TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

90 Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf: Treblinka
remnants of various objects) show merely that there was a camp at that place,
and the human remains as well as the ashes prove only that bodies were buried
or cremated in the camp. Nothing produced even a trace of evidence for mass
murder, to say nothing of such a crime against several hundred thousand people.
Among the objects discovered, the skulls as well as the human body parts
found in a state of decomposition deserve particular attention. From whom did
they come? If we subscribe to the official historiography, this question remains
unanswered. According to the official version, the cremation of the
bodies exhumed from the mass graves was finished by August 2, 1943, the
day of the prisoner revolt. During this revolt, at least 300 to 400 prisoners are
supposed to have been killed within the camp or in the vicinity of the wire
fence, 217 and in the following three weeks, allegedly more than 30,000 Jews
from the ghetto of Bia�ystok were gassed, whose bodies neither the Soviets
nor the Poles discovered. If there were such killings, these victims therefore
must have been cremated. The same is true for the bodies of those killed in the
revolt. The surviving prisoners were not killed on the spot, rather they were
transferred to Sobibór on December 20, 1943, as can be gathered from a corresponding
Wehrmacht bill of lading. 218 If decomposing body parts were
found in November 1945, this discovery is also inconsistent with the thesis
that the victims involved had been murdered more than two years before. Finally,
it is strikingly problematic that no single complete body was discovered.
From whom, therefore, did the skulls and body parts come? Were they
perhaps taken from the mass graves of Treblinka I? Could these have been the
remains of victims of the typhus epidemic, which had raged in the camp at the
end of 1943? This hypothesis seems all the more plausible in that none of the
skulls exhibited gunshot wounds. It could also furnish an explanation for the
odd circumstance that Treblinka II was bombed: the bombs destroyed not only
the two buildings, which in all probability had been left intact by the Germans,
219 but also scattered rotted body parts over a wide area and thus increased
the horrible effect of the ‘extermination camp’. In fact, the discovered
body parts were thoroughly exploited for propaganda.
217 Y. Arad, op. cit. (note 72), p. 298.
218 Reproduced in Z. �ukaszkiewicz, Obóz strace� w Treblince, op. cit. (note 38), p. 61.
219 Both buildings are clearly visible on an aerial photograph of November 1944, thus after the
occupation of the area by the Red Army, but it is not clear whether they are intact or partially
burned out: U.S. National Archives, Ref. No. GX 12225 SG, exp. 259; the exact date
of the photograph, which was published by John C. Ball for the first time, is unknown, cf.
Photograph 11 in the Appendix.