Stubble wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2025 6:29 pm
To point at it being sop, I point to Dresden, the buchenwald satellite site and other 'pyres' constructed in such a way. This implies sop.
We're talking about the bodies being exhumed, destroyed, mixed with sand, not the pyres.
This appears to be a hygienic measure to remove fluid from corpses to protect groundwater. A primary measure to remove body fluids rather than obliteration of remains.
The remains were obliterated, smashed though. I don't see evidence of fluid removal to protect groundwater, otherwise they would have removed the bottom layer of bodies, which they didn't do in many cases.
I see no evidence of SOP here, and you haven't offered any sites we can compare to. You can speculate, that's fine, but don't rely on SOP describe the mechanisms, eg diluting destroyed bodies in 100x parts of sand has hygienic value.
Archie wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2025 6:36 pm
And I will again post this picture from Ohrdruf showing this sort of outdoor cremation. Perfect separation. Riiiight.
It's your strawman of me that I am asserting "perfect separation". But in the picture you show the bodies are still visible / intact. Therefore you can just grab them and separate, no sifting necessary. Your own evidence counters your assertions.
I'm not saying wood wasn't used because it's convenient for me, but because of the described high proportion of cremains to wood in the graves. The opposite should be true if wood was the primary combustant and dumped in the graves with the cremains. But it's not. Dresden is a counterexample to your theory that you can't do it with liquid fuel. Everything I've read about Dresden mentions liquid fuel as the main fuel source,
here's David Irving
The whole of the city centre around the Altmarkt had already
been cordoned off. relatives who stumbled across the still-impassable
streets of the inner city were waved away by police and Party
officials. Wagon loads of corpses were now being driven to the frontiers
of this cordoned area by SHD and forced labourers, and there
handed over to army drivers and officers. The wagons were driven on
to the centre of the Altmarkt, and there their terrible loads were
tipped onto the cobbled paving.
Scores of police officials were at work here, making last efforts to
identify the people, and sworn to secrecy about what was happening.
The Steel girders had been winched out of the ruins of the Renner
department store on the Altmarkt and these had been laid across
crudely collected piles of sandstone blocks. A gigantic grill over
twenty-feet long was being erected. Under the steel girders and bars
They Shall Reap the Whirlwind 235
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. The soldiers trampled up and down on top of this
rotting heap, straightening the victims, trying to make room for
more, and carefully building the stack. Many of the dead children sand-
wiched into these terrible pyres were still wearing the colourful carnival
clothes that they had donned so eagerly two weeks before.
Finally gallons of gasoline, sorely needed though it was throughout
the whole Reich, were poured over the stacks of victims. A senior
officer cleared the Altmarkt square of all unnecessary by-standers, and
set a match to the heap. Once again thick black smoke coiled up
from the centre of the Dresden Altmarkt—as it had two weeks
before, and as it had indeed in 1349: history records how almost six
hundred years earlier the Margrave of Meissen, Frederick II, had
had his enemies burned at the stake here in the Altmarkt; they were the
Jews, accused of introducing the Plague. By a cruel coincidence the
burning had also fallen on Shrove Tuesday carnival day.
In the late hours of the evening the grill was re-erected over a dif-
ferent part of the square. Nazi Party officials saw to it that the ashes and
charred bones were collected and taken to the cemeteries to be
buried too.
In spite of their attempts to keep secret the fate of the victims
who had been swallowed up by the ruined emptiness of the inner city,
the story did leak out. Some citizens, risking their lives, made their way
to the Altmarkt to check on the rumours. Walter Hahn, a veteran pho-
tographer who had spent his life capturing this ‘Florence of the
Elbe’ and the surrounding countryside on film, obtained an official
pass signed by the gauleiter on February 25, and took a score of
photographs of the infernal scene in black and white and colour—pho-
tographs which helped belay the allegations that the ‘mass funeral
pyres’ were a product of Dr Goebbels’ propaganda.”
It took several small horse drawn carts and ten large trucks with
trailers to carry the ashes to the Heidefriedhof cemetery. Here the ashes
of several thousand of the victims who had thus been publicly cre-
mated were buried in a pit twenty-five feet long and sixteen feet
wide. In Colonel Thierig’s report signed in mid March is this paragraph
confirming the numbers cremated by that date:
Because of the rapid decomposition of the bodies and the excep-
tional difficulties encountered in recovering them as well as the lack
of suitable transport to convey them to the cemeteries, the
approval of the Gauleiter [Martin Mutschmann] and the city
236 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
authority was obtained to cremate altogether 6,865 bodies on the
Altmarkt. The ashes of the victims were transported to a cemetery.
Ownerless air-raid and travel-baggage and valuables were also
salvaged by the local civil defence director.”
Sorry I'm going to go with David Irving over you when it comes to these speculations. The method described is very similar to that of the Reinhard camps, Auschwitz. I think they were done in pits, so bodies were somewhat underground which probably facilitated burning to some degree.