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