Sobibor - Holocaust Propaganda And Reality - Unity of Nobility ...

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 123
by blowing up the concrete buildings.” 346 To the wildcat pits should also
be added the unknown number of diggings carried out by the surveyors
of the Central Commission for the Investigation of German
Crimes in Poland. 348 In this context one should further keep in mind that
the mass graves were reportedly dug with oblique sidewalls, so that the
surface areas of the pits were larger than the bottom areas. 349
At Beec the activity of the wildcat diggers caused a “great number
of human bones” and “ash from the corpses and from wood” to be
spread over the surface of the camp, 350 and as seen from the above
quoted 1947 report of the Central Commission, this was the case also at
Sobibór. It is entirely reasonable to assume that the more or less random
diggings at Sobibór also deceptively enlarged the graves in camp III by
destroying soil walls, thus connecting previously separate pits, or otherwise
altered the original dimensions of the graves. When the holes
were later filled in, bones and ashes from the surface mixed with sandy
soil would have ended up in them, creating the illusion that they were
part of the original graves.
As seen above, four out of six mass graves (#2, 3, 5, 6) are of irregular
shape. There is no reason to assume, however, that originally they
were not of regular shape, such as the square Grave No. 1. It follows
that the irregularly shaped graves have probably been enlarged in the
fashion described above. One may thus conclude with high probability
that the original size of the mass graves was considerably smaller than
Kola’s estimate of 14,718.75 m 3 .
As for the capacity of the Sobibór mass graves, we will simply note
that the graves in their present size are able to contain the alleged number
of 80,000 uncremated interred corpses, given a maximum density of
8 bodies per cubic meter, 351 but that this does not mean that 80,000
corpses were buried in them.
One might argue that it would make no sense to excavate such large
pits if the Sobibór dead amounted to only some thousands. This argument,
however, is fallacious for two reasons. First, if there were no
348
349
350
351
To this should further be added the mysterious excavations in camp III noted by Martin
Gilbert in 1996, op. cit. (note 298).
That this claim corresponds to reality is indicated by the fact that in the first series of
drillings made in hectare XVII south-west of the memorial mound (in the area of graves
No. 1 and 2), the thickness of the grave strata varied between 60 and 430 cm; A. Kola,
op. cit. (note 302), p. 90.
C. Mattogno, op. cit. (note 11, Engl. ed.), pp. 88f.
C. Mattogno, J. Graf, op. cit. (note 10, Engl. ed.), p. 137.