidating the ghettos in the Warthegau– had been completed with the deportations on 14 September 1942. Mattogno further argues that not even the commandant’s seniors could have known that there would be no further deportations, "as is apparent by the fact that they kept the camp in operation for some seven more months". This argument is also moot because a) there were cleanup and dismantling tasks that had to be performed after the end of deportations, and b) the commandant’s seniors may at some later stage (after they had informed the camp commandant that there would be no further deportations) have changed their minds about dissolving the camp and decided to maintain it a little longer. What is known for fact is that, in Gauleiter Arthur Greiser’s letter to Himmler dated 1 May 1942^[63], Greiser predicted that

The operation of special treatment of some 100,000 Jews in my governmental area, as approved by you in agreement with the Head of the Imperial Security Main Office, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, will be finished within the next 2-3 months.

Mattogno’s next shot as concerns Höss is the following argument:

Since the travel permit (Fahrgenehmigung) was introduced as evidence during the Höss trial and the Dejaco letter was then already known as document NO-4467, it is plausible that the Auschwitz commander tried in some way to explain these two documents.

That may be so, but why on earth would Höss provide a false explanation, predating a trip to Chełmno that had actually taken place at a later stage? What could he possibly have expected to gain thereby?

Next I’m accused of having omitted "two rather relevant facts". One is supposed to be that according to Reitlinger, Blobel had, when interrogated at Nuremberg "described this place as a ‘disused Jewish cemetery near Lodz.’", which in Mattogno’s mind "is perfectly coherent with the travel permit mentioned above, which refers to a trip “from Auschwitz to Litzmannstadt and back [von Au. nach Litzmannstadt und zurück].”" Honest-as-ever Mattogno omits the context of the quoted passage, which shows what Reitlinger thought of Blobel’s claim:

And it was at Chelmno, the earliest of the Pharaonic tombs, that Blobel’s ‘Commando 1005’ began its operations.
When interrogated at Nuremberg, Blobel delicately described this place as a ‘disused Jewish cemetery near Lodz,’ but it was at Chelmno that Höss visited Blobel on September 17th, 1942, to observe his ineffective attempts at eliminating mass graves by dynamite^[64].

Blobel’s claim (which may have been ironic) is at odds with several eyewitness testimonies independent of each other that place him at Chełmno, and also with the travel permit of 15.9.1942 and the travel report of 17.9.1942 if read in context and with the proper focus, as I demonstrated above. It can therefore be dismissed. Nevertheless, Blobel may not have been so far off as concerns the proximity of a disused Jewish cemetery, as is suggested by the following information:

In the forest near the main Chełmno memorial, Nowak has reconstructed a traditional Jewish cemetery from gravestones that once stood in the nearby town of Turek. Leveled by the Nazis in 1941, the cemetery was rediscovered by Nowak in 1990, after a vigilant factory worker informed her that stones "with strange writings on them" were being dug up on the grounds of a local dairy. ^[65]

Regarding the other of his "rather relevant facts", Mattogno regurgitates an argument from his Chełmno book^[66], asking why, as becomes apparent from Dejaco’s travel report, the SS delegation from Auschwitz first conducted a (Besichtigung) (an inspection or sightseeing, in this context rather the latter than the former) of the Łódź ghetto before driving to the "special installation". Why they shouldn’t have briefly visited the ghetto before going to inspect the "special installation", Mattogno doesn’t explain.

Next Mattogno asks (again, like in his book) why the travel permit did not mention the "alleged" destination of "Kulmhof and back"– a moot question as one would expect a certain discretion as concerns this place if (as all known evidence suggests, with no evidence pointing in another direction) it was a site of mass murder.

Then comes Mattogno’s last argument in this context, which is so deplorable that it deserves being quoted in full:

Chełmno is in fact not located “near Lodz,” but ca. 60 km north-west of this city. The travel permit came directly from the SS-WVHA and more precisely from SS-Brigadeführer Richard Glücks, commander of the Amtsgruppe D, and therefore it cannot be seriously considered that Höss, arriving at Łódź, would then have continued on to Chełmno on his own initiative.

The purpose of the travel permit was "inspecting the experimental station for field ovens Aktion Reinhard", so the permit’s holder was entitled to go wherever the "experimental station" was located. It was clearly not at Łódź itself, for Dejaco mentioned that he and his companions arrived there at 9 hours in the morning on 16.09.1942 and, after a visit to the local ghetto mentioned in only half a sentence, drove to the "special installation" for the demonstration thereof and subsequent conversation with Blobel. Activities at the "special installation" must have taken up a considerable part of the day, as the delegation drove back to Auschwitz only on the following day, 17 September 1942.

Regarding Mattogno’s utterances in his Chełmno "study" about the ball mill mentioned in Dejaco’s travel report of 17 September 1942, I had in the critique briefly summarized ("a peculiar "demonstration" that the Chełmno Sonderkommando used a ball mill (Kugelmühle) and not a bone mill (Knochenmühle), as if the two were mutually exclusively propositions and the former were not incriminating evidence to the crushing of bones", p. 454) the following arguments presented in a previous blog^[67]:

Mattogno’s unfortunate attempt to get rid of Höß’s testimony about Blobel’s activities at Chełmno is followed by a peculiar "demonstration" that the bone mill (Knochenmühle) procured by ghetto administration deputy Ribbe for the Chełmno Sonderkommando on 16.07.1942[47] was actually a ball mill (Kugelmühle). He refers to a letter sent on 01.03.1942 by Biebow, head of the Łódź ghetto administration, to Commissar Fuchs of the Łódź Gestapo regarding the acquisition for the Sonderkommando Kulmhof from the company Schriever & Co. in Hannover of what was obviously the ball mill (Kugelmühle) mentioned in Dejaco’s report of 17.09.1942. [48] A bone mill, Mattogno explains, is a device for making bone meal out of animal bones, and as this was obviously not the activity of Sonderkommando Kulmhof, the presence of such a device at Chełmno would raise "grievous suspicions" (gravi sospetti).[49] The use of a "simple" (semplice) ball mill[50], on the other hand, is supposed to be innocuous. Apparently it didn’t occur to Mattogno that a bone mill and a ball mill are not mutually exclusive propositions (the former term refers to the mill’s purpose, the latter to its functioning mechanism), that a ball mill is a device meant to crush hard substances by metal balls revolving inside a drum[51], and that it’s hard to conceive what hard substances, other than human bones, the Chełmno Sonderkommando is supposed to have needed a ball mill for. The device used for crushing bones as Janowska concentration camp and reportedly lent to Bełżec extermination camp for the same purpose is described in a manner suggesting a ball mill[52], and its appearance on the photo below [53] corroborates this impression.[54]

Following one of his ad hominem attacks ("Muehlenkamp is probably not in bad faith here, but due to his limited intellectual capacity he completely missed the point."), Mattogno basically regurgitates (pp. 1344-1346) the arguments addressed in the aforementioned blog, including the unsubstantiated claim that the possibility of the device’s being operated manually "is not exactly compatible with the alleged grinding of bone remains from tens of thousands of corpses". He then adds the following nonsensical remark:

However, if the Sonderkommando Kulmhof was indeed interested in such a machine already as early as 16 July 1942, this would indicate – from an exterminationist perspective – that the cremation problem had already been solved by then, but if that was the case, what then was the purpose of Blobel’s visit to Chełmno a few months later?

The remark is nonsensical because interest in a bone mill signals a commenced or ongoing endeavor to cremate corpses and reduce the cremation remains in a bone mill, and not that this endeavor has already been accomplished.

Finally, Mattogno produces his own theory as to what the "field furnaces Aktion Reinhard" were (p. 1346):

I posit instead that they were actually field waste incineration furnaces (Müllverbrennungsöfen) meant to destroy all flammable and unusable materials originating from the appropriation of Jewish goods (the economic aspect of “Aktion Reinhardt”), while the "ball mill" was used to grind down nonflammable materials. This is why the difference between a "ball mill" and a "bone mill" is of significance here.

So the "experimental station for field ovens Aktion Reinhard" was nothing but an experimental waste incineration furnace, according to Mattogno.

This postulate is followed by some particularly infantile ad hominem ("Muehlenkamp, with this Mühlenkampf (pun intended: Mühlenkampf, “dispute over mills”), gives another example of his incompetence and superficiality") and a supposed corroborating example (a paper and clothing incineration furnace mentioned by Sobibór witness Thomas Blatt), both of which can be safely ignored except for what they reveal about their author. For apart from being at odds with all related eyewitness and physical evidence, what Mattogno posits fails to explain the secrecy surrounding the device, i.e. why it was strictly referred to as a Sonderanlage (special installation or facility) in Dejaco’s report of 17 September 1942. Why didn’t Dejaco call it by the more informative name "Müllverbrennungsanlage", an installation or facility for incinerating waste, thus not leaving those for whom the report was meant guessing what he might be talking about? What could possibly have been so secret (and so special) about a waste incineration facility that it couldn’t be called by its proper name in a report about a service trip?

Mattogno’s explanation for the ball mill is not much better. One wonders what nonflammable materials among stolen Jewish goods Mattogno expects to have been ground down in this ball mill. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mattogno didn’t know himself.

Notes

[45]"The device described is simply put ridiculous: a kind of a huge “Lötlampe,” that is, a makeshift blowtorch: apparently Blobel, himself a World War One front veteran, did not know that there existed military flamethrowers (despite this device in its modern form being a German invention from 1901)." Ismer described the device as "a pot with a longer tube", which is what a flamethrower essentially is: a container with a flammable substance that is ejected through a tube and ignited at the end of it. Accordingly I referred to the device as a "flamethrower-like apparatus".
[46]"Ismer also mentioned the more effective cremation method that was eventually adopted; pointing out that "a certain technique in burning corpses on the grids" had been developed after some time. Former police officer Frank Sch., who for a time had been part of the guard detachment in the Rzuchów forest section of Chełmno (known as the Waldlager, or forest camp) testified that the bodies extracted from the mass graves had been burned in three or four pits about 5 meters long, 4 meters wide and three meters deep. The descriptions of Ismer and Frank Sch. suggest a method of burning corpses on grates inside of pits, akin to the one applied at Sobibor extermination camp."
[47] The source is Adalbert Rückerl, NS Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse, p. 273. Rückerl was quoting from the Bonn Jury Court’s judgment of 20 March 1963.
[48] W. Bednarz, "Obóz zagłady Chełmno" (The Extermination Camp of Chelmno), in: Biuletyn Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, I, 1946.
[49] Jens Hoffmann, "Das kann man nicht erzählen.»Aktion 1005« - Wie die Nazis die Spuren ihrer Massenmorde in Osteuropa beseitigten, 2008 KKV konkret Hamburg, p. 223. Mattogno complains that "Hoffmann limits himself to reporting the corresponding passage of the 20 March 1963 verdict by the Bonn Court, adding on his own that the rail tracks covered the pit, and therefore were positioned above it, while the verdict says only that the apparatus was constructed from "some iron rail as grid [einigen Eisenschienen als Rost]," without specifying their placement." See next note.
[50] According to Mattogno’s translation of Hoffmann’s German text, the pit was "covered" with iron rails. Hoffmann writes that the pit was "mit Eisenschienen belegt", which more correctly translates as "occupied with iron rails" and suggests that the rails were inside the pit instead of covering it. The pertinent text of the Bonn Jury Court’s judgment of 20 March 1963 reads as follows: "Daraufhin wurde ein Verbrennungsofen erstellt, der aus einer Grube im Umfang von ca. 4x4 m und einer Tiefe von 2m, einigen Eisenbahnschienen als Rost und einem seitlich in die Erde führenden Luftschacht bestand."– "Thereupon a cremation oven was set up, which consisted of a pit with an area of about 4x4 m and a depth of 2 m, some railway rails as a grid and an air duct leading laterally into the soil."
[51]"Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 1)" ([link])
[52]Carlo Mattogno, Chełmno. A German Camp in History and Propaganda, The Barnes Review November 2011 ([link])
[53]Carlo Mattogno, Il Campo di Chełmno tra storia e propaganda, 2009 by effepi, Genova
[54]Rückerl, Vernichtungslager, pp. 273f.
[55]Mattogno, Chełmno, p. 76.
[56]Rückerl, Vernichtungslager, footnote 64 on page 274: "Mehrere ehemalige Angehörige des Sonderkommandos Chelmno bekundeten bei ihren Vernehmungen, im Sommer 1942 sei der mehrfach mit der Durchführung der »Enterdungsaktion« (Kommando 1005 – Beseitigung der Massengräber im Ostraum) betraute SS-Standartenführer Blobel nach Chelmno zum Waldlager gekommen, um Versuche mit Leichenverbrennungen zu machen" - "Several former members of the Chelmno special detachment stated during their interrogations, that in the summer of 1942 SS-Standartenführer Blobel, who had been tasked several times with carrying out the »unearthing action« (Commando 1005 – removal of mass graves in the east) had come to the Chelmno Waldlager (forest camp) to carry out corpse cremation experiments." Hoffman ("Das kann man nicht erzählen", pp. 80f.) quotes from the deposition of Fritz Ismer on 1 August 1961 and refers to the depositions of Julius Bauer on 4/5 July 1963 and Franz Halle on 8 May 1963.
[57]In his notes with the title "Die »Endlösung der Judenfrage« im KL Auschwitz" ("The »Final Solution of the Jewish Question« in Auschwitz Concentration Camp"), transcribed under [link], Höss wrote the following:
"Ich selbst wußte nie die Gesamtzahl, habe auch keine Anhaltspunkte, um sie wiedergeben zu können.
Es sind mir lediglich noch die Zahlen der größeren Aktionen in Erinnerung, die mir wiederholt von Eichmann oder dessen Beauftragten genannt worden waren.
Aus Oberschlesien und GG [Generalgouvernement] 250000
Deutschland und Theresienstadt 100000
Holland 95000
Belgien 20000
Frankreich 110000
Griechenland 65000
Ungarn 400000
Slowakei 90000
Die Zahlen der kleineren Aktionen sind mir nicht mehr in Erinnerung, sie waren aber im Vergleich zu obigen Zahlen unbedeutend.
Ich halte die Zahl 2½ Millionen für viel zu hoch. Die Möglichkeiten der Vernichtung hatten auch in Auschwitz ihre Grenzen. Die Zahlenangaben ehemaliger Häftlinge sind Phantasiegebilde und entbehren jeder Grundlage."
("I myself never knew the total number and have nothing that would enable me to reproduce it.
I only remember the numbers of the larger actions, which were mentioned to me repeatedly by Eichmann or his deputies.
From Upper Silesia and GG [General Government] 250000
Germany and Theresienstadt 100000
Holland 95000
Belgium 20000
France 110000
Greece 65000
Hungary 400000
Slovakia 90000
The numbers of the smaller actions I don’t remember, but compared to the above numbers they were insignificant. I consider the number 2½ million to be much too high. The possibilities of extermination had their limits even in Auschwitz. Numbers stated by former inmates are products of fantasy and lack any foundation.")
The partial numbers mentioned by Höss, while not all accurate, add up to a fairly accurate total of 1,130,000, which is in line with the order of magnitude of Auschwitz-Birkenau victims established by historians. When Höss referred to numbers stated by former inmates, he may have had in mind numbers such as the 4 million claimed by Sonderkommando member Henryk Tauber ([link])
[58]Experten der Vernichtung, pp. 191-92, my translation. Berger is referring to why the mass graves at Bełżec were not cleared thoroughly and corpses were left at the bottom of the graves, but her explanation can also be applied as one reason why exhumation and cremation of the bodies began at a relatively late stage (no earlier than November 1942 at Bełżec, at about the same time or later at Sobibór and Treblinka).
[59]Translation, transcription and facsimile under [link]
[60]This was also the conclusion of the Bonn Jury Court in its judgment of 30 March 1963 at the trial against Heinrich B. et al, see the HC reference library’s thread "Number of Victims of Chelmno Extermination Camp" ([link]).
[61]Burmeister’s testimony is quoted in Kogon/Langbein/Rückerl et al (editors), Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, pp. 115, 123f., 125f., 129f. See transcription and translation of the vans’ description in the HC reference library’s thread "Testimonies about Engines used for Homicidal Gassing" ([link]).
[62] See the translated excerpts from the Bonn Jury Court’s judgment of 30 March 1963 under [link]
[63]Document NO-246, quoted in the blog "Gauleiter Arthur Greiser" ([link]) after Kogon et al, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, p. 18, and here after Mattogno, Chełmno, p. 31. Mattogno omitted the rest of the letter, in which Greiser asks for permission to use the Chełmno Sonderkommando to kill 35,000 Poles with open tuberculosis ("Though it is not possible to tackle this popular plague in the Old Reich with corresponding draconian measures, I think I can take the responsibility of proposing to you that here in the Warthegau the cases of open tuberculosis among the Polish people are extirpated."), as it runs contrary to his feeble argument that the "special treatment" mentioned by Greiser "was merely an extension to the Jews in Warthegau of the order that Hitler had sent to Greiser on 28 September 1941, concerning the expulsion of the Jews of the Reich proper and the Protectorate via the ghetto of Łódź during “next spring,” that is, spring 1942". In the magnum opus (pp. 273f.) Mattogno feebly tries to defuse Greiser’s reference to the killing of tubercular Poles by the same Sonderkommando that had been performing the "special treatment" of the Jews, studiously avoiding the above-quoted passage of Greiser’s letter. However, Mattogno had already made the fatal concession in MGK’s Sobibór book that Greiser’s letter of 1 May 1942 referred to the killing of tubercular Poles, see Jonathan Harrison’s blog "Mattogno’s fatal concession" ([link]). Jonathan Harrison addressed Mattogno’s behavior in detail in the blog "Mattogno's 'Riposte', 2013" ([link]).
[64]Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-1945. 2nd Revised and Augmented Edition Thomas Yoseloff South Brunswick, New York, 1968, p. 147.
[65]Juliet Golden, "Remembering Chełmno", in: Karen D. Vitelli, Archaeological Ethics, pp. 188-193 (p. 192).
[66]Addressed in the blog "Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 1)" ([link])
[67]As previous note.

Cremation Devices, Methods and TimesChełmno – Archaeological Research

Mattogno’s lamentable performance regarding eyewitness and documentary evidence to mass cremation at Chełmno is followed by an illustrated description of the Feist apparatus, an oven for the combustion of carcasses from animals dead from contagious diseases which was conceived by the veterinary Georg Feist in the second half of the 19th century, and which according to Mattogno resembles the cremation ovens used in the 2nd phase (1944/45) of the camp’s operation. Mattogno also repeats his claims regarding the performance of that oven, which will be addressed later on when discussing the capacity of Chełmno’s second phase ovens.



Mattogno then moves to my comments about his writings regarding archaeological finds of cremation objects, namely the relics of a blown-up crematorium discovered in 1986/87 (described as probably rectangular in shape, with a measurable size of 17x17m, walls obliquely narrowing towards the inside, concrete pipes supplying air to the hearth, a depth of 4.5 meters, and a bottom layer of brick and concrete debris) and seven other cremation objects identified (or reclassified) pursuant to archaeological investigations in 2003/04 (objects 2/03, 3/03, 4/03, 5/03, 10/03, 20/03 and 21/03). The descriptions of these objects are available on the site of the Chełmno museum^[68] and in a 2004 publication sponsored by the District Museum in Konin and the Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw^[69]. Mattogno (p. 1349) objects to the description of the crematorium discovered in 1986/87 on grounds that the stated dimensions (17 x 17 m) ^[70]"are erroneous because the current archeological reconstruction of the oven measures approx. 6 m × 5 m, and a picture from the time of the survey shows an even smaller excavation". My argument that the reconstruction covers only a part of the object’s identified size, and that the text on the plaque is inaccurately formulated, Mattogno dismisses as "speculation", notwithstanding the fact that such "speculation" is backed up by the object’s description in an archaeological text. It is duly noted that Mattogno yells "speculation" when it suits his argument, while indulging himself in speculations so far-fetched as to make the boldest speculation he objects to seem entirely reasonable by comparison^[71].

As concerns the other seven objects mentioned above, Mattogno quotes their descriptions and presents basically the same arguments regarding each object, which will be exemplified on hand of Object 2/03. The description of the object is quoted as follows:

Exhibit 2/03: It was uncovered fragmentarily during the first excavations carried out by the Museum in the years 1986-87. It was then misinterpreted as a pit for burning useless belongings of the victims. Square on the surface (8 × 8 m), it narrows towards the bottom with the depth slightly exceeding 5 m. The corners reveal slanting furrows, about 1-meter wide, containing traces of preserved concrete pipes, whose tasks was probably to supply air to the furnace interior. It was filled with sandy humus mixed with inclusions of burn waste, ashes, and pieces of burned bones. A few artifacts have been acquired, the most precious of which is a button from a Soviet uniform (the first one comes from the 1986-87 research). Furthermore, pieces of chamotte brick were found. Most likely the furnace had been dismantled.

Mattogno’s comment (p. 1354):

From what does it result that the exhibit was a cremation oven? The only evidence offered is the presence of "traces of preserved concrete pipes", "pieces of chamotte brick" and an unspecified amount of "ashes" and "pieces of burned bones" mixed with the sandy humus filling the object – crematory remains which, as far as we know, may just as well have ended up there at the time of the liquidation of the camp.

The "may just as well" assessment, which denotes equal probability, is of course wrong. It may be possible that the objects described "ended up there at the time of the liquidation of the camp". But that is by far the lesser of probabilities, whereas it is more probable, considering the shape of the structure and the nature of the objects described, that the object is the relic of what was a cremation facility during camp times.

Mattogno’s comments regarding almost all of the other objects are fraught with the same logical fallacy and therefore need not be addressed. Only in regard to Object 21/03 does Mattogno produce an additional argument:

I remind the reader that in the previous survey, exhibit 21/03 was "probably" (prawdopodobnie) a cremation oven measuring 5 m × 4 m; then it became a rectangle of 25 m × 9 m.

And so? More thorough investigation of the object led to a revision of previous findings.

In the critique (p. 455) I had argued that Mattogno had miscounted the number of probing excavations regarding some objects, based on an assessment shown in an earlier blog^[72]:

Object 2/03: 1 probing excavation (nº XV). Mattogno claims zero probes. , the number of probing excavations corresponding to a given object is the following: Object 3/03: 2 probing excavations (nos. XVI and XXVI). Mattogno claims just one probe. Object 4/03: 1 probing excavation (nº XVII). Mattogno claims zero probes. Object 5/03: 1 probing excavation (nº XIV). Object 20/03: 2 probing excavations (nos. XXVII and XXVIII). Object 21/03: 4 probing excavations (numbers XLV, XXXIX, XLVI and XLIV), with probing excavations XLIII and XLVII possibly also belonging to this object. Mattogno claims just one probe.

After some of the rhetorical bluster that Mattogno usually sends his opponents’ way ("Poor Muehlenkamp has not understood anything about the matter."), Mattogno reveals the difference in criteria that is supposed to account for the different probing excavations’ count regarding objects 2/03, 3/03 and 4/03: whereas I had also counted cross excavations related to the respective object, Mattogno had only admitted excavations in the object proper as "valid" probing excavations. Mattogno says nothing about Object 21/03, where according to the map on p. 1352 three probing excavations (XLVII, XLIV and XLV) apparently meet his criterion (he had previously claimed just one^[73]).

And as concerns Object 5/03, there is one other probe besides nº XIV that meets Mattogno’s criterion: probe nº XLIX, which I had not previously mentioned^[74].

Besides, is the (apparently post hoc) criterion that doesn’t count cross excavations regarding an object (probes XV, XVI and XVII are obviously related to, respectively, Object 2/03, 3/03 and 4/03) even an appropriate criterion? Hardly so, if one considers that the outline of Object 20/03 "was determined through a cross excavation"^[75], suggesting that cross excavations were as relevant to establishing an object’s layout as excavations in the object proper. Besides, probing excavations seem to have preceded an object’s (further) exploration, where not otherwise stated^[76].

In her articles about archaeological investigations at Chełmno, archaeologist Łucja Pawlicka Nowak (who Mattogno for some reason calls Pawlicka Kamiński) mentions^[77] that the rectangular shape of the objects considered field furnaces contradicts the depositions of two witnesses, H. May and Walter Dejaco, who recalled round cremation pits. It is possible that what these two witnesses described were provisional facilities that Blobel carried out experiments with, while the objects identified by archaeological research were those eventually used for the camp’s body disposal on a large scale, although May seems to have assumed that what he witnessed were the final facilities. Incidentally, the witness H. May, whose account of Chełmno has been reproduced on the HC blog site^[78], is conspicuously absent from Mattogno’s Chełmno book and was mentioned for the first time (after Łucja Pawlicka Nowak article on the Chełmno museum’s website) on p. 1356 of MGK’s magnum opus.

As to the nature of the objects identified in 2003/04, I had considered several possibilities (Critique, pp. 456f.):

Moreover, if Mattogno were right about the object found in 1986/87 being a cremation device without a brick chimney rather than one of the 1st phase crematoria (which is unlikely insofar as the object was a construction with a concrete foundation that could not be fully destroyed by explosions), it would still be entirely possible that objects 10/03 and 21/03 are the remains of the crematoria with chimneys observed by witnesses in the 1st phase. The other oven similar to the one uncovered in 1986/87 would then be Object 2/03, which like the former object is described as narrowing towards the inside, thus matching the description of the second-phase furnaces in the Central Commission’s report, whereas objects 3/03, 4/03, 5/03 and 20/03 would be traces of open-air cremation grates similar to those used at the Aktion Reinhard camps, corresponding to the above-mentioned descriptions of Frank Sch. and Fritz Ismer. Another possibility (considering that Object 20/03 has the same square surface area as Object 2/03, though unlike the latter it is not described as narrowing towards the inside) would be that the second-phase furnaces were objects 02/03 and 20/03, that only three objects (3/03, 4/03 and 5/03) correspond to grate structures described by Ismer and Sch. (which doesn’t exclude the possibility of there having been more such structures, considering the above-mentioned traces of open-air cremation found in the second grave), and that besides the crematoria with chimneys (objects 10/03 and 21/03) there was another furnace (the 1986/87 object) also used for cremating corpses right after gassing in the latter stages of the first phase.

Mattogno objects to my assessment of objects 3/03, 4/03, 5/03 and 20/03 on grounds of their being described by "Pawlicka Kamiński" as "field furnaces", semi-subterranean like the two ovens of 1944, whereas "Schalling speaks of “three or four pits [drei oder vier Gruben],” which were simple cremation pits without grids and in which the cremation was performed after having covered the corpses “with a powder [mit einen Pulver]”", while "Ismer mentions neither “field furnaces” nor cremation pits, but limits himself to refer generically to a generic reference to “a certain technique for the cremation of corpse on the grids [eine gewisse Technik bei der Leichenverbrennung auf den Rosten].”". One fallacy of this argument lies in that it treats the descriptions of Schalling and Ismer in isolation from each other, as if each of these two witnesses were describing different facilities. It is far more likely that either witness was describing different aspects of the same facilities, Schalling their pit construction and Ismer the roasters inside the pits on which the bodies were placed. The other fallacy lies in assuming that Schalling would not call a semi-subterranean structure with some brickwork a pit, which is not necessarily the case considering the brevity of Schalling’s description.

Mattogno further contrasts the dimensions stated by Schalling for the three or four cremation pits he described (5 x 4 m) with the dimensions of the four objects established by archaeological research, noting that "only one of the exhibits is somewhat compatible with Schalling’s declarations". That may be so, but it doesn’t rule out that objects 3/03, 4/03, 5/03 and 20/03, or at least the former three, were the "pits" described by Schalling with the roasters mentioned by Ismer, for Schalling could no more than estimate the dimensions of the "pits" and may well have been mistaken about their measurements, without that ruling out the essential accuracy of his testimony^[79].

That leaves the crematorium, or crematoria, of the camp’s 1st phase. Schalling mentioned one big furnace with a chimney 4 or 5 meters high, whereas witnesses interrogated by Judge Bednarz mentioned two crematoria "whose chimneys overtowered the forest". Mattogno argues (p. 1359) that the latter description suggests a chimney 15 meters tall, but that depends on the height of the trees surrounding the chimney, and besides the smoke emanating from the chimneys may have given the witnesses a mistaken impression.

Earlier on the same page Mattogno asks why the 1942 ovens would have chimneys if the 1944 ovens had none, overlooking the differences between conditions in either year: in 1944, unlike in 1942, the Chełmno area was within the range of enemy reconnaissance and bombing planes, which would make a chimney too conspicuous and thus not recommendable.

As concerns the construction of the chimney, Mattogno argues that a chimney 15 meters tall or taller would have required proper foundations and accurate static calculations, and could have been built only by specialized personnel under the supervision of an engineer. Yet Mattogno provides no indications that these conditions were not complied with, while the description of the structure identified in 1986/87, including fragments of concrete blocks from the crematorium’s foundation, suggest a massive construction.

Regarding the possibility of cremation ovens with chimneys 4-5 meters high, like the one described by Schalling, Mattogno argues that such "would have required the involvement of a specialized company, like J-A. Topf & Söhne or Hans Kori, for which there is no trace, whether documentary or testimonial". Absence of evidence might be considered evidence of absence if (like in the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau) a considerable body of documentary evidence regarding construction activities had survived, however there is no such body of documentary evidence regarding Chełmno, as no internal documents pertaining to the camp’s administration (and but a few external documents mentioning the place) have been recovered. Eyewitness testimonies are also no indication to the contrary of a specialized company’s involvement, given their paucity of detail.

Finally Mattogno argues that "no technician would have constructed true cremation ovens in the open, without the necessary foundation, flues and chimney", yet he does not demonstrate that the archaeological evidence points to the absence of these features.

Therefore, and contrary to his conclusion (p. 1360), Mattogno failed to demonstrate that Schalling’s testimony cannot be truthful and that there was not at least one crematorium with a brick and mortar chimney in the camp’s 1st phase.

So much for Mattogno’s response to the narrative/descriptive part of the critique’s chapter 8. To the roughly 17 pages (440-457) of this narrative/descriptive part, with a word count of about 5,800, Mattogno responded with about 64 pages of text (1296-1360) and a word count approaching 25,800. Consequently Part 1 of this series is almost as long as the critique’s chapter 8 (ca. 22,000 vs. ca. 24,000 words), though I managed to stay below the volume of Mattogno’s verbiage.

The next parts of this series will deal with the remaining 113 pages of Mattogno’s "encyclopedia", which address the technical aspects of cremation. I shall try to publish my assessment thereof within the next few months. As mentioned at the beginning of this Part 1, some weak spots of Mattogno’s cremation chapter have already been pointed out in discussions with Friedrich Jansson, especially in the articles collected under the label "Dresden"^[80]. Readers interested in the subject of cremation at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps and at Chełmno are invited to look up these articles.

Notes

[68] Museum of the former Extermination Camp in Chełmno-on-Ner ([link])
[69]Chelmno Witnesses Speak by Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak (Editor), Juliet D. Golden (Translator), Arkadiusz Kamiński (Translator). Konin and Łódź, 2004. The descriptions, maps and photographs regarding archaeological research in this book are digitalized in the HC reference library’s thread "Archaeological Research in the Grounds of the Chełmno-on-Ner Former Extermination Center" ([link])
[70]Chelmno Witnesses Speak, p. 44.
[71]Case in point, Mattogno’s baseless speculation that Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Chełmno were transit camps, which he upholds although it is at odds with all known evidence and supported by none. Mattogno isn’t able to produce a single name of a deportee "transited" via these camps to the Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union, which alone should – for the reasons explained in my "Challenge to Supporters of the Revisionist Transit Camp Theory" ([link]) – persuade him that his theory is hollow humbug.
[72]"Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 1)" ([link])
[73]Mattogno, Il Campo di Chełmno tra storia e propaganda, p. 128. Apparently Mattogno didn’t feel comfortable with his count of probing excavations, judging by his having dropped it in the English version of his book, where be merely stated the following: "A comparison with Lorek’s map shows, however, that the findings 2/03, 3/03, 4/03 and 5/03 had already been examined before, but at that time they had not been considered to be cremation sites so that here only the interpretation has changed. But for the findings 20/03 and 21/03 the function as a cremation site is only alleged." (Mattogno, Chełmno, p. 100).
[74]The object’s description (Chelmno Witnesses Speak, p. 66) mentions that "The rectangular outline of the object was established on the basis of two probing excavations."
[75]Chelmno Witnesses Speak, p. 65.
[76]Regarding Objects 5/03 and 10/03, it is expressly stated that exploration was not carried out (Chelmno Witnesses Speak, pp. 65 and 66). On the other hand, in the descriptions of Object 3/03 and 4/03 (p. 65) the process of uncovering the object is expressly mentioned.
[77]Chelmno Witnesses Speak, p. 64.
[78]See the blog "A Great Lie" ([link]). May’s description of the burning pits translates as follows: "After many attempts, cremation of the bodies was performed in pits about three meters deep (10 feet) and four meters in diameter (13 feet), reinforced with stones on the sides. The corpses were burnt in the fire inside the pit. The remaining long bones were pulled out and ground in a motor grinder placed in a wooden barrack."
[79] As already mentioned in this series (see note 32), measurements and other numbers are details that eyewitnesses tend to be mistaken about.
[80][link]

In 2003, Jean Ancel published the definitive study of Romanian misrule in Transnistria, including summaries and facsimiles of 1109 documents. I have posted some extracts here, along with a tabulation of sources here on shootings in Transnistria by German Selbstschutz units. I would draw three conclusions from these documents. Firstly, Antonescu's intention is clear that the deported Jews should die by starvation and disease if they cannot be driven across the Bug to be shot by the Germans (documents 31 and 279). Secondly, there is no doubt that conditions at Bogdanovka and other camps on the Bug were not designed to allow life to be sustainable [document 165: there are already 11,000 [in Bogdanovka] in sties not even large enough for 7,000 pigs]. Thirdly, the Germans over the Bug refused to handle these Jews, apart from a few thousand recruited for Organization Todt. Their actions indicate that they shared Richter's knowledge, namely that the "Purpose of the action is the liquidation of these Jews" (3319-PS).

In late 1941, the Romanians began to expel Jews from Odessa towards the Bug. Most of these Jews arrived at Bogdanovka, where they were were shot by a combination of German Selbstchutz (led by Hartung) and Romanian forces. A few weeks later, thousands of Jews from the environs around Odessa began to be sent to the Berezovka district, where they were shot in actions summarized here. What sources exist on the total number shot by the Germans?

Steinhart (p. 325-326, n. 940) cites the following sources on the German bodycount:

If, as the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission report indicates, Hartung mustered 60 militiamen and deployed them to the Bogdanovka camp for 14 days over the course of late December 1941 and early January 1942, then it is conceivable that the Selbstschutz murdered around 25,000 Jews. Alexander Jonus, one of the former militiamen, estimated that he and his compatriots murdered approximately 30,000 Jews at the Bogdanovka camp. Protokol doprosa / Ionusa Aleksandra, June 2, 1967, USHMM, RG-31.018M, Reel 17, 8537. The estimate that the Selbstschutz murdered between 25,000 and 30,000 Jews at the Bogdanovka camp is supported by wartime and postwar German sources. According to the marginalia on a May 12, 1942, letter from the German Foreign Office to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the ethnic German auxiliary police murdered at least 28,000 Jews.Abschiebung von rumänischen Juden am Bug, May 12, 1942, NARA, T120/3132/E510806. If Franz Rademacher‘s notation referred simply to the killings at the Bogdanovka camp,then it is similar to later Soviet estimates. Likewise, in his 1957 blackmail letter, Walter Vahldieck estimated that Hartung had orchestrated the murder of 36,000 Jews, approximately 20,000 more victims than Liebl, a neighboring Bereichkommandoführer who had not deployed to the Bogdanovka camp. 50 000 Juden aus Odessa / Tatsachenbericht von W. V., 1957, BAL, B162/2295, 26. The murder of 16,000 Jews under Liebl‘s command is confirmed by Soviet counterintelligence records. Protokol doprosa / A. M. G., September 20, 1944, Staatsarchiv Münster, Nr. 2902, 51. A former ethnic German resident of Transnistria offered a similar estimate of 17,000 to 18,000 victims to the West German police in 1962.Zeugen schaftliche Vernehmung von N. E., January 16, 1962, BAL, B162/2290, 184.

Rademacher's note (actually written by Triska) can be matched with the March Intelligence Report of the gendarmerie legion in the Berezovka district, which stated that "80% [of those evacuated from Odessa] have been executed" (Ancel, Document 569), and which is supported by at least eight surviving gendarmerie reports (here).

Further to this previous post by Roberto, I add the following from the Yad Vashem site:

Bogdanovka

Krasnodar

Kramatorsk

Utena

Chernovtsy