Frozen ground at Belzec

[Archie]

The other day I was thinking about the problem of digging up a bunch of bodies in the winter when the ground is frozen. I checked the timelines for the AR camps and for Belzec it seems this would have been a significant problem. This seems like a decent argument, yet I don't recall hearing it very much. Going from memory, I think Denier Bud did make some weather related arguments in One Third of the Holocaust, but IIIRC the point was that the rain and snow would disrupt the outdoor cremations. I checked Mattogno's Belzec book and I didn't see this argument about the frozen ground. I checked the newer Operation Reinhardt book (HH #28) and there he does make the argument (section 7.7).

However, no one ever considered that this procedure would have encountered an insurmountable obstacle due to weather conditions. This is especially true for Bełżec. It should be remembered that cremation would have taken place there in the middle of winter, from mid-December 1942 to March 1943.

In the following table and chart, I report the minimum temperatures (first column) and precipitation in mm of water (second column) that were recorded during those months at the meteorological station in Tomaszów Lubelski, only 8 km away from the alleged “death camp” (Documents 106f. and 108f.). Starting on November 22, 1942, temperatures dropped significantly.

From November 22 to 30, the average minimum temperature was -6.3°C, with a low of -10.3°C on the November 22. Therefore, the ground was solidly frozen by mid-December.

In total, from mid-December 1942 to March 1943, there were 31 days of precipitation, which brought down about 60 cm of water – some as rain, some as snow. The camp and the forests were covered with snow.

He goes on to talk about how the wood would have been frozen. He makes the point about the ground but only briefly.

Temperatures were particularly severe during the second and third weeks of January. On some days, daily minimum temperatures dropped as low as -25°C (-13°F). At such temperatures, it is virtually impossible to do any work out doors. And it is almost certainly impossible to dig up any soil or exhume any bodies, because the ground would have been so severely frozen that it would have required the use of jackhammers or explosives to break up the ground.

In the Belzec book (HH #9) Mattogno quotes this bit from Heinrich Gley where he says the "general exhumation and cremation" started after there was already snow.

As far as I can remember, the gassings were stopped toward the end of 1942, when we already had snow. Then the general exhumation and cremation started; it may have lasted from November 1942 through March 1943. The cremations went on day and night without interruption, first on one and then on two hearths. One hearth allowed some 2,000 corpses to be burned in 24 hours. The second hearth was erected about four weeks after the beginning of the cremation operation. Thus, on average, the one hearth burned a total of 300,000 corpses over a period of some 5 months, the other 240,000 over some 4 months. Of course, these are only general estimates. (pg. 84)

It seems pretty certain that the ground at Belzec would have been frozen during the period when several hundred thousand bodies were supposedly being dug up.

Katyn Forest

The German excavation of the Katyn site I think drives the point home in a very practical way and provides a nice comparison since it was right around the same time.

From Allen Paul's Katyn: The Untold Story of Stalin's Polish Massacre, Chapter 16, Wolf's Find.

That report was made on March 1, and for the next six weeks, until mid-April 1943, the discovery was a tightly guarded secret. For most of March, the ground was too frozen to begin large-scale excavations. The Germans used this time to prepare for a comprehensive investigation and a massive propaganda blitz.

By March 29 the ground had thawed sufficiently for digging to begin. By April 10 exploratory excavations had been made throughout the wooded area between the main road and the NKVD dacha that sat overlooking the Dnieper River marsh.

That's quite interesting. It says they couldn't dig until March 29. And keep in mind the Katyn find was a huge deal so they would have been quite eager to dig. And the number of bodies (around 4,400) was far, far less than the supposed 500,000 bodies at Belzec.

[Waldgänger]

Amazing idea, to analogise the supposed Reinhardt cover-up with Katyn. I don't have much to say about this otherwise, but it's not a question that comes up often simply because people don't know dates and seasons of major events in this fantastical chronology. Or, as when one reads the Bible for the first time when open to religious feelings, one simply accepts statements as if they occurred, though with rational retrospect, many questions are raised that didn't occur at the time.

I also think many people are primed by the "factories of death" imagery not to think in this limiting way about extermination camps. If these titans of science and efficiency could make electrocuting conveyor belts, vast industrial blast furnaces to consume thousands of dead in half an hour, and fit 800 people in the space of 35 square meters, surely a bit of frozen ground doesn't matter. Because of this superhuman attribution to the SS, every propaganda claim about their ability to destroy evidence (Sonderaktion 1005) falls into the realm of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for me...

Your idea here only reinforces the fact that this conspiracy to destroy evidence of mass murder is only an excuse by the Soviets for having no material evidence... same old, same old.

Incidentally, we don't hear about mass-gassings much at all at in Auschwitz during winter 1943 or 1944. I wonder if that's because the ground was also too solid there to burn typhus victims, since the crematoria were often not working.

[Archie]

"Fantastical chronology." I like that. Sometimes it does feel like we're arguing about Lord of the Rings or some other fictional universe.

The reason I like the Katyn example is because the way these arguments tend to go is we make some argument and then anti-revisionists try to come up with some tortured scenario where it could have still been possible. I'm sure there are ways to dig frozen ground. Special equipment, ground insulation, etc. But having a practical example the occurred at the exact same time brings it back to reality, I think.

[Callafangers]

Amazing idea, to analogise the supposed Reinhardt cover-up with Katyn. I don't have much to say about this otherwise, but it's not a question that comes up often simply because people don't know dates and seasons of major events in this fantastical chronology. Or, as when one reads the Bible for the first time when open to religious feelings, one simply accepts statements as if they occurred, though with rational retrospect, many questions are raised that didn't occur at the time.

While I would agree no events should be accepted as truth without due criticism, I would argue that there is more that matters when discussing religion than merely a question of whether each specific event happened exactly and literally as alleged. Religion (namely, Christianity) is one of the few collective affinities of the West, one which maintains a system of narrative and values which many millions of people align behind, willing to fight and die for it. This degree of alignment is otherwise almost non-existent, save for the minority in the West who still have some collective affinity on racial grounds. National Socialists understood the importance of this sort of collective affinity, and focused on racial grounds, perhaps especially due to their internal religion-related conflict. But whatever the form, there is no question that this kind of collective affinity/alignment is valuable and perhaps indispensable toward combating critical issues like Jewish/Marxist subversion and the like. A society having no such widespread, common systems of behavior and morality is a society that is without an immune system, susceptible to the collective manipulation strategies Jews (and the organizations they infiltrate and subvert) are famous for implementing.

As for frozen ground at Belzec, this is yet another physical evidence component which I probably should have included, here: viewtopic.php?t=59

[curioussoul]

Yes, it's been noted by a few authors that Belzec would have been the most problematic camp in terms of unearthing the alleged victims. In fact, it would have been impossible without specialized machinery and trained work crews. But your thread reminded me of another instance, apart from the ones already mentioned, in which frozen soil was mentioned by the Germans as a problem.

In one of the Einsatzgruppen reports from February 18, 1942, EM 170, the author informs us that:

"In the course of January there began a veritable mass die-off among the civilian population. In particular, towards the end of the day, the bodies were brought out of the houses on hand-sleds to the cemeteries, where they were simply thrown into the snow, due to the impossibility of digging graves in the hard-frozen ground."

Wilhelm Kube, the governor of Belarus, stated on February 6, 1942, that "the ground in Byelorussia was frozen solid to a depth of 2 meters".

(Einsatzgruppen, p. 66)

The temperatures around that time were very low, some −42°C, but the point still stands. Mattogno mentions a mass grave that "had to be excavated with explosives due to the frozen ground" (p. 69).

[TlsMS93]

According to the exterminationist thesis, after the discovery of Katyn, the Germans decided on Action 1005. They themselves are confused about the dates, as they claim that the operation began in mid-1942, even before Stalingrad. The most plausible reality is that it was a Soviet ploy to use against the Germans, especially since it makes no sense that so many people committed suicide and were concerned about destroying evidence of atrocities to avoid being judged.