Stubble wrote: ↑Tue Sep 09, 2025 7:01 pm
SanityCheck wrote: ↑Tue Sep 09, 2025 6:30 pm
A quick look at a photo of an exhumed mass grave might help clarify why the examples in the linked thread are not actually comparable. Scroll down and you'll see a photo of the mass grave at Serniki, not far from Pinsk, which was exhumed by Australian war crimes investigators in 1990
https://grahamtblewitt.com/the-serniki-mass-grave/
The top layer of bodies was examined, counting 553 skeletons, for evidence of their killing - through 9mm rounds manufactured between 1935 and 1941 in Germany, and 7.62mm Soviet rounds, as were used in the captured Soviet rifles used by the Schutzmannschaften.
The web page does not give the dimensions, but these are given in the longer article by Peggy O’Donnell, ‘“Gateway to Hell”: A Nazi Mass Grave, Forensic Scientists, and an Australian War Crimes Trial’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 32/3 (2018), 361–383, here 370.
Within a week of the Australians’ arrival in Serniki, they had created a pit 37.5 meters long, 3.6 meters wide, and 3 meters deep—very close to the size Fyodor Polyukhovich had remembered. The walls of the pit sloped outward at a 10-degree angle.
This is 405 cubic metres, which is larger than the probable original grave as the soil was sandy, and from the photo one can see also that the investigators were digging around the skeletons and remains.
There were certainly more corpses under the top layer (p.371):
The scientists laid white tape at one-meter intervals along the width and length of the grave, dividing it into meter square sectors to help them track their work, and to ensure an accurate count of the number of corpses. As the video camera rolled, members of the Australian and Soviet forensic teams started working at opposite ends of the grave. They picked up each skull on the top layer of bodies, cleaned it, examined it to determine age, sex, and cause of death, and then replaced it. All told, the forensic teams examined 553 sets of remains. They did not attempt to dig below the top layer of bodies, although it was clear to Wright and Oettle that more lay underneath. It was feasible, they concluded, that the grave contained the 850 victims cited in the charges against Polyukhovich. In particular, at the southern end of the grave, where the Australian team was working, it appeared that there were at least two layers. Wright later testified that he believed there were more bodies, “particularly at the southern end, [but] the density of bones, fat, and other soft
tissues made it, in my opinion, too unpleasant to remove the bodies.” In an interview years later, one of the Australian scientists recalled that the team was able to find enough of the required information for trial simply by analyzing the top layer: “It is not always necessary to exhume but it is often ruthlessly carried out when it needn’t be.”
The depth of the grave at 3m for only a few layers of bodies - assuming that the 'topmost layer' likely included a merged set of layers from the original mass execution, but even if there were only two layers, the point stands - is why the dimensions of 405 cbm compare with 553 counted sets of remains and 850 noted by eyewitnesses in the charges, which would be your 2-3 bodies per cubic metre.
[...]
I just want to, for clarity, show the forum what a 2-3 corpse per meter packing density looks like..
I don't think I am 'minimizing' the grave space.
I'd also like to point out that even if you double the density by removing the 'grave cap' that leaves you with 4-6/m^3, not 28.
I'd have to look at some of Kola's actual samples to see if SOP was followed after the desiccation of the corpses on open pyres. I again point to the findings of the various studies as proof that this measure was hygienic in nature and not for 'obliteration of the remains' (also, the German pyres for German civilians killed in saturation bombings by the allies). I also again point out, the grave space is extant, so, nothing was truly 'obliterated' 'without trace' to 'hide the scale of the crimes'.
So far as a determination of SOP being followed at the time, well, you can kick back on Gerstein if you like I suppose. I will ask again, what happens to a rotting mass of thousands of people when it rains, eh? I point out again that in a drizzle you will be walking through a river of excrement and in a downpour you will be neck deep in dead.
I don't think my estimate is unreasonable, at all. 10x that? I do think 20 persons per cubic meter is absolutely insane. You aren't going to get that unless the dead are a fluid and even then only just.
Stubble,
as noted before, there were many dozens of mass graves at the departure ends in the districts (Krakau, Galizien, Lublin and one part of a county in Radom district) surrounding Belzec, in places from which transports departed for Belzec, from the east (Galicia), west (Krakau) and north (parts of Lublin district). There were extensive mass killings on the spot in eastern Galicia in 1941 and again in 1943, the former before Belzec had opened, the latter after it closed. The number of Jews who were buried in these graves was over 200,000, and far from all of them were targeted by Aktion 1005, although it did operate in a few cities in eastern Galicia and some more towns in Distrikt Krakau.
The regional and local focus is what is constantly lost in the obsess-over-Belzec interminable discussions, yet you know full well that the settlements, towns, ghettos, municipalities, counties and regions are the main focus for conventional interest, not just in the USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos vol II, but for the not insignificant number of locally and regionally oriented Polish researchers.
.
Who are now exploring the aftermath of genocide and repeatedly hitting up against the issues of mass graves and memorials, not just for the big camps but for smaller killing sites and memorials. Quite a lot of this work is in English since Polish academia is becoming like Dutch academia and increasingly publishing straight to English, and also open access.
Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, Infrastructures of Holocaust Mass Graves: Work-in-Progress in Tylawa, Teksty Drugie [Online], 1 | 2023,
http://journals.openedition.org/td/22627
Among the matters which occupy me most in Tylawa is the spatial relationship between the memorial site and the killing site. While I applied infrastructural inversion to the memory and history of the mass shooting in Tylawa, which practically meant disassembling all processes into singular actions and routine procedures within their material settings, I realized that I overlooked one step that split history from memory. In 1946, Adolf Nattel, a survivor from Dukla, testified what he knew from hearsay (he was not in Dukla at that time), namely that in Tylawa the Germans shot around 400 people on August 13, 1942.51 Later testimonies mentioned about 500 victims. How did they know, and why were they so consistent? I went through the scarce documentation again and suddenly realized: the bodies may have been exhumed! In a handwritten table from 1948, we read that there are two mass graves with 522 bodies in total “for exhumation.”52 Another, undated table states that 503 bodies were “exhumed to Dukla in 1952”53 – a fact which I believe was only on paper. On the one hand, no other source mentioned such a large post-war entombment in Dukla; on the other hand, transporting 500 bodies would have been a large, cost- and time-intensive operation. Given that the bodies were already buried in the provisional mass grave in Tylawa, bringing them to Dukla was not necessary. In any case, however, local authorities carried out excavations in Tylawa in the early post-war years. In all likelihood, they took the bodies from the primary deposition place and entombed them accurately again. Having other resources (probably more time or shoveling machines), the people in charge of the post-war exhumations may have laid down the bodies in a deep grave measuring 25 x 5 meters which the monument later covered. Whether the spatial shift took place or not is still to be verified. If true, this hypothesis would explain at least some of the confusion mentioned above. There is no doubt, however, that exhumations and secondary entombments in close vicinity to the initial pits took place in other killing sites. While the mass shootings are usually commemorated (more or less visible), the exhumations are absent from the mnemonic space. Although commemorative forms, like the monument in Tylawa, suggest being located exactly at the crime scene, history and memory are often spatially separated.
The issue of exhumations in post-war Poland is not new, though it is still to be sufficiently discussed by researchers.54 In her monograph about the Polish post-war memory of World War II, Joanna Wawrzyniak argues that Poles “dug up corpses and arranged their funerals,” while the Polish state was consolidating its powers in the early post-war years.55 A very recent discovery, which I made in the archives, namely an internal report from the Council for the Preservation of Monuments of Fights and Martyrdom [Rada Ochrony Pomników Walk i Męczeństwa, ROPWiM], confirmed the importance of mass graves for the understanding of Polish post-war traumas. The report states that between 1947 and 1960 alone, approximately 2.5 million human bodies were exhumed to mass graves in Poland.56 Schools and the scouting organization [Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego, ZHP] largely supported these actions. Apparently, dead bodies affected not only the war generation, but the post-war cohorts too.57
This is just one memorial on a mass grave in wartime Kreis Sanok, Distrikt Krakau, containing victims from Dukla and Rymanow, both also in Sanok county.
There is similar evidence for the Ukrainian side of the current border for the immediate aftermath, of mass graves being exhumed, but the Polish side of the border seems increasingly quite striking. Not only was there an immediate postwar (1940s) survey of all mass graves, but the ROPWiM authority overseeing monuments and its local offices (as seen in the catalogue card in the article above) were keeping track further down the line, and engaged in tidying up and reburials.
There were few Jewish survivors in provincial postwar Poland, but other sources including travel reports from journalists indicate a great deal of activism to locate graves and also rebury victims in Jewish cemeteries. Entrepreneurial Poles even tried selling the whereabouts of graves to surviving Jews.
As late as the 1960s, as another article describes at the start, there were exhumations and reburials of Jewish victims, in the process of memorialising and commemorating them. The example noted from Slomniki of 71 victims reburied also falls under Distrikt Krakau (wartime Kreis Miechow).
Gryta, Janek. 2025. “Forgotten? Holocaust Monuments and Jewish Activism in 1960s Poland.” Jewish Culture and History 26 (1): 62–81. doi:10.1080/1462169X.2025.2450897 - open access as well.
Now, it's certainly possible given the efforts to destroy evidence (documents) and the remains (Aktion 1005) that more Jews were killed on the spot in the surrounding departure-end ghettos, but the numbers for the regions, counties and towns suggest that Hoefle's 434,000 figure was not only accurate for Belzec, it also applied to the deportations only. This number fits with the aggregated documents, underground reports and testimonies from the departure ends.
En route, large numbers of Jews tried and many succeeded in jumping from the trains, with dozens of survivors, but also reports of many being shot down or caught quickly and shot - therefore a small percentage of the 434,000 never reached Belzec at all.
There is also a source cited by Dieter Pohl indicating potentially 2000 Jewish workers at Belzec in early 1943, who would also need to be subtracted from the 434,000 figure.
Cremations began before the final transports to the camp, albeit late, so another and probably more significant percentage need to be subtracted from the 434,000 figure.
The problem with trying to lowball the capacity of the mass graves is that unless taken to a ludicrous extreme, the number must necessarily run to 10s of 1000s. 2-3 corpses per cubic metre is 40-60,000 corpses. Mattogno has 'conceded' and used ratios of 3.5 and even 8 corpses per cubic metre derived from one off mass graves (i.e. for burial), which would be 73,000 or 168,000 corpses in the Belzec graves.
None of these figures are explicable nor have they been explained. It would not take much more than 2 corpses per cubic metre to bury all the victims of the initial Lublin and Lwow ghetto actions in March/April 1942. The same ratio would accommodate all the victims of the August 1942 Lwow action, which was witnessed by Kurt Gerstein and survived by Rudolf Reder. Granted, revisionists would still have the problem of explaining what happened to all the other transports, but only blatantly lowballed numbers could avoid accounting for some of the big actions.
The same applies to concessions of deaths in transit or even limited euthanasia. Gerstein observed a transport from Lwow-Lemberg arriving with a quarter of the passengers already dead - a couple of thousand deportees. The report on the Kolomea-Belzec transport likewise recorded in a document a similar proportion of 8000 documented deportees who were dead on arrival, either from being shot in the chaos of the breakout attempts or from overcrowding and thus suffocation etc.
Deaths in transit might well have occurred on a daily basis for prolonged periods, requiring open mass graves to dispose of the corpses. *If* someone could find any evidence (hitherto entirely lacking) explaining where the 250,000 deportees from eastern Galicia went to in the west, and the remaining deportees went to in the east, or were dropped off on the way between Krakow and Belzec, as one example.
The suppositions and claims of low density burials for hygienic reasons lack any evidence. They are not historical and cannot be until historical sources on
these transports, regions and
this camp are provided.
The modelling of grave capacity cannot be historical, either, as already noted; it is at best an argument by analogy.
It further suffers from the inability to explain away the less 'extreme' camp sites much less the thousands of other mass graves for Jewish victims surrounding them, or further east. Yes, Belzec appears extreme for the packing of corpses into what was effectively a landfill site, not a deep burial mass grave. No, it's not intellectually coherent to generalise from the extreme case to less extreme ones (like the classic 2 corpses per cubic metre mass grave at Serniki).
