TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter IV: The Alleged Extermination Facilities in Treblinka 137
The effective air volume amounts to (26.5×3=) 79.5 m 3 in the first and
(34×10=) 340 m 3 in the second installation. Under these conditions, a pressure
of 0.5 atmospheres would be attained if a volume of exhaust gas had been
blown into the rooms that corresponded to half of their effective volume,
therefore (79.5÷2=) 39.75 m 3 in the first and (340÷2 =) 170 m 3 in the second
installation. This would have taken (38.25÷38.86=) less than a minute in the
first installation, but (170÷38.86=) a little more than four minutes in the second.
If the alleged gas chambers were actually hermetically sealed, the gassing
procedure under the circumstances described by the witnesses would therefore
have come to a standstill through breakdown of the engine after scarcely a
minute in the first facility, and after a little over four minutes in the second facility,
if the walls of the building had not already collapsed. But probably the
doors would not have withstood the pressure and been blown off their hinges.
9. The Burning of Bodies: The Mass Graves
a. Number and Size of the Graves
According to official historiography, about 860,000 of the 870,000 Treblinka
victims were buried before their cremation. 389
On the basis of his investigations of the mass graves of Hamburg (Anglo-
American terror-bombardment of July 1943), Katyn (Soviet mass murder of
Polish officers, 1940) and Bergen-Belsen (mass deaths from typhus in spring
1945), John Ball came to the conclusion that one could assume a maximum of
six bodies per cubic meter in a mass grave. 390 This number seems quite high if
one keeps in mind that in Treblinka I, the work camp, the Soviets found 105
bodies in a grave with an effective volume of 75 m 3 – therefore 1.4 bodies per
cubic meter, and that the medical expert Piotrowski, in his first calculation of
the content of the mass graves, set a figure of six bodies per 2 cubic meters,
thus 3 bodies per cubic meter, half the density proposed by Ball. 391 However,
in order to take into account the hypothetical existence of children as comprising
one-third of the victims, we assume a density of a maximum of 8 bodies
per cubic meter.
389
According to Arad, op. cit. (note 72), p. 396, 7,600 people were gassed in August 1943 and
directly cremated without an intervening period of burial.
390
John Ball, in: Germar Rudolf (ed.), op. cit. (note 81), p. 270.
391
See Chapter III. In the two other mass graves, the number of bodies per cubic meter was
even lower.