This article is my personal point of view on matters arising from Trump's campaign to date that may be of concern to readers of this blog who fear that his presidency would herald a slide from demagogic populism to violence and persecution. It is not my intention to equate Trump with fascism or Nazism, but I will note how his rhetoric can echo those vile voices and may produce violent results.

It does not require much knowledge of Goebbels or Streicher to realize that descriptions of Mexicans as "rapists" and of Islam as "an unbelievable hatred of us" are designed to demonize entire groups. This rhetorical echo is matched by parallels in specific proposals. The forcible deportation of 11 million people would have some similarities with early Nazi policy prior to the onset of the Final Solution, given that round-ups would require coercion and the splitting of families. It would be naive to assume that state violence would only be applied to the "undocumented" rather than the entire neighborhoods in which they lived.

His policies against Muslims would are idiotic as well as bigoted. Does Trump know that many Arabs are Christian and some Persians are Jews? How would these persons be spared the harassment that Trump would visit upon any brown-skinned person passing through an immigration barrier? Trump's surrogate Katrina Pearson advocates that the state pursues the closure of mosques that contain any Muslim who "preaches terrorism", a phrase she presumably feels the state can define. Such persecution would also be pursued through barefaced lying, such as Trump's assertion that "thousands and thousands of people were cheering" when the World Trade Center came down on 9/11.

On antisemitism, the JVL notes:

Although Trump's daughter converted to Judaism in 2009, is married to a Jewish man, observes Shabbat and keeps a Kosher diet, Trump has been known to make anti-Semitic comments. In a 1991 book written by a former close colleague of Trump, the real-estate mogul is quoted as saying, “the only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” During a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition on December 3, 2015, Trump depended on age-old Jewish stereotypes to relate to the crowd and get his message across. Trump commented that he is a, “negotiator... like you folks,” and asked the crowd, “Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t negotiate deals?” Trump added that he thinks that the Jewish people are not going to support him because “I don't want your money. And you want to control your own politicians.” These comments sparked backlash from Israeli news agencies, with the Times of Israel running a headline the next day that read,“Trump courts Republican Jews with offensive stereotypes.” 

Consequently, although Trump does not engage in the antisemitic dog whistling that some commentators believe has been committed by Ted Cruz, his promotion of stereotypes is a regressive prospect for Jews.

The following information is taken from pages 179-182 of this work by Michael Salter and concerns the four documents constituting Nuremberg exhibit PS-501, discussed in this series by Hans. The first involvement of the OSS was to locate the documents among those held by British intelligence in London. A cable from Donovan to Jackson dated June 1, 1945, detailed the role of Colonel Amen in obtaining "documents (originals) which contain details of gas by "death van" fitted out by that purpose" [Salter p.180, citing cable 18124, 1/6/45, Jackson Papers, Box 101, Reel 7, my emphasis]. These were placed in a dossier prepared by OSS X-2 branch and eventually picked up by Whitney Harris, who discusses here (pp.198-199) how he used them in the interrogation of Ohlendorf while preparing for the case against Kaltenbrunner. The documents were also authenticated by Rauff in Ancona, as Hans shows here. Although the Becker-Rauff document became part of PS-501, it was originally filed by the OSS as Feldpostnummer S2704 / SECRET. Rauff gave a further very detailed confirmation of the document in Chile in 1972, shown here.

On the whining of Weckert and others about the origins of these documents, I refer readers to the quote by Zimmerman in Roberto's post here.

“Rabinowicz returned to the Warsaw ghetto between September 21 and 25” (Jansson)

“an article published on September 20, 1942 in the publication Oyf der Wach contains a story which parallels the ‘Rabinowicz’ document very closely” (Jansson)

, not to scale, shows both these corpse-disposal areas. Also, in describing the work-crews in the upper (extermination) camp, Arad wrote about how corpses were handled following gassing, “After the victims’ bodies were thrown into a pit by the body-transport workers, the corpses were arranged in rows by the burial detail.  To save space, the bodies were arranged head-to-foot; each head lay between the feet of two other corpses, and each pair of feet between two heads.  Sand or chlorine was scattered between the layers of bodies.” Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, p 112; see also p 85 for use of chlorine in the reception area of the camp. Krzepicki’s detection of a “very faint smell” of the gas near the bathhouse is consistent with the use of chlorine in the camp’s operations.
 Jacob Apenszlak, ed., The Black Book of Polish Jewry. An Account of the Martyrdom of Polish Jewry Under the Nazi Occupation (American Federation for Polish Jews, 1943)

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1


Fuel requirements (1)

Part 2 of this series addresses fuel requirements for cremating the murdered deportees at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps and at Chełmno.



Based on figures about the Jewish population in the Łódź Ghetto on June 30, 1942, whereby out of a total of 96,874 inhabitants 25,947, or 26.8 %, were children under the age of 16, MGK had on p. 131 of their Sobibór book^[81] postulated that ca. 27 % of deportees from Polish and Soviet territories to Sobibór extermination camp had been children under the age of 16. On pp. 457-58 of the critique I had contested the appropriateness of this percentage on grounds that children – especially younger ones – were among the first to be deported due to their uselessness for physical labor, and that in transports of people unable to work, children, especially such of younger ages, were more strongly represented than in the general population. Mattogno blusters (p. 1361) that "Poor Muehlenkamp does not know what he is writing", then refers to a statistic about deportees from the Łódź Ghetto between 1 January and 30 June 1942, whereby "deportees born in 1926 (16 years of age) or later correspond to 14,819 out of a total of 54,990, hence 26.9%, which is almost identical to the percentage given above (26.8) ". This is supposed to show that "minors were not deported to a higher proportion than adults".

Actually all the mentioned statistic shows is that between 1 January and 30 June 1942, Jews from the Łódź ghetto were taken to Chełmno extermination camp without differentiating between adults and minors, and that, contrary to what was stated in the Łódź State Police’s office report dated 9 June 1942, the 54,990 Jews "evacuated from the ghetto and handed over to the special detachment" (what for, Mr. Mattogno?) according to that report did not only include such that were "not able to work"^[82], but also able-bodied ones whose labor was not needed. It doesn’t show that this was always the case, including without limitation the examples I provided in the critique: in the Warsaw ghetto 99 % of all children had been removed by November 1942 according to a ghetto statistic^[83]. 9,000 Jews were "evacuated" from the Lentschütz district, 1,000 being left behind because they were urgently required for carrying out Wehrmacht tasks. Of the about 6,000 Jews in the Löwenstadt Ghetto, around 3,000 were "evacuated" as not able to work, while the remainder, which consisted of skilled workers, was taken to the Łódź Ghetto. A report from the Łódź State Police dated October 3, 1942, reported the "evacuation" in September of about 15,700 Jews sick and unable to work from the Łódź Ghetto^[84]. In an earlier blog^[85] I demonstrated that among deportees from the Galicia district children aged 14 and under must have made up a much higher proportion (42.1 %) than they did among the general population.

For the above reasons, the proportions of children aged 14 or under among the deportees that I considered in the critique (one third) can be considered adequate, even conservative.

On pp. 458 to 461 I had calculated the amount of human body mass that needed to be cremated at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Chełmno, culminating in Table 8.3 on page 461 whereby 1,551,000 corpses of people murdered at the three camps weighed a total of 55,114,000 kg, considering an average weight of 34 kg for deportees to each of Bełżec, Treblinka and Chełmno and 48 kg for deportees to Sobibór. In my response to chapter 11 of MGK’s magnum opus^[86], I revised the average weight of the former to 38 kg. This is the average weight of a hypothetical group consisting of two adults and one child aged 14 or under, in which the adults weigh 48 kg each and the child weighs 18 kg. Taking these values I revise Table 8.2 on page 461 of the critique, in which I calculated the average weight of deportees to Sobibór extermination camp^[87], as follows:

Table 2.1 – Revision of Table 8.2 (critique, p. 461)

The total weights of deportees to all four camps are revised as follows:

Table 2.2 – Revision of Table 8.3 (critique, p. 461

How much wood was required to burn this mass of human bones and tissue?

Mattogno begins his response to my answer to this question by quoting (p. 1362) a long slab of text from MGK’s Sobibór book (pp. 133f), which describes three systems developed in India for the cremation of human bodies in the open. One is the Teri apparatus, "a true cremation oven" according to Mattogno, which cremated bodies with a fuel consumption of 110 to 145 kg per body during trial runs, corresponding to a ratio of about 1.8 kg of wood per kg of body weight assuming that the latter is 70 kg. The second is the Mokshda Green Cremation System, of which Mattogno provides the following images on p. 1365:

Image 2.1 – Mokshda Green Cremation facility

Image 2.2 – Mokshda Green Cremation facility in operation

Mattogno informs that the fuel consumption of this device is 150 kg of wood per cremation, which corresponds to 2.14 kg per kg of body weight under the above assumption. The third is the "Fuel Efficient Crematorium", which MGK describes as "consisting of three connected brick walls, similar to a barbecue grill, about 1.5 m high, holding a metal cremation grate at a level of about 50 centimeters". The fuel consumption of this device is 200 to 300 kg of wood per cremation. Taking the average of these values and again assuming a corpse weight of 70 kg, MGK had calculated a ratio of 3.9 kg of wood per kg of body, which he now corrects to 3.6 kg. This is supposed to have been the ratio that would have applied on the cremation pyres of the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps and at Chełmno.

Why the "Fuel Efficient Crematorium" and not the Mokshda Green Cremation System, was one of the questions I asked in the critique, further referring to an earlier version of this device, a "raised human size brazier", that used only 100 kg per cremation (ratio assuming a 70 kg corpse: 1.43:1) but had to be abandoned because it failed to gain acceptance among tradition- minded Hindus, and to an estimate by the device’s inventor, Vinod Kumar Agarwal, whereby it should take only 22 kg of wood to cremate an average human body^[88].

In this context I pointed out that MGK didn’t explain the reason (other than convenience) for their choice and that, according to MGK’s source about the Mokshda Green Cremation System, the "Fuel Efficient Crematorium" had failed to achieve the desired fuel efficiency due to "unscientific design" and "poor quality of material of construction"^[89] In response Mattogno (p. 1366) limits himself to quoting the paragraph mentioning these shortcomings and arguing that the "Fuel Efficient Crematorium" was inefficient only in comparison with the Mokshda facility but more fuel-efficient than the traditional Hindu funeral pyre.

In the Mokshda facility, according to Mattogno, "the principle of air flow around the corpses is ensured by the special structure of the grid and by the presence of a single corpse, with the possibility to regulate the combustion with the help of a movable chimney" (p. 1366). These features are supposed to mean that, despite being also based on a raised grate that allowed air to circulate and feed the fire, the pyres at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps cannot be compared with the Mokshda cremation facility. Mattogno argues that the documented cremation system most resembling these pyres, the one used to cremate corpses of air raid victims at Dresden after the Allied bombing attacks on 13/14 February 1945, mainly differs from the Mokshda facility in that "the air flow only took place around the pile as a whole and affected only the external parts of the corpses".

It may be that not every single corpse on one of the Dresden pyres was exposed to the air flow like a single corpse is on a grid structure like the Mokshda facility, but the mass of corpses as a whole was exposed to the air flow in very much the same manner, so there are reasons to doubt Mattogno’s conclusion that only the external parts of the corpses were "affected" and that the purpose of the pyres was "not incineration, but the partial carbonization of the bodies for hygienic reasons". The best way to resolve this issue is to look at what the evidence says about the degree to which the corpses were meant to be combusted on the Dresden pyres, what degree of combustion was achieved, and how the latter compares to the degree of combustion on the pyres at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.

This takes us to the following questions:

1. What was the purpose of the Dresden cremation pyres, i.e. what was the expected result of the cremation?
2. To what extent was that purpose achieved?
3. How does the result of cremation on the Dresden pyres compare to the result of cremation on the Aktion Reinhard(t) pyres?
4. What fuel was used to burn the corpses on the Dresden pyres?
5. How much fuel was spent on burning the corpses in the Dresden pyres?

The first of these questions is answered by the Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am 13., 14. und 15. Februar 1945^[90], which includes the following information:

Mit Rücksicht auf die schnell fortschreitende Verwesung und bestehende außerordentliche Schwierigkeiten bei der Bergung, sowie Mangel an geeigneten Fahrzeugen zur Überführung auf Friedhöfe mit Zustimmung des Gauleiters und der Stadtverwaltung auf dem Altmarkt insgesamt 6865 Gefallene eingeäschert. Die Asche der Gefallenen wurde auf einen Friedhof überführt.

Considering the quickly progressing decomposition and existing extraordinary difficulties in the recovery [of the corpses], as well as the lack of suitable vehicles for transportation to the cemeteries, a total of 6,865 fallen were cremated^[91]on the Altmarkt. The ash of the fallen was taken to a cemetery.

(Emphases added.) We see that the purpose of the pyres was to cremate the corpses, to reduce them to something that could be called "ash" or "ashes". As there was a lack of suitable vehicles for transportation of corpses to the cemeteries, the corpses had to be at least reduced to remains so small that they could be transported to the cemeteries with the reduced number of transportation vehicles available.

As to the second question, the extent to which the aforementioned purpose was achieved follows from the last above-quoted sentence of the Schlußmeldung and from the document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945, quoted by Dresden historian Matthias Neutzner^[92]:

Zwei Wochen lang wurde der alte Marktplatz im Zentrum der Stadt zu einem Krematorium. Am 5. März waren die in den Strassen gesammelten Leichen geborgen, die Scheiterhaufen erloschen. »Auf dem Altmarkt lagen nach meiner Schätzung 8 – 10 cbm Asche«, wurde der Stadtverwaltung am Tage vorher gemeldet. »Der Brigadeführer hat gewünscht, dass diese Asche in Gefässe geladen (Kisten oder Säcke) und nach dem Heidefriedhof transportiert werde, wo sie an der auf dem Plan in Blei eingezeichneten Stelle in die Erde versenkt werden soll. Es ist nicht notwendig, die Kisten oder Säcke in der Erde mit zu belassen. Sie schütten also die Asche aus den Transportgefässen in das Grab aus, so dass die Transportgefässe mehrfach verwendet werden können. Der Transport soll Dienstag beginnen.«

For two weeks the old market place in the city center became a crematorium. On 5 March the corpses collected in the streets had been retrieved, the pyres gone out. »By my estimate, 8 - 10 cubic meters of ash lay on the Altmarkt«, was reported to the city administration the day before. »The Brigadeführer wished that this ash be loaded into recipients (boxes or sacks) and transported to the Heidefriedhof, where it is to be sunk into the earth at the place marked in lead on the map. It is not necessary to leave the boxes or sacks in the soil. You shall thus pour the ash from the transport recipients into the soil, so that the recipients can be reused several times. Transport should start on Tuesday.«

(Emphasis added)

What was it that these documents referred to as "ash"? How large or how small were the cremation remains described by this term?

That expression would hardly be used for carbonized corpses such as those shown in the picture below of people burned to death in the US firebombing of Tokyo on 9-10 March 1945. ^[93]

Image 2.3 – Victims of Tokyo firebombing

A closer match (though not quite the same) would be this carbonized rat, reduced to 13 % of its original mass^[94]:

Image 2.4 – Carbonized rat

Or this carbonized rabbit, reduced to 16.97% of its original mass^[95]:

Image 2.5 – Carbonized rabbit

Or the carbonized human remains shown in the photo below^[96]:

Image 2.6 – Carbonized human remains

The human remains on the last of these pictures, while not "ash" in a strict sense of the term, would be small enough to be packed into boxes or sacks, taken to the Dresden Heidefriedhof with the reduced transportation means available (mentioned in the Schlußmeldung) and poured from their recipients into the soil as mentioned in the document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945. They would thus have met the objective pursued when deciding to burn corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt. However, there is at least one photo of a Dresden pyre suggesting that the leftovers of these pyres were even smaller^[97], namely that they looked like the piled up bone fragments visible in the foreground of the photo below.

Image 2.7 – Dresden Altmarkt pyre burning, with cremation remains in the foreground

Such remains would more appropriately be called "ash" than the carbonized remains shown in the previous pictures, though they would still not be "ash" in a strict sense of the term.

Now to the question how the result of cremation on the Dresden pyres compares to result of cremation on the Aktion Reinhard(t) pyres. The following evidence suggests that the corpses were at best reduced to the same extent as the corpses on the Dresden pyres, but probably to a lesser extent:

a) Leleko’s testimony^[98], whereby "The parts of the body that had burned but had preserved their natural shape were put into a special mortar and pounded into flour."
b) Chil Rajchman’s memoirs quoted in Part 1 of this series^[99]:

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. […] 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. […]

c) Larger incompletely burned or unburned human remains found on the site of Bełżec extermination camp, such as mentioned in the report of 13.10.1945 by coroner Dr. Mieczyslaw Pietraszkiewicz, quoted on pp. 383f. of the critique. In the cremation remains unearthed during excavations ordered by Judge Godzieszewski, the coroner found "hands and arms, women’s hair, as well as human bones not totally burnt", "human hair, part of a human body, … and remnants of incompletely burnt bones", "a human skull with remnants of skin and hair, as well as two shinbones and a rib", "human bones, such as jawbones and shinbones", "skulls, parts of skulls, vertebrae, ribs, collarbones, shoulder blades, arm bones, lower legs, wrists, fingers, pelvic bones, thigh bones, lower legs, and foot bones", "two forearms and a lumbar portion of the backbone with some soft tissue and traces of carbonization", various bones allowing to "conclude that they belong to persons of different age groups, from two-year-olds up to very old people, as borne out by toothless jaws and numerous dentures", one partially burnt jawbone "containing milk teeth as well as incipient permanent teeth, which indicates that it belongs to a person 7 to 8 years of age", "shapeless portions of soft tissue from human bodies", "two lower legs belonging to a two-year-old child", "partly decomposed, partly mummified", "small soft tissue parts of human bodies that are in the ash and not completely carbonized". A description of the site quoted on p. 385 of the critique, obviously by Judge Godzieszewski, mentions "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". Some postwar photos of the Bełżec site available online show human bones and skulls^[100].
d) Larger incompletely burned or unburned human remains found on the site of Treblinka extermination camp as described in Judge Łukaszkiewicz' reports dated 13 November and 29 December 1945, quoted on pp. 394f. of the critique. The former report mentions that excavations in a bomb crater taken to a depth of 7.5 meters found numerous "human remains … partially still in a state of decomposition". The latter mentions that, in an area of ca. 2 hectares covered by "a mixture of ashes and sand", there were found "countless human bones, often still covered with tissue remains, which are in a condition of decomposition", as well as "human skulls". Such remains can be viewed on photos of the Treblinka site available online^[101].
e) My own finds upon the soil of Sobibór in October 2008, which besides small "ashes" mixed with soil included partially burned bone fragments as well as unburned bone fragments^[102].

Based on this evidence of rather incomplete cremation of the corpses, one can conclude that the Aktion Reinhard(t) pyres are comparable to those on the Dresden Altmarkt not only as concerns their construction, but also as concerns the cremation results achieved. This, in turn, means that the types and amounts of fuel expended on the Dresden Altmarkt pyres can be considered an accurate indicator of the types and amounts of fuel required to burn the corpses of murdered deportees on the pyres of the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.

The fuel used to burn the corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt included wood placed below the grates, which can be seen on photos like the ones below, taken from page 1367 of MGK’s magnum opus:

Image 2.8 – Dresden pyre

Image 2.9 – Dresden pyre

David Irving, quoted on p. 486f of the critique, mentioned "bundles of wood and straw" poked under the steel girders, as well as "more straw between each layer" of corpses.

Finally and most importantly, there was gasoline poured on the corpses. The primary source for the use of this fuel seems to be Theodor Ellgering, who in his capacity as Geschäftsführer Interministerieller Luftkriegsschädenausschuβ (Manager of the Inter-ministerial Air War Damage Committee) was in charge or directing relief measures after the bombing attack on 13/14 February. In a postwar account of his activities, Ellgering wrote the following^[103]:

Wir standen trotz dieser doch gewiβ primitiven Bestattungsart vor der Notwendigkeit, das Tempo weiter zu beschleunigen, denn infolge des milden Wetters begannen die Leichen in Verwesung überzugehen. Dadurch verbreitete sich über der völlig zerstörten Innenstadt ein pestilenzartiger Gestank. Es war deshalb aus gesundheitspolizeilichen Gründen dringend notwendig, die Leichenbergung zu beschleunigen. Der von vielen Seiten gemachte Vorschlag, die Toten in den städtischen Grünanlagen – also an Ort und Stelle – zu beerdigen, war aber nach Ansicht der Hygieniker wegen Gefährdung der Trinkwasserversorgung nicht durchführbar. Um den Ausbruch von Seuchen zu vermeiden, wurde die Altstadt zum Sperrgebiet erklärt. Es blieb keine Wahl mehr, als die … Genehmigung zur Verbrennung der Leichen zu geben, die auf dem Altmarkt stattfand, wo aus Eisenträgern riesige Roste gebaut wurden, auf denen jeweils 500 Leichen zu Scheiterhaufen aufgeschichtet, mit Benzin getränkt und verbrannt wurden.

Despite this certainly primitive kind of burial we stood before the necessity to further accelerate the pace, for due to the mild weather the corpses began to decompose. Due to this a pestilential stench spread over the completely destroyed inner city. It was urgently necessary, for public health reasons, to accelerate the recovery of the corpses. However, the suggestion made from many sides to bury the dead in the municipal green areas – i.e. on the spot – was not executable according to the hygienists’ opinion as it would imperil the drinking water supply. In order to prevent the outbreak of epidemics, the old town was declared a restricted area. There was no choice but to … grant permission for the burning of the corpses, which took place on the Altmarkt, where they made giant grates with iron girders, on each of which 500 corpses were piled up in pyres, drenched with gasoline and burned.

This takes us to the last of the five questions, the question what amounts of each fuel were used.

About the amount of straw placed between the layers of bodies, according to Irving, there is no information. Judging by what can be seen on the above pictures, it must have been negligible.

There is also no information about the amount of wood (and, according to Irving, straw) that was placed underneath the girders. What can be done is to calculate the maximum amount of wood that could be placed below the girders, based on the area of the pyre and the space between the bottom of the girders and the soil. That space, judging by the lower of the above pictures, cannot have been more than half a meter. The area of the grate was estimated on p. 492 of the critique as being one-fifth to one-fourth of the area of a Treblinka grate. Taking Mattogno’s high-end estimate of such grate’s area (90 m²)^[104] and the larger proportion, the area of a Dresden grate would have been (90 ÷ 4 =) 22.5 m². So the maximum volume of wood and straw that could have been placed underneath these grates was (22.5 x 0.5 =) 11.25 cubic meters.

As the proportion of wood and straw is not known and only wood can be seen on the above photographs, I’ll consider for the purpose of the following calculations that only wood was placed under the grates. What mass of wood corresponds to 11.25 cubic meters depends on the type of wood. In their Sobibór book (p. 138), MGK considered wood with a heating value of 3,800 kcal/kg, which corresponds to wood with a water content of 20 %. According to an online list of green and dry wood weights^[105], the heaviest type of wood with such water content weighs 4,552 lb/cord. 1 lb = 0.45359237 kg and 1 cord = 3.624556416 cubic meters, so 4,552 lb/cord equals 569.66 kg/cubic meter. This means that, under the assumption regarding specific wood weight that is most unfavorable to my argument, a maximum of (11.25 x 569.66 =) 6,408.64 kg of dry wood could have been placed underneath a grate on the Dresden Altmarkt. Assuming that the 6,865 corpses were burned at a rate of only about 400 per pyre^[106], at least 17 pyres would have been required. I’ll add one for good measure and make it 18 pyres. The maximum amount of dry wood placed underneath the grates would thus be (18 x 6,408.64 =) 115,355.52 kg.

Now to the gasoline. Just like regarding the wood, there is no information available about the amount. According to my calculations mentioned on p. 489 of the critique^[107], the burning of 6,865 corpses weighing 49 kg on average would have required 68,004 liters of gasoline, corresponding to 357,914 kg of fresh wood or 188,376 kg of dry wood.

Mattogno approach to this estimate is quite amusing. First he claims (p. 1410) that I don’t "state how much gasoline was needed". Five pages later (p. 1415) he quotes my estimate of ca. 68,000 liters and argues, believe it or not, that the amount I estimated is too high:

Another inane (mis)demonstration. The source Muehlenkamp quotes from, Irving, speaks also of the utilization of “wood and straw” (“Under the steel grinders and bars were poked bundles of wood and straw. On top of the grill were heaped the corpses, four or five hundred at a time, with more straw between each layer”), which, together with the clothing, reduced the demand for gasoline, which therefore could not have been 68,000 liters. Hence this comparison is useless.

So I can with Mattogno’s blessing consider the 68,004 liters I calculated to have been the absolute maximum amount of gasoline used on the Dresden pyres. What is more, according to Mattogno I should apparently convert the 115,356 kg of dry wood under the grates that I calculated above into gasoline equivalent and deduct it from the 68,004 liters (according to MGK’s factors for converting dry wood into fresh wood and fresh wood into gasoline, the deduction would be about 41,643 liters). I won’t do that, however, as I want to establish the amount of wood or wood equivalent that was required to burn corpses to "ash" on the Dresden pyres under the assumptions most unfavorable to my argument. The dry wood equivalent amount of wood and gasoline used to burn 6,865 corpses^[108] weighing a total of (6,865 x 49 =) 336,385 kg would thus be the following:

Dry wood placed under the grates: 115,356 kg
Dry wood equivalent of gasoline: 188,376 kg
Sum total: 303,732 kg.

The wood weight to corpse weight ratio would thus be 303,732:336,385, or 0.9:1.

If this ratio, which according to Mattogno is too high for the Dresden pyres, was possible on these pyres, it was also possible (with results that were at best the same, but probably worse) on the pyres of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka.

This, in turn, means that Mattogno has, based on his own arguments and largely on sources he provided himself, already lost his case as concerns fuel requirements at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.

But let’s see what else he’s got to say on this subject.

Notes

[81] Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, 2010 The Barnes Review, Washington D.C. Online: [link].
[82]The mentioned report is quoted in the Landgericht Bonn’s judgment dated 30 March 1963, see translated excerpt in the HC reference library’s thread "Number of Victims of Chelmno Extermination Camp" ([link].
[83]Mentioned in "The Hell of Polish Jewry", an article about the Ringelblum Archive in the online English edition of Spiegel magazine ([link]): "According to a statistic in the archive, 99 percent of all children had already been deported by November 1942. There were still 60,000 people living in the residential area, most of them men who worked in the workshops."
[84]These deportations are mentioned in the Bonn judgment dated 30 March 1963, see note 82.
[85]"Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,1)". ([link]).
[86]See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 1)" ([link]).
[87]In this camp, unlike in the other three extermination camps, a majority of the deportees (101,979 out of 170,165) had been deported directly from places other than ghettos in the territories of Poland and the USSR occupied by Nazi Germany. These deportees, not having gone through the rigors of ghetto life, still had a normal mass and weight. I assumed an average weight of 62 kg for the adults and 31 kg for the children and the proportion of children claimed by MGK in their Sobibór book, as explained on page 460 of the critique.
[88]Both the "raised human size brazier" and its consumption and Agarwal’s estimate are mentioned in Jeremy Elton Jacquot, "More Eco-Friendly Funeral Pyres Introduced in India", 6.12.2007 ([link]).
[89]"Global Environment Facility", CEO’s notification to GEF Council Members dd. March 13, 2008 ([link]), p. 6.
[90] Transcribed online under [link].
[91]The infinitive form of eingeäschert, einäschern, can also be translated as "to burn to ashes", according to the Leo online dictionary ([link].
[92]Matthias Neutzner, Martha Heinrich Acht, pp. 93 and 221.
[93]Image shown on Wikipedia under [link].
[94]"Rattus carbonized. A rat experiment" ([link]).
[95]"Pyrolyzed test-rabbit" ([link]).
[96]"In Libyen kommen weitere Grausamkeiten ans Licht", Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29.8.2011 ([link]).
[97]The picture is featured on David Irving’s website under [link].
[98]The Interrogation of Pavel Vladimirovich Leleko ([link]).
[99]The Last Jew of Treblinka, p. 77. See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Introduction and Part 1, Section 1)" ([link]).
[100] Yad Vashem Photo Archive, search results for "Belzec" ([link]).
[101]See the blog "Photographic documentation of Nazi crimes" ([link]), photos 1.1.84, 1.1.85, 1.3.2 – 1.3.7, 2.7.1 and 2.7.2; Yad Vashem Photo Archive, search results for "Treblinka" ([link]).
[102]See the blog "Mass Graves at Sobibor – 10th Update" ([link]), the HC reference library thread "My Trip to Sobibór" ([link]) and the YouTube video "Mass Graves at Sobibór" ([link]).
[103]Quoted after Götz Bergander, Dresden im Luftkrieg, Verlagshaus Würzburg – Flechsig, 1998, p. 180.
[104]Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf, Treblinka – Extermination Camp or Transit Camp, Theses & Dissertation Press, Chicago 2003 (online: [link]), p. 148.
[105]"Wood Species - Weight at various Moisture Content" ([link]).
[106]Ellgering, as quoted above, mentions 500 per pyre, but Irving, as quoted on p. 486 of the critique, mentions "four or five hundred" corpses burned at a time. I’m using the figure most unfavorable to my argument.
[107]Details in the blog "Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 2)" ([link]).
[108] Mattogno’s co-author Jürgen Graf doesn’t make Mattogno’s life easier in the fuel requirements question, for he counterfactually insists on a much higher number of Dresden victims, and accordingly a much higher number of corpses cremated on the Altmarkt, than becomes apparent from the available evidence and has been established beyond a reasonable doubt by the meticulous work of a commission of historians. Clinging to a manipulated version of a contemporary document, Jürgen Graf rants as follows, in footnote 2420 on p. 1069 of the magnum opus: "Not content with such a patently ridiculous statement, Myers makes the outrageous assertion that only 25,000 people died in the fire-bombing of Dresden. With respect to this worst single atrocity of World War II, he writes: “Several witness statements suggested the death toll lay significantly above 100,000 victims, even though the actual death toll has recently been revised to around 25,000” (ibid.). As a matter of fact, a report of the Ordnungspolizei of Dresden stated: “Until the evening of 20 March 202,040 dead bodies, predominantly women and children, were recovered. The number of victims is expected to rise to 250,000.” www.cpgg.info/doc/tagesbefehl_47htm. Incidentally, the National Socialist government tried to conceal the dimension of the slaughter in order to avoid outbreaks of panic among the German population. Cf. Wolfgang Hackert, Bombenlügen. Richtigstellung zum Terrorangriff auf Dresden, Kopp Verlag, Rottenburg 2011.". The original Tagesbefehl 47, whose manipulation by adding a zero at the end of each number was addressed i.a. at the Irving-Lipstadt trial (see under [link], [link] and [link]) mentioned 20,204 confirmed dead, 25,000 expected dead and 6,865 corpses burned on the Altmarkt. According to the manipulated version that Graf claims to be authentic, 68,650 corpses would have been burned on the Altmarkt.

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2


Fuel requirements (2)

On p. 136 of MGK’s Sobibór book Mattogno had dismissed as possible indicators of fuel requirements in mass cremation a number of directives stating fuel requirements "either because they also mention fuels other than wood (straw, coal, liquid fuels) or because they refer to the initial layout of the pyre, allowing for the addition of fuel depending upon the progress of the incineration"– hardly a convincing argument, as I pointed out in the critique (note 105 of p. 462). He then postulated that the only reliable data refer to the operational results of the Air Curtain Burner, and presented a source about air curtain incinerations in which the fuel consumption had been 3.04 kg of timber per kg of carcass.



On p. 1368 of the magnum opus, Mattogno refers to his previous writings, shows a diagram (Illustration 12.18) and brags as follows:

In order to avoid any pointless controversies, I based myself on a technical expert report concerning such a facility and the necessary related scientific equipment, starting with the combustion diagrams indicating the temperature flow over time (Illustration 12.18).

Having thus given himself a "scientific" image in the eyes of gullible "Revisionist" readers^[109], Mattogno contrasts his approach with my response, which is supposed to have consisted only of a reference to a private message I received from the sales manager of Air Burners LLC in Florida, USA, who in Mattogno’s mind must have wanted to "present his product in the most favorable light, including with regard to its efficiency". I don’t think said sales manager saw my inquiry as that of a potential customer because I gave him no reason to, but even if he did he would have been stupid (subjecting his company to eventual warranty claims because the product failed to meet advised performance parameters) to claim a fuel efficiency three times higher than the one that could be achieved in practice, which he would have done when informing me that the fuel to carcass ratio was about 1:1. Additionally and more importantly, the sales manager was not my only source, for footnote 103 on pp. 461-62 reads as follows (emphases added):

Online under http://web.archive.org/web/20060929080547/http://www.aphis.usda.gov/NCIE/oie/pdf_files/tahc-carcass-disp-jan05.pdf. MGK (Sobibór, p.135) claim that the only reliable data regarding fuel requirements in (open-air) carcass burning refer to the use air curtain burners, devices for the cremation of carcasses that consist of a burner and a powerful blower linked to an enclosure of refractory material or to a ditch into which the carcasses are placed. They mention a case in which the burning of 16.1 tons of carcasses required 49 tons of timber with an average humidity of about 20 percent, a wood weight to carcass weight ratio of 3.04 to 1. However, air Curtain incinerators are not noted for fuel efficiency, according to the TAHC’s aforementioned General Guidelines for the Disposal of Carcasses, whereby air curtain incineration is "fuel intensive" (p.9). These guidelines on the other hand mention fuel-to-carcass ratio much lower than MGK claim for the experiment they mention: "The materials required are wood (in a wood: carcass ratio of from 1:1 to 2:1), diesel fuel for both the fire and the air-curtain fan, and properly trained personnel. For incineration of 500 adult swine, the requirements are 30 cords of dry wood and 200 gallons of diesel fuel." (p.8) The mentioned ratios are in line with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)/TAHC report on an experiment of burning swine carcasses at Pilot Point, Texas, on 19-20 December 1994, available under http://www.airburners.com/DATA-FILES_Tech/ab_swine_report.pdf. They are also in line with a communication sent to the author by Mr. Norbert Fuhrmann, sales manager of Air Burners LLC in Florida, USA, which is quoted in Muehlenkamp, ‘Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research - Part 4 (2)’. According to Mr. Fuhrmann: "A good rule of thumb is that you need roughly in tons the same amount of wood waste as the weight of the carcasses for bovines, pigs, horses, sheep, etc. For 5 tons of carcasses you need 4-5 tons of wood waste."These equally reliable sources conveniently omitted by MGK show that carcasses can be burned at a much lower wood-weight-to-carcass-weight ratio than in the cases they mention.

The footnote is quoted in full and with added emphases to show that Mattogno could impossibly have missed the highlighted passages, and that his claim that I presented the sales manager of Air Burners LLC in Florida, USA as my only source can therefore not have been due to mere oversight. It is, to put it plainly, a lie of Mattogno’s – and not a very intelligent one considering how easily it can be exposed as such.

Following this disgraceful behavior, Mattogno refers to the wood/flesh ratios he observed in his own experiments, and asks why I have not performed such experiments myself. He omits that the reason why he performed these experiments was because certain data in German engineer W. Heepke’s writings about carcass cremation he had referred to were not to his liking, as becomes apparent from Mattogno’s article about his experiments^[110]. Rather than perform experiments, I obtained an article about the experiments that Heepke had referred to, written by the veterinarians who had conducted these experiments, which suggests that – contrary to Mattogno’s speculation whereby the experiments had resulted only in more or less complete carbonization^[111], the carcasses were reduced to what the authors called "a weakly smoking heap of ashes" in one case^[112].

In the mentioned article the authors, Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé, described six carcass cremation experiments performed according to two different methods. In experiments I, II and III, the carcass was placed on iron T-carriers placed across a pit in which the fire was burning. In experiments IV, V and VI, the fire was burning in a smaller pit excavated from the bottom of a larger pit, and the carriers on which the carcass was lain were placed across the smaller inner pit, so that the carcass burned inside the pit whereas in experiments I, II and III it burned outside the pit. On p. 1369 Mattogno shows an illustration of the second method, which I reproduce below with some editing (I have reddened the iron carriers’ support placed across the inner pit). This is followed by an illustration of the first method, in which the reddened carrier support is placed about the outer pit and the inner pit, which doesn’t exist, has been blackened.

Image 2.10 – Pit arrangement in Lothes & Profés experiments IV, V and VI

Image 2.11 – Pit arrangement in Lothes & Profé’s experiments I, II and III

The former arrangement I likened to the method applied at Sobibór according to several eyewitness testimonies (burning on grates inside a pit), the latter to the method applied at Treblinka according to Leleko’s testimony and the judgments at the 1st (Kurt Franz et al) and 2nd (Franz Stangl) Düsseldorf trials. Regarding Bełżec and Chełmno, I assumed that the arrangements must have corresponded to either the one applied at Sobibór or the one applied at Treblinka. ^[113]

Mattogno kindly provided two cremation grid facility schemes on p. 1370, the upper showing what he considers to have been the arrangement at Treblinka and Bełżec, the latter the arrangement at Sobibór.

Image 2.12 – Cremation schemes by Mattogno

I slightly edited the former scheme to show what I consider to have been the arrangement at Treblinka.

Image 2.13 – Edited Treblinka cremation scheme

Regarding the Sobibór structure Mattogno seems to have no objections ("The facility with a grid inside a pit is attested to by exterminationist historiography only for Sobibór"), whereas regarding Treblinka he objects that "the data resulting from the verdict of the Düsseldorf Court of 3 September 1965 and of 22 December 1970 and from the testimony of Leleko are contradictory, rendering it impossible to establish the system of cremation employed in that camp". That may be so if one acts like 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. If, however, one makes to effort of trying fit the pieces of the puzzle together, which is what historians do, it is possible to reconcile the verdict of the Düsseldorf Court of 3 September 1965 (which doesn’t mention a pit, but neither rules out that there was one) with the verdict of 22 December 1970 and the testimony of Leleko (in which a pit is mentioned) ^[114]. As concerns Bełżec, Mattogno’s objection is that "the only witness providing any details in this regard, Heinrich Gley (in his interrogation of 8 May 1961), spoke of a “construction of large grids, upon which the corpses were burned,” without any reference to pits". That may be so, but the very paucity of the description means that the presence of a pit underneath the "construction of large grids" cannot be excluded. Regarding Chełmno Mattogno makes no comment.

Mattogno then claims that a comparison of his cremation schemes with the sketch of the Lothes and Profé facility "shows that the systems are unrelated". Actually the comparison shows that they are quite similar to each other. Setting up the grates inside a pit and lighting a fire underneath has the same effect as placing the grates atop a smaller fire pit inside a larger pit, which is that of avoiding heat loss and protecting the fire against the wind. One might even argue that air circulation was better in the Sobibór arrangement than in experiments IV, V and VI by Lothes and Profé. And the only difference between the Treblinka arrangement as I reconstructed it and the arrangement in Lothes & Profé’s experiments I, II and III is that in the latter the bottom of the grates was on the rims of the pit whereas in the former there was some space between the bottom of the grate and the rims of the pit, corresponding to the above-ground part of the concrete blocks supporting the grate.

In their aforementioned article, Lothes & Profé rendered their total fuel requirements (minus accelerants whose quantities were considered negligible) in "evaporation units" (E.U.), an "evaporation unit" being the amount of energy required to evaporate 1 kg of water. They also provided information that allows for converting these evaporation units into wood weights, as I did on p. 465 of the critique, namely that 1 kg of wood can evaporate 9 kg of water. If 1 kg of wood can evaporate 9 kg of water, the mass in kg of wood or wood equivalent can be obtained dividing by nine the number of E.U. stated by Lothes & Profé regarding each of their experiments, which leads to the following wood weights per kg of carcass weight:

Experiment I: 4.5÷9 = 0.5 kg
Experiment II: 3.88÷9 = 0.43 kg
Experiment III: 6.75÷9 = 0.75 kg
Average I, II and III: 5.04÷9 = 0.56 kg
Experiment IV: 3.65÷9 = 0.41 kg
Experiment V: 4.76÷9 = 0.53 kg
Experiment VI: 4.5÷9 = 0.5 kg
Average IV, V and VI: 4.3÷9 = 0.43 kg

Mattogno objects to the assumptions underlying Lothes & Profe´s calculations and mine (namely that 1 kg of wood evaporates 9 kg of water, 1 kg of brown coal evaporates 12 kg of water) on grounds that "since the vaporization heat of 1 kg of water ter equals 640 kcal, it is not clear how 1,500 kcal could vaporize 9 kg of water and 2,000 kcal 12 kg of water". He therefore elaborates on an alternative method for calculating the wood equivalent of the flammables used in experiment I, which however reaches the same results as concerns the wood equivalent of wood and brown coal spent in that experiment (300 kg for a 600 kg carcass, corresponding to 0.5 kg of wood per kg of carcass), the only difference resulting from his including in the calculation the 25 kg of tar also applied by the veterinarians in that experiment, which these had left out of their calculations. These are Mattogno’s calculations on pp. 1372f., which are quoted because they are necessary to understand his subsequent calculations:

The energy content of 1 kg of lignite coal briquet is between 4,700 and 5,200 kcal/kg,2999 on average 4,950 kcal/kg. This means that Heepke considered the efficiency of the combustible material used in the above-mentioned experiments to be [(2,000 ÷ 4,950) × 100 =) 40.4%.
The effective heat developed by the anthracite coal tar thus corresponds to (228,750 × 0.404 =) 92,415 kcal.
If the wood used had a calorific effect of 1,500 kcal/kg with an efficiency of 40.4%, its energy contents would be (1,500 ÷ 0.404) ≈ 3,700 kcal/kg, a value compatible with normal parameters of dry wood.
By expressing all the combustible materials as units of wood, one obtains the following balance: wood: 100 kg × 3,700 kcal/kg = 370,000 kcal.
briquet: 150 kg × 4,950 kcal/kg = 742,500 kcal, corresponding to (742,500 kcal ÷ 3,700 kcal/kg =) 200 kg of wood;
tar: 25 kg × 9,150 kcal/kg = 228,750 kcal, the equivalent of (228,750 kcl ÷ 3,700 kcal/kg) ≈ 62 kg of wood.
The equivalent consumption of wood is therefore (100 + 200 + 62 =) 362 kg, and the above-mentioned ratio changes from 0.46 to 0.60.
In the case of fresh wood (1,900 kcal/kg), with a calorific effect of (1,900 kcal/kg × 0.404 =) 767 kcal/kg, the total consumption would be (362 kg ÷ 1,900 kcal/kg × 3,700 kcal/kg) ≈ 705 kg, with a ratio of 1.17:1.

In the following I’ll do these calculations for all six experiments performed by Lothes & Profé. For (dry) wood, brown coal and tar I’ll take Mattogno’s energy values (respectively 3,700, 4,950 and 9,150 kcal/kg), for the resin used in experiment nr. II I’ll assume the same value as for tar, which should be on the high side as Lothes & Profé considered resin a comparatively ineffective accelerant. For the conversion from dry wood to fresh wood I’ll use the same formula as Mattogno. I also provide the results without including the tar or resin for comparison, which are identical to those of Lothes & Profé calculations and my own previous calculation.

Table 2.3 – Wood/wood equivalent consumption in Lothes & Profé’s experiments I to VI, with and without considering tar or resin.

Following his calculations that I expanded above, Mattogno on p. 1373 produces the following bluster:

Here Muehlenkamp’s obtuse ignorance takes over. The results of these experiments depended on two simultaneous factors: on one hand the capacity to burn in an efficient way the fat of the carcass; on the other the capacity to monitor the combustion process accurately.

Regarding the first factor, Mattogno wouldn’t be breaking any news if he just wanted to express what is self-understood, namely that the carcasses burned by Lothes & Profé were normally fed carcasses containing fat that contributed to the combustion process. But Mattogno tries to make believe that Lothes & Profé burned the corpses’ fat in a particularly efficient form and that the carcasses they burned were particularly fat ones. For the former L&P’s article offers no support and Mattogno quotes no other source, so I’ll politely call this a speculation of Mattogno’s. In support of the latter, Mattogno quotes from L&P’s article a passage that I translated as follows:

After the carcass had completely caught fire, no more burning material was added, obviously for reasons of economy. Due to the abundant fat the burning process was nevertheless entertained.

The quote is taken out of context, for it refers not to any of the six burning experiments undertaken by Lothes & Profé but to an earlier burning of an anthrax carcass expressly described as a "very well fed cow", and only the burning time (40 hours) and the cost incurred (about 3 marks) are stated, but not the amounts of fuel (brown coal briquettes) that were employed. As concerns the six experiments, only in one (experiment nr. IV) was the carcass described as "very massive and fatty", suggesting that in the other five experiments the carcasses had a fat content that was normal for their species but not noteworthy. In four of the six experiments, including experiment nr. IV, the carcasses burned were horse carcasses. Horses are not generally known to be fat animals^[115], which was presumably why the fat content of the animal burned in experiment nr. IV was considered extraordinary and accordingly noted.

Now to the second factor that is supposed to have accounted for the low fuel consumption in Lothes & Profé’s experiments. In order to claim "the possibility, or rather the necessity, to monitor accurately the combustion process and to oxygenate the carcass adequately", Mattogno mistranslates a statement of engineer Heepke’s^[116]:
"Die einzige Schwierigkeit liegt nur darin, dass stets ein Sachverständiger den Prozess in die Wege leiten muss."
as follows:
"The only difficulty was that the process had to be constantly supervised by an expert."

Apart from using the past tense where Heepke had written in the present tense, the translation is flawed in that "in die Wege leiten" does not mean "to supervise" let alone "to constantly supervise", as a native speaker of the German language will immediately recognize. The Leo online dictionary^[117]offers the translations "to initiate something" and "to engineer something" for "in die Wege leiten". What Heepke probably meant to say is that the making of the pit or the outer and inner pits, the arrangement of the burning materials, the placement of the iron carriers and the placement of the carcass on the iron carriers required expert guidance, notwithstanding the precise instructions contained in Lothes & Profé’s article^[118]. Maybe expert guidance was also required to extract the carcass’s entrails, which was part of Lothes & Profé’s recommendations based on their experiments IV, V and VI. However, once the burning process had started (or at the latest after the carcass had caught fire), what would the experts on site be required for?

Among other things (what other things?) in order to put the entrails "on the pyre piece by piece as the combustion proceeded", according to Mattogno. As soft tissues "not only restrict heat transfer but also effectively cut off the oxygen supply to the underlying bone", according to a source about another cremation topic quoted by Mattogno^[119], this is supposed to have a major impact on fuel consumption and cremation time. Yet in at least two of Lothes & Profé experiments, the ones numbered II and III, the entrails were not extracted from the carcass prior to cremation^[120]. Nevertheless experiment II, while lasting 6 hours longer than experiment I, was more fuel-efficient than the latter (0.52 vs. 0.60 kg of wood or wood equivalent per kg of carcass, including the tar), whereas experiment nr. III, while more fuel-intensive than the previous two (0.87 kg of wood or wood equivalent per kg of carcass, including the tar or resin) lasted only 8 hours and 15 minutes, less than half the duration of experiment I although the carcass weighed exactly half as much (300 vs. 600 kg). So these results don’t suggest that removing the entrails before cremation and putting them on the pyre as the burning progresses leads to savings in fuel consumption or time. To be sure, the entrails were removed in all of experiments IV, V and VI, which were more fuel-efficient on average than experiments I, II and III (0.55 vs. 0.67 kg of wood or wood equivalent per kg of carcass, including the tar or resin), and the burning was also considerably faster, but Lothes & Profé expressly attributed these advantages to the arrangement of the pyre:

By burning the carcasses in the two-part (sunken) pit one achieves, besides a better use of the burning material, a certain independence from the wind. As the pits must sometimes be made already on the day of postmortem, this advantage, having in view an eventual change of the wind direction, should not be underestimated.

So if the removal and later addition of the entrails had an impact on fuel consumption and/or burning time, it must have been marginal.

This means that Mattogno’s explanation for the low fuel consumption in Lothes & Profé’s experiments fails on both arguments. The low fuel consumption was due neither to the carcasses being extraordinarily fat nor to constant expert supervision namely as concerns the removal and later addition of the carcasses’ entrails. It was due to arrangement of the pyre, with the "two-part (sunken) pit" achieving slightly better results than the one-part pit, though not by a wide margin as concerns fuel consumption.

Therefore, and considering the above-mentioned similarities between Lothes & Profe’s pyre arrangements and the pyre arrangements at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps, what reasons are there to not use the former as a fuel consumption indicator for the latter?

While conceding (p. 1376) that a direct comparison between Lothes & Profé’s pyres and the pyres of Aktion Reinhard(t) would "only" make sense "if the corpses in the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps would have been put one by one onto the cremation grids", Mattogno argues that "the orthodox hypothesis is radically different", the "radical" difference being that the corpses didn’t lie on the grates side by side in a single layer but were piled on top of each other. Mattogno claims that in a huge heap of corpses placed over a grid "only the external parts would be exposed to the flames and oxygen, while the internal parts would remain protected from the heat and without the influx of oxygen for a considerable time", and argues that for this reason "directives for the combustion of dead animals prescribe that carcasses are not amassed on top of each other".

The directive he presents in support of his argument on p. 1383 is a Field Manual of Wildlife Diseases, by Milton Friend and J. Christian Franson, namely it’s Chapter 4 on "Disease Control Operations"^[121], which we shall thus take a look at.

The carcasses that these instructions refer to are avian carcasses, and the instructions point out that it’s important to "keep the fire contained and to get sufficient air movement under the carcasses to maintain a hot fire and completely burn the carcasses", suggesting that the objective is a complete combustion and not merely a however thorough carbonization. Incineration is "facilitated by stacking or piling carcasses on the burning platform, soaking them with used oil or some other fuel, and waiting about 10 to 15 minutes before igniting them". During dry weather, "burning carcasses in a pit surrounded by a vegetation-free area is more desirable than above-ground burning". In either situation, however, "piling too many carcasses on the fire at once is a common mistake"; it is recommended to "burn carcasses one layer at a time" The reason for this recommendation is given in Figure 4.13, which contains the following two images that Mattogno reproduces on p. 1383:

Image 2.14 – Correct layering of carcasses

Image 2.15 – Incorrect layering of carcasses

The stated (possible) consequences of incorrect layering are that charred outer carcasses may insulate inner carcasses from incineration. As the carcasses portrayed are avian carcasses and the instructions are chiefly if not wholly concerned with the burning of such carcasses, the question arises whether these consequences have something to do with particular characteristics of this type of carcass. Birds have feathers that can retain water, and accordingly are more difficult to burn than e.g. swine. ^[122] However, instructions for the burning of animals felled by foot and mouth disease^[123]also mention that "If carcasses are piled incorrectly on top of one another rather than in a single layer, carcasses in the centre may be protected and not burn properly". The wording suggests that "protection" of carcasses in the center of the pyre is considered a possible ("may be protected") and not a certain consequence of incorrectly piling carcasses on top of one another. In fact, one of the images in the aforementioned Chapter 4 shows avian carcasses that seem to have been incorrectly piled on top of one another and are nevertheless burning well enough.

Image 2.16 – Avian carcasses being incinerated on an above-ground burning platform

Piling carcasses on top of one another seems to also have been practiced on occasion during the 2001 food and mouth disease epidemic in the UK, as is suggested by the image below. ^[124]

Image 2.17 – Layering of carcasses during the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic in the UK

If carcasses in the center of the pyre are "protected" from the fire by charred outer carcasses, the stated consequence is an improper burning of the carcasses in the center, which would have its parallel in the improper and incomplete combustion or carbonization of corpses or parts of corpses on the Aktion Reinhard(t) pyres that becomes apparent from the aforementioned evidence and had to be made up for by laborious post-incineration processing. It is therefore not an argument against considering fuel consumption in Lothes & Profé’s pyres an indicator of fuel consumption on the Aktion Reinhard(t) pyres.

On pp. 465f. of the critique I had considered the possibility that the fuel-to-carcass ratio might be lower when burning large numbers of carcasses than when burning a single carcass, based on a table shown by Mattogno that states the kg of fuel per kg of carcass ratio in various types of animal incinerator ovens, with the ratio decreasing as the maximum load of carcass mass increases. Mattogno delivers a lecture spanning about 1 ½ pages preceded by his customary ad hominem ("Muehlenkamp offers another example of his sad incompetence"), in which he claims that the more favorable fuel-to-carcass ratios in the larger ovens were due to certain characteristics of the larger ovens, namely a "better ratio of load to refractory wall weight". I have no way of verifying the accuracy of this claim and therefore let Mattogno indulge in his vanity, while noting that the fuel-to-carcass ratio can indeed be reduced when cremating multiple carcasses in relation to the burning of a single carcass, as is mentioned on p. 28 of the Australian Veterinary Emergency Plan - Operational Procedures Manual – Disposal (hereinafter "Ausvetplan"), which was pointed out to me by one of Mattogno’s fellow "Revisionists"^[125]. The latest version of the Ausvetplan (Version 3.1, 2015) ^[126] contains the following information in Appendix 7:

Experience has demonstrated that a single bovine carcass (around 500 kg) can be completely consumed using 1.5 tonne of dry timber (Worsfold and King 2006). For multiple carcasses, the amount of timber can be reduced to around 1.0 tonne per adult bovine. Carcasses are layered onto the pyre, preferably on their backs. Because the rear ends of bovine carcasses are usually the hardest to consume, alternating carcasses head to tail can even out the burn. Carcasses should only be stacked one row high and should have sufficient air space around them (Figure A7.1). The number of carcasses per pyre should be limited to a manageable level. Restricting airflow around the carcasses will reduce the efficiency of combustion and produce more smoke.

(Emphases added.)
There’s no indication that stacking carcasses more than one row high would increase fuel consumption, but if more fuel were used to achieve the same result despite reduced combustion efficiency, that increase might be offset by economies of scale, so that carcasses piled on top of each other contrary to these instructions would require the same amount of fuel per weight unit as a single carcass.

The wood weight to carcass weight ratio according to the instructions quoted above is 3:1 when incinerating a single carcass and 2:1 when incinerating multiple carcasses. Lothes & Profé, on the other hand, achieved a wood weight to carcass weight ratio of 0.67:1 in their least fuel-efficient experiments I to III, and of 0.56:1 in their most fuel-efficient experiments IV to VI, burning a single carcass on each occasion. What explains the huge difference in fuel-to-carcass ratios? Maybe it is the superiority of Lothes & Profé’s method alone, in which case the question would arise why this method (assuming familiarity with the same) is not recommended for carcass incineration in instructions like the Ausvetplan. Possible reasons for this could be that certain required materials (the iron T-carriers used by L&P) are not so easy to obtain, especially when a large number of carcasses has to be disposed of within a short time, and that the proper setting up of a pyre according to Lothes & Profé’s method, as mentioned by Heepke, requires expert guidance. Whatever the reason, the fact is that the configuration of a pyre shown in the image on p. 88 of the Ausvetplan, in which the carcasses are placed directly on the burning material above ground:

Image 2.18 – Example of construction of a pyre, including aerial view (Ausvetplan, p. 88)

resembles the "simplest procedure" described by Engineer Heepke as quoted by Mattogno^[127], except that the burning material is above ground and not inside a pit. This "simplest procedure", according to my calculations in an earlier blog^[128], is rather fuel intensive, with ratios even above the 3:1 ratio for individual carcass cremations stated in the Ausvetplan.

Another possible explanation for the difference in fuel requirements between the Ausvetplan’s instructions and the experiments of Lothes & Profé is that the fuel requirements stated in the former are meant to bring about a complete combustion of the carcass, whereas the experiments of L&P were meant to achieve and did achieve a lesser degree of combustion. An indication in this sense is provided by a later article written by Lothes & Profé^[129], in which the authors used the terms (vollständige) Verkohlung (carbonization) and Verbrennung in regard to the results of their further experiments as if they meant the same. This suggests that the objective of L&P’s cremation experiments was satisfied when the carcasses were completely carbonized. If one considers that complete carbonization means a reduction of the corpse or carcass mass as shown in the above images 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6, i.e. a reduction to remains that might be called "ash" or "ashes" in a generous sense of the term, it stands to reason that this was also the purpose of the pyres set up on the Dresden Altmarkt and in the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps, and that as concerns the latter a considerable effort to further reduce remains by post-cremation processing was envisaged by the camps’ SS supervisors. This, in turn, is a further reason for considering Lothes & Profe’s experiments to be indicators regarding the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps as concerns fuel consumption.

Now back to Mattogno, who, oblivious of the impact of economies of scale, claims on p. 1378 to have demonstrated "above" that "the “mass incineration of corpses” would result in a proportionally higher consumption of combustible materials in respect to a single cremation, both because the air could not freely flow around each corpse and because the high temperature of the blaze would prevent any access to the pyre", such access being supposedly necessary "to control the process of combustion and to rationally and economically handle the fat of the bodies". Actually there is no demonstration "above" of a "proportionally higher consumption of combustible materials in respect to a single cremation", as Mattogno provided no calculations in this sense and such are also not to be found in the source he refers to, which merely mention the possibility of corpses in the centre of a pile burning not so well. As to activities meant to "rationally and economically handle the fat of the bodies", Mattogno hasn’t revealed what such activities he has in mind, namely as concerns the experiments of Lothes & Profé; the only activities he mentioned was adding the carcasses viscera to the fire as the burning progressed, which as we have seen had a marginal effect on fuel economy, if any at all. Maybe he thought of something like moving the bodies on the pyre with iron tools, so as to place them where the fire is hottest and thus help their ignition. If so, the witness Reichman’s statement that "Within a few minutes the fire would take so it was difficult to approach the crematorium from as far as 50 meters away", quoted by Mattogno, would be no argument against the possibility of tending the fire if it referred only to the heat of the initial blaze, after which the fire became less intense, or if the SS somehow managed to fix the problem, mentioned by Chil Rajchman, "that the work is hampered by the intense fire, which does not let anyone get close to the oven"^[130]. One or the other possibility if suggested by testimonies whereby the Feuerkolonne (fire detachment) used pitchforks and iron poles not only to arrange the bodies on the grate, but also to shift them around after the fire had caught^[131].

Perhaps in order to obfuscate the fact that he has so far provided no arguments of substance against using the results of Lothes & Profé’s experiments as an indicator of fuel requirements at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps, Mattogno changes the subject to Auschwitz, on the pretext that the "plagiarist bloggers" are "fierce supporters of the notion that human fat was collected in the “cremation pits” for use as fuel, especially with regard to Auschwitz-Birkenau". Especially? I’m not aware of the collection of human fat in cremation pits for use as fuel having been reported for any camp other than Auschwitz-Birkenau, and I neither understand what the procedure adopted there has got to do with the subject matter of the discussion, which are the camps of Aktion Reinhard(t) and Chełmno extermination camp.

Mattogno claims to have demonstrated in another article that "a fundamental contradiction exists between the technique of Lothes and Profé and the testimonial evidence" (to the collection of fat in the cremation pits at Birkenau, he obviously means) and adds that "as explained above, the heat produced by the fat from the carcass was rationally managed by being poured into the pit below (measuring 1 m × 2.5 m × 0.75 m) from where it helped fuel the combustion". The only "explanation" I remember to have seen was the aforementioned out-of-context quote from Lothes & Profé’s 1902 article meant to create the impression that their results were achieved due to the burned carcasses’ particularly high fat content, but if the fat from the carcass was "rationally managed by being poured into the pit below" (where it would fall according to the law of gravity, big deal), this is another parallel between Lothes & Profe’s experiments and the pyres at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps, which were entertained largely due to the bodies’ fat that dripped onto the fire below and caught fire there, as mentioned in passing by Bruce V. Ettling in an article about experiments in one of which a similar effect was observed^[132].

Mattogno subsequent rambling about the impossibility of the Birkenau fat collecting procedure described by witnesses is off-topic in this discussion and will therefore be ignored here. In what seems to be a further effort to obfuscate the shortcomings of his argumentation against the similarity between Lothes & Profé’s experiments and the Aktion Reinhard(t) pyres, Mattogno then asks why, if the grid system underlying these pyres was so effective, the same was not also implemented at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Simple answer to an irrelevant and pointless question: probably for the same reason that Rudolf Höss, obviously a man who liked to do things his own way instead of copying others, preferred to continue killing his victims with Zyklon B rather than with engine exhaust, even after having been introduced to the latter method.

After this excursion to Auschwitz, Mattogno quotes the conclusions I stated on pp. 467f. of the critique, which I will also have to quote in full to make Mattogno’s related comments understandable:

The conclusions that the above leads to are the following:
a) Fuel expenditure in cremating corpses or carcasses essentially depends on applying the correct method.
b) MGK presented no arguments that would make a wood weight to corpse/carcass weight ratio of 2:1 seem inappropriate.
c) There are good reasons to assume that the fuel-weight to carcass-weight ratio achieved in burning corpses at Nazi extermination camps was much lower than 2:1. Aggarwal’s "raised human-sized brazier" may have achieved a ratio of 100 kg of wood vs. 70 kg of corpse = 1.43:1, and the carcass-burning experiments I to III conducted by Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé in the early 20th Century (the comparatively less fuel-efficient of their experiments) achieved an average ratio of 0.56:1. Descriptions of the burning process at Sobibor actually suggest a similarity to the more fuel-efficient of Dr. Lothes & Dr. Profé’s experiments, the ones at which a ratio of 0.48:1 was achieved.
d) There's no reason why SS expert Floss (the man who according to the Stangl judgment "brought the grid into the right position" at Treblinka) could not have achieved in mass burning a ratio equal to or lower than what had been achieved by Dr. Lothes & Dr. Profé burning individual carcasses in the early 20th century.

After some of his ad-hominem rhetoric regarding item a), Mattogno flies into a fit of full-blown hysteria regarding item b), which he calls a "pathetic lie" on grounds of his having presented the following "essential consumption data for the various systems presented (in relation to a body of 70 kg)":

1) Teri cremation oven: 1.82 kg of wood for each kg of body
2) Mokshda system: 2.14 kg/kg
3) Fuel Efficient Crematorium: 3.6 kg/kg
4) traditional Hindu pyre: 7.14 kg/kg
5) Air Curtain System (technical expert report): 3.04 kg/kg
6) burning of carcasses: 3.6 kg/kg (based on the total weight of the ashes)
7) burning of poultry carcasses in Virginia: 4.4 kg/kg
8) combustion experiments by Mattogno: 3.5 kg/kg.

Mattogno’s "lie" accusation would be silly even if his list were not mendaciously selective in his favor, for it contains two examples of ratios in the order of 2:1, which alone means that it’s not inappropriate to consider the possibility of a 2:1 ratio in mass cremation of carcasses besides the higher ratios mentioned by Mattogno.

As concerns item 5), we have seen before that Mattogno conveniently swept under the carpet the TAHC’s General Guidelines for the Disposal of Carcasses, which mention a wood to carcass ratio of from 1:1 to 2:1. This alone means that the only liar here is Mattogno.

Example 7) can also be considered mendacious insofar as Mattogno omits the factors leading to this extraordinarily unfavorable ratio that are stated in the respective source, referred to in footnote 106 on p. 462 of the critique, which show that incineration of poultry carcasses can hardly be taken as a representative case^[133].

As concerns example 6), Mattogno is presumably referring to a claim made on pp. 135f. of MGK’s Sobibór book, whereby 350 kg of ashes per ton of animal from the burning of a beef carcass, mentioned in an article identified in footnote 105 on p. 462 of the critique, contain 60 kg of carcass ash (6 % of 1,000 kg) and 290 kg of wood ash, which are supposed to correspond to (290÷0.08=) 3,625 kg of wood, signifying a wood-to-carcass weight ratio of 3.6 to 1. The falsity of this calculation was exposed on pp. 508f. of the critique, where it was demonstrated that the ratio is rather in the order of 2:1.

And then there are the mass cremation examples that Mattogno completely left out of his list, namely those presented by his fellow "Revisionist" Heinrich Köchel. ^[134] As I demonstrated in an earlier blog^[135], three of these cremation cases (Heddon-on-the-Wall, first Oswestry and Bondues, France) plus one guideline presumably based on a wide range of experience (FAO) yield fuel to body mass ratios below 2:1, and even close to or below 1:1 if pig weights higher than 100 kg are considered. This proves that it is possible to cremate carcasses in open pyres with fuel to body mass ratios below 2:1 or even close to or below 1:1.

Such possibility alone means that Mattogno and his epigones cannot provide proof that it is impossible to cremate carcasses in open pyres at fuel to body mass ratios below their desired 3.5:1 ratio. Interestingly Mattogno had in an earlier publication addressing this writer^[136] argued, with reference to Köchel, that "From a serious study of the literature relating to the burning of animal carcasses during epidemics, it turns out that the equivalent given for a human corpse weighing 70 kg is 140 kg of firewood, thus 2 kg of firewood per 1 kg of meat.". Now he seems to have realized that Köchel’s examples are detrimental to his argument, and thus dropped them like a hot potato.

That leaves the "Fuel Efficient Crematorium" in India (which is fuel efficient only in comparison to the traditional Hindu pyre), the traditional Hindu pyre, and the "combustion experiments by Mattogno" as the only examples in support of Mattogno’s desired ratio of 3.5:1, versus a larger number of examples pointing to significantly lower ratios. Mattogno’s claim that his assumption of a 3.5:1 ratio for the Aktion Reinhard(t) pyres is "very much validated" can therefore only evoke amusement.

The same goes for Mattogno’s comment to my conclusion c), which deserves being quoted in full splendor:

Point c) constitutes another proof of Muehlenkamp’s incompetence. The claim of a consumption of 100 kg of wood for the cremation of a body of 70 kg using the Mokshda system was only a theoretical forecast of its inventor, Vinod Kumar Agarwal. When the apparatus was built in Delhi, the consumption turned out to be 150 kg (see point 37).

One wonders what part of the following information in the pertinent source (emphases added) ^[137]:

Estimating that it should only take about 44 pounds (22 kilograms) of wood to cremate the average body (as opposed to the excessive 880 pounds, or 440 kilograms, typically consumed in a 6 hour long formal Hindu cremation), he built his first pyre in 1993, an elevated brazier (i.e. a metal pan or cooking device) under a roof with slats to maintain the heat, which allowed air to circulate and feed the fire.
While seemingly a good idea (it only used about 100 kilograms of wood and reduced the process to 2 hours), nobody was buying it. This prompted Agarwal and his team to "get religion on our side."

could have been too hard for Mattogno to understand. Agarwal’s first creation, the "elevated brazier", was clearly not just a theoretical forecast according to this description, but a tested device that yielded the results described. Incidentally, information about its successor, the Mokshda facility (brought to me by the ever useful Friedrich Jansson) ^[138], also suggests the possibility of a ratio lower than that claimed by Mattogno:

Recently, a highly influential family reportedly reached Lodhi Road crematorium ground with the mortal remains of their beloved. Along with it they brought 400 kg of precious sandalwood for the purpose of cremation. After all, the last rites ritual is an important occasion to honour and respect the memories of the departed soul. So, even if it takes huge quantity of this valuable timber, so be it.
At the crematorium they came across an eco-friendly cremation system Mokshda, using which they were told could save 300 kg of the wood. They did exactly that, used 100 kg of the wood and took back the rest. But the makers of Mokshda aren't as lucky every time. People are not willing to listen so readily. ^[139]

The article later mentions that the Mokshda Green Cremation System (MGCS) requires MGCS requires "150 kg of wood as against the 400 kg required in the conventional system". This information can be reconciled with the 100 kg that become apparent from the above quote by assuming that the fuel requirements are not the same in every cremation and 150 kg per corpse is a maximum.

The MGCS has undergone significant modifications since its first version, modifications apparently aimed less at increasing efficiency than at making it more acceptable to tradition-minded Hindus:

Before building its latest pyres—including the dozen currently functioning—the NGO consulted Hindu priests on all aspects of their design. Among several changes that resulted, it stopped making its pyres in iron, which is an “unclean” metal for Hindus. It includes an icon of the Hindu god Shiva with each pyre, and has an education programme to help persuade traditionalists of the environmental evils of a conventional burning. ^[140]

Could it be that the mentioned changes (e.g. replacing iron by a less conductive metal, or by tile material) sacrificed some fuel efficiency to better acceptability? Perhaps, but the above-quoted source also mentions 100 kg of wood per corpse cremation:

This “Mokshda green cremation system” gives control over the temperature and circulation of the air around the flames. Mokshda says its system can dispose of a corpse in no more than two hours, using only 100kg of wood.

And it further mentions planned improvements, though the article quoted earlier suggests that these have not yet been achieved:

With further improvements, Mokshda aims to be able to reduce an adult's corpse to ashes with only 70kg of wood.

These are current values or projections for individual cremation. It may be more difficult if not impossible to achieve the same air flow quality for each corpse in multiple cremation, but on the other hand, wouldn’t the above-mentioned economies of scale reduce fuel consumption, perhaps by one-third (i.e. from 150 kg to 100 kg, from 100 kg to 67 kg, or from the projected 70 kg to 47 kg per corpse)? Looks like a possibility to be taken into consideration.

Still, the methods closest to the pyres on the Dresden Altmarkt and the Aktion Reinhard(t) pyres, as concerns both arrangements and the degree of cremation achieved, seem to be those applied by Lothes & Profé in their 1902 and 1903 experiments. Mattogno claims to have shown "above" that the application of the results obtained by Lothes and Profé to Sobibór is "abusive and senseless", though there is no such demonstration anywhere "above".

After announcing a later demonstration in point 75 of "huge errors" I’m supposed to have committed as concerns "the ratio of the carcass mass to the surface of the pit" (which I’ll address when I get to point 75), Mattogno repeats his arguments about the entrails and inner organs being taken out of the carcasses and gradually fed into the blaze. As we have seen above, this procedure was not adopted in all of Lothes & Profé’s experiments, and there is no indication that its impact on fuel requirements was more than marginal. So I can continue maintaining that Mattogno has produced no relevant arguments against using the results of Lothes & Profés experiments as an indicator of fuel consumption at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.

The first sentence of Mattogno’s comment to my conclusion d) also deserves to be quoted in full, for it contains a collection of argumentative fallacies:

Point d) shows Muehlenkamp’s impressive gullibility. Based on mere testimonial statements, he considers Herbert Floss a kind of Deus ex machina for cremations (but wasn’t Blobel the “expert”?), without explaining where, when and how he would have achieved this extraordinary mastery with regard to cremation techniques.

"Based on mere testimonial statements" is a false dilemma, for testimonial statements are historical evidence in the real world, if not in the fantasy world that Mattogno (who, as I wrote earlier, doesn’t get to set the standards by which historical facts are established) lives in. The "Deus ex machina" remark is a straw-man, for I consider Floss to have been nothing more than what the evidence shows him to have been: someone who managed to implement a functioning cremation system at Treblinka, and presumably also at the other Aktion Reinhard(t) camps. The mention of Blobel is supposed to point to a contradiction in my argumentation, but Mattogno cannot point out where I proclaimed Blobel to have been "the expert"; what I wrote on p. 451 of the critique was that Blobel seems to have claimed the credit for a cremation system based on grids, the working out of which may not even have been his merit. As to the absence of an explanation "where, when and how" Floss "would have achieved this extraordinary mastery with regard to cremation techniques", this is another false dilemma, for it’s completely irrelevant to what the evidence shows Floss to have done at Treblinka through what prior experience he had acquired the necessary knowledge on how best to set up cremation grates. Trying to point out another supposed contradiction, Mattogno then remarks that "his knowledge was apparently not that extraordinary after all, considering that, according to Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, he limited himself to bringing “the grid into the right position.”". Even that alone would have been instrumental to the success of cremation operations at Treblinka, according to the judgment at the Stangl trial^[141] from which the reference to the "right position" is taken.

The "right position" was one in which the bodies of victims containing some fat were placed on the grate over the fire in such a manner that the fat dripped into the fire and char below, ignited there and helped sustain the cremation – the very rational and economic handling of the bodies’ fat that, according to Mattogno, was the reason, or one of the reasons, for the fuel economy achieved by Lothes & Profé. ^[142]

Still having produced no argument of substance against the use of Lothes & Profé’s experiments as an indicator of fuel consumption on the AR pyres, Mattogno then takes to stomping his feet:

His speculation (“there’s no reason”) is flawed and nonsensical, in fact I have presented many facts demonstrating the exact opposite. In conclusion, his claim that at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka there existed “the possibility of a lower ratio” than the one resulting from Lothes’s and Profé’s experiments (0.56 : 1) is without foundation, and therefore he has not even made any dents on my arguments in favor of a 3.5 : 1 wood/corpse ratio.

Many facts demonstrating the opposite? Other than the repeated claim that bodies piled on top of one another would not burn as well as single bodies or bodies placed side by side (a possible but not a necessary consequence of piling up the bodies, according to Mattogno’s sources), I have seen nothing. And the second sentence is bereft of any logic: even if I had not supported the possibility of a lower fuel-to-carcass ratio than the one resulting from Lothes & Profé’s experiments, this would still be a long way from vindicating Mattogno’s claim (based, as we have seen, on a comparatively reduced number of examples including his own experiments, versus a larger number of examples pointing to lower ratios) of a fuel consumption 5.26 higher (if the tar or resin used as accelerants by Lothes & Profé are included in the fuel consumption calculations) than that achieved by Lothes & Profé in their less fuel-efficient experiments. It would be more accurate to say that Mattogno has not made any dents on my arguments in favor of a 0.67 wood/corpse ratio.

It may be that in a pyre consisting of piled-up bodies some corpses (namely those in the centre of the pyre) will not be exposed to air flow and heat in the same manner as bodies lying side by side on a grate, and that this leads to either a less thorough combustion of such bodies or to more fuel being required to achieve the same degree of combustion. But on the other hand, economies of scale reduce the amount of wood per kg of carcass required, by one third according to the Ausvetplan^[143], which presumably does not consider multiple cremations on a scale so much in excess of individual cremations as the pyres of the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps, where such economies may have been even higher. If economies of scale and additional fuel consumption due to the pyre’s arrangement cancelled each other out, the ratio would still be 0.67 kg of wood per kg of corpse, without the corpses being less thoroughly combusted, or carbonized, than in Lothes & Profé’s experiments. Or it would be lower with a less thorough degree of combustion/carbonization, which would be compatible with the aforementioned evidence to what cremation remains left by the Aktion Reinhard(t) pyres looked like, even despite intensive post-cremation processing.

On p. 468 of the critique I had referred to cremation experiments carried out by arson investigator Bruce V. Ettling^[144], particularly to one experiment in which a carcass, suspended on the seat springs of a car with a lot of char and ash underneath, had been largely consumed by a fire fed by the carcass’s own fat dripping onto the char, which acted like a candle wick and kept the fire burning. Ettling had concluded that that a carcass, and presumably also a human body, "can be rather thoroughly consumed by fire from its own fat", a necessary condition being that "the body be suspended in such a way that it is over the fire which is fed from the body fat". What is more, the results of this experiment reminded him of what he had read about the cremation procedure at Treblinka, in which an expert had "arranged the bodies on a rack with the corpses that appeared to contain some fat being placed on the bottom of the pile", after which a good fire beneath the rack had "caused fat to drip down and burn", and the bodies suspended over the fire fed by such fat had eventually been "reduced to ashes".

Mattogno’s first argument against Ettling’s observations and my reference thereto is nothing short of pathetic: he objects (p. 1382) that "the carcass in the experiment was “suspended on the seat,” not placed on top of a grid", even though Ettling had drawn a parallel between the seat springs on which the carcass was suspended over a fire fed by its own fat and the grid on which Treblinka corpses had been suspended over a fire fed by their own fat.

Mattogno’s next objection is that "the procedure presupposes that the body contains a normal amount of fat", whereas I’m supposed to have postulated "starved bodies with a very low fat content for the corpses at Bełżec and Treblinka". Actually I had considered a population that was underweight on average, without this excluding the presence of better-off individuals who were better fed than the average^[145] and thus "appeared to contain some fat", as Ettling put it. These bodies would, to the extent they had not been consumed by the strong wood fire lit below them, continue burning in their own fat, and help the burning of corpses above them the way a burning or glowing log helps the burning of another placed on top of it.

Next Mattogno repeats his "air flow" mantra, unsupported by any quantitative data about how a restriction of the individual corpse’s exposure to air flow in a pyre would affect fuel requirements, and without a demonstration that restricted air flow would offset the "self-combustion" effect described by Ettling regarding one of his experiments, which reminded him of what he had read about Treblinka cremation procedures.

In Table 8.4 on p. 469 of the critique I presented as preliminary calculation of wood requirements to burn the deportees at Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Chełmno extermination camps, juxtaposed with MGK’s calculation of wood amounts. The calculation is preliminary in that it doesn’t take into account the effects of dehydration due to loss of water during the decomposition process on the one hand and the fat loss due to the underfed state on average of a majority of deportees on the other; further calculations later in the critique take into account the effects of dehydration and malnutrition. A revised version of Table 8.4, considering an average weight of 38 instead of 34 kg for deportees from ghettos (48 kg for adults, 18 kg for children aged 14 and under, with a 2:1 relation between the former and the latter), and the fuel-to-carcass ratio of Lothes & Profés less fuel-efficient 1902 experiments including the tar or resin used as accelerant, is presented below.

Table 2.4 – Revision of Table 8.4 (critique, p. 469)

Mattogno (p. 1383) furiously hollers that this table (or its predecessor) "is worthless and merely displays Muehlenkamp’s superficiality and incompetence"^[146], then adds that "the Mokshda device is a cremation apparatus similar to – or the least different from – those of the Reinhardt camps, with a consumption of 2.14 kg of wood per kg of corpse". Apart from the fact that the Mokshda device’s consumption may well be below 2 kg of wood per kg of corpse, as pointed out above, Mattogno seems to have forgotten his earlier remark that a direct comparison between Lothes & Profé’s pyres and the pyres of Aktion Reinhard(t) would "only" make sense "if the corpses in the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps would have been put one by one onto the cremation grids"– which acknowledges that, as demonstrated above, Lothes & Profé pyres are, after the pyres on the Dresden Altmarkt, what most closely resembles the pyres of the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.

After repeating his air flow mantra and announcing a later demonstration that "based on the body composition indicated by Muehlenkamp, the effective consumption would have been far bigger than his imaginative speculations", Mattogno then complains that I applied Lothes & Profé’s ratio to the "Chełmno ovens as well, even though the only performance results known to him with regard to the Feist apparatus, and quoted by me in my Chełmno study, are more than five times higher". This conveniently ignores the fact that the contraptions Mattogno compares to the Feist apparatus were applied only in the camp’s second phase (1944/45) and handled no more than 7,176 bodies, whereas in the camp’s first phase cremation was performed either in crematoria with chimneys or on grates resembling those at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps and accordingly the pyres of Lothes & Profé. As concerns the consumption of the Feist apparatus, it should be taken into account that its purpose was to completely reduce carcasses to ashes, and fuel consumption was calculated accordingly^[147]. At the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps and as Chełmno, on the other hand, the purpose of cremation seems to have been only to carbonize the corpses to such a degree that they could be further reduced by laborious crushing and grinding, and the fuel consumption would accordingly be much lower. That's one of the reasons for the parallel to Lothes & Profé’s experiments which, judging by their aforementioned 1904 article, only strove to achieve a complete carbonization of the carcasses they burned. Ironically, this purpose would confirm Mattogno’s conjectures in his article about combustion experiments^[148]– albeit to the disadvantage of his arguments about fuel consumption at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps.

That said, we turn to the effects that dehydration during the decomposition process on the one hand and malnutrition on the other had on fuel requirements.

Notes

[109] As I remarked in the blog "Jürgen Graf at his best" ([link]), the notoriously self-projecting and dishonest accusations and openly anti-Semitic invective that grace the magnum opus suggest that Mattogno and his co-authors have long given up on making "Revisionism" look like a reasonable alternative to what they call "orthodox" historiography, and are aware that they will be forever reduced to fishing for the applause of frustrated individuals who share their resentments and ideological convictions.
[110] Mattogno, "Combustion Experiments with Flesh and Animal Fat" ([link]). I’m referring to Mattogno’s considerations that culminate in the following passage: "For more reliable results, I conducted a number of experiments as described in the following sections."
[111] Which, as demonstrated above, was probably what was achieved both at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps and in the Dresden Altmarkt cremations, so the experiments in question are an indicator of fuel consumption at these places even if no complete combustion was achieved.
[112] Dr. Lothes und Dr. Profé, "Zur unschädlichen Beseitigung von Thiercadavern auf dem Wege der Verbrennung", Berliner Thierärztliche Wochenschrift, Nr.37, 1902, pp.557-560. A translation and a scan of this article are available on the HC forum’s thread "About the Safe Removal of Animal Carcasses through Burning" ([link]).
[113] See critique, pp. 464f, as well as Part 1 Section 1 ([link]) and Section 2a ([link]) of this series.
[114] See Part 1, Section 1 of this series ([link]).
[115] Which is why horse meat is the kind of meat with the lowest fat content, see the article "Warum ist Pferdefleisch gesund?" ([link]).
[116] Quoted from W. Heepke, Die Kadaver-Vernichtungsanlagen, pp. 36f.
[117] See under [link].
[118] See the article’s translation under [link].
[119] Jacqueline I. McKinley, B. Tech, "In the Heat of the Pyre: Efficiency of Oxidation in Romano-British Cremations – Did it Really Matter?," in: Christopher W. Schmidt, Steven A. Symes (eds.), The Analysis of Burned Human Remains, Elsevier, London, 2008, p. 165.
[120] Regarding experiment nr. II L&P expressly mention that the carcass was burned with the viscera "in their natural place" ("mit den in natürlicher Lage befindlichen Eingeweiden verbrannt"). The carcass in experiment III was burned "in the manner described above" ("in der vorstehend bezeichneten Weise verbrannt"), which must be understood as a reference to the description of experiment II, meaning that in experiment III the entrails were also "in their natural place". As concerns experiment nr. I it is unclear from the wording ("das abgehäutete Cadaver eines Pferdes nebst Eingeweiden im Gewichte von 12 Centnern" - "the skinned carcass of a horse together with the viscera, weighing 12 cwt") whether the viscera were inside or outside the carcass, so I assume the latter.
[121] Online under [link].
[122] See critique, footnote 106 on p. 462. The link mentioned therein is no longer active. A cached version is available under [link].
[123]"Burning of Carcasses for Foot-and-Mouth Disease (Disease Investigation & Control - Treatment and Care)" ([link]).
[124] Image from the article "Foot and mouth disease outbreak: EU bans import of British livestock" ([link]).
[125] See the blog "On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (2)" ([link]).
[126] Available under [link].
[127]"Combustion Experiments with Flesh and Animal Fat" ([link])
[128]"Incinerating corpses on a grid is a rather inefficient method …" ([link])
[129]"Die unschädliche Beseitigung von Tierkadavern auf dem Wege der Verbrennung" Von Dr. Lothes und Dr. Profe\ Köln a. Rh. Fortschritte der Veterinär-Hygiene, Heft 12, März 1904, pp. 325-328. A translation of this article is available in the HC reference library’s thread "About the Safe Removal of Animal Carcasses through Burning" ([link]).
[130]The Last Jew, p. 88.
[131] Translation from Sara Berger Experten der Vernichtung, pp. 212f: "The decomposing corpses and parts of corpses were taken out of the mass graves with the help of the excavators and lain or thrown by the pits. Parts of corpses remaining in the pits had to be taken out by the »working Jews« with pitchforks or by hand. A group of inmates laid the corpses onto the litters, then they were taken by the »carriers« to the burning roasters at running pace. In order to have an overview over the number the corpses’ heads were hacked off so as to better count them. At the fire roasters the corpses were taken over by the »fire detachment«, which arranged the corpses in several layers on the roaster with the help of pitchforks and hooks and shoved them back and forth until they had been completely cremated". Berger refers to the following testimonies (footnote 119 on p. 551): Eliahu Rosenberg, 26.6.1970 (testimony at trial main proceedings) and 24.12.1947; Shlomo Hellmann, 21.12.1959; Abraham Lindwasser, 17.12.1964 (testimony at trial main proceedings); Abraham Goldfarb, 14.12.1964 (testimony at trial main proceedings); Henryk Reichmann, 12.10.1945; Pinchas Epstein, 25.9.1970 (testimony at trial main proceedings); Münzberger, 22.10.1964 (deposition at trial main proceedings); Grossmann, 5.7.1961; Leon Finkelsztein, 28.12.1945; Rajchman and Wiernik in their respective memoirs.
[132] Bruce V. Ettling, "Consumption of an Animal Carcass in a Fire", The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, Vol. 60, No. 1, Mar., 1969, pp.131-132. The article is quoted on p. 468 of the critique and completely transcribed in the HC reference library’s thread "Consumption of an Animal Carcass in a Fire" ([link]).
[133] According to the contractor hired to burn the poultry carcasses, the same were difficult to burn - more difficult than swine "because the swine have more fat and do not have feathers that can retain water". In this particular case, furthermore, the quality of the wood used left much to be desired: "rotted wood", "small diameter (brush)", "saturated wood", "too much metal". The management of the operation was also not the most efficient, leading MGK's source to point out that "Once the fire has reached operating temperatures, carcasses need to be loaded across the length of the fire box to avoid cooling of the fire by "clumps" of cool carcasses" - apparently this was not possible because the contractor didn't have "enough trained operators to load no more than 2 - 3 hours per shift." Regarding the source for this information, which Mattogno ignores, see note 122.
[134] Heinrich Köchel, "Leichenverbrennung im Freien", in: Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, 8 /4, 2004, pp. 427-432 (online under [link]).
[135]"On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (3)" ([link]).
[136]"Belzec or the Holocaust Controversy of Roberto Muehlenkamp" ([link])
[137] See note 88.
[138] Same blog as note 135.
[139] Shailaja Tripathi, "A thought for the dear departed", The Hindu, March 18, 2012 ([link]).
[140]"Burning bodies better", The Economist, June 18th 2007 ([link]).
[141]Justiz und NS Verbrechen (JuNSV), Bd. XXXIV (Urteil LG Düsseldorf vom 22.12.1970, 8 Ks 1/69; Lfd.Nr.746).
[142] The procedure was described as follows by Chil Rajchman (The Last Jew, pp. 85f.): "He orders that the first layer of corpses should consist of women, especially fat women, placed with their bellies on the rails. After that anything that arrives can be laid on top: men, women, children. A second layer is placed on top of the first, the pile growing narrower as it rises, up to a height of 2 metres."
[143] As note 126. If the ratio for individual cremation was 0.67, the ratio for multiple cremation would be ca. 0.45 kg of wood per kg of carcass.
[144] As note 132.
[145] See Part 1, Section 1 of this series ([link]), where I furthermore pointed out that Treblinka also received deportees that had not previously gone through the rigors of ghetto life and were thus not malnourished on average.
[146] If Mattogno’s repetitive ad hominem tirades are beginning to bore our readers, they are not alone. I also yawn whenever I read them.
[147] Dr. F. Puntigam, "Die unschädliche Beseitigung der Tierkadaver und der Fleischkonfiskate", p. in: Transations of the IXth International Veterinary Congress at the Hague, 13-19 September 1909: "Binnen 5—6 Stunden ist der Kadaver vollständig verascht." ("Within 5—6 hours the carcass is completely reduced to ashes."). The Transactions are available online under [link]; the quoted sentence, which is part of a description of the Feist apparatus, can be found at the end of the second paragraph on the left on p. 336 of the PDF. In his earlier response, Mattogno had claimed that the Feist apparatus had produced "merely the combustion of all soft tissues".
[148] Mattogno, "Combustion Experiments" (as note 110): "We have to state, though, that the aim of the experiments was only to render hygienically harmless the carcasses of animals that had died from infectious diseases; for this, a more or less complete carbonization was all that was required."

                                                                               26. March     2.

II D Rf/Hb
B. Nr. 167/42g

                   1.) Letter

                   To the
                   Crim. Tech. Institute
                   at the Reich Criminal Police Office

                   Berlin.

                   [...]

In the mean time I found more than a dozen documents from the Criminal Technical Institute, mostly authored by Albert Widmann reporting the shipment of medicals, showing the same characteristic of lacking sender and date with void. For example:

                                                                                16. Nov.     4.

                      Chemistry 4      

Mr. medical councillor Dr. Sch.
State Mental Home
Eichberg/Rheingau
via Eltville, train station Hatenheim

                      [...]

(carbon copy of letter Widmann to Sch. of 16 November 1944, Bundesarchiv B 162 / 822, p. 51, my translation; addressee abbreviated for reasons of privacy protection)

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2
Part 2, Section 3


Fuel requirements (3)

In what concerns the effects that dehydration during the decomposition process on the one hand and malnutrition on the other had on fuel requirements, Mattogno (p. 1384) takes issue with the following statement on pp. 469f. of the critique, conveniently leaving out the first sentence (highlighted below) from his quote:

In the later stages of the decomposition process, butyric fermentation and dry decay, a corpse is left without most, and finally without all, of the water that makes up most of the human organism. One would expect this to positively influence external fuel requirements in two respects, one being the much lower mass to be burned and the other that little or no heat is expended in evaporating body water. This assumption is supported by evidence whereby at Treblinka extermination camp corpses removed from the graves required less fuel for burning than fresh corpses.

My expectation regarding the loss of mass "makes no sense", according to Mattogno, "because it has to be specified first what the cause of this lower mass was". Which was just what I did in the sentence that Mattogno purposefully omitted, from which it becomes apparent that the loss of mass comes from the loss of water (which, as I pointed out in a related footnote, makes up 61.8 percent of a human body’s weight). Thus Mattogno’s objection is not exactly pertinent.

My source for the lesser fuel consumption being Arad^[149], Mattogno makes a fuss about my referring to Arad "as if Arad had reported experimental data instead of mere babblings" (the vulgar language aside, this is a false dilemma as it doesn’t necessarily require "experimental data" to establish facts or phenomena, at least outside Mattogno’s world), then argues that "Arad doesn’t even mention the witnesses said to have given such statements" and that his account "contradicts testimonial evidence as well as objective facts" (as if objective facts could not be established on hand of testimonial evidence).

The testimonial evidence Mattogno uses in support of his argument, again conveniently cherrypicking snippets from a testimony he otherwise dismisses as wholly unreliable, is that of Leon Weliczker, who he quotes in Polish after an account by this witness published in 1946^[150], and translates as follows:

This depends also on whether the corpses are decayed. If they are decayed, they burn less well. In any case, the difference in time needed for the cremation of a pile of decayed corpses and one of fresh corpses amounts to one day.

Jens Hoffmann provides the following text in German, translated from an English-language publication of Weliczker’s account^[151]:

Wie lange so ein Scheiterhaufen brennt, hängt davon ab, ob die Leichen bekleidet oder nackt sind. Bekleidete Leichen verbrennen langsamer. Im gleichen Sinne wirkt sich die zunehmende Verwesung aus. Frische Leichen brennen schneller als schon verwesende, deren Verbrennung bis zu einem Tag länger dauert.

Which translates as follows:

How long such a pyre burns depends on whether the corpses are clothed or naked. Clothed corpses burn more slowly. In the same sense the progressing decomposition has an impact. Fresh corpses burn faster than already decomposing ones, whose burning takes up to one day longer.

The term "already decomposing ones" suggests that Weliczker is referring to the initial stages of the decomposition process, not to the later stages in which the corpses is dessicated. Even so it is hard to understand why corpses in the initial stages of the decomposition process should burn more slowly than fresh ones, as it seems counterintuitive that clothing should prolong instead of shorten the cremation process^[152]. So these claims suggest some confusion in the witness’s recollections, like Weliczker’s claim that the corpses he carried had weighed 70-80 kg. ^[153] At least as concerns corpses in the advanced, dessicated stages of decomposition (which were the ones I was referring to), Mattogno seems to agree with Arad’s description, for he states on p. 1411 that "charred corpses burn with more difficulty than fresh ones, but dried corpses more easily". As to Arad, it is true that his above-quoted descriptions are not accompanied by footnotes leading to sourcenotes, but that doesn’t mean that Arad invented these descriptions. Chil Rajchman observed the phenomenon described by Arad: ^[154]

It turns out that the corpses dug out of the pits burn even better than those of recently gassed people.

According to Mattogno in MGK’s Sobibór book^[155], the effect on wood consumption of a corpse's complete dessication, which according to his calculations would save ca. 37,800 kcal in external energy, would be offset by "a loss of, say, 40% of body fat and 12% of proteins", so that burning a corpse with all of its water, fat and proteins would take the same amount of wood as burning a corpse that has no water, 60 % of its fat and 88 % of its proteins. In the critique I objected that this cannot be so considering the latter corpse’s much lower mass and much higher energy value per weight unit, and provided the following tables on p. 471:

Table 2.5 – Tables 8.5 and 8.6 of the critique (p. 471)

It defies common sense that cremating a corpse weighing only 17.14 kg, of which 29.41% are fat, 47.14% are proteins and 23.46% are other substances, and which has an energy value per weight unit of 5,339.08 kcal/kg, should require the same amount of wood as cremating a corpse weighing 60 kg, of which 64 % are water, 14 % are fat, 15.30 % are proteins and 6.7 % are other substances, and which has an energy value per weight unit of only 1,525.16 kcal/kg. Yet this is exactly what Mattogno claims on p. 1386 of the magnum opus, on grounds that "a human body of 60 kg and one of 17.14 kg have an almost identical positive balance: 91,509.60 against 91,503.36 kcal", which is supposed to mean that "in both cases the cremation of the corpse requires roughly the same energy provided by the combustible material".

While it is easy to understand why considerable additional energy provided by the combustible material is required in the former case (mainly to evaporate the water, as a precondition for the combustible parts of the body to start combusting), what would the same amount of external energy be required for in the latter case, where there is no water to be evaporated? Maybe the combustion of the remaining protein needs some extra energy, but the amount thereof would be very low in comparison with the amount required in the former case to evaporate the water, which in the latter case is no longer there. So Mattogno’s postulate makes no sense. But Mattogno insists on it. Proclaiming the sum of energy provided by the body and energy provided by the external combustible material to be a fixed value that must be reached for combustion to take place, Mattogno produces the following calculation:

a) For a corpse of 60 kg: (79,800 + 49,600 – 37,900) + (0.56 × 60 × 3,800) ≈ 219,200 kcal; b) For the corpse of 17.14 kg: (47,900 + 43,600) + x = 219,200 kcal; since x = 127,700, the resulting coefficient is: [127,700 ÷ (17.14 × 3,800 )] = 1.96 In fact: (1.96 × 17.14 × 3,800) = (0.56 × 60 × 3,800)

whereby, if the burning of a corpse weighing 60 kg, thereof 64 % water, requires wood 33.6 kg of wood at a ratio of 0.56 kg per kg, the burning of a corpse weighing 17.14 kg, thereof 0 % water, requires the same 33.6 of wood at a ratio of 1.96 kg per kg. In other words, the amount of wood per kg of corpse would be 3.5 times higher, even though the corpse weighing 17.14 kg has an energy value per weight unit that is not lower, but (5,339.08 ÷ 1,525.16 =) 3.5 times higher than that of the corpse weighing 60 kg. By Mattogno’s reasoning, if the second corpse weighed only 1 kg and thus produced only ca. 5,339 kcal of energy, burning it would require (219,200 – 5,339 =) 213,861 kcal, corresponding to (213,861 ÷ 3,800 =) ca. 56 kg of wood.

In the real world, a dessicated corpse with an energy value of 5,339.08 kcal/kg^[156] will burn on its own once it has been set on fire, which requires only relatively modest amounts of kindling wood and/or a liquid accelerant, as can be seen in an online video^[157]. The burning of carcasses reduced to their bones also requires modest amounts of fuel, according to my reading of a technical report I had referred to in note 132 on p. 471 of the critique, about a procedure adopted in Argentina whereby a carcass is disinfected, covered with a polyethylene sheet and left lying until only the bones are left, which are then burned. ^[158] Mattogno calls this reading "an arbitrary speculative addition on the part of Muehlenkamp, that is, a lie", on grounds that the amount of combustible required to burn the bones is not specified in the report, but in yet another projection of one of his habits overlooked the list of material required for the "inactivation of the cover", i.e. the burning of the bones: "5000 c.c. of diesel fuel" and "Safety matches". As the list of materials required mentioned no fuel beyond these 5 liters of diesel, I understood the "more fuel" mentioned in the deactivation instructions as being included in the 5 liters of diesel, a part of which was to be poured into the openings before ignition while the rest was to be added later until combustion was complete. To be sure, the text is formulated in a manner that could also lead to another interpretation, but as no fuel beyond those 5 liters of diesel is mentioned in the list of materials required, I don’t consider my interpretation to be far-fetched. It seems to also have been the interpretation of the reader whose description of the procedure pointed me to the aforementioned technical report^[159], who wrote that "Over 240-260 days the carcass decomposes. They then burn off the tarpauline and the remaining bones and grease using 5 L of diesel."

Further evidence of the high calorific content of bones, and the accordingly low amounts of external fuel required to burn them, comes from an extinct site about disposal methods for various types of waste in Aschaffenburg county, Germany, in which it was stated that bones of animals may be burned in the Gemeinschaftskraftwerk Schweinfurt – a power plant that produces electricity and heating by burning trash and coal – at no expense because bones have about the same heating value as brown coal. ^[160] Last but not least, there is the message I received on 11 August 2005 from Mr. Norbert Fuhrmann, Sales Manager of Air Burners LLC, Florida, USA, wherein he informed me, among other things, that bones have about the same calorific value as brown coal and therefore the incineration of bones requires much less wood than that of an entire carcass^[161].

Mattogno refers to his "previous rebuttal to Muehlenkamp" for what concerns the combustion of bones, but as that "previous rebuttal" has in turn be rebutted in an earlier blog^[162], this reference is the equivalent of throwing in the towel on this subject. Apparently in order to conceal this unfavorable outcome, Mattogno precedes the reference to his "previous rebuttal" by changing the subject back to fuel expenditure in burning fresh carcasses, announcing that he "encountered an important piece of information with regard to the combustion of an anthrax carcass", whereby the recommended wood weight to carcass weight ratio is about 4:1. This is indeed the ratio that the recommendations for burning in Mattogno’s source^[163] suggest, but what Mattogno doesn’t tell his readers is that the quantities mentioned (100 pounds of straw, 2½ gallons of accelerant and 2 tons of wood or ½ ton of wood and ½ ton of coal) apparently refer not only to the burning of the carcass itself, but also to the burning of soil contaminated by the carcass:

The carcass and all materials associated with it should be destroyed and the ground should be disinfected. This can be very difficult.[…] If blood and body fluids have contaminated the ground and material under the animal, they should be incinerated as well. Remove soil deep enough to collect any blood and body fluids that have seeped into it. This could be up to 6 inches. This material can be placed on top of the carcass prior to igniting the pyre (Figure C).

Moreover the burning method shown in the article’s illustrations, of which Figure C is reproduced on p. 1389 of the magnum opus, corresponds to the least fuel-efficient of Lothes & Profé’s experiments, experiments X and XI described in their 1904 article^[164], in which the carcass was placed above-ground directly on combustible material piled up inside a pit, instead of on iron rails or carriers lain across the pit. Yet even in these experiments Lothes & Profé achieved ratios far below the one that follows from the anthrax article, as shown in the table below^[165].

Table 2.6 – Fuel consumption in Lothes & Profé’s experiments VII to XI

The difference between a 4:1 ratio and a ratio of 0.79:1 or 1.54:1, depending on whether the anthrax article refers to quantities of dry or fresh wood (the recommendation to use "railroad ties or pallets" suggests the former) can be partially explained by the requirement to burn contaminated soil along with the carcass, and it is also probable that the authors of the article considered high amounts of fuel to be on the safe side in their recommendations. The main reason for the difference, however, is probably the different degree of combustion meant to be achieved in one and the other case: whereas the anthrax article’s recommendations are meant to achieve a complete reduction to ashes of the carcass, Lothes & Profé, as mentioned above, seem to have considered the burning complete when the carcass was completely carbonized. As also mentioned before, the reduction of corpses to carbonized remains that could be further broken up by post-cremation processing is also likely to have been the objective of cremation at the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps. Carbonized remains so reduced that they could fit into sacks or boxes and transported to cemeteries with the little transport capacity available would also have satisfied the Dresden city administration’s idea of "ash" as a result of the Altmarkt pyres, judging by the remains visible in images 2.4 to 2.6 of this Part 2 – or, for that matter, by the cremation remains visible on some post-liberation photographs of Majdanek^[166].

Now back to the burning of decomposed corpses. As "objective facts" supposed to contradict the notion that burning such corpses – at least when in an advanced state of decomposition in which the corpse has lost most of its water – requires proportionally less fuel than burning fresh corpses, Mattogno had presented the burning of 21,000 decomposing carcasses at Epynt in Wales between April 24 and the end of August 2001, arguing that this burning required an amount of fuel and a timeframe far in excess of those that had been observed with fresh carcasses^[167]. Yet the related report^[168] states several reasons for this, which I quoted on p. 472 of the critique: after a failed attempt to burn them in the burial pit, the carcasses were moved to the burn site "in their deteriorated state, mixed with mud and stones." The pyre temperature was too low for safe burning, for the pyre "was built on the flat with no trench to create the draft usually necessary to ensure high temperatures for burning." Moreover the pyre "was in fact over 400 metres long (whereas according to the EA's report it should have been 250 metres long) and was so wide that the machines used to stoke up the fire could not reach the centre which left much of the carcasses only partly burnt." Those machines caught fire themselves, leading to the use of "fire hydrants alongside the pyres to dowse down burning machines.".

In summarizing these factors, I stated that "the pyre was inadequately wide and didn’t allow for air circulation, which rendered the burning very inefficient". Taking advantage of this unfortunate wording, which suggests that inadequate air circulation was related to the width of the pyre, Mattogno argues that, on the contrary, the airflow was more than sufficient precisely due to the width of the pyre – conveniently overlooking the report’s statement that, due to the absence of a trench to create the draft required to ensure high temperatures, the burning temperature had been too low. He further claims that the fire hydrants, which I assumed to have further lowered burning efficiency, had no impact on the burning as the water they poured on burning machines didn’t reach the pyre, even though the text whereby the machines caught fire as they tried to stoke up the fire suggests otherwise. But Mattogno’s main argument is that, if the corpses were "mixed with mud and stones", the corpses in the Aktion Reinhard(t) mass graves were mixed with huge amounts of sand that would have landed on the pyre, amounts that Mattogno estimates based on his sand-filling trick addressed in my response to the magnum opus’s chapter 11, whereby he tried 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 (mis)reading related eyewitness testimonies^[169]. One factor that I pointed out as possibly contributing to the disastrous results of the Epynt burning Mattogno doesn’t address at all: the previous failed attempt to burn the carcasses in the burial pit, as their charring would have made a crust that doesn't ignite well^[170]. This omission is all the more noteworthy as Mattogno argues on p. 1411 that "charred corpses burn with more difficulty than fresh ones".

Thus Mattogno’s arguments do not change my conclusion that the Epynt burning cannot be used as evidence in support of the counterintuitive proposition that burning decomposed corpses requires more fuel than burning fresh ones.

That said, we now turn to the effect that malnutrition, namely the resulting loss of fat, is likely to have had on fuel requirements. In MGK’s Sobibór book, Mattogno had based his related arguments on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment (November 1944 through December 1945), in which 36 volunteers underwent a restricted diet over 24 weeks and saw their weight dropping from an initial average 69.4 kg in the last week of the control period to 52.6 kg at the end of 24 weeks of semi-starvation, a loss of 16.8 kg of which 6.2 kg were water, 1.5 kg were proteins and 9.1 kg were fat. Mattogno had calculated^[171] that "the loss of 6.2 kg of body water saves some 6.2×(640+0.493×700) 6,100 kcal in terms of fuel requirements, as opposed to a loss of available fuel of (9.1×9,500+1.5×5,400) 94,500 kcal caused by the loss of body fat and proteins", and that this resulted "in a negative balance of some 88,400 kcal, the equivalent of 23 kg of dry wood" that would have to be added to the amount of wood that would have been required to burn the body of a volunteer having its initial weight of 69.4 kg. In the critique (p. 473) I had objected that quantifying the additional wood required to burn an emaciated corpse would have to take into account the weight loss and the impact thereof on the corpse’s calorific value in kCal/kg. On the next page I had presented the following two tables:

Table 2.7 – Tables 8.7 and 8.8 from the critique (p. 474)

The left hand table, 8.7, shows the original weight of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment (MSE) test subjects, broken down into water, fat, protein and other substances according to the ratio applied earlier by Mattogno^[172] (64 % water, 14 % fat and 15.3 % proteins, other substances the balance between the sum of these three substances’ weight and the test persons’ original weight of 69.4 kg). I had assumed that burning such corpse on a grid with the method applied by Dr. Lothes & Dr. Profé in their experiments I to III would require wood at a ratio corresponding to the average of these three experiments without considering the tar or resin, i.e. 0.56 kg of wood per kg of corpse or 38.86 kg of wood in total. Considering the calorific value of wood that I understood Mattogno had used in his calculations, 3,843.48 kCal/kg, 0.56 kg of wood would correspond to 2,152.35 kcal, which added to the corpse’s heating value per weight unit (1,525.16 kcal/kg) yields 3,677.51 kCal/kg. This I assumed to be the heating value per weight unit at which the corpse of an MSE volunteer prior to the experiment would combust.

The right hand table, 8.8, shows the weight of an MSE test subject at the end of the experiment, broken down into water, fat, protein and other substances considering the loss in the former three substances during the experiment. The body, weighing 52.60 kg, has a heating value per weight unit of only 330.98 kcal/kg (vs. 1,525.16 kcal/kg prior to the experiment), which means that more wood is required to reach the 3,677.51 kCal/kg required for the corpse’s combustion. The difference being 3,346.53 kcal/kg, the wood is required at a ratio of (3,346.53 ÷ 3,843.48 =) 0.87 kg for each kg of carcass. The total amount of wood required for cremation accordingly rises from 38.86 kg to 45.80 kg, i.e. by 6.94 kg instead of the 23 kg calculated by Mattogno.

Mattogno calls my calculation "completely senseless" on p. 1393, but the reader is required to go through Mattogno’s calculations and explanations to understand what’s supposed to make it so "senseless". On p. 1395 Mattogno argues that my calculation is "invalid" because it rests on the "fundamental presupposition" that "the total heat consumption is directly proportional to the weight of the corpse". Indeed the total heating value of the reaction shown in Table 8.8 (52.60 kg x 3,677.51 kcal/kg = 193,436.96 kcal) stands in about the same relation to the total heating value of the reaction shown in Table 8.7 (105,846.10 kcal + (38.86 kg x 3843.48 kcal/kg = 149,357.63 kcal) = 255,203.73 kcal) as the weight of the body in Table 8.8 (52.60 kg) to the weight of the body in table 8.7 (69.40 kg). However, that was a consequence of my factoring in the weight of the body in calculating the thermal balance required for cremation, instead of ignoring it like Mattogno did. And while my model of direct proportion is a necessarily simplified one for lack of better data on how loss of mass/weight affects the thermal balance, it’s still a better model than one that doesn’t take loss of mass/weight into consideration. The latter is the model that Mattogno proposes. His calculations, in which the invariable is the total heating value of the reaction shown in table 8.7 (255,203.73 kcal), can be visualized in the following table:

Table 2.8 – Mattogno’s calculation of fuel requirements to burn an emaciated MSE test person

By postulating that the amount of energy required to burn an emaciated corpse weighing 52.60 kg is exactly the same as that required to burn a normally fed corpse weighing 69.40 kg, Mattogno raises the wood weight to corpse weight ratio from 0.56 to 1.18, and the absolute amount of fuel required from 38.86 by 23.01 kg to 61.87 kg. Although the body has lost about 24 % of its mass, burning it requires about 59 % more wood.

According to Mattogno’s calculation method, if the body were reduced to half its emaciated weight (26.30 kg) by losing half of each substance that makes up the 52.60 kg, the amount of wood would further increase, as shown in the next table:

Table 2.9 – Mattogno’s calculation of fuel requirements to burn "half" an emaciated MSE test person

This theoretical body weighs only half as much as the body in Table 2.8, the proportion of water, fat, proteins and other substances being the same. And yet burning it would require more wood, according to Mattogno’s calculation method. How can this be?

To highlight the utter absurdity of Mattogno’s calculation method, I repeated the halving operation that led from Table 2.8 to Table 2.9 until the theoretical body weighed a mere 0.82 kg, as shown in the next table:

Table 2.10 – Mattogno’s calculation of fuel requirements to burn 0.82 kg of an emaciated MSE test person

So the final consequence of Mattogno’s setting the total heating value as an invariable is that 66.33 kg of wood would be required to burn 0.82 kg of corpse.

Mattogno’s alternative calculation method is not much better. He explains it as follows (p. 1396):

Simplifying this, it could also be stated that the above-mentioned theoretical 255,200 kcal are necessary to burn 10.62 kg of protein; the relationship between the total heat and the one produced by protein is of (255,200 ÷ 57,300 =) 4.45; and therefore it results: ((4.45 × 57‚300) + 105‚800) ÷ 3‚843.48 = 38.86 kg of dry wood analogically, for the body of 52.60 kg it is calculated as: ((4.45 × 49‚250) + 17‚400) ÷ 3‚843.48 = 61.55 kg of dry wood‚ The two calculation methods lead to an almost identical result: 61.87 and 61.55 kg.

The method is difficult to understand as the first division yields not 38.86 but 93.94 kg. The second division, on the other hand, actually yields 61.55 kg. The calculation that Mattogno is proposing is shown in the table below.

Table 2.11 – Mattogno’s alternative calculation method regarding fuel requirements for burning a Minnesota Starvation Experiment (MSE) test person (1)

The calculations are the following: ((i) ÷ (ii) x (iii)) + (iv) = (v); (v) ÷ (vi) = (vii) = 61.55 kg. The fixed value is the quotient of (i) ÷ (ii). Accordingly the wood weight to carcass weight ratio remains constant at 1.17 regardless of the body weight as long as the proportion between water, fat, proteins and other substances remains the same, as shown in the next table in which every value in Table 2.11 "After MSE" is divided by 2.

Table 2.12 – Mattogno’s alternative calculation method (2)

But what if the proportion between these substances changes? What if, for instance, the body further dehydrates, losing an additional 10 kg of water, while fat and proteins remain the same? In that case we get the results shown in Table 2.13 below.

Table 2.13 – Mattogno’s alternative calculation method (3)

If we compare Table 2.13 with the right half ("After MSE") of Table 2.11, we see that the wood consumption has increased from 61.55 kg to 64.11 kg, and the wood weight to corpse weight ratio has increased from 1.17 to 1.51, even though the body is not only 10 kg lighter but also has a higher heating value per weight unit (640.12 kcal/kg vs. 330.98). This is of course impossible, and such impossibility shows that Mattogno’s calculation method is not sound.

To further illustrate this, Table 2.14 below assumes a total loss of fat while the other substances are the same as in Table 2.11 "After MSE". One would of course expect wood consumption to be higher, but quite the contrary happens:

Table 2.14 – Mattogno’s alternative calculation method (4)

Wood consumption sinks from 61.55 kg to 60.03 kg and the wood weight to corpse weight ratio goes down from 1.17 to 1.15, even though the body has a lower heating value per weight unit (222.32 kcal/kg vs. 330.98 kcal/kg). This cannot possibly be.

An even more bizarre result is obtained in Table 2.15, in which the water content is the same as in 2.11 "After MSE" but fat and proteins are each reduced by half. Wood requirements should increase, but instead they go down from 61.55 kg to a ludicrous 25.87 kg, and the wood weight to corpse weight ratio goes down to 0.54, and that even though the body now has a negative heating value per weight unit (- 212.34 kcal/kg). This is utter nonsense.

Table 2.15 – Mattogno’s alternative calculation method (5)

Both of Mattogno’s calculation methods thus fail to pass the sanity check.

I therefore prefer to stick with my own calculation method, which may be simplified but produces more consistent results than either of Mattogno’s methods.

Notes

[149]Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, p.175: "At first an inflammable liquid was poured onto the bodies to help them burn, but later this was considered unnecessary; the SS men in charge of the cremation became convinced that the corpses burned well enough without extra fuel." P.176: "The bodies of victims brought to Treblinka in transports arriving after the body-burning began were taken directly from the gas chambers of the roasters and were not buried in the ditches. These bodies did not burn as well as those removed from the ditches and had to be sprayed with fuel before they would burn."
[150] Weliczker, L., Brygada śmierci: Sonderkommando 1005 (Pamiętnik). Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, Łódź, 1946.
[151]"Das kann man nicht erzählen….", p. 95.
[152]On p. 1410 of the magnum opus, Mattogno argues as follows regarding the Dresden Altmarkt pyres: "It must be observed that the corpses of Dresden were cremated with clothing, and not naked as the bodies of the alleged gassed. In addition of producing heat, the clothing was impregnated with gasoline as well as body fat, rendering the combustion more efficient."
[153]Addressed in the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 1)"[link].
[154]The Last Jew, p. 87.
[155]MGK, Sobibór, pp. 137f.
[156]As I showed in the critique (p. 128 on p. 471), this is not far below the calorific value of coking coal.
[157]"burning the dead cattle" ([link]). The video shows a dessicated case burning after having been set on fire with what seems to be a modest amount of gasoline, lit from a safe distance by throwing a burning piece of wood onto the carcass sprinkled with the gasoline.
[158]"Elimination of the carcasses of animals that have died from anthrax" ([link]).
[159] Quoted in the blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,2)" ([link]). Mattogno’s "lie" accusation was aped by his acolyte Friedrich Jansson, see the blog "On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (1)" ([link]).
[160] See the blog blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,2)" ([link]).
[161] The message is quoted in the blog "Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research - Part 4 (2)" ([link]). A video available under [link] shows the burning of bones and horns from cattle in Lagos, Nigeria, with what doesn’t look like much external fuel.
[162] Same as note 159.
[163]"Anthrax" ([link])
[164] As note 129.
[165] L&P mentioned that they used "a few liters" ("einige Liter") of petroleum as an accelerant in each experiment. I assumed this to mean 5 liters in each case. The Lower Heating Value of crude petroleum, which "is closest to the actual energy yield in most cases", is given as 34,822 Btu in the online table "Liquid Fuel Measurements and Conversions" ([link]). 34,822 Btu correspond to ca. 8,775 kcal.
[166] See the blog "Mass Graves and Dead Bodies" ([link]), photos 3.9 to 3.14.
[167] MGK, Sobibór, p.138.
[168] Available for download as a Word document at [link].
[169] See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 2)" ([link]). At Bełżec it seems that the burning of partially decomposed corpses mixed with sandy soil ("die halb verwesten Leichen, die mit sandiger Erde vermengt waren") on "normal pyres" ("auf normalen Scheiterhaufen") was rather unsuccessful, but the problem was solved when burning on grates made of railway and trolley rails was implemented (Sara Berger, EdV, p. 191).
[170] Critique, note 136 on p. 472.
[171] MGK, Sobibór, p. 139.
[172] MGK, Sobibór, p. 137.

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2
Part 2, Section 3
Part 2, Section 4


Fuel requirements (4)

As concerns the Minnesota Starvation Experiment (MSE) data, Mattogno complains that I "unbelievably" think the MSE volunteers lost 9.1 kg of their fat, without mentioning that I took these 9.1 kg directly from his writings about Sobibór^[173]



Mattogno in turn seems to have inferred these 9.1 kg from a statement in his source^[174] whereby fat represented 54 % of the decrement in body mass (which was 69.4 kg – 52.60 kg = 16.80); Mattogno’s calculation was the following: 54 % of 16.80 kg = 9.1 kg. So what I "unbelievably" assumed was also assumed by Mattogno himself at the time of his Sobibór writing, but Mattogno is not man enough to admit it.

Instead he now claims that the source quoted by him (which would be Fidanza’s article "Effects of starvation on body composition", as the calculations on p. 139 of MGK’s Sobibór book refer to this article) "shows that this cannot be true". Yet said source obviously doesn’t show what Mattogno claims it does, for he refers to other sources, not quoted in the Sobibór book^[175], to make the point that the essential or primary fat "constitutes 3% of the body weight in men and 12% in women and will simply not go away by fasting". Then he produces a table from another source^[176] about the MSE, according to which test subjects were 24 % lighter than controls (which weighed 70 kg, vs. the test subjects’ 53.2 kg) and contained 3.3 kg of fat vs. 9.9 kg in controls, a loss of 67 %.

Using the data from Mattogno’s other source, and assuming that the proportional content of water and protein is the same in the 53.2 kg body according to Mattogno’s other source as in the 52.6 kg body according to Fidanza and only the contents of fat and (accordingly) of other substances are different, one obtains the comparative wood consumptions shown in the table below. For the purpose of this table I also changed the heating value of wood from 3,843.48 kcal/kg to 3,800 kcal/kg, pursuant to Mattogno’s complaint on p. 1394^[177].

Table 2.16 – First revision of the critique’s tables 8.7 and 8.8

In the next table I change the wood weight to corpse weight ratio from 0.56 to 0.67 in "Table 8.7b", i.e. to the average ratio calculated for Lothes & Profé’s experiments I to III including in the calculation the tar or resin that the veterinarians used as an accelerant (see Table 2.3).

Table 2.17 – Second revision of the critique’s tables 8.7 and 8.8

Now for the deportees to the Nazi extermination camps. The baseline calorific profile, corresponding to a wood weight to corpse weight ratio of 0.67:1, would be that of the normally fed deportees that were taken directly to Sobibór or Treblinka from places of origin outside the General Government. For these deportees I had calculated an average weight of 57 kg (85,495 adults weighing 62 kg on average and 16,484 predominantly elder children weighing 31 kg on average, see Table 2.1 and pp. 460f. of the critique). Assuming the same proportions of water, fat, proteins and other substances as in tables "8.7a" and "8.7b" included in the above tables 2.16 and 2.17, the per head wood requirements to cremate these corpses would be as follows:

Table 2.18 – Revision of the critique’s Tables 8.14

Malnourished deportees from Polish ghettos would have a lower heating value, and their cremation would accordingly require more wood per weight unit. On pp. 1374f of the magnum opus Mattogno argues, based on a BMI calculation table^[178], that the indices of normal weight for a person of 1.60 m height correspond to 47.36-63.97 kg, on average 55.66 kg, that the weight for adults I considered (43 kg) lies 22.74 % below the average value and that this weight loss is "almost the same" as the 24.2 % weight loss^[179] of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment test persons, which implies that their loss of fat must be equivalent. Now I’m considering an average weight of 48 kg for adults and 18 kg for children aged 14 and under (average weight of a person in a population of which children make up one-third is thus 38 kg), so the adults would still be above the lower range of normal weight on Mattogno’s scale, meaning that I might consider no loss of fat at all. Nevertheless, I’ll consider that a weight loss of (55.66 – 48 =) 7.66 kg of 13.76 % means some loss of fat, and that the loss of weight is distributed by water, fat, proteins and other substances in the same percentages as I considered for the differences between tables 8.7a/8.7b and 8.8a/8.8b in Tables 2.16 and 2.17. Assuming that the distribution of fat, water, proteins and other substances is the same in a person weighing 55.66 kg as in a 70 kg MSE control person, the substance distribution of an adult person weighing 48 kg and an average person in the population weighing 38 kg (if identical to that of the adult person) would thus be the following:

Table 2.19 – Distribution of substances making up the weight of a Minnesota Starvation Experiment (MSE) control person, an MSE test person, an adult person weighing 55.66 kg, an adult person weighing 48 kg and an average person in a population in which two thirds are adults and one third are children aged 14 and under

The next table calculates wood requirements for cremating a person weighing 38 kg, i.e. a malnourished ghetto inhabitant, based on the wood requirements for cremating a person weighing 57 kg, i.e. a deportee from outside the General Government (Table 2.18).

Table 2.20 – wood requirements for cremating a deportee from outside the GG and a ghetto inhabitant

So if the cremation of a normally fed deportee from outside the GG by the method applied and with the results achieved in Lothes & Profé’s experiments I to III required 38.19 kg of dry wood (ratio: 0.67:1), the cremation of an underfed deportee from a ghetto in the GG, by the same method and with the same results, required 29.14 kg of dry wood (ratio: 0.77:1).

The above values are for fresh corpses. Corpses that had been lying in mass graves for some time would have lost at least part of their water and, if they had been lying in the graves for a long time, also part of their fat and proteins. In the critique I had estimated how long what numbers of corpses had been lying in mass graves at the four extermination camps, based on research about the sequence of deportations to each camp and the numbers involved in each deportation. In this respect the most recent data as concerns Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka are those provided by German historian Sara Berger, who in her study about the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps and their staff included lists of deportations, ordered chronologically and by place of origin^[180]. Some numbers in these lists and the sum totals of deportees to each camp are different from those used in the critique, which are based on the Höfle report and the earlier studies of Yitzhak Arad and Jules Schelvis. In the following I shall maintain the total numbers used in the critique as well as their subdivision (regarding Sobibór and Treblinka) into deportees from ghettos in the General Government and from outside the GG, so as to better illustrate the impact of changing assumptions and conclusions regarding fuel requirements. As Berger’s data are based on the most recent research about this subject, I shall however apply to these numbers the monthly percentages of arrivals from the stated places of origin that I calculated on the basis of Berger’s deportation lists. The results of these operations are shown in the three tables below.

Table 2.21 – Deportations to Bełżec

Table 2.22 – Deportations to Sobibór

Table 2.23 – Deportations to Treblinka

As concerns my previous assumptions regarding deportations to Sobibór, Mattogno accuses me (p. 1397) of having fabricated "the hypothesis that until the end of June 28,721 deportees at the camp arrived from the General Government, 19,030 of which in May", omitting the fact that said hypothesis was well substantiated on hand of deportation lists based on the Hagen Court’s verdict and Jules Schelvis’ study about Sobibór^[181].

Then he attacks the source I mentioned regarding the stages of decomposition^[182] as "six pictures of a small piglet of 1.5 kg decaying on the soil, without any indication of after how much time after the death of the animal they were taken, with a lapse of time for each stage of a minimum of 0-3 days to a maximum of 50-365 days", which is supposed to make it "a rather imprecise and hence irrelevant source". The first part of Mattogno’s argument ("six pictures of a small piglet") is a mischaracterization as the source explains why a piglet was used to model human decomposition and each picture illustrating a stage of decomposition links to a page that explains in detail what happens during that stage. The second part of Mattogno’s argument ("without any indication of after how much time after the death of the animal they were taken") is pretty irrelevant as the images are illustrations accompanying an explanatory text and I assumed that each image corresponds to the end of the process according to the image’s caption (e.g. 50 days regarding stage 5 – butyric fermentation) for good measure. The third part of Mattogno’s argument ("with a lapse of time for each stage of a minimum of 0-3 days to a maximum of 50-365 days") is notoriously hypocritical, considering that two pages later Mattogno quotes a source whereby butyric fermentation occurs "after 3-6 months" (presumably below ground), a far larger span than that given by my source for butyric fermentation above ground (20-50 days).

In response to my argument that the mass graves were obviously not closed until they had been filled to the rim (based on which I had assumed that the speed of decomposition was closer to that of decomposition above ground than to that of decomposition below ground) Mattogno invokes a testimony of SS-Sturmbannführer Streibel whereby he couldn’t see the corpses in the grave pits at Sobibór because they were covered with a layer of earth. The first sentence of Bolender’s testimony I quoted in note 140 on page 475 ("The first grave had been covered with a layer of sand.") shows I didn’t contest the graves’ having been covered with a layer of sand after having been filled, so Mattogno’s argument is pointless.

Mattogno then argues that, if each layer of corpses was covered with a layer of sand, "the corpses in a layer were always isolated from other layers by a layer of sand, and therefore this procedure is analog to a normal burial and not to the exposition to fresh air". That may be so if the layer of sand between each layer of corpses had been as thick as per Mattogno’s sand-filling trick, but there probably wouldn’t be much isolation if only a thin layer of sand covered each layer of corpses, as becomes apparent from the evidence^[183]. Mattogno invokes "Casper’s dictum" whereby decomposition of buried corpses is eight times slower than above ground, ignoring sources whereby the time ratio is four to one rather than eight to one^[184].

That said, the assumption that corpses inside the AR mass graves decomposed about as quickly as if they had been lying in the open, which is essential to my hypothesis that a significant part of the corpses had at least reached the stage of butyric fermentation by the time they were unearthed for cremation, is indeed debatable, and it’s also a fact that, notwithstanding the sources and arguments presented in an earlier blog^[185], there are no certain data about how much water a corpse has lost when reaching the stage of butyric fermentation and how much fat and proteins are left in the body or (as Mattogno claims on p. 1388) have been gasified or been converted into liquid fatty acids that leave the body and seep into the soil. In order to reduce the amount of speculation, I shall therefore stick with available quantitative data, which concern the amount of leachate issued by buried carcasses in the first two months after burial.

According to sources already mentioned in my response to Mattogno’s chapter 11^[186], liquids "available for immediate release" representing approximately one-third of the mass of a carcass are released into the soil within two months after burial, 50 % thereof during the first week. Applied to the persons mentioned in Table 2.20 above, this means that, after two months in a mass grave, they would have lost one third of their body mass in water alone.

The loss of leachate obviously corresponds to what the Australian Museum calls the black putrefaction stage, during which a large volume of body fluids drain from the body and seep into the surrounding soil^[187]. The page mentions that insects "consume the bulk of the flesh", a process that goes on through the stage of butyric fermentation^[188], in which all the remaining flesh is removed and the body dries out. This stage, according to another source that calls it the "adipocere-like stage"^[189], "is characterized by hydrolysis of the carcass fatty tissue. The carcass loses its shape completely and becomes a mass of non-decomposed hair, fat, skin, and cartilage. Decomposition occurs firstly in the subepitelial fat, which becomes a mass containing parts of the digestive tract".

The above description suggests that a) no or no significant loss of fat occurs during the previous stage (called the "decaying stage", which would correspond to the "black putrefaction stage" according to the Australian Museum’s website), and b) at the end of the "adipocere-like stage" stage the body still has some fat but no more water or flesh.

Most of the flesh, according to the Australian Museum, disappears during the "black putrefaction stage" as it is consumed by insects and bacteria (mainly the latter if the body is buried). Proteins are contrained in the body’s flesh and bones. I shall therefore assume that the, besides the water corresponding to one-third of its mass, the body also loses about half of its proteins during the "black putrefaction" or "decaying" stage, an assumption unfavorable to my argument as it reduces the amount of energy available in the body and thus increases the amount of external flammable substances required for cremation.

The fat content I shall leave untouched pursuant to what is suggested by the above-quoted sources. Mattogno, who on pp. 1399f. suggests the possibility that the unearthed corpses were in a state of wax-fat transformation^[190], will hardly have any grounds for objecting to this assumption.

The calorific profile of and amounts of wood required to burn the decomposing body of a ghetto deportee and the decomposing body of a deportee from outside the General Government would thus be the following:

Table 2.24 – wood requirements for cremating a decomposing deportee from outside the GG and a decomposing ghetto inhabitant

In response to my calculations in the critique now modified by tables 2.20 and 2.24, Mattogno repeats his own calculation in which the total heating value of a corpse’s combustion (as opposed to the heating value per kg of corpse) is a constant regardless of changes in the corpse’s mass. We have already seen what nonsensical results Mattogno’s calculation method leads to if applied to increasingly lower body masses, while my calculation method (in which the heating value per kg of corpse is constant) leads to more consistent results, even if it implies the simplified assumption (for lack of better data) that total heat consumption changes proportionally to the weight of the corpse.

To his flawed calculations Mattogno adds the argument (pp. 1402f) that the human skeleton’s bones, although they present "a positive balance of approx 15,400 kcal", also "burn endothermically, as can be seen from their flash point temperature of 700°C". That may be so, but it’s also a fact, borne out by three independent sources mentioned above, that burning bones requires considerably less external fuel per weight unit than burning a whole corpse.

Mattogno closes this section of his writings with the following conclusion:

These exposed facts show what the rational utilization of the fat in the experiments by Lothes and Profé really means. If, due to a careful conduction of the cremation, the fat is released and is burned in a slow and gradual way, it adds a considerable contribution to the combustion of the protein. If, however, the cremation proceeds uncontrolled, as it would have been the case in the Reinhardt camps, the fat is released and burned for the most part in the initial stage of the combustion process so that its energy can be utilized only partially, and what is lost must be substituted by external combustibles.

One doesn’t find anything in either of Lothes & Profé articles about the fat being released and "burned in a slow and gradual way" due to "a careful conduction of the cremation", so Mattogno must have sucked this out of his fingers. There’s no apparent difference between the way fat was released into the burning flammables below in Lothes & Profés experiments and the way this happened on the pyres of the extermination camps or the Dresden pyres.

Based on tables 2.20 and 2.24, one can subdivide the corpses cremated in the extermination camps as follows:
A– Decomposing, largely dehydrated corpses of sufficiently nourished deportees (Table 2.24). Average weight: 33.64 kg. Weight of wood required for cremation: 14.35 kg. Weight ratio: 0.43.
B– Decomposing, largely dehydrated corpses of malnourished deportees (Table 2.24). Average weight: 22.23 kg. Weight of wood required for cremation: 13.30 kg. Weight ratio: 0.60.
C– Non-decomposed corpses of malnourished deportees (Table 2.20). Average weight: 38 kg. Weight of wood required for cremation: 29.14 kg. Weight ratio: 0.77.
D - Non-decomposed corpses of sufficiently nourished deportees (Table 2.20). Average weight: 57 kg. Weight of wood required for cremation: 38.19 kg. Weight ratio: 0.67.

Categories A and B correspond to corpses that had been lying in mass graves for at least two months before being cremated. Considering the chronology of deportations shown in tables 2.21 to 2.23, these would be:

- Of the deportees to Bełżec, where wholesale cremation started in November 1942, at least those who had arrived until August 1942 inclusive;
- Of the deportees to Sobibór, all who arrived between May and August of 1942;
- Of the deportees to Treblinka, where successful wholesale cremation probably started in February 1943 (see discussion below; unsuccessful cremation attempts started earlier), all who arrived in 1942;
- Of the deportees to Chełmno, considering the statements by Franz Schalling and Fritz Ismer whereby unearthing of the previously buried corpses for cremation started in the summer of 1942^[191], the deportees that arrived until May of 1942^[192].

The corresponding revised wood consumption tables for the four camps are the following:

Table 2.25 – Dry wood requirements for burning the corpses at Sobibór

Table 2.26 – Dry wood requirements for burning the corpses at Bełżec

Table 2.27 – Dry wood requirements for burning the corpses at Treblinka

Table 2.28 – Dry wood requirements for burning the corpses at Chełmno

The following summary table shows the dry wood requirements for all four camps:

Table 2.29 – Dry wood requirements for burning the corpses at the four extermination camps

The total amount of 28,004.5 tons of dry wood exceeds the previously calculated amount shown in Table 8.22 on p. 482 of the critique (23,615.7 tons) by 4,388.8 tons.

The above calculations assume the use of dry, seasoned wood such as was used by Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé in their carcass burning experiments. With freshly cut wood the amount required would have been somewhat higher. According to Mattogno in MGK’s Sobibór book^[193],"1 kg of dry wood (20% humidity) with a calorific value of 3,800 kcal/kg is the equivalent of 1.9 kg of green wood." Assuming this is correct, and that the extermination camps could only obtain green wood for burning the corpses, the wood quantities in Table 2.29 would have to be multiplied by the factor 1.9, yielding the figures in Table 2.30 below.

Table 2.30 – Fresh wood requirements for burning the corpses at the four extermination camps

Mattogno’s further objections against my previous calculations in the critique have partially been addressed already, namely
a) his repeated claim (p. 1404) that "the system used in Chełmno was similar to the Feist apparatus" (which applies only to the ca. 7,000 corpses burned in the second 1944/45 phase of the camp’s operation, whereas in the first phase the method considered most efficient was the burning on grates according to Fritz Ismer^[194], and what little is known about the oven or oven(s) also used in the first phase shows that they were different from Mattogno’s Feist apparatus);
b) his repeated claim that the fuel weight to carcass weight ratio in the Feist apparatus is 2:93:1 "without considering the petroleum, straw and foliage" (even if the Feist apparatus and the 2nd phase ovens at Chełmno were exactly the same and operated in the same manner, and if Mattogno understood his sources about the Feist facility’s fuel consumption correctly^[195], fuel requirements cannot be compared as the Feist apparatus was fueled so as to achieve a more thorough degree of combustion than was achieved in the Chełmno ovens);
c) his argument that "the first two ovens were built in spring 1942 according to the judge Bednarz, which means between the end of March and the end of June 1942, which means that the alleged new corpses were cremated immediately without burial" ( first of all, the witnesses interrogated by Judge Bednarz 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; and third, there is independent corroboration for the summer timing by witnesses not interrogated by Bednarz, such as Fritz Ismer and Frank Schalling^[196]).

Where they have not been addressed already, they don’t need to be addressed as the calculations have changed. I will therefore move directly to Mattogno’s comments about my considerations regarding where the wood required to burn the corpses was obtained.

As concerns Chełmno, it is clear that the wood was obtained from external suppliers, including the Pole Michał Radoszewski^[197] and the German forest superintendent Heinrich May, who in his account about Chełmno^[198] recalled the following regarding the camp’s 1st phase:

I requested the fuel wood from the State Forestry Office (Landesforstamt) where I was ordered to give it to Bothmann.
First, I provided him with a large quantity of poles and gnarled wood. Later I also had to provide some thicker wood. Finally, the demand was so great that I had to cut down all the trees in some of the forest districts.

Regarding the camp’s 2nd phase, May recalled that

In the spring of 1944, Bothmann and his special unit returned unexpectedly and again demanded large quantities of fuel wood.

No testimonies of external wood suppliers similar to May’s are known regarding Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, but there’s no reason why, working in an occupied country noted for its abundant wood production^[199], the staff of these camps should not have had access to such suppliers as well.

In the critique I had calculated the relatively modest truck or rail transport capacity that would have been required to transport to the extermination camps the amounts of fresh or dry wood calculated in the critique (with the currently calculated amounts of, respectively, dry and fresh wood, the capacity would have been 5,601 and 10,642 5-ton truckloads or 1,120 and 2,128 railway car loads á 25 tons). This prompted Mattogno to produce the following pearl:

Obviously there is not documentary and no testimonial trace of this huge inflow of lorries or of trains full of wood. But who cares? The speculation is convenient to Muehlenkamp, and it therefore does not require any proof.

Now look who’s talking. Whereas I of course require proof of systematic mass murder (which is what all related evidence inequivocally points to, with no evidence pointing in another direction), Mattogno obviously requires no proof at all in support of his "transit camp" pet theory, whose utter hollowness is borne out especially by the fact that, to this day, no "Revisionist" has been able to provide the name of a single individual who was "transited" via the supposed "transit camps" to the Soviet territories occupied by Nazi Germany. However, this doesn’t mean that every ancillary detail of what happened at these camps, like the amount and provenance of cremation fuel, has to be proven by evidence, especially if one considers that the camp records were destroyed (as mentioned in Globocnik’s letter to Himmler of 5.1.1944, Nuremberg document 4024-PS) and that wood shipments were hardly a detail that would under the circumstances catch the particular attention of camp staff members, inmates or bystanders or be of interest to interrogators in the course of criminal investigations, which were about establishing the basic facts of the crime and the deeds of the perpetrators rather than the crime’s logistics. In this respect the question is whether absence of evidence means evidence of absence, and unlike in what concerns the names of supposedly "transited" Jews^[200], the answer in what concerns external wood supplies to Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka is clearly "no". Mattogno claims that "the exclusive use of Waldkommandos" is what becomes apparent from the eyewitness evidence, but he’d be hard-pressed to find an eyewitness testimony that expressly or even implicitly rules out that wood was also obtained from sources other than inmate lumbering detachments. On the other hand there is at least one witness to external fuel supplies to Sobibór, Unterscharführer Werner Becker, whose testimony I quoted after Arad’s book (where he is called "Becher Werner")^[201] and who Mattogno quotes as follows on p. 1406^[202]:

"Ich habe verschiedene Dienste ausgeführt, so wie bereits gesagt, ich habe Lebensmittel für das Lager sowie Holz für die Verbrennung der Menschen gebracht.""I performed various services, as already stated, I brought victuals for the camp as well as wood for the combustion of people."

Mattogno argues that as it seems unbelievable that the camp’s forest commando "carried the tons of wood they cut into the camp by hand", it is more likely "that the wood was loaded on lorries or onto similar devices", and that this is what Becker’s statement refers to. However, Mattogno’s hypothesis – for which he presents no evidence, after having made a fuss about there being no evidence for my hypothesis of external fuel supply – is contradicted as concerns Treblinka by Richard Glazar, a witness that Mattogno will later try to use to his advantage. As concerns the felling and transportation of wood for cremation, Glazar wrote the following^[203]:

To clear the woods around the perimeter of the camp – that’s our main task now. Felled trees are hauled into camp and chopped into firewood. As spring becomes summer without transports, the greatest concentration of activity in the first camp moves down to the grounds behind the Ukrainian barracks, to the lumberyard. Those of us from Barracks A work there, along with other commando units who had previously worked at the sorting site. Idyllic mounds of freshly sawn and split firewood grow up and shine out from among the towering pines that have not been felled. A path runs along the side of the lumberyard and leads up to the main gate of the second camp. Though it is some seventy meters away, the gate is clearly visible from our work site. Here we deliver what wood is needed in that part of the camp. No one from there is allowed out to work by the SS. The main work in the second camp still consists of digging up and incinerating the bodies from old transports.

Nothing there about the wood being transported by truck as opposed to being taken where it was required by the very detachment(s) in charge of cutting it. If the same procedure as at Treblinka was adopted at Sobibór – and there are no reasons for assuming that it was not –, then Becker’s account, as also becomes apparent from the context (Becker mentioned wood along with victuals he also brought for the camp), was referring to wood he brought in addition to that procured by the lumbering detachment.

Now, let us counter-intuitively assume that the staff of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka did not have external wood suppliers like Radoszewski and May at Chełmno. How would they have then coped with the fact that their inmate lumbering detachments could not procure all the wood required for burning the corpses? The answer to this question comes via one of Mattogno’s most imbecilic remarks, which can be found on p. 1415 of the magnum opus:

In the case of Dresden it was necessary to cremate within short notice the corpses without the supply of huge amounts of fuel wood. In the Reinhardt camps there existed no such urgency, and an unlimited amount of wood was available in the surroundings. In such a situation, only a Muehlenkamp would have decided to cremate the corpses using gasoline instead of wood. The SS, to their fortune, were not Muehlenkamps.

With no external wood suppliers and insufficient lumbering capacities of their own, an unlimited amount of wood available in the surroundings wouldn’t have solved the cremation requirements of the Aktion Reinhard(t) camps, so they would have had to turn to liquid fuel as their main combustion agent – just like the people in charge of burning the corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt.

The following table shows the amounts of gasoline that would have been required to burn the corpses at the extermination camps if gasoline had wholly replaced wood as an external flammable. The amounts were calculated on the basis of the fresh wood amounts in Table 2.30 and Mattogno’s claim in MGK’s Sobibór book that 100 kg of fresh wood are the equivalent of 19 liters of gasoline^[204]

Table 2.31 – Gasoline requirements for burning the corpses at the four extermination camps

Like it predecessor tables showing the dry wood or fresh wood consumption that would have been required, the above table is theoretical insofar as the SS didn’t use only solid or liquid fuel and neither used one type of either alone. They used various types of solid and liquid fuels, in proportions that can not longer be established. On the basis of multiple eyewitness accounts in each case, Sara Berger has established the following regarding the three camps of Aktion Reinhard(t):
Bełżec: Layers of corpses and wood were alternately placed on the grates consisting of railway rails, doused with a flammable liquid (oil or gasoline) and set on fire. ^[205]
Sobibór: Underneath the grates made of railway rails a fire was lit with branches and twigs, petroleum and charcoal. The corpses on top of the grates were doused in a flammable liquid. ^[206]
Treblinka: The burning was done with dry wood and brushwood as well as rags and chunks of wood drenched in petroleum, gasoline, diesel and crude oil. ^[207]

Regarding Treblinka Berger writes that the wood was collected by the lower camp’s forest detachment (Waldkommando), but the use of dry wood makes it seem doubtful whether this was the only source, as the only dry wood (as opposed to fresh wood) that the forest detachment could have harvested would have been brushwood, of which there must have been a large supply also due to the constant replacement, as they dried up, of branches and leaves woven for camouflage purposes into the camp’s extensive outer and inner fencing. ^[208]

The use of rags is easy to explain as there must have been plenty available from the clothes and bed sheets that were taken away from the victims before killing them. The use of rags drenched in liquid fuel is of interest in connection with the previously quoted argument of Mattogno’s whereby the clothes worn by the bodies burned on the Dresden pyres made them burn better than those on the extermination camps’ pyres.

If placed between and/or below the bodies, the rags drenched in flammable material at Treblinka would have contributed heat to the burning process. Additionally they might have the wick effect mentioned in an article by John D. DeHaan and others^[209]. The authors described an experiment they performed as follows (emphases added):

In the test reported here, a freshly-slaughtered pig carcass with a net weight of 215 lb. (95 kg) was wrapped in a cotton blanket and placed on a carpet-covered plywood panel. The fire was initiated using 1 L of gasoline poured on the shoulder area of the blanket-wrapped carcass. The gasoline burned off within 4 min, having ignited a large area of the blanket and adjoining carpet. Flames from those fuel packages resulted in the establishment of a steady-state fire sustained by the rendering of the body fat, with the necessary wick provided by the charred cotton blanket and carpet. The heat release rate of this fire was 60 +- 10 kW, with flames less than 12 in. (0.35 m) high for its duration. The fire sustained itself by the rendering process for more than 6 ½ h from ignition, at which time it was extinguished. An average mass loss rate of 1.5 g/s (5.3 kg/h) was observed during the self-sustained fire. Extensive destruction of the carcass (more than 60% by weight) included reduction of large bones to a fragile, ashen state.

They reached the following conclusions (emphasis added):

It has been demonstrated that given a source of external ignition of some duration (10 to 15 min or longer) such as a fire in clothing or bedding, the skin of a body can char and split and the melted, subcutaneous fat be released. If that fat can be absorbed onto a suitable porous rigid substrate that can act like a wick, it can support flaming combustion for as long as fuel is available.[…]Given enough time and an adequate wick, such fires can sustain themselves for many hours, accomplishing a great deal of damage including fragmentation and powdering of bone.

The rags used to burn corpses at Treblinka may have contributed in a similar manner to sustaining the bodies’ combustion with their own subcutaneous fat.

As to the liquid flammables mentioned by Berger (petroleum, gasoline, diesel and crude oil), there’s no evidence regarding when and in what amounts these substances were brought into the camp, just as there is no evidence to the delivery of dry wood from external suppliers. But as the evidence shows that these substances were there and used in abundance (the rags, which must have been plentiful, were drenched in them, as were chunks of wood), the evidence whose absence Mattogno decries is not needed to ascertain the factuality of these liquid flammables’ availability and usage.

Notes

[173] MGK, Sobibór, p. 139.
[174] Flaminio Fidanza, "Effects of starvation on body composition", The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1980 33: 7 1562-6 ([link]).
[175] Alexander Bertuccioli, Dall’indagine antropometrica alla composizione corporea. Manuale pratico, in: www.aracneeditrice.it/pdf/3697.pdf; Massa grassa, in: www.benessere.com/dietetica/massa_grassa.htm
[176] A. Roberto Frisancho, Human Adaptation and Accomodation. University of Michigan, 1993, p. 382.
[177]"Had he read my text more carefully, he would also have noticed that on the previous page I had indicated the energy contents of dry wood with 3,800 kcal/kg; it is therefore obvious that the above-mentioned 23 kg is a rounded value (the exact value is in fact 23.26 kg)."
[178]"Body Mass Index (BMI) berechnen" ([link]).
[179] According to Fidanza (as note 174).
[180]Experten der Vernichtung, pp. 416 to 431.
[181] Critique, Table 8.1 on p. 459 and p. 475.
[182] The Australian Museum’s webpage "Stages of Decomposition" ([link]).
[183] See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 2)" ([link]).
[184] See the blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,2)" ([link]).
[185] As previous note.
[186] See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 1)", footnote 126 ([link]).
[187]"Stage 4: Black putrefaction - 10 to 20 days after death" ([link]).
[188]"Stage 5: Butyric fermentation - 20 to 50 days after death" ([link]).
[189]"Insects of forensic importance from Rio Grande do Sul state in southern Brazil", in: Revista Brasileira de Entomologia, vol. 52 no.4 São Paulo 2008, online under [link].
[190] An argument he already put forward in his previous response to this writer, which is discussed in the blog "Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (4,2)" ([link]).
[191] See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 1, Section 2a)" ([link]).
[192] See the blog "Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 2)" ([link]).
[193] MGK, Sobibór, p.143.
[194] See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 1, Section 2a)" ([link]).
[195] Big "ifs", see the blog "Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 2)" ([link]).
[196] See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 1, Section 2a)" ([link]).
[197] See the blog "Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 2)", note 119 ([link]).
[198] Transcribed in the blog "A Great Lie" ([link]).
[199] As mentioned on p. 483 of the critique, already in 1921 Poland’s state forests alone furnished 3,439,047 cubic meters of building timber and 2,019,758 cubic meters of fuel wood. Privately owned wood preserves, according to the same article, yielded 25,000,000 cubic meters of wood per annum, of which only 12,000,000 cubic meters were used to satisfy domestic requirements of reconstruction, fuel, mining etc. while the rest could be exported. According to a source mentioned in MGK’s Sobibór book (the webpage "Weight of various types of wood", http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_wood.htm), the weight of freshly cut red pine (the kind of wood abounding in the Sobibor area) is 880 kg per cubic meter, which means that 53,210.5 tons of fresh wood would have a volume of ca. 60,467 cubic meters, a mere 0.47% of the export yield of 13 million cubic meters or 0.24% of the total yield of Poland’s privately owned wood preserves of 25 million cubic meters in 1921.
[200] See the blog "Challenge to Supporters of the Revisionist Transit Camp Theory" ([link]).
[201] Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, p. 171.
[202] After Peter Lang (ed.), Der "Euthanasie"-Prozeß Dresden 1947. Eine zeitgeschichtliche Dokumentation, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin/Bern/New York/Paris/Wien, 1993, p. 183.
[203] Richard Glazar Trap with a Green Fence, translated by Roslyn Theobald, 1995 Northwestern University Press, Illinois, p. 115.
[204] MGK, Sobibór, p.143 n.423 n.426.
[205]Experten der Vernichtung. p. 191; list of testimonies regarding the procedure and the fuel in note 11 on p. 540.
[206]Experten der Vernichtung. p. 198; list of testimonies regarding the procedure and the fuel in note 41 on p. 543.
[207]Experten der Vernichtung. p. 212; list of testimonies regarding the procedure and the fuel in note 118 on p. 550.
[208] See the blog "«B» as in «Bullshit» " ([link]).
[209] John D. DeHaan, Ph.D. and Said Nurbakhsh, Ph.D, "Sustained Combustion of an Animal Carcass and Its Implications for the Consumption of Human Bodies in Fires", Journal of Forensic Sciences 2001 Sep;46(5):1076-81; online reprint under [link].

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2
Part 2, Section 3
Part 2, Section 4
Part 2, Section 5


Fuel requirements (5)

In the context of my previous calculations of gasoline requirements for burning corpses at the extermination camps (table 8.4 on p. 486 of the critique), I referred to the cremation of corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt, in which the main combustion fuel was gasoline. The Dresden pyres, as we have seen already, pose a big problem for Mattogno, and his utterances in this respect are accordingly incoherent and even counterproductive.




After concluding on the wrong grounds that gasoline is "not the best method to perform cremations"^[210], Mattogno accuses me (p. 1411) of not having taken into consideration an "essential factor" regarding the Dreden cremations. The supposed "essential factor" is that the victims of Dresden "had died mostly by having been burned alive in the "firestorm" caused by incendiary bombs" (which is wrong – most victims died through suffocation and only in a small number of cases were bodies so mutilated or burnt that the exact number could not be ascertained) ^[211]. Mattogno then quotes an excerpt from the Final Report of the Historian’s Commission about the Air Attacks on Dresden between 13 and 15 February 1945^[212] whereby "the commission excludes that a larger number of people – that is some thousands or even tens of thousands – could have vanished virtually ‘without a trace’". As this conclusion of the historian’s commission was one of its arguments against exaggerated death toll claims regarding Dresden, which are largely proclaimed by right-wing extremists, and as the commission concluded (p. 67 of the report) that up to 25,000 people ("bis zu 25.000 Menschen") were killed in the air attacks on Dresden between 13 and 15 February 1945, this quote may have got Mattogno into trouble with his co-author Jürgen Graf, who proclaims a death toll ten times higher than the maximum death toll concluded on by the historians’ commission^[213]. Assuming, that is, that Graf believes his own BS and is not just paying lip service to six-digit Dresden death toll figures to please his fans of the extreme right.

It is not clear why Mattogno brings up the commission’s conclusion whereby a large number of victims could not have vanished without a trace. His conclusion ("This fact further complicates the general situation, because charred corpses burn with more difficulty than fresh ones, but dried corpses more easily.") suggests an argument that the Dresden corpses (which he claims were charred) burned worse than the corpses on the extermination camps’ pyres. And Mattogno’s statement that dried corpses burn "more easily" than fresh ones stands in stark contrast with the nonsensical postulate on p. 1386, discussed in Section 3 of this Part 2, that the burning of a desiccated corpse weighing 17.14 kg, with a heating value per weight unit of 5,339.08 kcal/kg due to the absence of water, requires the same amount of wood as a fresh corpse weighing 60 kg, with all its water inside and a heating value per weight unit of only 1,525.16 kcal/kg. This suggests that Mattogno isn’t all too convinced himself by the calculations he throws around.

A further indication in this direction comes right after the interesting statement quoted above, as my earlier calculation whereby Treblinka would have needed about 23,000 liters of gasoline per day to burn its corpses with that fuel alone (the amount was meanwhile raised to 28,163 liters, see Table 2.31) causes Mattogno to snicker as follows (p. 1411):

Muehlenkamp is in full delirium. As I explained many times, he is alienated from reality (a form of exterminationist schizophrenia) and does not differentiate between the possible and the real: for him (and when it is more convenient) what is possible is also real!

This snickering is followed on the next page by astronomic "real" fuel consumption figures:

The equivalent gasoline amount, already huge in spite of his ridiculously low demand of wood, becomes absurd if one considers the real amount (see point 91): 185,694,640 kg of wood only for the camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, corresponding to (185,694,640 × 1.9 =) 352,819,810 kg of fresh wood, which then equates to (352,819,810 ÷ 100 × 19 =) 67,035,763 liters of gasoline! For Treblinka the requirement would have been of [(105,707,640 × 1.9 ÷ 100 × 19) ÷ 150 =] 254,403 liters per day!

These figures stand in sharp contrast with Mattogno’s arguing a mere three pages later, in a passage already quoted in Part 2, Section 1 of this series ("Another inane (mis)demonstration.[…]Hence this comparison is useless"), that the amount of gasoline I had calculated as necessary for burning 6,865 corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt (ca. 68,000 liters) is too high.

Mattogno cannot have failed to notice that the 68,000 liters for the Dresden pyres were calculated by the same method and based on the same assumptions (dry wood weight to corpse weight ratio = 0.56:1; fresh wood amount = dry wood amount x 1.9; gasoline = fresh wood amount ÷ 100 × 19) as the daily consumption of ca. 23,000 liters that I had "deliriously" calculated for Treblinka. ^[214]

How can 68,004 liters of gasoline for 6,865 corpses at Dresden (ca. 9.9 liters per corpse) ^[215] be considered too high by Mattogno when at the same time he considers 38,160,458 liters for 789,000 corpses at Treblinka (ca. 48.4 liters per corpse) to be appropriate, moreover after he has repeatedly stated that the cremation methods applied at one or the other place were equivalent? The obvious answer is that Mattogno doesn’t believe in his astronomic fuel requirement numbers but knows them to be widely exaggerated.

Before I turn to Mattogno’s musings about the fuel situation in Germany, I’ll address his arguments regarding the contribution of the camps’ own lumbering detachments to providing the fuel required for burning the corpses.

Regarding Sobibór, I had demonstrated that, considering the fresh wood requirements I had calculated and Mattogno’s own figures about wood-felling capacities (a team of 30 inmates of the Sobibor forest detail would have been able to handle (0.55 x 30 =) 16.5 tons of wood per day^[216]), that camp would have been almost self-sufficient as concerns cremation wood. Against this demonstration Mattogno (p. 1408) can produce no argument better than claiming that the wood amount I calculated is "grotesquely low" and referring to his "point 91" for the much higher "effective amount" (which, as we have seen, Mattogno doesn’t believe in). I for my part have to slightly revise my statement regarding Sobibór’s near self-sufficiency in cremation wood, pursuant to the amount of 8,627.5 tons of fresh wood stated in Table 2.30. Over a period of 365 days this corresponds to ca. 23.6 tons per day, which means that a balance of (23.6 – 16.5) = 7.1 tons of fresh wood per day would have to be made up by wood from external suppliers and/or by liquid flammables. Even with the strength of 40 men assumed by Arad for the Sobibór Waldkommando^[217]there would still be a balance of (23.6 – 22 =) 1.6 tons of fresh wood per day. ^[218]

What I wrote about the possible production of the Treblinka Waldkommando must have thrown Mattogno into another of his fits of hysteria, for in his point 62 starting on p. 1408 he not only dishes up ad hominem rhetoric rather thickly ("Childishness and hypocrisy emanate also in the case of Treblinka") but also calls me names ("In his desperation, miserable Muehlenkamp uses every possible subterfuge."), thereby again signaling that he has long given up being taken seriously outside the circle of his fellow "Revisionist" believers.

Mattogno takes issue with two aspects of my considerations in this respect: the strength of the Waldkommando and the duration of cremations at Treblinka.

As concerns the former, Arad^[219] had written that the forest team originally consisted of a few dozen prisoners but was enlarged when the cremation of the corpses started. I considered it reasonable to assume that a detachment starting out with at least 24 members (a few dozen is at least two dozen) and then reinforced ended up numbering 60 to 80 of the permanent inmates of Treblinka extermination camp. Mattogno comments this hypothesis by hollering that I inflated the number of the "detainees" assigned to the Waldkommando, "even though the witness Glazar speaks of about 25 persons". Mattogno is obviously referring to the following part of Glazar’s memoirs^[220]:

The camouflage unit is the only one of the old work squads that still has enough real work to do. There is so much exterior and interior fencing that there are always repairs to be made. And if there are no repairs, then the camouflage unit is well suited for the forestry work in the vicinity of the camp – for clearing and cutting. Several times a day, under the supervision of the guards and little Sydow, some part of the twenty-five men unit has to go out into the forest, climb into the trees, harvest large branches, and carry them back into the camp, where they will be used for repairs. The other part of the unit straightens and firms up the posts, tightens the barbed wire, and weaves the new pine boughs into the fence until there are no longer any gaps in the dense green wall. We know how to carry our two or three straps in such a way that everyone immediately understands: We are the camouflage unit. In the forest we bundle the pine boughs we have harvested and then strap them to our backs.

As becomes obvious from the above, Glazar was referring not to the Waldkommando, the lumbering detachment in charge of procuring wood for cremation, but to the camouflage unit, whose job was to make sure that the camp’s outside and inside fences were always adequately camouflaged with green foliage from pine boughs woven into the fence. As concerns lumbering work, Glazar had written earlier^[221] that this was done by "those of us from Barracks A", along with "other commando units who had previously worked at the sorting site". This suggests a labor force well in excess of 25, so my assumption that there may have been 60-80 woodcutters seems reasonable.

As concerns the time during which the bodies were cremated, I had considered a period that lasted "at least from March or April to August 1943, but probably until the end of October 1943, i.e. 5 to 7 months". Mattogno trumpets that this assumption is disproved "sensationally" by Arad’s statement that "In this camp the entire cremation operation lasted about four months, from April to the end of July 1943"^[222]. However, Arad’s statements in this respect are not uniform, as I demonstrated in a blog linked to in note 172 on p. 485 of the critique^[223]. Mattogno obviously didn’t bother to read this article – or, for that matter, the statements of Arad quoted therein.

What is more, cremation of the bodies at Treblinka started well before April or even March 1943, as mentioned in Part 1 of this series, where I mentioned three phases of cremation at Treblinka that I consider probable, and concluded that the probable start date of the 3rd phase, in which the corpses were systematically removed from the mass graves with excavators and burned on pyres made of concrete bases and railway rails, started in late February 1943, probably earlier as Chil Rachjman dated the arrival of a cremation specialist nicknamed the "Artist" by the inmates to January 1943. If the 3rd phase started in late February and lasted until late August August 1943 (the last deportees from the Bialystok ghetto arrived between 17 and 23 August 1943^[224], so cremation of corpses cannot have ended before that), it would have lasted for 6 months. If the 3rd phase started in early February 1943, as seems plausible considering Rachjman’s timing of the "Artist"’s arrival, the period would be closer to 7 months, even without considering the aforementioned possibility that cremation continued beyond August 1943.

Assuming a period of 7 months and a strength of 60-80 for the Waldkommando, men, the production would have been 6,930 to 9,240 tons of wood, which would correspond to between 31.2% and 41.6% of the fresh wood requirements stated in Table 2.30.^[225]In addition there would be a huge but unquantifiable amount of brushwood that would have piled up throughout the camp’s operation due to the constant renewal of the fence’s camouflage foliage as it dried out^[226]. The balance in relation to total cremation fuel requirements would have to be provided by wood from external suppliers, rags and liquid fuels. Note that these calculations assume that the corpses of all deportees murdered at Treblinka were cremated during the aforementioned 3rd phase. As we shall see below, this was not the case.

Now back to the question whether Nazi Germany could afford to allocate large amounts of liquid flammables to the burning of murdered deportees at extermination camps.

In this context Mattogno takes issue with my reading of Globocnik’s message dated 4 September 1942 to Werner Grothmann, a member of Himmler’s RSHA staff, which is translated on p. 303 of the critique as follows:

Dear Grothmann, As an SS and Police Chief my engine fuel rations have once again been painfully reduced. I could carry out Einsatz ‘Reinhard’ until now with my allotment. This present cutback restricts the operation still further. As large foreign deliveries are imminent, please factor these circumstances into consideration. I ask you to obtain a special ration exclusively for this action from a proper Reich Office. SS-Obergruppenführer Krueger is not in the position to issue more engine fuel to me. SS and Police Chief for the District of Lublin, Globocnik

My co-author Jason Myers argued that
i) the "large foreign deliveries" (grosse Auslandsanlieferungen) that Globocnik referred to were the expected deportations of many Romanian Jews to Bełżec, which were discussed in late August, but never commenced;
ii) The terminology that Globocnik used (Treibstoff) explicitly refers to engine fuels, from which the gas chambers operated, it being also possible that the fuel was required for excavating work on mass graves and possibly also cremations, which began at Sobibor shortly after the time of this letter, especially with reports of corpse incinerations in August which are available from Bełżec and Treblinka.
In my reading of this document, I emphasized the need of engine fuels for cremation.

Mattogno’s first argument is that, as the message was addressed to a member of Himmler’s personal staff, my interpretation would imply that "Himmler, who was the direct superior of Globocnik, either did not know anything about the alleged decision to cremate the corpses, a rather implausible fact because the decision was his, or he knew it but nonetheless authorized the reduction of fuel, and then either he wanted to willingly interfere with the activities of his subordinate, another implausible fact, or he knew that the fuel was not needed at all for future cremations" Either of Mattogno’s scenarios doesn’t make much sense, the first ("either did not know anything about the alleged decision to cremate the corpses") because the decision to cremate corpses at Sobibór for hygienic reasons need not have emanated from Himmler but may well have been an initiative of the camp’s commandant that the same had informed Globocnik of, the second ("he knew it but nonetheless authorized the reduction of fuel") because the reason why fuel allotments had been reduced in August 1942 was not a decision of Himmler’s but in all probability the need of large amounts of fuel for the 1942 summer offensive in the Soviet Union, which ranked higher on the list of Hitler’s priorities than Himmler’s extermination program and to which Himmler therefore had to bow. So what was being asked of Himmler via Grothman was that he should exercise his influence with the Führer in the sense of obtaining more fuel for "Einsatz ‘Reinhard" despite the priority of military operations at the time.

Mattogno’s next argument is that the letter’s text invalidates my supposition because "Globocnik gives as the reason for the need of a higher fuel supply not a “cryptonym” allegedly created for cremations, for instance “Sonderaufgaben” (special tasks) or something similar, but the impending arrival of “big contingents from abroad [grosse Auslandslieferungen],” ". This is also a weak argument because Globocnik obviously needed more fuel to handle "big contingents from abroad", which may have been planned deportations from Romania as Jason Myers presumed, rather than deportations to Sobibór from Slovakia, the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia and the Reich, which had arrived already in June 1942^[227]. Wherever these "big contingents from abroad" were supposed to come from, the question is what about their handling could have required large amounts of fuel, if the handling was limited to taking them off the trains, dispossessing them of their valuables, showering and delousing them and putting them back on the trains again, as per Mattogno’s "transit camp" fantasy. Mattogno thinks he found a faith-conforming answer in Grothmann’s reply to Globocnik, quoted on p. 881 of the magnum opus, in which Grothmann transmitted Himmler’s suggestion that Globocnik should "try under any circumstances to transport the valuables from the Jewish resettlement to Berlin not by motor vehicles but in freight cars under guard". However, this was obviously seen as a means of improving the fuel situation but not as a solution to the problem, for Grothmann ended announcing that he had "nonetheless once again inquired with SS-Gruppenführer Jüttner whether he can somehow supply you with additional fuel". If, as Mattogno is eager to conclude, "the fuel requested for the “Aktion Reinhardt” was for shipping the goods robbed from the Jews via trucks to Berlin", the problem would have been solved by using trains instead of trucks, and no further inquiry would have been necessary.

Mattogno then sets out to demonstrate that "at that time the fuel situation in Germany was not as bright as Muehlenkamp wants to make us believe", for the purpose of which he refers to
a) An appeal by Reich Minister Speer dated 22 October 1942 to the holders of private vehicles to convert them from liquid fuel to generator gas, lest they could no longer count on receiving gasoline or diesel fuel for their vehicles within a foreseeable time (which implies that, as of the date of this appeal, even private motor vehicles were still mostly running on liquid fuel);
b) An information by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Oil Division Final Report, War Department, Washington, D.C., 1947, whereby most of Nazi Germany’s aviation and motor fuel was synthesized from coal, air and water;
c) The documented assignments of fuel to the Military Commander in Chief in France, which were considerably reduced between the 3rd quarter of 1941 and the 3rd quarter of 1942, and again between that time and the 3rd quarter of 1943.

What is all this supposed to mean in the context of my argument? Not much, as I didn’t argue that Nazi Germany’s fuel situation was particularly bright in mid-1942 and no efforts at saving had to be made. My argument was that at that time Nazi Germany had sufficient fuel to feed its essential projects, which were the war effort and another state project considered equal in importance to the war effort if not part of the same, the extermination of a minority of perceived dangerous subversives and useless eaters harmful to Germany. Gasoline requirements for burning corpses at the extermination camps, even it that had been done with gasoline alone (which it was not – wood, rags and other liquid flammables were also used), would have been comparatively trifling: the daily requirements of Treblinka, even according to the updated calculations in Table 2.31, would have been lower (28,163 vs. 33,000 liters) than the daily gasoline consumption of a single armored division^[228]. And whatever difficulties in fuel supply Nazi Germany may have had in mid-1942, they were nothing compared to the difficulties they were facing in February 1945, when the Reich had lost almost all of its external petrol resources (the oilfields in Romania and Hungary) and its war machine was bogging down for lack of fuel. Yet in that very month the Nazi government did not consider it wasteful to spend ca. 68,004 liters of gasoline (according to my earlier calculations) or 81,361 liters of gasoline (according to my current calculations) ^[229] on municipal sanitation purposes, to burn the corpses of 6,865 victims of the Dresden air raids. This brute fact renders moot all of Mattogno’s considerations about Nazi Germany’s fuel problems in 1942, leaving him no alternative but to dispute as too high even the lower of the amounts I calculated for Dresden. Yet by doing that, as explained above, Mattogno unwittingly reveals that he considers the astronomic fuel amounts he postulates for the extermination camps to be widely exaggerated – or in other words, that he doesn’t believe his own BS.

Obviously uncomfortable with the notion that high amounts of liquid fuel were used in burning the corpses at the extermination camps, Mattogno quotes a slab from MGK’s Sobibór book in which he had referred to survivor witness Thomas Blatt’s assertion that "the pyre, sometimes more than three yards high, was then doused with kerosene and ignited", as supposedly showing that liquid combustible was used only for the ignition of the pyres. Yet the quoted statement says nothing about the amount of liquid fuel employed or the proportions of liquid versus solid fuel, which for all we know may have been like on the Dresden Altmarkt pyres.

Regarding Mattogno’s argument about volatility as a disadvantage of using gasoline for cremation, I had remarked that if this was a problem at the extermination camps, it would also have been a problem at the Dresden Altmarkt, where it doesn’t seem to have hindered the cremation of the corpses. Mattogno sees a difference in that "for the corpses of Dresden the hazard of explosion was reduced, since the gasoline impregnated also the clothing". A demonstration that this would have been so is not provided, and if impregnation in clothing reduced the hazard of explosion at Dresden, so did impregnation in the rags reportedly used to burn the corpses at Treblinka. Moreover, whereas at Dresden only gasoline seems to have been used, evidence indicates that at the extermination camps also less volatile liquid fuel was employed.

That said, I could move on to the next part of this series, regarding the duration of cremations. Before I do that, however, I would like to deal with Mattogno’s arguments regarding fuel requirements in points 74, 75 and 91 of chapter 12.

According to a document from the British Environment Agency (EA) referred to in MGK’s Sobibór book^[230], a typical pyre for 300 cows at the time of the British Foot & Mouth Disease Crisis in 2001 included 175 tons of coal, 380 railway sleepers, 250 pallets, four tons of straw and 2,250 liters of diesel.

The wood equivalent of these various types of fuel, according to my related assumptions^[231], would be as shown in Table 2.32 below. Assuming an average weight of 500 kg per cow and 150,000 kg of carcass mass in total, the wood weight to carcass weight ratio would be 2.15:1.

Table 2.32 – Fuel requirements for a typical carcass pyre according to Environment Agency North West Region Area, "Extracts from Submission to Cumbria County Council’s Inquiry into the Foot and Mouth Crisis"

A wood weight to carcass weight ratio in the order of 2:1 doesn’t suit Mattogno, who has promised (p. 1397) to demonstrate, "based on experimental data", that ratios achievable in individual cremation cannot be achieved in mass cremation. Accordingly he tries to push up the ratio. In my calculations based on the calorific value of each substance, 1 kg of coal is the equivalent of ca. 1.48 kg of wood, which Mattogno (p. 1424) calls "a false but convenient value". After some unnecessary and mistaken speculation about my sources^[232], Mattogno argues that the "official source" he "quoted in the point 51" establishes "as a practical criterion a relationship between wood and coal of 3:1, that is 3 kg of wood equal 1 kg of coal". Actually the "official" source in question^[233] states no such relationship, which Mattogno simply infers from the information that "The approximate quantities of fuel that will be needed are 100 pounds of straw, 2½ gallons of accelerant and 2 tons of wood or ½ ton of wood and ½ ton of coal.". Notwithstanding this inference, Mattogno uses a coal to wood ratio of 2:1, which would bring the wood weight to carcass weight ratio in Table 2.32 to 2.76:1 (Mattogno claims 2.82:1).

Either ratio would make the typical FMD pyre described by the EA look rather fuel-inefficient, judging by the Ausvetplan’s statement^[234] that in multiple cremations experience has shown that "the amount of timber can be reduced to around 1.0 tonne per adult bovine" weighing 500 kg, a ratio of 2:1. But Mattogno doesn’t care about that, nor about the other sources I listed above, whereby wood-to-carcass ratios between 2:1 and 1:1 have been achieved in mass cremation of carcasses. Having found one source seemingly supporting his counterintuitive claim (which runs contrary to what experience has shown according to the Ausvetplan) that in mass cremation wood to carcass ratios are higher than in individual cremation^[235], Mattogno quickly promotes the EA’s information to the category of "experimental data", as if "the specialists of the British Environment Agency" had reported on the results of experiments they had made to see how much fuel was required for mass cremation of carcasses during the Foot and Mouth Disease in the UK, and such experiments were proof that in mass cremations the wood to carcass ratio is "more than five times higher" than in the cremations of single carcasses performed by Lothes & Profé.

All of this is utter nonsense. First of all, the "specialists of the British Environment Agency" were not reporting on experiments they had performed, but on incineration practices they had observed during the FMD epidemic in the UK – and about the consequences of which they were concerned, as becomes apparent from the context of what Mattogno falsely calls "experimental data"^[236]. Second, the higher ratio in comparison with Lothes & Profé’s experiments has nothing to do with the difference between mass cremation and individual cremation, as already follows from the fact that, according to the Ausvetplan, wood to carcass ratios tend to be lower in the former than in the latter. It is due to a) differences in methodology (in the FMD pyres there were no pits and no iron carriers like in Lothes & Profé’s experiments, but the carcasses were simply placed on top of the flammable material lying above ground), and b) differences in the degree of consumption by fire that was meant to be and was achieved in one and the other case, "complete carbonization" in Lothes & Profé experiments vs. complete reduction to ashes on the FMD pyres. As mentioned above, the lesser degree of consumption in Lothes & Profé’s experiments has its parallel in the comparatively incomplete combustion achieved in the Nazi extermination camps or on the Dresden Altmarkt, and Mattogno himself confirms the latter when he turns to the subject of ashes on p. 1456:

In the exterminationist perspective ashes and non-combustible substances should be even higher. Yakov Kaper, the witness of Babi Yar referred to by Muehlenkamp (according to whom the cremation system utilized there was the same as the one of the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps) stated:
"Bones remained almost untouched though they were in fire. They were gathered and put on a special ground lain with granite plates. A special team was crushing those bones into small pieces with special mortars."
If we believe judge Łukaszkiewicz (see point 17), in 1945 the area of the Treblinka camp was full "with cremation remains as well as skulls, bones and other parts of human bodies covering an area of at least 1.8 hectares." With Muehlenkamp’s stupid comment – "this shows that the results of the exhumation, burning and crushing procedure were not nearly as complete as certain descriptions suggest.” (p. 449) – and with his explicit admission that "the result of the cremation process was not complete combustion of all bodies" (see point 16), he confirms that the amount of ashes and non-combustible substances should have been much higher that the theoretical.

It was much higher, and I can live with that, as we shall see. But Mattogno, who likes to call his opponents’ intelligence into question, has with this comment unwittingly struck the final nail in the coffin of his arguments regarding fuel requirements, for incomplete cremation means that I’m spot-on in applying Lothes & Profé’s ratios to the extermination camps while he’s comparing apples with oranges when arguing that ratios from FMD carcass cremation in the UK should be applied.

What follows is easy to guess. Based on his 2.82:1 ratio as the one applicable to normally fed deportees (for which I had estimated an average weight of 57 kg), Mattogno calculates the wood weight supposedly required to burn the other categories of corpses (decomposed normally fed deportees, un-decomposed underfed deportees and decomposed underfed deportees) according to the methods discussed in Section 3 of this Part 2 (tables 2.8 to 2.15 and related comments). The results, summarized in Table 12.8 on p. 1429, are accordingly absurd:
- The corpses of my former category "A" (decomposed normally fed deportees weighing 28.88 kg) are supposed to have required more wood (163 vs. 160 kg, ratio 5.64:1 vs. 2.82:1) than the corpses of normally fed un-decomposed deportees (category "D"), even though they have roughly half the mass and their heating value per weight unit is higher (2,579.67 vs. 1,525.16 kcal/kg, see Tables 8.14 and 8.15 on p. 478 of the critique).
- The corpses of my former category "C" (un-decomposed underfed deportees), whose cremation I considered to be the most fuel-intensive of all categories (ratio 0.87:1, vs. 0.62:1 for category "B", 0.56:1 for category "D" and 0.29:1 for category "A", see Tables 8.11 on p. 476, 8.13 on p. 477 and 8.14/8.15 on p. 478 of the critique as well as the list of categories on the same page), don’t require much more wood (139 vs. 136 kg) and have a more favorable wood weight to corpse weight ratio (4.08 vs. 8.01) than the corpses of my former category "B" (decomposed underfed deportees), even though the former have about twice the mass (34 vs.16.96 kg) and a much lower heating value per weight unit (330.98 vs. 1,287.82 kcal/kg) than the latter.

One cannot take this nonsense seriously, and as we have seen, Mattogno doesn’t take it seriously himself. For when it comes to the cremation of air raid victims on the Dresden Altmarkt, an amount of gasoline that I calculated on the basis of the 0.56:1 wood weight to corpse weight ratio (average of Lothes & Profé’s experiments I to III without considering the tar or resin used as accelerant, see Table 2.3) is protested as too high by the very same gentleman who claims these exorbitant amounts of wood for the burning of extermination camp victims. Mattogno is obviously trying to take his readers for a ride, certain that an audience of uncritical fellow "Revisionists" will gladly accept the offer.

Notes

[210] Mattogno quotes from an article by John D. DeHaan ("Fires and Bodies" in: Christopher W. Schmidt, Steven A. Symes (eds.), The Analysis of Burned Human Remains p. 12) an account of the author’s experience in which "a woman was doused with a gallon of gasoline and set alight while dressed in a shirt, denim pants and cotton socks, lying on a sandy soil surface". The woman "died from shock but her skin was nearly intact, penetrated to any degree only at her ankles where the cotton socks, secured by a leather belt, absorbed enough gasoline to continue to burn for some minutes". While this shows that gasoline does not do much damage to the human body is someone lying on the ground is doused with gasoline and set on fire, it says nothing about the effect that gasoline would have as a combustion agent if a corpse lies on a grate removed from the ground and gasoline is poured on both the body and on solid flammables lying below the grate.
[211] See the judgment at the Irving-Lipstadt trial, section 5.2 (d) (vii) - "Further misuse of figures: refugees, burials, and excavations" ([link]).
[212]Abschlussbericht der Historikerkommission zu den Luftangriffen auf Dresden zwischen dem 13. und 15.Februar 1945, online under [link].
[213] See note [108].
[214] See the blog "Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 2)"[link].
[215] According to the current assumptions the amount would be higher: (6,865 x 49 =) 336,385 kg of corpse mass, (336,385 x 0.67 =) 225,378 kg of dry wood, equivalent to (225,378 x 1.9 =) 428,218 kg of fresh wood, equivalent to (428,218 ÷ 100 x 19 =) 81,361 liters of gasoline.
[216] MGK, Sobibór, p.144.
[217] See Critique, p. 485.
[218] This is assuming a wood feller’s daily production of 0.55 tons per day. In his "Conclusions on the “Aktion Reinhardt” Camps" Mattogno presented a contemporary source (p. 1471) suggesting an output of 1.35 tons per day. At this rate Sobibór’s wood fellers could produce at least (30 x 1.35 =) 40.5 tons of fresh wood per day, rendering the camp more than self-sufficient as concerns wood supply.
[219]Belzec, Sobibor Treblinka, p. 170.
[220] Trap with a Green Fence, pp. 127-28.
[221] See note 201 and related quote.
[222]Belzec, Sobibor Treblinka, p. 177.
[223]"If they did it the simple way, they didn’t do it!" ([link]).
[224] Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung, p. 431.
[225] If a wood feller’s daily output was 1.35 t (see note 218), the production would rise to between 17,010 and 22,680 tons of wood, corresponding to 76.5% or 102% of the camp’s requirements.
[226] See the blog "«B» as in «Bullshit» " ([link]).
[227] Sara Berger, Experten der Vernichtung, pp. 422-23.
[228] A regiment of the 21st Panzer Division in Africa consumed 4,400 liters of petrol per day of combat in 1941; the daily consumption of the entire division was 33,000 liters (Pier Paolo Battistelli, Rommel's Afrika Korps: Tobruk to El Alamein, Botley: Osprey, pp.56-57).
[229] Mattogno’s co-author Graf insist that the number burned on the Altmarkt was 10 times higher, which would raise the fuel requirements, according to my current calculations, to 813,610 liters of gasoline.
[230] Environment Agency North West Region Area, "Extracts from Submission to Cumbria County Council’s Inquiry into the Foot and Mouth Crisis". (http://cmis.carlisle.gov.uk/CMISWebPublic/Binary.ashx?Document=6837 – no longer active), section 5.2.4 on page 13, quoted in MGK, Sobibór, p.135 n.394.
[231] Critique, notes 237 on p. 506 and 239 on p. 507; "Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research - Part 4 (2)" ([link]).
[232] Mattogno obviously failed to look up the critique’s notes and the article mentioned in the note above, or then he did and is arguing against better knowledge.
[233] An online article about "Anthrax" ([link]). According to another source (European Nuclear Society, "Coal equivalent" - [link]), 1 kg of firewood is the equivalent o 0.57 kg of coal.
[234] As note [126].
[235]"As it was easily foreseeable for reasons explained above, this coefficient is higher than the one of the Mokshda apparatus: (2.14)", Mattogno triumphantly proclaims.
[236] Environment Agency North West Region Area, "Extracts from Submission to Cumbria County Council’s Inquiry into the Foot and Mouth Crisis", section 5.2.4 on page 13:
"A typical pyre for 300 cows included some 175 tonnes of coal. 33 railway sleepers, 250 pallets, four tonnes of straw and 2,250 litres of diesel. Such a pyre could:
• Release body fluids. disinfectants and eitcess liquid fuel into the ground immediately before burning. ln some areas where additional groundwater protection was required a number of pyre pits were lined to contain these.
• Ernit particles (including PM10), sulphur dioi-tide. nitrogen dioxide and other products of combustion such M dioxins or poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
• Leave 15 tonnes of carcass ash and 45 tonnes of other ash to be disposed of.
• Contaminate air and water from other waste burnt on the pyres."

Here are the results of our Holocaust Controversies poll on what the present readership would like to have featured more on the blog. Posted here without further comment (but open for discussion). Thanks to all who took part (49 participants, multiple votes were possible).

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2
Part 2, Section 3
Part 2, Section 4
Part 2, Section 5
Part 3, Section 1


Duration of Cremations (1)

Mattogno commences this section on p. 1416, insisting that in his statement whereby an excavator could dig up 3,000 corpses "at one time", survivor eyewitness Jankiel Wiernik^[237] had indeed meant "at one time" and thus "uttered a monstrous nonsense"



Actually it’s a monstrous nonsense to understand Wiernik’s statement literally instead of logically interpreting it as meaning "in one day" or "in one shift", but what’s more interesting is the point that Mattogno is trying to obfuscate, which I derived from his own remark that 3,000 bodies take up a volume of about (3,000×0.045 =) 135 m³. 135 m³ would be the volume occupied by a pile of bodies stacked on a 90 m² grate at a height of (135 ÷ 90) = 1.5 meters – 5 layers of bodies with an average height of 0.3 m per layer as considered by Mattogno & Graf^[238], each layer consisting of (3,000 ÷ 5 =) 600 bodies. Assuming the area of 66 m² estimated by the author, the height of the pile would be ca. 2 meters (135 ÷ 66), corresponding to about 7 layers, each layer consisting of ca. 429 bodies (3,000 ÷ 7).

In response to my objection that an area of 1.75 m × 0.50 m occupied by each body on the grate (including "the necessary intervening space for the passage of the products of combustion") was excessive as an adult person with the corresponding measurements would be a rare exception among deportees to Treblinka (and moreover most of the bodies had been lying in mass graves prior to cremation and lost a significant part of their volume), Mattogno quite pointlessly responds that the surface area calculated in M&G’s book corresponds to the measurements of the "ideal man" (an individual 67.2 inches = 170.7 cm tall and 17.7 inches = 44.95 cm wide) ^[239]"adding a mere 0.105 m² of space between a corpse and the other".

Based on the volume displacement of the "ideal man" (0.093 m³), a lower volume displacement I calculated for Polish Jews of low stature and with narrow shoulders (0.045 m³) and the grate areas assumed by M&G (90 m²) and by myself (66 m²), I had on p. 492 of the critique presented four scenarios for the height of and number of layers in a pyre containing 3,500 corpses (the number that had to be burned on each of two pyres every day to dispose of about 860,000 bodies within 122 days, according to M&G^[240]), each way below the 29 layers 8.7 meters high that had been claimed by M&G^[241]. Mattogno objects that I treat the corpses "as if they were bricks which can be perfectly arranged without losing even one cubic centimeter of space, which is absurd". However, he does not produce an alternative calculation in stacked cubic meters "with gaps" that would substantially change my results, so his objection is pointless.

Mattogno then argues that such a compact pile of corpses as I considered "would not have allowed even a minimal circulation of combustion air between the individual corpses" and been the equivalent of "cremating the corpse of a blue whale". A more proper comparison would be the cremation of the corpses on the Dresden Altmarkt pyres, which were also stacked compactly as can be seen on Walter Hahn’s photographs. But then, Dresden is a subject that Mattogno prefers to avoid in this context, as we shall see.

After some pointless musing about the scarcity of detail in eyewitness descriptions as concerns the procedure of stacking the corpses onto the pyre, the technique of cremation and the aspect of the corpses, a reference to the exaggerated amounts of sand that result from Mattogno’s aforementioned sand-filling trick (and not, as he claims, from "Muehlenkamp’s assumptions and from the testimonies"), and further considerations about the need to use ladders if the pyre exceeded a certain height and the result being "a cluster even more chaotic than the one created after the Dresden bombings", Mattogno refuses to have a look at the critique’s Table 8.25, which is based on his own calculations regarding "the amount of wood burned per square meter in one hour", on grounds that the demand of wood assumed by me is wrong. As we have seen, Mattogno doesn’t believe himself in the exorbitant amounts of wood he claims, so a revision of Table 8.25 based on my currently calculated wood demand should be of interest to him.

Table 3.1 – Revision of Table 8.25 (critique, p. 494).

Next we see Mattogno running away from a comparison with the Dresden Altmarkt pyres, on grounds that "we don’t have any certain data about this, neither for their surface, nor on the effective number of corpses put on them, nor about the actual time period for the cremations, nor regarding the type and amount of combustibles used, nor about the result of the cremations".

First of all, since when does Mattogno need "certain data"? His "transit camp" theory is based on fragmentary data taken out of context plus the wildest of baseless speculations at best.

Second, as demonstrated in Part 2, the result of the cremations can be established quite precisely on hand of at least one of Walter Hahn’s photographs and two contemporary documents, the Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am 13., 14. und 15. Februar 1945 and the document StAD, Marstall- und Bestattungsamt, Nachtrag I - Schreiben, 4.3.1945 referred to and partially quoted by Dresden historian Matthias Neutzner. The result was cremation remains small enough to be called "ash" in both documents, to be loaded into boxes and sacks and transported to the cemetery despite a lack of suitable vehicles for corpse transportation mentioned in the Schlußmeldung.

Third, the type of combustibles used can be established on the basis of Walter Hahn’s photographs, which show wood placed underneath the grates, and of Theodor Ellgering’s postwar report quoted in Part 2, which mentions that the corpses were burned with gasoline.

Fourth, as to the amount of combustibles used, Mattogno himself has set a maximum: wood or wood equivalent corresponding to 68,004 liters of gasoline (corresponding to 357,914 kg of fresh wood or 188,376 kg of dry wood).

Fifth, the effective number of corpses put on a pyre is also known: about 500 according to the aforementioned Theodor Ellgering and to British historian Frederick Taylor, who informs that the cremations took place from 21 February to 5 March 1945 and that one pyre was burned every day during these 13 days. ^[242] As to the dimensions of a Dresden pyre, its length was estimated at "over 20 feet" (ca. 6.1 meters) by David Irving^[243]. To take account of the "over", I’ll make that 23 feet or 7 meters for good measure. A look at images 2.8 and 2.9 in Part 2, Section 1 suggests that this estimate is accurate. The width of a pyre can also be estimated on the basis of Image 2.9 and another of Hahn’s photos shown in an earlier blog^[244]:



Image 3.1 – Dresden pyre

On this image 5 steel carriers can be clearly seen, and there seems to be a sixth carrier on the left side. The distance between the first four carriers seems to be about 20-30 cm, so let’s take the average and say it is 25 centimeters. The distance between the fourth and the fifth carrier looks larger, say 40 centimeters. Between the fifth and the sixth carrier the distance again seems to be in the order of 25 centimeters. So the space between carriers would add up to 1.40 meters, and if each carrier was 10 cm wide at the base (which seems high compared to the assumed distance between carriers) we would have a width of roughly 2 meters, and a pyre area of about 7 x 2 = 14 square meters. If this pyre area was sufficient to burn 500 corpses at a time, then burning 3,500 corpses required a pyre area 7 times larger, i.e. 98 square meters. The area considered by M&G, 90 square meters, would be sufficient to burn about 3,214 corpses, while the area I estimated, 66 m², would be sufficient to burn about 2,357 corpses at the Dresden pace.

The only thing that cannot be established on the basis of available data is how long each of the Dresden pyres burned. We know that one pyre was burned every day, but a significant part of the day would have been spent bringing the corpses to the Altmarkt, trying to identify them and building the pyre. If these activities lasted half of a 24-hour period, then each pyre burned for about 12 hours.

About the number of corpses burned at one time on a Treblinka pyre eyewitnesses provided varying information, the lowest number being that given by Ukrainian guard Leleko^[245], who stated that about 1,000 bodies were burned simultaneously and the burning process lasted up to five hours. Against my mention of Leleko’s testimony, Mattogno knows no better than to baselessly accuse me of "childish gullibility" and of treating this testimony "like unquestionable experimental data" (which of course is nonsense – I treat a testimony as such and thus as a source of evidence) ^[246].

In Part 1 of this series^[247] I considered the possibility that each of the "furnaces covered on the top with four rows of rails" described by Leleko was a grate consisting of four rails, and that the witness recalled several such grates placed next to each other. If so, his description coincides with other testimonies mentioning several cremation grates. Mattogno & Graf mention two of them: Henryk Reichmann, who stated that "five to six grates were built, each of which was able to accommodate 2,500 bodies at a time", and Szyja Warszawski, who "specified that each grate measured 10 m × 4 m"^[248]. Mattogno now (p. 1420) tries to get rid of Warszawski’s testimony, by arguing that it cannot be "reconciled with the ones published in the verdict of the Düsseldorf Jury Court (Schwurgericht) of 3 September 1965 and with the dimensions of 25 m × 2.625 m as calculated by Muehlenkamp based on them". While Mattogno again behaves like the brat who throws the puzzle out of the window, the Düsseldorf Jury Court presumably based its findings of fact as concerns the length of the pyre on a preponderance of testimonies mentioning rails "about 25 to 30 meters long", assuming that Warszawski – if he testified before the court or his earlier testimony was read at the main proceedings – underestimated the length of the grate. As to the width estimated by Warszawski, it seems too high if a grate had five to six railway rails, as it would imply a distance of more than 50 cm between rails. On the other hand Chil Rajchman’s description^[249] seems to understate the width of the grate (1 ½ meters), as it would mean that the rails alone occupied 6 x 12.5^[250] =) 75 cm and the space between two rails would be just 15 cm. Notwithstanding these differences, both witnesses coincided in that there were five to six grates (Warszawski) or six grates (Rachjman) ^[251], and there is no reason to dismiss the testimonies on this mutually corroborated detail.

Except for inconvenience to Mattogno’s argument, that is. Mattogno would like "one grid or at maximum two" to have operated at Treblinka, and he appeals to Jankiel Wiernik and Franz Stangl in support of this notion. In note 203 on p. 493 of the critique I had, after pointing out M&G’s omission of a passage from Wiernik’s "A Year in Treblinka" that doesn’t fit their bubble (see below) written that M&G had "referred to a plan of the camp drawn by Wiernik that was presented at "the trial in Düsseldorf" to claim that there were just two cremation facilities because two are drawn on said plan". In a typical attempt to conceal his own dishonest omission by accusing his opponent of having omitted important information, Mattogno hollers that he and his co-author had also referred "the plan of Jankiel Wiernik from the year 1945", which in Mattogno’s book represents "a fundamental document for orthodox holocaustology". Whatever that is supposed to mean, my argument was that the plan presented at the Düsseldorf trial was not meant to convey a statement about the number of grids and was neither understood in this sense by the court (which concluded that the number of cremation roasters could not be established exactly in the main proceedings), so there was no reason for me to mention the 1945 plan that is oh-so-important to Mattogno.

To my argument that the Düsseldorf plan was a sketch not drawn to scale obviously meant to give a rough idea of the location of the grids rather than make a statement as to their number, Mattogno responds with the straw-man argument that this would be tantamount to "the statement that, in drawing two gassing facilities, the witness did not mean to say that there were actually two such facilities, but that he intended only “to give a rough idea of their location."". Mattogno’s dishonesty is rather flagrant, as he is obviously familiar with Wiernik’s A Year in Treblinka^[252], where Wiernik wrote the following:

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. The result was one huge inferno, which from the distance looked like a volcano breaking through the earth's crust to belch forth fire and lava.

While Wiernik didn’t state the number grates, the reference to "additional fire grates", the number of corpses claimed to be cremated on them and the description of the "huge inferno" clearly show that Wiernik can impossibly have claimed that there were only two grates at Treblinka, and that his drawings on maps can therefore not be understood as a statement about the number of grates. Mattogno is clearly arguing against better knowledge here.

Not content with this showpiece of bad faith (something he routinely accuses his opponent of on rather flimsy pretexts), Mattogno adds the feeble argument that, in a map shown to camp commandant Stangl and confirmed by him to be "absolutely correct", only one grid is drawn. Considering that there are at least three testimonies pointing to a multitude of grids (Warszawski’s, Rachjman’s and Wiernik’s), the symbol representing a grid on the map in question can only be understood as meaning to illustrate where the grids, about whose number Stangl need not have cared (and which he need not even have known, as he left the running of the camp to Kurt Franz), were located.

A laughably feeble argument of Mattogno’s in this context is that "several" such facilities in the upper camp according to the Düsseldorf Court is not in contrast with "two". If the Düsseldorf Court had concluded on just two burning grids pursuant to Wiernik’s map, it would have stated that number in its findings of fact, instead of concluding that the number of burning grids could not be ascertained.

Sara Berger concluded on the basis of various eyewitness testimonies^[253] that there were four to six roasters up to 30 meters long and 1 ½ to 2 meters wide^[254], on which over 5,000 corpses were burned every day, so that the burning of the corpses – which she assumed to have started at the end of February 1943^[255]– approached its end in August 1943. The total area of the roasters thus was between 4 x 45 m² = 180 m² and 6 x 60 m² = 360 m² - about 13 to 26 times the area of the Dresden pyres and thus capable of burning (13 x 500 =) 6,500 to (26 x 500 =) 13,000 corpses every day, so that the number assumed by Berger (5,000 corpses per day) is entirely plausible. At this rate, (180 x 5,000 =) 900,000 corpses could have been burned in the six months between the end of February and the end of August 1943. This renders unnecessary my speculations, based on several statements of Arad^[256], whereby cremation and crushing of bones may have lasted way beyond August 1943.

Omitting the passages of Arad’s book on which I had based this theory, Mattogno (p. 1419) rants about my "miserable trickery to expand the time period of the cremations", before indulging in some trickery of his own to make that period as short as possible. Arad, he states, explicitly gives a period of 4 months from April to July (two months short, according to more recent research). According to Wiernik, "the cremations started after the German announcement of their discovery of the mass graves in Katyn (13 April 1943)" - obviously a misdating, as at that time the "Artist" had been in Treblinka for about three months, according to Rachjman^[257]. The witness Stanisław Kon declared that at the time of the revolt (2 August) the cremation of the corpses was "substantially already terminated" - "substantially" doesn’t mean wholly, and the last transports arrived more than two weeks after the revolt. The Düsseldorf Jury Court dated the beginning of cremations to the spring of 1943 and stated that "after widely differing incineration experiments had been performed for this purpose, a large cremation facility was finally built" - actually the "widely differing incineration experiments", in what I call the 2nd phase of cremations at Treblinka, had been going on since November or December 1942^[258]. So try as he might, Mattogno cannot refute the conclusion that the 3rd phase of cremation at Treblinka started some time after the arrival of the "Artist" in January 1943, latest at the end of February 1943 as assumed by Sara Berger, and didn’t end before the end of August 1943. However often he brings up "the 122 days which we considered in our Treblinka study", the period of wholesale and successful cremations at Treblinka was about 180 days.

The number of corpses cremated during the 3rd phase does not include those cremated during the 2nd phase and those cremated at the "Lazarett" throughout the camp’s operation. As concerns the latter, the Düsseldorf Jury Court at the 1st Treblinka trial (Kurt Franz et al) attributed thousands of deportees besides several hundred working Jews to the defendant Mentz, hundreds if not thousands to the defendant Miete. In the last months of 1942 a transport consisting of old Jews from Germany in passenger cars arrived at Treblinka; all occupants were killed by Mentz and Miete at the "Lazarett". Sara Berger^[259] mentions a transport of 883 Jews from Darmstadt and Mainz that arrived in late September or early October 1942. She also mentions a transport of old and sick people that arrived from Mława in the Zichenau district on 11.11.1942; it stands to reason that the occupants of this train were also murdered at the "Lazarett". Altogether the number of people killed at the "Lazarett" can be estimated at a minimum of 5,000, but it was probably much higher.

Then there was the 2nd phase of cremations at Treblinka, which started in November or December 1942 and went on for at least two months before the "Artist" got an efficient system going. The maximum daily number burned during this phase was one thousand according to Rachjman^[260]. If we assume that the daily average was half that much, then within a period of two months about 30,000 Jews were burned.

That leaves 789,000 – 5,000 – 30,000 = 754,000 corpses to be burned in the 3rd phase of cremations at Treblinka, which is assumed to have lasted from late February to late August 1943.

Besides the Dresden pyres, I also referred to a pyre for mass burning of cattle and the pyres used by Lothes & Profé as parameters of comparison. I referred to an online source^[261] about the burning at High Bishopton Farm, Whithorn, Scotland, of 511 cattle, 90 sheep and 3 pigs over a period of three days on two separate pyres, each of which was 50 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. Assuming average carcass weights of 500 kg for cattle, 100 kg for pigs and 50 kg for sheep, the total weight of carcass mass burned was (511x500)+(90x50)+(3x100) = 260,300 kg. The area of the pyres was 2 × (50x1.5=) 75 m² = 150 m². Assuming a total cremation time of 72 hours, the carcass weight cremated per hour and square meter of pyre was 260,300÷(72x150) = 24.1 kg. At this rate the pyres of Treblinka could burn a minimum of (180 x 24.1 =) 4,338 kg, corresponding to (4,338 ÷ 24.03^[262] =) ca. 181 corpses per hour and a maximum of (360 x 24.1 =) 8,676 kg, corresponding to (8,676 ÷ 24.03 =) ca. 361 corpses per hour. Burning 754,000 corpses would thus take 4,166 or 2,089 hours, corresponding to 174 or 87 days.

Mattogno argues that the pyres’ total length of 100 meters, according to directives prescribing 3 ft (≈ 1 m) of length for each adult bovine carcass^[263], could only burn 110 carcasses at a time. According to another source, the burning of 840 bovine-equivalent carcasses, placing two swine or two sheep on top of each bovine carcass, requires ca. 585 meters of pyre length. According to that source’s formulae (1,000 swine = 200 bovine-equivalent carcasses, 700 sheep = 140 bovine-equivalent carcasses) the Whithorn pyre burned about 530 bovine-equivalent carcasses. These could not be incinerated on 100 m of grid, lest each carcass would have only 20 cm of the grid’s length available to it. Mattogno considers the following possibilities (p. 1432):

a) either the numbers mentioned are erroneous – the real ones being only ca. 1/5, for example there were only 111 instead of 511 bovines –, b) or the carcasses were put on the pyre not simultaneously but in succession –, c) or finally the data given for the grid were erroneous, the correct ones being much bigger.

Possibility b) seems to be the likeliest to me and was considered in the critique (footnote 207 on p. 494). If the pyres burned for 72 hours, this would mean that they were loaded about five times during this period and each set of 100-odd bovine-equivalent carcasses burned for about 14 hours.

Possibility c) has been addressed by Mattogno’s acolyte Friedrich Jansson, who has claimed^[264] that the "Report To Dumfries and Galloway Council Air Monitoring of Carcass Pyre At Whithorn" mistakenly gave the pyres’ width at 1.5 meters, because "The narrowest width of pyres used during the 2001 UK FMD outbreak was determined by the length of a railroad tie (as railroad ties were placed crosswise along the pyres), which is approximately 2.5 meters.". The only evidence he offered in support of this claim is a photograph captioned "Piles of animal carcasses await disposal in Cumbria", but let’s assume the claim is accurate. What would this imply? It would imply that the carcass weight cremated per hour and square meter of pyre was (260,300÷(72x250) =) 14.46 kg. At this rate, it would require the higher range of total pyre area at Treblinka (360 m²) 145 days to cremate the aforementioned 754,000 corpses.

Yet this calculation doesn’t take into consideration two important factors, the degree of combustion required and achieved (which can be assumed to have been much higher in the Whithorn pyres than at Treblinka) and the amount of flammable material used. The Whithorn pyres required 72 hours not just to burn 260,300 kg of carcass mass, but also the wood and other flammable material used to burn the carcasses. And this amount must have been much higher in relation to the amount of carcass mass than at Treblinka. If we assume a ratio of 2:1 between wood or wood equivalent weight and carcass weight^[265], then what burned on an area of 250 m² within 72 hours was 780,900 kg of carcass plus wood or wood equivalent, at a rate of 43.38 kg per hour. The Treblinka pyres, assuming the use of dry wood for comparison, would have to burn (754,000 x 24.03) = 18,118,620 kg of corpse mass plus (754,000 x 14.83^[266]=) 11,181,820 kg of dry wood, or 29,300,440 kg of corpse mass plus wood in total. Burning this amount of carcass and wood would require 3,752 hours = 156 days with 180 m² of pyre area and 78 days with 360 m² of pyre.

If we consider only the wood, as Mattogno did in his books about Treblinka and Bełżec^[267], we get the following times:

Table 3.2 – Burning times for wood required to burn corpses at Treblinka

Mattogno posits (p. 1433) that the starting point for calculating duration of cremations must be the fact that, according to one of his sources^[268], "fourteen sq ft (≈1.3 m²) of surface area should be allowed for an adult bovine carcass.". However, this information refers not to burning carcasses on pyres, but to burying carcasses in pits (p. 8). According to the same source (p. 13), 840 bovine-equivalent carcasses (500 cattle, 1000 swine and 700 sheep) can be accommodated on a pyre 585 meters long. The width of the pyre is not stated, but according to Figure 1 on page 11 (reproduced by Mattogno as Illustration 12.27, see below) the fire bed is about as wide as a bovine carcass’s body length from head to hind quarters. The table below shows the average weights and body lengths of cows from nine breeds of cattle^[269].

Image 3.2 – Construction of a fire bed for burning carcasses, from: National Animal Health Emergency Management System Guidelines U.S. Department of Agriculture. April 2005. Operational Guidelines: Disposal, in: Operational Guidelines: Disposal, in: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/emergency_response/tools/on-site/htdocs/images/nahems_disposal.pdf

Table 3.3 – Average weights and lengths for cows from nine breeds of cattle.

Based on the average length from Table 3.3, the pyre’s area can be calculated as 585 x 1.41 = ca. 825 m². As concerns the weights of the animals I shall consider the same as regarding the Whithorn pyres, i.e. 500 kg for cattle, 100 kg for pigs and 50 kg for sheep. The total weight of carcasses burned on this pyre would thus be (500x500+1,000x100+700x50 =) 385,000 kg, or ca. 467 kg per square meter of pyre.

According to the same source (p. 11), the bulk of the carcasses "should burn within 48 hours" if weather conditions are favorable. The throughput of this pyre would thus be 9.73 kg of carcass per hour and m² of pyre, instead of 8 kg as calculated by Mattogno.

Again, 48 hours is the time required to burn not the carcasses alone, but the carcasses and the flammable materials of the fire bed, the quantity of which is calculated so as to bring about a complete reduction of the carcass to ashes (whereas at the AR camps and at Dresden such thorough reduction was neither the intended nor the achieved result). Assuming a wood or wood equivalent weight to carcass weight ratio of 2:1 like in regard to the Whithorn pyres, what burns within 48 hours are 1,155,000 kg of carcasses and wood, which means a throughput of 29.17 kg of carcass and wood per hour and m² of pyre. Even at this low burning rate, which is way below that of the Whithorn pyres even assuming that their area was not 150 m² but 250 m² as claimed by Jansson, Treblinka could have burned the 29,300,440 kg of wood and corpses calculated above within 116 days if it had a total grate area of 360 m². If we consider Mattogno’s rate for FMD pyres (2.82:1), the time is shortened to 91 days. To the extent that wood was replaced by rags and liquid fuel, the time would be accordingly shorter.

In Table 8.26 on p. 495 of the critique, I calculated the carcass weight combusted per hour and square meter of grate in Lothes & Profés experiments I to VI, assuming a grate area of 2 m² in each case. Mattogno predictably tries to enlarge the grate area.

Thus he argues (p. 1426) that "as results from the Illustration 12.19, the pit is 2.50 m long (its length is subdivided into four sections of 600, 650, 650 and 600 mm = 2500 mm), and therefore its surface is of 2.5 m²". He’s referring to the inner pit in Lothes & Profé’s experiments IV to V, and the illustration is rather irrelevant in this context given Lothes & Profé’s description of the pit’s arrangement^[270]:

From the bottom of a pit 2 meters long, 2 meters wide and 0.75 meters deep there was made a second pit also 2 meters long and 0.75 meters deep, but only 1 meter wide, so that the upper pit's bottom simultaneously formed the side edges of the lower pit, 0.5 meters wide each. Onto these edges were lain the 2 meter long T-carriers transversally to the pit's longitudinal direction.

So the outer pit’s area was 2x2 = 4 m² whereas the inner pit’s area was 2x1 = 2m², which I considered to be the area of the grate, assuming that the carriers were placed as far away from each other as the length of the pit permitted and the width of the carriers plus the space between them would thus be 2 meters, while of the carriers’ length 0.5 meters on each side rested on the inner pit’s borders.

As concerns experiments I to III Lothes & Profé provide no measurements. Based on his Illustration 12.19 (which did not refer to Lothes & Profé’s experiments, judging by the difference between the measurements in the drawing and those given in the veterinarians’ article), Mattogno claims that the grid measured 2 x 2.5 meters, i.e. that it’s area was equal to the area of the pit according to the illustration. This is rather unlikely, however. For if the carriers in experiments I to III were 2 meters long like in experiments IV to VI (and there’s no indication that they were longer), the pit cannot have been 2 meters long by 2 meters wide as the outer pit in experiments IV to VI, otherwise the carriers could not have been lain across the pit but would have fallen inside the pit. As it would make sense to place the carriers across the pit in the same manner as in experiments IV to VI – that is, with 0.5 meters of the carriers’ length resting on each side of the pit –, I therefore assume that the pit in experiments I to III was 2 meters long as in experiments IV to VI, but only 1 meter wide. The area of the grid, again assuming that the carriers were placed as far away from each other as the length of the pit permitted, would thus again be 2x1 = 2m².

Besides trying to reduce the grate area in Lothes & Profé’s experiments, Mattogno (p. 1427) argues that the speed of cremation was related to the fat content of the carcasses, which he calculates as 229.6 kg out of 1,750 kg for the carcasses in experiments I to III and 200 kg out of 1,525 kg for the carcasses in experiments IV to VI (ca. 13.1 % of the body mass in each case). In my calculations the fat content of freshly killed deportees makes up (8.06÷57 =) 14.14 % of the body mass in deportees from outside the General Government and (3.85÷38 =) 10.13% of the body mass in ghetto deportees (see Table 2.20 in Part 2, Section 4), while the fat content of decomposing deportees makes up (8.06÷33.64 =) 23.96% of the body mass in deportees from outside the GG and (3.85÷22.23 =) 17.32% of the body mass in ghetto deportees (see Table 2.24 in Part 2, Section 4). Considering that there were more decomposing ghetto deportees than freshly killed ghetto deportees in all four camps (see Tables 2.25, 2.26, 2.27 and 2.28), I would expect the average fat content in percentage of body mass to be at least as high in cremated deportees as in the carcasses burned in Lothes & Profé’s experiments.

That said, and instead of addressing Mattogno’s irrelevant calculations based on his futile attempts to reduce the grate area in Lothes & Profé’s experiments, I provide below an updated version of the critique’s Table 8.26, in which I consider not only the weight of the carcasses, but also the weight of the solid flammables employed (i.e. excluding the tar or resin used as accelerants). Besides Lothes & Profés experiments, the table also includes the Whithorn pyres (assuming an area of 250 m² instead of 150 m², according to Jansson) and the model pyre from the USDA/NAHEM’s "Operational Guidelines: Disposal" as calculated above (assuming a wood or wood equivalent weight to carcass weight ratio of 2:1 in each of these two cases).

Table 3.4 – Weight combusted per hour and square meter of grate/pyre in various carcass cremation scenarios.

The next table applies the throughput values in Table 3.4 to the 29,300,440 kg of wood and corpses calculated above, assuming 180 m² and 360 m² of total grate area at Treblinka.

Table 3.5 – Times required to burn calculated corpse and wood mass at Treblinka with the throughput values from Table 3.4.

Table 3.5 shows that, except if they managed a throughput like was achieved in Lothes & Profé’s experiments IV to V, 4 grates à 45 m² wouldn’t have been sufficient to burn the aforementioned mass of body and wood within the assumed period of 6 months, whereas with 6 grates à 60 m² this would have been no problem. If, like at Dresden, the main external combustion agent was liquid fuel, the amount of wood to be burned would have been much reduced. As mentioned above, even the lower total grate area of 180 m² would have been about 13 times larger than the pyre area available on the Dresden Altmarkt, where corpses were burned at a rate of 500 per day.

This allows us to ignore Mattogno’s absurd calculations of exorbitant cremation times at Treblinka and move on to Bełżec.

Notes

[237] Jankiel Wiernik, "One Year in Treblinka", in: The Death Camp Treblinka. A Documentary, edited by Alexander Donat, New York 1979, pages 147 to 188. Transcribed in the HC online library under [link].
[238]M&G, Treblinka, p.148.
[239]Alex Bay, The Reconstruction of Treblinka, "Appendix D - Ash Disposal and Burial Pits (Continued)" ([link]).
[240] M&G, Treblinka, p.147.
[241]M&G, Treblinka, p.148.
[242]Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. New York: HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 350f, quoted on p. 177 of the critique.
[243]David Irving, Apocalypse 1945. The Destruction of Dresden, Focal Point, 2007, p.278f., quoted on p. 486 of the critique.
[244]"Jansson finally answered my Dresden Altmarkt question …" ([link]). The photo used to be available on the German Historical Museum’s web pages about the bombing of Dresden ([link]).
[245]As note 28.
[246]While having a low opinion of eyewitness testimony as a source of evidence (except of course when it suits his arguments), Mattogno seems to think wonders of what he calls "experimental data". Actually "experimental data" can be pretty worthless, namely if the experiments are performed by charlatans like Mattogno, and even if performed by serious researchers they are conveyed via the written or oral testimony of such researchers, which means that the source of evidence as concerns "experimental data" is someone’s testimony about experiments he performed and the results thereof.
[247]See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Introduction and Part 1, Section 1)" ([link]).
[248]M&G, Treblinka, p. 148.
[249]The Last Jew, p. 85: "He [the specialist who Rajchmann called "the Artist"] lays down ordinary long, thick iron rails to a length of 30 meters. Several low walls or poured cement are built to a height of 50 centimeters. The width of the oven is a meter and a half. Six rails are laid down, no more."
[250]Regarding the width of rails at the base see the blog "Incinerating corpses on a grid is a rather inefficient method …" ([link]).
[251]The Last Jew, p. 87.
[252]As note 237.
[253]Listed in footnote 117 on p. 550: Münzberger, 22.10.1964, deposition at main proceedings; Szyja Warszawski, 9.10.1945; Henryk Reichman, 12.10.1945 and 14.1.1965; Abraham Lindwasser, 17.12.1964 (testimony at main proceedings); Abraham G6oldfarb, 14.12.1964 (testimony at main proceedings); Matthes, 15.10.1964 (testimony at main proceedings); Elias Rosenberg, 24.12.1947; Horn, 8.7.1970 (deposition at main proceedings); Hirtreiter, 9.11.1950; Münzberger, 14.5.1964; Rachjman’s and Wiernik’s memoirs.
[254]Experten der Vernichtung, p. 212 (as note 33).
[255]As above, p. 211.
[256]See the blog "If they did it the simple way, they didn’t do it!" ([link]): "The cremation of the corpses in the death camps of Operation Reinhard continued until the last days of activity there." (Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka, p. 177; about one quarter of the corpses still lay in the graves in the second half of July 1943, p. 280; last transports arrived on 18 and 19 August 1943, p. 372; "At the end of November, the last Jewish workers at Treblinka were shot and burned before Kurt Franz and his men left Treblinka", p. 373.
[257]The Last Jew, pp. 85-88.
[258]See the blog "Mattogno on early cremation at Treblinka" ([link]).
[259]Experten der Vernichtung, p. 428.
[260]The Last Jew, p. 84, quoted in the blog mentioned in note 258 above.
[261]Report to Dumfries and Galloway Council about Air Monitoring of Carcass Pyre at Whithorn’, by Dr. C. MacDonald Glasgow Scientific Services, 3.10.2001, http://www.fmd-enviroimpact.scieh.scot.nhs.uk/Papers/FMD%20Whithorn.pdf. Pyre data are on page 6.
[262]Average weight of deportees cremated at Treblinka, see Table 2.27 in Part 2.
[263]National Animal Health Emergency Management System Guidelines U.S. Department of Agriculture. April 2005. Operational Guidelines: Disposal, in: Operational Guidelines: Disposal, in: www.aphis.usda.gov/emergency_response/tools/onsite/ htdocs/images/nahems_disposal.pdf
[264]See the blog "Memo for the controversial bloggers, part Vd: Dresden pyres, gasoline as a fuel for cremation, and High Bishopton farm" ([link]), commented in the blog "On "Revisionist" error nitpicking (7)" ([link]).
[265]According to the Ausvetplan (see note 126); Mattogno’s ratio would be 2.82:1.
[266]See Part 2, Section 4, Table 2.27.
[267]M&G, Treblinka, p.149. The same calculation was presented in Mattogno, Bełżec, p.86.
[268]National Animal Health Emergency Management System Guidelines U.S. Department of Agriculture. April 2005. Operational Guidelines: Disposal, in: Operational Guidelines: Disposal, in: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/emergency_response/tools/on-site/htdocs/images/nahems_disposal.pdf
[269]The table is based on tables 2 and 3 of the article "Comparison of body measurements of beef cows of different breeds", by Szabolcs Bene, Barnabás Nagy, Lajos Nagy, Balázs Kiss, J Peter Polgar and Ferenc Szabo, Arch. Tierz., Dummerstorf 50 (2007) 4, 363-373, online under [link]
[270]As note 112.

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2
Part 2, Section 3
Part 2, Section 4
Part 2, Section 5
Part 3, Section 1
Part 3, Section 2
Part 4


Duration of Cremations (2)

Based on a number of eyewitness testimonies and a secondary source, the construction and size of a Bełżec cremation grate was reconstructed by Sara Berger as follows^[271] (my translation):

Together with some comrades and guards Gley obtained ten railway rails about ten meters long, trolley rails and huge stones. They mounted the rails onto the stones, so that these, together with the trolley rails meant to keep the corpses from sliding through, formed a heightened grid roaster. With the help an excavator and the reinforced working detachment they alternately placed corpses and wood on the railway rails, poured flammable liquid like oil and gasoline over the corpses and ignited them. The Jewish »burning detachment« had to keep the fire going and see to it that the corpses burned completely.

The length of the grate, bar evidence that rails were aligned in a row to make it longer, was thus ten meters. Assuming that the rails were 12.5 cm wide at the base and the distance between them was 50 cm (which seems reasonable considering the use of trolley rails to keep the corpses from sliding through), the grate would have been 5.75 meters wide, about the same as one of the roasters or the single roaster at Sobibór, which was 10 meters long and six meters wide^[272]. I shall therefore assume the same measurements (10 x 6 meters = 60 m²) for a Bełżec roaster.

According to Gley, as quoted on p. 441 of the critique^[273], there was initially only one fireplace (Feuerstelle), and about 4 weeks after commencement of the burning operation another fireplace was erected. So Gley must have gone procuring rails on at least two occasions – possibly more, considering that it is not clear whether by fireplace (Feuerstelle) Gley meant a single pyre or a cremation site consisting of more than one pyre, while on the other hand there are testimonies of outsider witnesses mentioning 3 or an undetermined number of cremation grates at Bełżec^[274]. So we can conclude that Bełżec had at least two grates with a total area of (2 x 6 x 10 =) 120 m² or 3 grates with a total area of (3 x 6 x 10 =) 180 m². That’s about 9 to 13 times the area of the Dresden pyre estimated above, so if that pyre could incinerate 500 corpses per day, the pyres of Bełżec could manage a daily average of 4,500 to 6,500 corpses. Gley stated that each grate could burn about 2,000 corpses within 24 hours, so the capacity of two grates would be 4,000, that of three grates 6,000 within 24 hours. Comparison with the Dresden pyres suggests that these figures are realistic, even conservative.

The other calculation method establishes, like in regard to Treblinka, how much time would have been required with the throughputs from Table 3.4 to cremate the mass of corpses and wood that would have required burning if Bełżec had relied on dry wood as its (main) external combustion agent. The results, considering the figures from Table 2.26 in Part 2 (12,555,644 kg of corpse mass plus 8,689,909 of wood = 21,245,553 kg) are the following:

Table 3.6 – Times required to burn calculated corpse and wood mass at Bełżec with the throughput values from Table 3.4.

We see that even with three grates of the assumed dimensions, burning the corpses of 434,508 deportees within the time frame given by Gley (5 months at one fireplace, 4 months at both) would be compatible only with the throughput values of Lothes & Profé’s experiments IV to V and the Whithorn pyres.

The picture changes, however, if the cremation relied chiefly on liquid fuel as the external combustion agent and the amount of wood was accordingly lower. In Part 2, Section 1 I submitted the following solid and liquid fuel requirements for the Dresden pyres, deliberately maximizing the former:
Dry wood placed under the grates: 115,356 kg
Dry wood equivalent of gasoline: 188,376 kg
Sum total: 303,732 kg.

The relation is roughly 38 % wood, 62 % liquid fuel. If this relation is applied to the Bełżec pyres and the amount of wood is reduced accordingly, the mass or corpses and wood to be burned is reduced to 15,856,031 kg, and the burning times are the following:

Table 3.7 – Times required at Bełżec to burn corpse mass and reduced wood mass (due to predominance of liquid fuel) with the throughput values from Table 3.4 .

We see that in this scenario, the time frame given by Gley^[275] is additionally compatible with the throughput of Lothes & Profé’s experiment nr. III, even though this would imply that only about 23 % of the time (ca. 5 ½ hours a day) was available for putting together a pyre.

An indication that liquid fuel was indeed the predominant external combustion agent at Bełżec can be found in the expert opinion of coroner Dr. Mieczyslaw Pietraszkiewicz, quoted on pp. 384f. of the critique. The coroner found that "the aforementioned bones and soft tissue parts as well as the ash are predominantly of human origin" whereas "A very small part comes from wood."

As concerns the time of cremations, Mattogno claims that I assume 150 days "without giving a source", even though on p. 499 I expressly refer to the testimony of Heinrich Gley, whose account of the cremations I had quoted at length on p. 441. Mattogno tries to make believe that I derived these 150 days from Gley’s recollection that the operation "should have lasted from November 1942 until March 1943", which he contrasts with Gley’s earlier statement that the general exhumation and cremation of the corpses began after the gassings were stopped. As this happened in December 1942 "according to Arad", Mattogno reasons that the cremation cannot have started before that month. However, he omits the fact that Gley not only gave the November 1942 to March 1943 time frame after that statement, but expressly stated the following, as reproduced in my quote:

One fireplace allowed for burning about 2,000 corpses within 24 hours. About two [correction: four] weeks after the beginning of the burning action the second fireplace was erected. Thus on average there were burned about 300,000 bodies at the one fireplace over a period of 5 months and 240,000 bodies at the other fireplace over a period of 4 months. Of course these are only approximate estimates. It should be correct to put the total number of corpses at 500,000.

Mattogno claims that in the interrogation of 8 March 1961 Gley explicitly said that he received the task to procure the rail tracks for the cremations in early 1943. As mentioned above, he must have performed this procurement task more than once, the first time before the first fireplace was erected, and later when the second fireplace was set up. Another of Mattogno’s arguments to shorten the cremation period is that the witness Reder escaped from Bełżec "at the end of November" 1942, the cremations had not yet started. However, Reder was not very good at dates. Thus he claimed in his report^[276] that people from the surrounding areas had told him about ever less transports arriving in 1943 and the opening of the graves and cremation of the corpses having happened in 1944. It is thus possible that his escape from Bełżec happened earlier than he recalled.

After his failed attempt to shorten the cremation period at Bełżec, Mattogno disgraces himself by accusing me of having "kept silent about the fact that the total number of cremated corpses according to Gley is 540,000, 105,500 more than the number accepted" by me. I’ll leave it open whether he just overlooked the prominent quote of Gley’s account on p. 441 of the critique, with the footnote whereby "Gley’s estimate of the number of bodies cremated must be considered too high in light of the Höfle Report, whereby the total number of Jews deported to Belzec was 434,508", whether he had forgotten it by the time he got to arguing the duration of cremations, or whether he is again arguing against better knowledge. Either way, Mattogno once more made a fool of himself.

On we move to Sobibór. As mentioned in Part 1^[277], cremation replaced burial as the camp’s body disposal method in October 1942 and was extended to the previously buried victims in late November or early December 1942. Sara Berger considers it probable that there was only a single roaster 10 meters long and 6 meters wide^[278], so I’m assuming a total grate area of 60 m² for this camp. Comparison with the Dresden pyres suggests that the Sobibór roaster could burn over (4 x 500 =) 2,000 corpses per day. At this rate, burning the corpses of all 170,165 deportees murdered at Sobibór would take about 85 days, and burning the disinterred corpses (for which Mattogno gives the number 85,000 on p. 1438, quoting a witness statement by Jan Piwoński whereby these corpses were burned from December 1942 until February or March 1943) would take just 43 days, meaning that, if Piwoński’s time frame is correct, the cremation of the disinterred corpses must have proceeded at a comparatively relaxed and leisurely pace, unless numerous freshly killed deportees had to be cremated as well in that period. If we take the throughput values from Table 3.4 and consider the dry wood requirements from Table 2.25 in Part 2, the times required to burn 11,630,696 kg of corpses and wood (corresponding to 170,165 corpses) or 5,809,750 kg of corpses and wood (corresponding to 85,000 corpses) would have been the following:

Table 3.8 – Times required to burn calculated corpse and wood mass at Sobibór with the throughput values from Table 3.4.

According to the above table the cremation of the disinterred corpses must have taken longer than recalled by Piwoński, unless the throughput was like in Lothes & Profé’s experiments IV to VI or like in the Whithorn pyres – or unless the wood was mostly replaced by liquid fuel. The cremation of all corpses at Sobibór, which took place for a year after cremation was implemented, would be compatible with the throughput of Lothes & Profé experiment nr. III, the average of experiments I to III, each and the average of experiments IV to VI, the Whithorn pyres and the USDA/NAHEM model pyre. So, one grate with an area of 60 m² was sufficient to serve Sobibór’s cremation purposes.

Mattogno (p. 1436) insists that grave nr. 7 identified by Prof. Kola in 2001 was the only site to which Kola attributed the possibility of it having been a cremation site, even though this is not what becomes apparent from his own translation in MGK’s Sobibór book, which reads as follows^[279]:

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

Having realized that this translation does not serve his argument, Mattogno now changes the translation of the above paragraph’s fore-last sentence, which in Polish reads "Być może jest to jednak miejsce, gdzie palono zwłoki", into "this could be the location where the corpses were burned". However, the context of the previous sentence ("The structure was classified as a grave only because of the cremated corpse remains."), and the expression "a site where corpses were burnt", whose translation Mattogno left unchanged, suggest that Mattogno’s earlier translation of the fore-last sentence was the correct one, and that he is now manipulating his own earlier translation for his convenience.

Based on the translation of the term grób ciałopalny by Polish native speaker who translated Prof. Kola’s 2001 report into English for me, I had argued that Prof. Kola had considered each of graves nos. 1 and 2 to be "a body burning grave", i.e. a grave in which bodies were burned, whereas Mattogno insists that his translation, whereby grób ciałopalny means "a pit (gravesite) containing remains of cremated corpses, not a cremation pit", is the correct one. Though a Systran translation of grób ciałopalny as "crematory grave" confirms the correctness of my translator’s translation, the issue can be ultimately left open. This because the area of grave nr. 7 was stated by Prof. Kola to be "at least" 10 x 3 m, meaning that it could have been larger, and subsequent archaeological research by Haimi and Mazurek has further hardened this possibility. Their description^[280] suggests the probability that the area of grave nr. 7 was twice or more than twice as large as the minimum estimated by Kola, and thus sufficient to contain a 60 m² cremation grate.

After briefly trying to rekindle the discussion about whether the grates of the Sobibór cremation facility were above a pit (as recalled by some witnesses and assumed by historian Jules Schelvis, who Mattogno quotes) or inside a pit (as recalled by other witnesses^[281]), and after arguing that a pyre area of 450 m² (the possibility of which I had considered based on the assumption that graves nos. 1 and 2 were cremation graves) would have been far more than Sobibór needed (which is correct), Mattogno takes issue (p. 1437f.) with my interpretation of a statement by Polish witness Piwónski whereby he had been told by some of the Ukrainian guards that one day as many as 5,000 to 6,000 bodies were disinterred at Sobibór. Mattogno argues that, contrary to my interpretation, the witness’s statement doesn’t imply that the mentioned number of corpses was burned on the day of their disinterment. That is fine with me insofar as Sobibór never needed to burn that many corpses in a single day (neither did Treblinka or Bełżec, for that matter).

Thereafter Mattogno addresses the issue of smoke emanating from the cremation pyres as a sign of inefficient combustion (p. 1439). In this respect I had argued that a) outsider witnesses mostly mention flames that were widely visible, especially at night, rather than smoke and dust and b) smoke may also be due to the use of certain materials for burning, for example the tar used as an accelerant in some of Lothes & Profé’s experiments. Mattogno counters the first argument with a quote from p. 357 of the critique that refers to a Soviet report whereby hundreds of Treblinka bystander witnesses "saw giant columns of black smoke from the camp". The second he basically ignores, repeating his worn mantra whereby "comparison of Lothes/Profé’s single carcass with a grid containing several thousand corpses is nonsensical, because in the former case the combustion process could easily be managed while in the latter this was impossible" (Mattogno has not yet revealed what exactly, besides feeding entrails piecemeal into the fire in most but not all experiments, Lothes & Profé are supposed to have done to manage the combustion process, and there’s evidence regarding both Treblinka and Bełżec, mentioned in Sara Berger’s book^[282], that managing the combustion process there was not as impossible as Mattogno claims). He also proclaims smoke as a sign of incomplete combustion to be "an elementary principle known for several centuries", and supports this with a quote from a 1918 technical publication whereby heat loss "can reach even 10%, in the case of black dense smoke" - such as can be seen on some pictures of FMD pyres, I presume^[283]. However, his argument is hardly a strong one because, as we have seen, incomplete combustion (leaving behind whole skeletons, body parts that retained their natural shape, bones that had to be put on the pyre a second time or crushed in an almost unburned state, skulls, even unburned tissue) was precisely the result of the pyres at the Nazi extermination camps.

Mattogno further adduces the impact that the weather would have on the cremation process, namely if, like at Bełżec, it was done in the wintertime. He speaks of "frozen soil and frozen corpses" burned with "frozen wood cut every day in the forests". However, the soil of graves opened starting November 1942 need not have been frozen, the same applies to the corpses, and instead of "frozen wood cut every day in the forests" Gley and his work teams could have used stockpiled brushwood from the constant renewal of the camouflage fencings, dry wood obtained from external suppliers and high amounts of liquid fuel.

To Mattogno’s argument that "the unearthed corpses were simply dumped from the excavator in vague piles of shapeless mass", thus not allowing for open spaces to be provided for the passage of air, I had responded that this was in contradiction with eyewitness testimonies whereby the corpses were placed and arranged on the pyres by prisoner-workers after excavators had extracted them from the graves. Mattogno counters (pp. 440f) that "the testimonies are contradictory", and in support of this supposed contradiction presents a second hand testimony from Jan Piwónski whereby a Sobibór guard had told him about the bodies being placed on the grate with an excavator after the fire was burning, a statement by Treblinka witness Reichmann whereby corpses were placed on the grid "with the excavators from the pits" and a "similar statement" by Sobibór witness Kurt Thomas. Only one of these witnesses (Reichmann) ever got to see the grates with his own eyes, and his statement quoted by Mattogno doesn’t rule out the intervention of workers placing and arranging the bodies on the grates, moreover as this procedure, in which the carriers work according to instructions whereby "the first layer of corpses should consist of women, especially fat women, placed with their bellies on the rail" (after which "anything that arrives can be laid on top") and "grab the human body parts with their hands, throw them into the litters and quickly carry them to the ovens", and later a special commando is created for the purpose of "tossing the dead onto the carriers’ litters", is described in detail in Chil Rajchman’s memoirs^[284].

I further argued that the corpses in the mass graves were not necessarily a shapeless mass of flesh and bone but may have looked like the decomposed corpses of civilians found by Soviet investigating commissions at many Nazi killing sites. On the pretext that Soviet investigations are "comparatively poorly documented", Mattogno changes the subject to his favorite Katyn and argues that there the corpses were extracted by hand "with great care and diligence" (which is irrelevant to the question what the corpses looked like prior to extraction) and were mostly in a state of corpse wax-fat formation. However, I wasn’t talking about Katyn, and if Mattogno doesn’t want to look at the images of people murdered by his Nazi heroes, that’s all the more a reason for showing him the following, which are among those mentioned in note 230 on p. 503 of the critique^[285]:

Image 3.3 - "1.2.27 USHMM 85805 Soviet soldiers exhume a mass grave in Lvov"

Image 3.4 - "1.2.28 USHMM 86588 Soviets exhume a mass grave in Zloczow shortly after the liberation"

Image 3.5 - "2.3.20: Dorogobush/Smolensk region on 5.9.1943: women try to identify their relatives."

Image 3.6 - "2.3.21: Near the Ukrainian village of Petrikovo/by Tarnopol. Members of a Soviet investigation commission before the exhumed corpses of civilians shot."

Image 3.7 - "2.3.22: Soviet military medics examine exhumed corpses."

Image 3.8 - "2.3.23: Forensic medics from a Soviet investigation commission in the village of Polikovichi near Mogilev. Among the people murdered there are also babies and children. For comparison the corpse of an adult was placed in the foreground."

Image 3.9 - "2.5.2: Victims of the Gestapo in Oryol. The gorge where the civilians were shot."

Image 3.10 - "2.5.6: Taganrog. Soviet citizens tortured to death."

While arranging decomposed or decomposing bodies on the grid must have been more unpleasant than doing so with bodies of freshly killed people, there’s no reason why the prisoner-workers couldn’t have arranged them in a fashion at least as "orderly" as victims of the Dresden air attack on the pyre at the Altmarkt. The fragility of the bodies from the extermination camps’ graves, which were likely to become separated into several pieces in the hands of their handlers, might even have helped a cremation-friendly arrangement. Against the former of these arguments Mattogno protests that the arrangement of the bodies on the Dresden pyres was not "orderly" enough for his taste. The latter he ignores, instead producing a photo^[286] supposed to demonstrate that corpses in putrefaction exhumed from mass graves with excavators could not be considered anything but an "indistinguishable mass of flesh and bone". However, the piglet shown on the photo, even though it has reached the stage of butyric fermentation, still has the distinguishable forms of a piglet, and this applies all the more to the piglet in the previous stage of black putrefaction^[287], which I now consider most exhumed corpses to have reached.

Regarding Chełmno, one has to distinguish between the camp’s first phase (1942/43), in which about 150,000 people were murdered, and the second phase (mid-1944), in which the number of murdered deportees was 7,176. I start with the second phase, like I did in the critique, where I referred to my calculations in an earlier blog^[288] regarding the capacity of the two chimneyless ovens described by witnesses Zurawski, Srebrnik and Bruno Israel, which Mattogno likens to the Feist apparatus for cremating carcasses. Regarding that apparatus, Mattogno quoted a technical description^[289] containing the information he translates as follows:

The complete combustion required from 5 to 6 hours for the small animals and from 8 to 9 hours for the bigger ones which weighed from 250 to 500 kg, that is like 4-8 corpses of an average weight of 60 kg each.

Mattogno (p. 1443) wants this understood as meaning "that the 8-9 hours refer to carcasses from 250 to 500 kg and the 5-6 hours to carcasses weighing less than 250 kg", and attributes my different interpretation of this statement to "stupidity or bad faith". However, it is Mattogno’s interpretation that makes no sense. For if the author of this technical paper had wanted to distinguish between animals weighing more and such weighing less than 250 kg, why didn’t he simply say so? And what sense would it then make to point out that one carcass weighing 250 to 500 kg corresponds to "4-8 corpses of an average weight of 60 kg"? No, what the author of this technical paper obviously meant to say was that the cremation of 250-500 kg of carcass mass takes 8-9 hours if that mass consists of bigger animals (weighing 250 to 500 kg apiece) and 5-6 hours if that mass consists of smaller animals (weighing 60 kg apiece on average). In other words, smaller animals burn faster than bigger ones even if their number adds up to the same mass.

Human beings being akin to smaller animals, the cremation of up to (8 x 60 =) 480 kg of corpse mass consisting of human being would take 5 – 6 hours, which considering the area of the Feist ovens’ grid (0.6 m²) corresponds to a throughput of at least (480 ÷ 6 ÷ 0.6 =) 133 kg of corpse mass per hour and m² of grid area. The area of the Chełmno ovens’ grid, according to testimonies, was (1.5 x 2 =) 3 m² and could thus handle three times that number or 399 kg, corresponding to 10.5 corpses à 38 kg per hour and oven, or 21 corpses per hour for the two ovens. Burning the corpses of 7,176 ghettos deportees murdered in the camp’s second phase would thus take (7,176 ÷ 21 =) ca. 342 hours or 14.25 days. The killing period of the second phase lasted from 23 June to 14 July 1944, i.e. for 22 days, and cremation could have continued thereafter, so there’s no reason why the capacity of these two ovens should have been insufficient for the number of corpses they had to handle. And this is assuming that the corpses were completely cremated as they would be in a Feist oven according to Puntigam’s article referred to in Part 2, Section 2^[290] and the technical paper quoted by Mattogno in his Chełmno book, whereby "everything is reduced completely, leaving an ash residue of 1 to 2.5 kg"^[291]. An incomplete cremation requiring intensive post-cremation processing, such as was practiced at Chełmno and the other extermination camps, would require much less time. And also much less fuel, which is why Mattogno’s arguments based on the claimed fuel consumption of the Feist oven are as irrelevant as his calculation of how long the Chełmno ovens, according to his throughput assumptions, would have required to cremate "the 21,685 corpses of the alleged gassed in the first two weeks of September 1942, shortly before Höss’s alleged visit". The latter remark further suggests that Mattogno either has not yet been able to tell 1942 from 1944 and the camp’s first phase from the second one, or that he expects to continue fooling his readers by cheerfully mixing up the two.

As concerns the first phase of the camp’s operation, I had considered the 3 or 4 cremation pits described by Franz Schalling, in which I assumed the grids mentioned by Fritz Ismer to have been placed, to correspond to at least the objects 3/03, 4/03 and 5/03 identified during archaeological excavations in 2003/04. Given the discrepancies between the measurements given for the pits by Schalling (20 m² each, which would give three pits a total area of 60 m²) and the measurements of objects 3/03, 4/03 and 5/03 discovered in archaeological investigations in 2003/04, whose combined area is 142 m²^[292], I had considered both possibilities for my cremation time calculations, reckoning that Schalling may have underestimated the areas of the pits or the same may have been enlarged after the time of his observation. As the descriptions of Ismer and Schalling together suggest a method akin to the one applied by Lothes & Profé in experiments IV to VI, that of burning the corpses on grates placed inside of pits, I had for good measure considered that, like in these experiments, the grate area had been only half the pit area (30 m² and 71 m²) when applying the throughput of these experiments to the numbers and weights of corpses assumed to be cremated in Chełmno’s first phase facilities. The corresponding calculations with the throughput of burned corpses and wood according to Table 3.4 would be the following, considering the 95,510 category "B" corpses in Table 2.28 of Part 2, Section 5 (2,122,710 kg of corpse weight plus 1,270,721 kg of wood weight = 3,393,431 kg of solid mass to be burned):

Table 3.9 – Times required to burn calculated corpse and wood mass at Chełmno with the throughput values from Table 3.4.

We see that in any scenario the number of days required for cremation would have been well below the at least 5 months of the 1st phase during which corpses were cremated at Chełmno.

The remaining 54,490 corpses of the 1st phase could have been burned within about (54,490 ÷21 =) ca. 2,595 hours = ca. 108 days even with the two ovens used in the 2nd phase. If can be safely assumed that the crematorium or crematoria with chimneys used in the 1st phase had a higher capacity.

Mattogno’s objections to my arguments and calculations in the critique are quite pathetic.

The first (p. 1445) is that no "orthodox holocaust historian" takes the 3 or 4 pits mentioned by Schalling into consideration. To which the simple answer is: so what? I’m not bound by what historians did or did not take into consideration.

The second is that if I accept Shalling’s testimony, then I must also accept the findings of fact of the Bonn Jury Court’s judgment of 30 March 1963, which mention a single cremation pit with the measurements of 4 x 4 meters. This is utter nonsense, of course. Using a court’s findings of fact as a source is fine where it can be assumed that the court duly took all available evidence into account, but this is not the case here already because the archaeological evidence, which only came to light in 2003/04 and points to the existence of several cremation pits/field ovens, couldn’t possibly have been known to a court in 1963.

The third is that Schalling’s testimony contains an apparently inaccurate statement about the corpses having been "sprinkled with a powder" and should thus be thrown out of the window entirely. Maybe in "Revisionist" cloud-cuckoo-land, but in the real world inaccurate information about a certain detail in an eyewitness testimony does not mean that the testimony is wholly inaccurate. Mattogno moreover forgets that I didn’t use Schalling’s testimony in isolation, but in conjunction with the testimony of Fritz Ismer, who credibly testified about the burning of the corpses on grates (presumably placed over pits, though the witness didn’t mention this) ^[293].

The fourth is the argument that the objects identified and described by archaeologists cannot be reconciled with the cremation pits mentioned by Schalling and besides are "simple speculations" by the archaeologist. This has already been discussed in Part 1^[294].

The fifth is patently idiotic, as Mattogno accuses me (p. 1447) of trying to "forcefully reduce to the dimensions indicated by Schalling (4 m × 4 m) the actual measurements of 8 m × 9 m (exhibit 3/03), 7 m × 8 m (exhibit 4/03) and 8 m × 8 m (exhibit 20/03)". Apparently Mattogno failed to notice that I a) considered objects 3/03, 4/03 and 5/03 (and not 3/03, 4/03 and 20/03) as corresponding to the pits mentioned by Schalling, and b) made my calculations with both Schalling’s estimate about the measurements of these pits and the measurements resulting from archaeological research.

After having thus made a fool of himself once more, Mattogno incurs in further disgrace with a "general observation", in which he postulates his ridiculously overblown calculations of wood requirements (which, as I pointed out in Part 2, Section 5, he obviously doesn’t believe in himself) and then calculates how awfully long it would have taken a lumbering detachment from the camp to procure these exorbitant amounts of wood. The latter exercise is particularly amusing as I had expressly mentioned in the critique (note 157 on page 483, quoted by Mattogno on p. 1406) that Chełmno had several external wood suppliers, including witnesses Michał Radoszewski and Heinrich May – and thus was not dependent on what wood its own labor detachments could procure. Heinrich May, in his capacity as forest superintendent for the Koło district, had been forced to eventually "cut down all the trees in some of the forest districts", according to his recollections. ^[295]

Notes

[271]Experten der Vernichtung, p. 191; the testimonies mentioned in note 11 on p. 540 are the following: Tauscher, 18.12.1963; Unverhau, 3.8.1970; Jührs, 11-13.10.1961; Michal Kusmierczak, 16.10.1945 u. 13.10.1966; Edward Luczyński, 15.10.1945; Fedor Korownitschenko, 13.8.1966; Ludwig Obalek, 10.10.1945; Stefan Kirsz, 15.10.1945; Gley, 8-10.5.1961; Taras Olejinik, 24.10.1966. Berger also refers to Michael Tregenza’s article "Bełżec – Das vergessene Lager des Holocaust", in Irmtrud Wojak/Peter Heyes (editors), »Arisierung« im Nationalsozialismus. Volksgemeinschaft, Raub und Gedächtnis, Frankfurt am Main/New York 2000, pp. 241-267 (p. 253).
[272]Berger, Experten der Vernichtung, pp. 197f.
[273]With a slight mistake in that it reads "two weeks" where it should read "four weeks".
[274]See critique, p. 499 and note 5 on p. 441.
[275]Which may be too short, judging by at least one eyewitness testimony (Eustachy Ukraiński’s deposition before examining judge Godziszewski in Zamość on 11.10.194, BAL B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. VI, f. 1117-20, referred to in note 5 of p. 441 of the critique) whereby corpses were burned starting December 1942 and throughout the spring of 1943, with several fires burning at the same time.
[276]German translation in BAL (Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg = Federal Archives in Ludwigsburg, Germany) B162/208 AR-Z 252/59, Bd. II, f.258 ff (p. 286).
[277]See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Introduction and Part 1, Section 1)" ([link])
[278]Experten der Vernichtung, pp. 197 f.
[279]MGK, Sobibór, p. 120.
[280]Quoted in the blog mentioned in note 277, after Yoram Haimi, "Preliminary Report of Archaeological Excavations in the Sobibór Extermination Center November 2012 – May 2013" ([link]).
[281]See the blog mentioned in note 277.
[282]Regarding Treblinka, see note 131. Regarding Bełżec, see the above description of the grates and the burning process, translated from Experten der Vernichtung, p. 191.
[283]See the articles "Farmers rise from the ashes of foot and mouth" (The Telegraph, 19 Feb 2011, online under [link]), and "When foot-and-mouth disease stopped the UK in its tracks" (BBC News Magazine, 17 February 2016, online under [link]).
[284]The Last Jew, pp. 85-87. See also Sara Berger’s reconstruction of the procedure translated in note 131.
[285]Images and captions are from the blog "Photographic Documentation of Nazi Crimes" ([link]).
[286]From the Australian Museum webpage "Stage 5: Butyric fermentation - 20 to 50 days after death" ([link]).
[287]See the Australian Museum webpage "Stage 4: Black putrefaction - 10 to 20 days after death" ([link]).
[288]"Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 3)" ([link]).
[289]M. de Cristoforis, Elude pratique sur la crémafion. Imprimerie Treves Frères, Milano, 1890, pp. 125-128, quoted in Mattogno, Il Campo di Chelmno tra storia e propaganda, pp. 110-112.
[290]See note 147.
[291]Mattogno, Chelmno: A German Camp in History & Propaganda, p. 87.
[292]Object 3/03: 8x9 = 72 m²; object 4/03: 7x8 = 56 m²; object 5/03: 3.5x4 = 14 m². The measurements are stated in the sources mentioned in notes 68 and 69.
[293]See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 1, Section 2a)" ([link]).
[294]See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Part 1, Section 2b)" ([link]).
[295]See the blog "A Great Lie" ([link]).

Introduction and Part 1, Section 1
Part 1, Section 2a
Part 1, Section 2b
Part 2, Section 1
Part 2, Section 2
Part 2, Section 3
Part 2, Section 4
Part 2, Section 5
Part 3, Section 1
Part 3, Section 2
Part 4


Cremation Remains

As Mattogno rightly pointed out in his otherwise self-defeating statement addressed in Part 2, Section 5, it follows from my assumption of an incomplete combustion of the corpses on the extermination camps’ pyres (an assumption that, as we have seen, is borne out by ample evidence) that I must consider an amount of human cremation remains "much higher than the theoretical".



Of the carbonized remains I showed in Images 2.4 to 2.6 (Part 2, Section 1), the least reduced seems to be the "pyrolyzed test rabbit", which was reduced to 16.97 % of its original mass. I shall therefore assume that the remains of the corpses cremated on the extermination camps’ pyres made up 17 % of the original mass, as opposed to the 5 % ash assumed in MGK’s Sobibór book^[296]. As concerns wood, I’ll start by using the percentages stated in the source^[297] mentioned earlier in the same book^[298], 6 % in case of fresh wood as Mattogno did^[299]and 10 % in case of dry wood. The specific weights of human ash and wood ash I’ll consider are the same that Mattogno considered Mattogno & Graf’s book about Treblinka^[300]: 0.5 g/cmᶟ for human ashes, 0.34 g/cmᶟ for wood ashes. As concerns the volume of the mass graves I’ll consider the following:
For Bełżec: the 21,310 mᶟ estimated by Prof. Kola for the 33 mass graves he identified. This is conservative considering the probable further burial pits pointed out by Alex Bay^[301]. However, as Bay provides no information about the size of these pits, I’ll have to make do with Kola’s estimate.
For Sobibór: the volume of pit nos. 1 to 6 discovered by Prof. Kola, corrected for sloping (see critique, Table 7.2 on p. 394) plus the volume of grave nr. 7 estimated by Prof. Kola (27 m³ - this is conservative because grave n.º 7 was probably much bigger, as pointed out in Part 3, Section 2), plus the 250 m³ of the newly discovered grave nr. 8^[302]. Total rounded volume: 13,024 m³.
For Treblinka: the 61,762 mᶟ required to bury 726,441 corpses in the extermination sector at the concentration (11.76 corpses per cubic meter) considered possible by Alex Bay^[303].
For Chełmno: the 16,179 mᶟ of the burial graves nos. 1 to 4 (see critique, Table 7.3 on p. 400), plus the 4,096 mᶟ I estimated for the 11 ash disposal pits called the called the "fifth grave" by archaeologists^[304], for a total of 20,275 mᶟ.
The calculations based on this input, assuming the theoretical scenarios of cremation only with dry wood and only with fresh wood^[305], are shown in Tables 4.1 and 4.2 below.

Table 4.1 – Weight and volume of cremation remains and proportion of grave space occupied by such remains, assuming cremation with dry wood

Table 4.2 – Weight and volume of cremation remains and proportion of grave space occupied by such remains, assuming cremation with fresh wood

Pursuant to the already mentioned document from the British Environment Agency, whereby a typical pyre for 300 cows at the time of the British FMD crisis in 2001 could leave 15 tons of carcass ash and 45 tons of other ash to be disposed of, Mattogno (p. 1449) argues that I should have calculated the total amount of ash as follows:
15 tons of ash from the carcass, or 10% of the carcass mass;
45 tons of ash from the fuel, or 30% of the carcass mass;
60 tons of total ash, or 40% of the carcass mass.

As concerns the carcass ash Mattogno’s percentage is lower than what I considered in the above tables (17%). As concerns the ash from the fuel his reasoning is fallacious insofar as the fuel-to-carcass ratio was much higher in the British FMD pyres than the fuel-to-corpse ratio in the pyres at the extermination camps – 2.15:1 according to my calculations (see Table 2.32 in Part 2, Section 5), 2.82 according to Mattogno. What Mattogno might argue – and he so does, albeit in an unnecessarily elaborate way – is that I should apply the percentage of solid combustible materials that are left as residue in FMD pyres, instead of the 6-10 % stated in his aforementioned source. That percentage applied to dry wood, as well as it’s equivalent for fresh wood, are shown in the table below (the amounts per unit of fuel are the same as in Table 2.32 of Part 2).

Table 4.3 – Ratios of solid fuel residue/solid fuel, based on information from the British Environment Agency about a typical pyre for 300 cows at the time of the British FMD crisis in 2001

Applying these ratios for solid fuel residues instead of those in Tables 4.1 and 4.2, we get the following:

Table 4.4 – Weight and volume of cremation remains and proportion of grave space occupied by such remains, assuming cremation with dry wood, with solid fuel residue percentage from Table 4.3

Table 4.5 – Weight and volume of cremation remains and proportion of grave space occupied by such remains, assuming cremation with fresh wood, with solid fuel residue percentage from Table 4.3

These are the volumes of cremation remains assuming that solid fuel was solely or predominantly used for cremation. As mentioned in Part 2, Section 4, the availability of sufficient solid fuel, namely wood, presupposes supplies from outside the camp, such as is evidenced for Sobibór and especially Chełmno. Without such outside supplies and the camp’s own lumbering teams not being able to procure sufficient wood, the predominant external fuel, like in the Dresden pyres, would have to be liquid fuel like gasoline, diesel and crude petrol.

In Part 2, Section 1 and Part 3, Section 2, I presented a calculation of the relation between solid and liquid fuel in the Dresden pyres, which deliberately overestimates the former and yet leads to a relation of about 38 % solid fuel vs. 62 % liquid fuel. Assuming that, like at Dresden, only 38 % of the fuel used for cremation was solid fuel, the volume of cremation remains and the percentage of grave space theoretically occupied thereby changes as follows:

Table 4.6 – Weight and volume of cremation remains and proportion of grave space occupied by such remains, derived from Table 4.4 assuming that 38 % of the total fuel used for cremation was solid fuel.

Table 4.7 – Weight and volume of cremation remains and proportion of grave space occupied by such remains, derived from Table 4.5 assuming that 38 % of the total fuel used for cremation was solid fuel.

These tables render it unnecessary to address Mattogno’s further calculations and his rambling – including the pathetic self-projecting accusations of "bad faith"– about the critique’s Tables 8.39 to 8.43, which contain several possible scenarios as concerns corpse and fuel residues at Nazi extermination camps based on data about cremation of carcasses^[306]. I thus move on to p. 1456, where Mattogno addresses evidence suggesting that liquid fuel was indeed the predominant combustion agent at Bełżec, namely the already mentioned expert opinion by coroner Dr. Pietraszkiewicz whereby the ash he examined was predominantly of human origin and only a small part came from wood. Mattogno knows no better than to accuse the coroner of manipulation, claiming that "it is a simple hyperbole to say that there was a huge amount of human remains" and that "the illustrations shown by Muehlenkamp as evidence and by me render this statement simply farcical (see chapter 11, point 3)". This pathetic argument was duly addressed in my discussion of the magnum opus’ chapter 11^[307].

Mattogno then turns to the question how much of the cremation remains ended up inside the mass graves as opposed to being scattered elsewhere or taken away from the camp. He starts with Bełżec, where the scattering of ashes in fields and woods near the camp was mentioned by at least one witness, Rudolf Reder, who was told by local inhabitants that after cremation "the bones were ground and the wind scattered the ash over fields and woods". Mattogno protests that Reder’s account is "historically unfounded" because Reder erroneously mentioned 1944 (instead of 1943) as the year in which the graves were opened and their contents burned. However, it does not logically follow from this dating error that what Reder was told about the scattering of the ash is also mistaken, so Mattogno adds the argument that "Reder mentions the activity of the wind which could “scatter [zerstäuben]” only the dust, and therefore an insignificant part of the ashes", as opposed to a deliberate scattering of the ashes by the SS staff. The "insignificant part" argument is amusing as Mattogno had earlier (p. 1451) lectured me about the exact opposite, namely the predominance of fly ash in the total ash mass^[308].

Mattogno’s last card in this respect, which he also welcomes as confirmation of the reduced cremation period (110 instead of 150 days according to Gley, or longer according to Ukraiński) is the "report about the end of the Polish investigations about Bełżec", according to which the ashes were buried. It is understandable that the investigators reached this conclusion after having conducted excavations yielding huge amounts of ash along with incompletely burned or unburned human remains^[309]. However, this doesn’t exclude the scattering of a large part of the ashes, by wind or deliberately by the SS, considering what Reder learned from local inhabitants and the evidence to such scattering or other disposal at the other three extermination camps. Why should Bełżec have been the only camp where all cremation remains were buried?

When it comes to Sobibór, Mattogno freaks out and hollers about "the well-known lie – based obviously only on testimonies about the utilization of the ashes of the cremated as fertilizers for the fields, which is the equivalent of the lie about the human soap". Actually there is no equivalence between a phenomenon described by several eyewitnesses and the wartime "human soap" rumor, testimonies are valid and important evidence in historiography and criminal investigation, and if Mattogno yells "lie" he has to demonstrate that the eyewitnesses made statements against better knowledge about this detail.

This is what he feebly tries to do over the next few pages regarding the witnesses I mentioned, but he stumbles right away over Jakob Biskobicz, whose account of having been ordered by Wagner to "scatter the human ash, which was assigned to me from the camp Nr. 3, in the vegetable garden in Sobibór" he cannot show to have been a lie, so he has to content himself with the rhetorical question how much ash that "veggie garden" could absorb. Quite a lot over a period of one year, especially if it was dimensioned so as supply the camp staff, guards and inmates with vegetables.

The witness Kurt Thomas seems to be an easier target for Mattogno’s discrediting efforts, but he isn’t. His mention of a "Verbrennungsschacht" (cremation shaft) can, notwithstanding Mattogno’s protestations to the contrary, be understood as referring to a pit in which the cremation roaster was set up. His statement that "the claws of a crane pulled the corpses out and into the shaft" doesn’t imply that the corpses were placed onto the roaster by the crane, again contrary to Mattogno’s interpretation. His mention of "firebombs" instead of liquid fuel (besides coal and wood) is at odds with other testimonies, but then Kurt Thomas, like every inmate witness of Sobibór, didn’t get to witness the cremation device and procedure from close up (of the inmates who did none survived). The same goes for his description of the gassing process, which he wrongly claimed (with the caveat "if my memory does not fail me") to have been carried out with "Cyklon". His mention of wood-felling by a detachment of detainees doesn’t contradict the abundant use of gasoline (in addition to such wood) for cremation, contrary to Mattogno’s argument, and even if it did that would be irrelevant to the witness’s credibility. Finally, his exaggerated estimate of the number of victims (750,000-800,000) is nothing one should hold against the traumatized survivor of an extermination camp, whose ability and inclination to count exactly were limited by circumstances and the shock of his experience. None of all this rules out the possibility that Thomas witnessed and accurately recalled the loading of ashes into barrels for shipment to Germany, or the use of "ash, mixed with unburned coal and the dirt from the shaft", to "sprinkle the roads in the camp due to the sabulosity of the soil".

In this context it is amusing to see Mattogno, who complains about his opponent’s "hypocrisy"ad nauseam (without it being clear where exactly the "hypocrisy" is supposed to lie in each case), accuse this writer of what is one of Mattogno’s own favorite practices, as he mumbles about my "opportunistic and deceitful method, which consists of taking single elements of contradictory testimonies and using them to compose a historical “reconstruction”". Actually there’s nothing "opportunistic and deceitful" about using parts of a testimony based on the objective criteria of plausibility and corroboration, which is what I do (and what historians also do). What is "opportunistic and deceitful" is using in support of one’s arguments selected snippets from a testimony otherwise dismissed as wholly unreliable, based on no criterion other than convenience – a practice that Mattogno is notorious for.

Mattogno’s next target is bystander witness Bronisław Lobejko, who learned from Ukrainian guards that the human ash was mixed with gravel and scattered upon the camp’s roads and paths, whereas unburned bones were crushed by Jewish inmates with hammers and then mixed with grit. After yelling "hearsay" (which is a source of historical evidence, and also of judicial evidence in numerous cases), Mattogno lamely argues that Lobejko’s description of the cremation facility contradicts my reconstruction of the same (which is not the case, and if it were that would be irrelevant) and provided an exaggerated estimate of the number of victims (800,000) and an obviously inaccurate description of the killing method (bottled gas). None of this excludes the accuracy of what Lobejko recalled having been told about the ash disposal, moreover as this is in line with other testimonies.

Regarding bystander witness Jan Piwoński, who recalled that the Germans transported away "even the ash of the burned corpses", Mattogno again points to an exaggerated estimate of the number of victims (as if that would mean anything regarding the detail in question), and just as irrelevantly claims that the witness didn’t recall to have heard anything about "dousing the corpses with fuel", unlike other witnesses I mentioned in Part 1^[310]. Interestingly Mattogno had earlier (p. 1310) quoted the same witness with a statement whereby a guard had told him 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".

As concerns Treblinka, Mattogno refers to his blunder in point 18 of chapter 12, which was already pointed out in Part 1^[311].

On p. 511 of the critique I had addressed Mattogno’s claim that at Bełżec "the graphs of the analyses of the 137 drill cores presented by Kola show that the ash in the graves is normally intermingled with sand, that in more than half of the samples the layer of ash and sand is extremely thin", and that furthermore "out of the 236 samples, 99 are irrelevant, and among the 137 relevant ones more than half show only a very thin layer of sand and ash, whereas among the remainder the percentage of sand is not less than 50%, and the thickness of the sand/ash layer varies greatly."^[312]I had pointed out that Mattogno had not explained how he had managed to determine, on hand of the schematic representations of core samples in Kola’s book, how high the ash content detected in each of the samples shown was. Mattogno doesn’t improve on that shortcoming now, merely providing the wisecracker quip (p. 1462) that he had established the ash content in each of the samples "based on the respective captions published by Kola". A substantiation of his quantitative conclusions – which do not follow from Kola’s captions – is still missing.

Further arguments in this context – namely that current concentrations of cremation remains in the mass graves may be much lower than the original ones due to leveling works and robbery digging, which scattered the larger part of the ashes across the surface as pointed out by Prof. Kola^[313], and that the excavations at Bełżec directed by judge Godzieszewski’s on October 12, 1945, according to which there were layers of cremation remains well above two meters below ground^[314], belie Mattogno’s claim that the sand cover layer of the Bełżec mass graves had been two meters thick – Mattogno simply ignores as he moves from Bełżec to Chełmno.

Regarding that camp I had explained why a 1988 analysis of soil samples revealing just "some percent" of human ash in these samples meant nothing in favor of Mattogno’s contentions. I had also taken issue with Mattogno’s assumption that these samples came from ash disposal pits "4 meters deep and 8 meters wide" described by Judge Bednarz, i.e. from pits making up the "fifth grave" identified by archaeological research in 2003/04. Mattogno furiously hollers (p. 1463) that "This has nothing to do with a “fifth grave” of which Muehlenkamp fantasizes", although his quote of Bednarz’s description of these ash disposal pits matches an archaeologist’s conclusions about the "fifth grave"^[315]. Thus he reveals that his earlier assumption had concealed from his readers the fact that the 1988 sample had actually come from "the crematory oven", and makes a big deal out of that oven’s description as a place containing a huge amount of crushed human bones, ash and bone dust – as if that description contradicted or was contradicted by the identification of "only an irrelevant percentage of bone remains" in the sample. What Mattogno calls "irrelevant" is actually quite relevant considering that, even if all cremation remains of human bodies and solid combustibles had ended up in the burial and ash disposal pits and none had remained by the cremation facilities or been disposed of outside the camp^[316], the remains would at the very most (see Table 4.5) have filled up 20 % of these pits’ volume.

Regarding Sobibór, MGK had in their Sobibór book^[317]attempted to reduce the amount of cremation remains found by Prof. Andrzej Kola in his 2001 investigation, by creatively interpreting their own translation of Kola’s report. Thus Kola’s statement whereby "Particularly noticeable traces of cremation occurred in the lower parts of the graves where distinct layers of scorched bones, with a thickness up to 40-60 cm, could be identified" was taken as meaning that the "particularly noticeable" traces of cremation were the only such cremation remains found and that there was only one layer "with a thickness up to 40-60 cm", although Kola had affirmed neither. Striking out against my critique of these misinterpretations, Mattogno accuses me of a misinterpretation of my own: I’m supposed to have argued that Kola’s above-quoted statement referred only to graves nos. 1 and 2. I’ll attribute this accusation to Mattogno’s meager reading capacities, for my statement (which Mattogno even quotes) was that "Kola, as the context of his quoted statement suggests, is likely to have meant the lower layers of cremation remains in graves nos. 1 and 2, which he considered to have been used for cremation only, and the layers closest to the corpse layers in the other graves, which after all were up to 5.80 meters deep" (I emphasized the part that Mattogno missed). This had been my explanation for the apparent contradiction between Kola’s reference to the "lower parts of the graves" in the above-quoted text and the individual descriptions of graves 3, 4, 5 and 6, which were stated to contain skeletal remains or corpses in wax-fat transformation in their "lower" parts and cremation remains in their "upper" parts. An alternative possibility is that the "lower parts of the graves" was as simple texting mistake of Prof. Kola’s.

Following this embarrassing accusation, Mattogno again converts the plurality of layers "with a thickness up to 40-60 cm" that Kola refers to into one single such layer, and then argues that layers other than those "particularly noticeable" (or, as he now translates it, "the clearest, the most decipherable (readable)" must have been "uncertain, indecipherable, or irrelevant compared to the main decipherable layers", even though there is nothing in Kola’s text to sustain such interpretation. Then he hypocritically refers to his previous explanation that Prof. Kola’s statements "are not specific enough to permit a quantitative evaluation of the ash present in camp" - which did not keep him from making such calculation based "on the only data considered unambiguous and therefore predominant by Kola himself" (read: on his self-serving interpretation of Prof. Kola’s data, namely the reduction of a plurality of layers to a single one) and high-handedly proclaiming what amount of ashes these data suggest and what amount would remain unaccounted for^[318].

This creative falsehood would, even if it were not a falsehood, not serve as a demonstration that the amount of cremation remains found by Prof. Kola’s is incompatible with the amounts calculated in either of Tables 4.1 and 4.2 or 4.4 to 4.7. All of these tables are based on the assumption that all cremation remains ended up in the camp’s burial or ash disposal pits and remained there. Given the evidence that a significant proportion was otherwise disposed of and the impact of robbery digging, this is a merely theoretical assumption.

After referring once more to his overblown residue calculations and lamely claiming to have demonstrated ad nauseam that mine are "inconclusive and deceitful", Mattogno turns to the question why the corpses at the AR camps and at Chełmno had been cremated.

Why Cremation?

In his book about Bełżec, Mattogno had offered two possible explanations for the cremation of the corpses, whose number he had conceded to be "several thousands, perhaps even some tens of thousands": the cremation may have "had to do with the danger of contamination of the ground water" and/or with a concern that the Soviets might discover "mass graves full of corpses dead of disease or malnutrition" and exploit these for propaganda against the Germans^[319].

Regarding the first explanation, I had questioned why, if groundwater contamination had been a concern, the SS had dug as deep as the ground water level in the first place, although for "several thousands, perhaps even some tens of thousands" of dead bodies one really didn’t need pits that deep. Regarding the second, I had questioned why, if there was a concern about the Soviets discovering "mass graves full of corpses dead of disease or malnutrition", there had been no effort at cremating corpses at a great many other places where the same concerns would have applied, including smaller concentration camps or sub-camps without installed cremation facilities, labor camps like Treblinka I and especially camps for Soviet POWs of which some had mass graves containing tens of thousands of starvation and disease victims.

In response to my first question, Mattogno argues that at Bełżec the mass graves were not dug as deep as the groundwater level, which had been reached in only one of Prof. Kola’s drilling samples, that "the groundwater level in 1942 may have been different from the one at present" and that "the excavation of shallower pits would certainly not have decreased the risk of leachate reaching the groundwater due to the sandy consistency of the soil". The latter is not exactly true as sandy soil tends to act as a filter^[320]. The former is belied by Prof. Kola’s finds that "the analysis of sponge in grave sites indicates in many cases the grave excavations were dug to the depth of 4,50-5,0 m, reaching the underground waters"^[321] and underground waters also appeared at a depth of 4.10 meters in grave n.º 1^[322], not only in the drill 485/-30-50 grave n.º 10 that Mattogno refers to.

Besides, independently of whether or not ground water level was reached, why were there 7 graves 5 meters deep or deeper, plus another 17 graves 4 meters deep or deeper, among the 33 graves identified by Prof. Kola^[323], while on the other hand the graves at Treblinka I labor camp were only "up to 3 meters" deep, and the estimate that they contained "at least 6,500 people" was made "under the assumption that the levels of corpses reach only up to 1.5 m in depth"? Why just (1,607 x 1.5 =) 2,410.5 m³ for 6,500 corpses at Treblinka I, but at least 21,310 m³^[324]at Bełżec for just "several thousands, perhaps even some tens of thousands"? Mattogno doesn’t attempt to answer this question, instead harking back to the mass grave capacity issue by asking how, if 1,607 m² of grave area at Treblinka 1 contained only 6,500 corpses, 5,490 m² of mass graves at Bełżec could contain 434,508 corpses. The answer to this question is provided in the response to Mattogno’s chapter 11. ^[325]

My second question Mattogno doesn’t even attempt to answer, instead changing the subject to what he claims is a major "historiographical" problem (why, despite Blobel’s having received orders from Gruppenführer Müller in June 1942, cremation of corpses didn’t start at about the same time at all camps where mass extermination was conducted), as opposed to my "stupid" question that he tries to avoid. Mattogno’s big problem is actually a false dilemma, considering that a) each Chełmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau pertained to administrative organizations different from each other and from the AR camps, b) the cremations did not start at "wildly divergent times" at the AR camps as Mattogno claims (wholesale cremation at Bełżec and the 2nd phase of cremation at Treblinka started at about the same time, in November 1942, whereas cremation at Sobibór started one month earlier due to that camp’s specific sanitation problems), c) the reason why Chełmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau started cremating earlier, besides the former being Blobel’s experimentation ground, was that sanitation problems became acute at these places at an earlier stage.

Mattogno quotes Shmuel Spector, who claims that "serious health problems" including leakage from the bodies threatening the wells and the drinking water arose at all three AR camps at the end of the summer of 1942, and calls Spector’s "a desperate explanation, which tries to reconcile two irreconcilable themes: the hygienic-sanitary question and Blobel’s alleged mission". Actually the only one of the three camps where the drinking water supply was threatened was Sobibór; at the other two the "noxious odors" also mentioned by Spector were a problem, but there’s no evidence that the drinking water supply was imperiled. And one has to be Mattogno to consider hygienic-sanitary and crime concealment purposes, which were obviously complementary at each of these places, to be "irreconcilable".

Based on Spector’s mistaken claim, Mattogno ends this chapter with the only attempt to explain why the corpses at Treblinka II were burned but the corpses at Treblinka I were not: the (actually non-existing) "serious health problems" at the former, he argues, didn’t exist at the latter "because the corpses were buried outside the camp". As already pointed out in the response to chapter 11, there is no advantage under the aspect of avoiding groundwater pollution that the commandant of Treblinka I could have hoped to gain by burying the camp’s mortality a mere 500 meters away from the camp, 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^[326].

What is even more telling than the failure of this one explanation attempt is that Mattogno cannot provide a single example of the Nazis having resorted to open-air cremation (as opposed to cremation in installed facilities, which was a standard sanitary feature at the major concentration camps run by the SS-WVHA) to dispose of corpses produced by extreme privation, as opposed to such of people they had shot or gassed.

Thus ends my response to chapter 12 of MGK’s magnum opus, which is followed by Mattogno’s "Conclusions on the “Aktion Reinhardt” Camps", including but not limited to the mass graves and cremation topics. I don’t consider it necessary to (again) address these "conclusions", as this series and the preceding response to chapter 11 have amply shown them to be utter nonsense.

Meanwhile, not a single Jew "transited" to the occupied Soviet territories via these supposed "transit camps" has yet been found.

Notes

[296] MGK, Sobibór, p. 148.
[297]"Best Management Practices for Wood Ash Used as an Agricultural Soil Amendment" ([link]).
[298]MGK, Sobibór, p. 136.
[299]As note 296.
[300]M&G, Treblinka, pp. 149f.
[301]Alex Bay, The Reconstruction of Belzec, "4.6 - Camp II: The Killing and Graves Area" ([link]).
[302]See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 2)" ([link]).
[303]Same blog as previous note. As mentioned there, the volume of the mass graves may have been higher.
[304]See the blog "Mattogno on Chełmno Cremation (Part 3)" ([link])
[305]As pointed out in Part 2, the SS used various types of solid and liquid fuels, in proportions that can no longer be established.
[306]These tables, by the way, contain a spreadsheet formula error (in my disfavor) decried by Mattogno on p. 1454 and by Friedrich Jansson in a blog discussed in the blog "Sad sack Jansson …" ([link]).
[307]See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 1)" ([link]).
[308]"In 2008, of a total of 136,073,107 tons of ashes produced in the United States (rounded down to 130 million by Muehlenkamp), as much as 72,454,230 tons were “flying ashes” (fly ash).3120 The fixed ashes were therefore (136,073,107 – 72,454,230 =) 58,846,920 tons. The percentage of the fixed ashes was therefore of (58,846,920 ÷ 10173121 × 100 =) 5.78%."
[309]See the investigation reports quoted, partially after Mattogno’s Bełżec book, on pp. 383-385 of the critique.
[310]See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Introduction and Part 1, Section 1)" ([link]).
[311]See the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia (Introduction and Part 1, Section 1)" ([link]).
[312]Mattogno, Bełżec, p.87. Regarding the dishonesty of Mattogno’s claim that the samples in Kola’s book are the only relevant core samples from mass graves, see Chapter 7 of the critique (pp. 407-408) and the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 3)" ([link]).
[313]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, p. 20.
[314]The excavation report is quoted after Mattogno’s Bełżec book on p. 383 of the critique.
[315]In her article about archaeological research on the grounds of Chełmno extermination camp (online under [link]), archaeologist Łucja Pawlicka Nowak wrote the following in her description of the pits making up the "fifth grave": "According to W. Bednarz, the depth of the pits was about 4 m, and the width 8-10 m. Even now the flora on the pits is more luxuriant, making this stretch more visible on the surface."
[316]"What amount was scattered over forests, what part was sent to Poznań to Fort VII, how much was sent to German settlers as a fertilizer - this we shall never find out. In the second phase of the center operation the ash problem was solved 'simpler' - the ashes were just thrown into the Ner River." (Łucja Pawlicka Nowak, as previous note). During his interrogation on 1 August 1961, Fritz Ismer testified that in the camp’s first phase "These bone remains were to be used as fertilizer, but later they were removed by scattering them in open fields." (see the blog "Mattogno’s Cremation Encyclopedia Part 1, Section 2a"– [link]).
[317]MGK, Sobibór, pp. 118 and 148.
[318]MGK, Sobibór, p. 148.
[319]Mattogno, Bełżec, p. 91.
[320]See the blog "Well. Well? Well!" ([link]).
[321]Kola, Bełżec, p. 19.
[322]As above, p. 21.
[323]See critique, Table 7.1 on p. 389.
[324]The volume of 33 mass graves estimated by Prof. Kola, not considering the additional mass graves pointed out by Alex Bay (as note 301).
[325]See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 4, Section 1)" ([link]).
[326]See the blog ""Alleged" Mass Graves and other Mattogno Fantasies (Part 5, Section 1)" ([link]).