Real World Mass Grave Data

[Archie]

It would be useful to collect some data on real mass graves. This could be of use in sanity checking some of the assumptions that get thrown around in various debates where our opponents tend to assume every grave is filled to the absolute fringe of physical reality. This will probably end up as a wiki page.

I think the key metrics would be total bodies, grave area, and bodies per square meter. Or whatever is available. Volume/depth is also good but that information isn't always readily available.

Katyn

This is the classic example.

4,233 bodies/487 square meters of area = 8.7 bodies per square meter

https://holocausthistorychannel.wordpre ... rrections/

Early Treblinka Excavations

There were three graves that were excavated at Treblinka by the Soviets/Poles. See Mattogno and Graf's Treblinka book, page 77.

305 bodies/150 square meters = 2.0 bodies per square meter

Volume was 320 cubic meters, which would be 0.95 bodies per cubic meter.

Srebrenica (Bosnian War)

There are said to have been around 8,000 people killed, spread out in many different graves. When I search for the largest grave, one called Crni Vrh seems to be one of the main ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crni_Vrh_mass_grave

629 bodies/200 sq meters ("at least") = 3.15 bodies/ sq meter
629 bodies/600 cu meters = 1.05 bodies/cu meter

The grave size is from the website below that says "more than 40 metres long, five metres wide and three metres deep." It seems there was a formal excavation in 2003 so presumably there is an official report on it.
https://massgravesmap.balkaninsight.com/crni-vrh/

This grave was a "secondary grave," meaning the bodies were moved/consolidated to this larger grave. This seems to fairly common. The very largest graves have bodies from several killing sites. This is probably because it's difficult to kill huge numbers in one spot since it's hard to round people up like that without them resisting.

Cambodia

According to Wikipedia,

As of 2009, the Documentation Center of Cambodia has mapped 23,745 mass graves containing approximately 1.3 million suspected victims of execution. Direct execution is believed to account for up to 60% of the genocide's death toll,[31] with other victims succumbing to starvation, exhaustion, or disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide

This would indicate a very large number of relatively small graves (around 55 people per mass grave). The data quality here seems a little spotty. I can't find any hard numbers.

According to one report, the largest grave was perhaps 7,000 bodies. In the appendix, there is a listing of mass graves, some of which have quite large numbers (in tens of thousands, a few even larger), but I don't know that these have been confirmed or excavated.

It appears that this largest type of mass grave is associated with large-scale, indiscriminate population purges, such as when it was determined that the population of an entire district was to be liquidated. The largest mass grave located to date is believed to have contained the remains of some 7,000 victims. (See Table2: Descriptive statistics)

https://d.dccam.org/Projects/Maps/Mass_Graves_Study.htm

Nuremberg 17th Century Plague Victims

There have been recent excavations of a site in Nuremberg. There were initially said to be 1,000 plus bodies. I see sources saying 3,000 bodies. I can't find any data on the exact size, but media reports say there are eight pits.

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology ... ogists-say
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Nuremberg- ... 21427.html

[curioussoul]

Apparently Ball went through and looked at the packing densities at Katyn, Hamburg and Bergen-Belsen and concluded a maximum theoretical density of 6 per cubic meter. Graf/Mattogno also mention the numbers 1.4 and 3.0 for the graves found in the Treblinka I labor camp, according to the Soviets. And this from the Graf/Mattogno Treblinka book:

How many graves were there, and how large were they? The Düsseldorf Court of Assizes conceded at the trial of 1964-1965 that it had discovered no accurate information about this. In its verdict it says:

“The details determined in the main trial concerning the number and size of the body pits likewise differ very widely from one another. Nevertheless, one can form an idea of the extent of the pits when one hears that according to the statement of defendant S., one of the pits contained no less than approximately 80,000 corpses.“

But according to the witness E. Rosenberg, who is the sole person to give ‘exact’ details, the mass graves measured 120 m × 15 m × 6 m, which, if one assumes a top layer of 0.5 m, gives an effective volume of (120×15×5.5=) 9,900 m3. Consequently, each grave could contain (9,900×8=) 79,200 bodies, which agrees almost exactly with the comment above of the Düsseldorf Court. In accordance with this, if 860,000 bodies were really buried in Treblinka before their cremation, there must have been (860,000÷79,200=) 11 graves of this size, the total surface area of which amounted to (120 × 15 × 11 =) 19,800 m2.

[borjastick]

I understand the need for investigators to make and assessment of maximum burial grave contents but isn't it odd to think of bodies in cubic metre multiples? I would picture a cubic meter, easy given I stack my winter firewood in a cube or stere format, and then look at that cubic meter and try to picture how many bodies could be laid in that space. Maybe six or seven but then what about their legs which will protrude out another meter thus reducing the amount of bodies in the next cubic meter.

Maybe I have got the wrong of the stick here.