TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter IV: The Alleged Extermination Facilities in Treblinka 145
12. Cremation
a. Complexity of the Problem
The matter of the missing crematoria is all the more grotesque in that the
problem of cremating the corpses would have been tremendous, if the official
version of Treblinka corresponded to the facts. The American Jewish historian
Konnilyn G. Feig comments the following in this regard: 425
“The incredible complexity of the mass-grave problem frustrated the
Germans. Their dismay was legitimate. Treblinka’s soil contained 700,000
bodies – a volume of 69,000 cubic meters weighing 35,000 tons, the same
as a medium size battleship. Even if 1,000 bodies could be burned each
day, 700 days would elapse before Himmler’s order had been obeyed.
Franz and Lalka [nickname of an SS officer] tried many approaches to
the problem. They poured buckets of gasoline on the bodies in one ditch –
producing huge flames and slightly singed corpses. They piled one hundred
bodies into wide but shallow ditches, and dumped in gasoline again. The
resulting fire did not destroy the corpses. They experimented with varying
sizes of piles and quantities of gasoline – to no avail. At the end of the first
testing period they concluded that Himmler’s request would take 140 years
to fulfill.
As a second experiment, they built huge pyres – alternating bodies and
wood and soaking the whole with gasoline. The fire destroyed the bodies
but the test could not be repeated, for it was wartime and gasoline and tree
trunks were not available in the quantities necessary to burn 700,000
corpses.”
Before we continue, we must correct the figures given here. If 700,000
bodies weighed 35,000 tons, then the average weight of a body was 50 kg and
it occupied a volume of approximately 0.05 m 3 ; thus, the entire volume was
35,000 m 3 and not 69,000 m 3 .
In our calculations, we are assuming the number of bodies to be 870,000 as
given by Arad and the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, and assume the average
weight to be 45 kg, since the corpses would have been buried for many
months, leading to a loss of weight by desiccation. Thus, the total weight of
the bodies would have amounted to 39,150,000 kg and the volume occupied
by them would have been 39,150 m 3 .
Feig goes on to say: 426
“Finally, the planners were forced to bring an expert, Herbert Floss.
[…] Floss had the prisoners erect four cement pillars, 76 centimeters high,
forming a rectangle 19 meters long and 1 meter wide. On top they laid
425 Konnilyn G. Feig, Hitler’s Death Camps. The Sanity of Madness, Holmes & Meier Publishers,
New York-London 1981, pp. 306f.
426 Ibid., p. 307.