TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

88 Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf: Treblinka
south of the camp, a total of 41 mass graves were found, of which 40 had been
desecrated; many bodies were strewn around them. One grave was only partially
violated, and from it 10 corpses were able to be recovered. The court
physician examined 112 skulls and determined that in only two cases had a
shot in the head been the cause of death. The entire surface area of the graves
amounted to 1,607 m 2 . Concerning the number of the bodies discovered, �ukaszkiewicz
wrote: 211
“Due to the destruction of the graves, it is not possible to count the
bodies which have been there. The medical expert Mieczys�aw Piotrowski
affirms, however, that one grave of 2 × 1 × 1 m (without taking into consideration
the upper level of earth which covers the bodies) contains at
least 6 nude bodies. Considering the size of all 41 graves, and under the
assumption that the levels of corpses reach only up to 1.5 m in depth (the
depth of the graves is up to 3 m), one can calculate that at least 6,500 people
were buried there.”
On this occasion, the surveyor Trautsolt drew a map of the area of Treblinka
I, on which he indicated the exact position of the graves. [212] Of these, 17
were aligned in a row in a north-south direction; their total length was approximately
510 m.
This report provokes the following reflections:
1. It may well be that a grave of 2 m × 1 m × 1 m can hold up to six bodies,
but these measurements correspond to an entirely normal single grave. If
one wished to dig mass graves, these would not have been merely one meter
wide. Until evidence to the contrary, it is therefore to be assumed that
such a grave contained only one body.
2. These (mass) graves could have been violated only in the period between
October 1944 and August 1946, thus by the Poles, the Soviets, or by both
simultaneously – but why?
3. If merely the remains of 122 people were found there, as the Polish judge
remarks, where, then, were those of the other ca. 6,400?
The likeliest supposition would be that the bodies were dug up by the local
authorities and buried at the cemetery of the nearby village, possibly also in
the vicinity of the camp, where there is still a cemetery today. In this case, it
would of course have been strange that �ukaszkiewicz had heard nothing of it.
But there is yet another, more disturbing explanation, to which we shall later
return: the alleged violation was presumably done in order to be able to exaggerate
the number of victims of Treblinka I. If one takes the three mass graves
found by the Soviets in August 1944 by way of comparison, then the 41
211 Z. �ukaszkiewicz, “Obóz pracy w Treblince,” in: Biuletyn G�ównej Komisji Badania
Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce, III, 1947, p. 120. Cf. also S. Wojtczak, op. cit. (note 61), p.
135. Wojtczak claims that according to the expert Piotrowski the graves contain 10,000 bodies.
212 See Document 6 in the Appendix.