The Treblinka camp in Poland is one of the “Reinhardt” camps, which, like Auschwitz, has been the subject of a number of allegations of mass gassing of Jews.

Above: A picture of the Treblinka site today: almost nothing remains of the camp, and all layouts of the camp are based on individual survivor's memory.

According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1997), "a total of 870,000 people" were killed and buried at Treblinka between July 1942 and April 1943. Then, between April and July 1943, the hundreds of thousands of corpses were allegedly dug up and burned in batches of 2,000 or 2,500 on large grids made of railway ties.

FORENSIC EXAMINATION OF TREBLINKA SITE REVEALS NO MASS GRAVES

A detailed forensic examination of the site of the wartime Treblinka camp, using sophisticated electronic ground radar, has however found no evidence of mass graves there. For six days in October 1999, an Australian team headed by Richard Krege, a qualified electronics engineer, carried out an examination of the soil at the site of the Treblinka camp in Poland, where, Holocaust historians say, more than half a million Jews were put to death in gas chambers and then buried in mass graves.

Krege's team used an $80,000 Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) device, which sends out vertical radar signals that are visible on a computer monitor. GPR detects any large-scale disturbances in the soil structure to a normal effective depth of four or five meters, and sometimes up to ten meters. (GPR devices are routinely used around the world by geologists, archeologists, and police.) 

Above: The Krege team undertaking its ground scan at Treblinka, with the monument clearly visible in the background. The ground scanning technique is used worldwide by geologists and law enforcement agencies to discover earth movements or buried bodies. The scan at Treblinka yielded no results - no mass graves, nor even evidence of large scale earth moving, as is alleged occurred at the camp.

In its Treblinka investigation, Krege's team also carried out visual soil inspections, and used an auger to take numerous soil core samples. The team carefully examined the entire Treblinka site, especially the alleged "mass graves" portion, and carried out control examinations of the surrounding area.

They found no soil disturbance consistent with the burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies, or even evidence that the ground had ever been disturbed. In addition, Krege and his team found no evidence of individual graves, bone remains, human ashes, or wood ashes.

"From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the camp site," says Krege, who lives in Canberra. "We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this natural layering is massively disrupted or missing altogether."  Because normal geological processes are very slow acting, disruption of the soil structure would have been detectable even after 60 years, Krege noted. "Historians say that the bodies were exhumed and cremated towards the end of the Treblinka camp's use in 1943, but we found no indication that any mass graves ever existed," he says.

 

(Thanks to the Journal of Historical Review | Volume 19, number 3 for the contents of this page)