TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter IV: The Alleged Extermination Facilities in Treblinka 151
the Polish-Soviet commission of September 1944, according to whom the single
connecting road between Treblinka I and Treblinka II “was covered with
cinders and ashes to a height of 7-10 cm,” would result in a maximum volume
of (3,000m×4m×0.1m =) 443 1,200 m 3 . But �ukaszkiewicz made no statement
referring to this, and it would have been a rather stupid attempt to ‘eradicate’
the traces on the part of the SS men of Treblinka anyway. Finally, this claim
contradicts even the witness testimony, according to which the ashes were
poured into the mass graves in toto. Thus, for example, Wiernik writes: 444
“It was our job to fill in the empty ditches with the ashes of the cremated
victims, mixed with soil, in order to obliterate all traces of the mass
graves.”
f. Wood Supply
Where did the administration of the Treblinka camp obtain the 139,200
metric tons of wood required for the incineration of the bodies?
According to the witnesses, trees in the nearby forest were felled for the
wood supply. The work was performed by a “Holzfällerkommando” (woodfelling
unit). 445 But the witness reports are extremely vague about the details,
which one can well understand. During a period of 122 days, this party would
have had to cut down, saw up and haul into the camp (139,200÷122=) 1,140
tons of wood every day! This means that every day it had to fell and saw up at
least 760 trees and transport the load on 76 trucks carrying 15 metric tons
each. This is decidedly too much, especially if one considers that this woodfelling
party is supposed to have consisted, according to R. Glazar, of merely
25 men. 87
The environs of Treblinka are today overgrown with fir trees. A 50-yearold
fir forest yields 496 tons of wood per hectare. 446 For the sake of simplicity,
we round this number to 500 tons. In order to obtain 139,200 tons of wood,
the SS would therefore have had to cut down (139,200÷500=) 278.4 hectares
of forest, which corresponds to 2.7 square kilometers! But such a large deforested
zone would naturally have not gone unnoticed by the local Poles, who
were questioned by Judge �ukaszkiewicz in his investigations. On the other
hand, in the aerial photographs of May and November 1944 a thick forest of
approximately 100 hectares can be recognized on the north and east side of the
camp, of which at least one hectare is located on the camp area itself. 447 The
forest stretches beyond the Wólka Okr�glik-Treblinka road, and borders on it
443
Length of the road: 3,000 m. Width of the road: 4 m. Depth of the layer: 0.10 m.
444
A. Donat, op. cit. (note 4), p. 181.
445
Ibid., p. 97.
446
G. Colombo, Manuale dell’ingegnere civile e industriale, op. cit. (note 394), p. 161.
447
U. Walendy, “Der Fall Treblinka,” op. cit. (note 105), p. 33.