- From: hengist
- A detailed
forensic examination of the site of the wartime Treblinka camp, using
sophisticated electronic ground radar, has 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 former Treblinka II 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.
According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1997),
for example, "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.
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.) 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 II 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 the 30-year old
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.
While his initial investigation suggests that
there were never any mass graves at the Treblinka camp site, Krege
believes that further work is still called for.
"Historians say
that the bodies were exhumed and cremated toward the end of the
Treblinka camp's use in 1943, but we found no indication that any mass
graves ever existed," he says. "Personally, I don't think there was a
mass extermination camp there at all."
Krege prepared a
detailed report on his Treblinka investigation. He says that he would
welcome the formation, possibly under United Nations auspices, of an
international team of neutral, qualified specialists, to carry out
similar investigations at the sites of all the wartime German
camps.
Krege and his team are associated with, and funded by,
the Adelaide Institute, a south Australia revisionist "think tank."
Its director, Dr. Fredrick Töben, was jailed in Germany for seven
months in 1999 for disputing Holocaust extermination
claims.
(Sources: "'Vernichtungslager' Treblinka: archaelogisch
betrachtet," by Ing. Richard Krege, in Vierteljarhreshefte für freie
Geschichtsforschung, June 2000 [4. Jg., Heft 1], pp. 62-64; "'No
Jewish mass grave' in Poland," The Canberra Times, Jan. 24, 2000, p.
6; "Poland's Jews 'not buried at Treblinka'," The Examiner
[Australia], Jan. 24, 2000. [The latter two newspaper items are
reprinted in facsimile in VHO-info, May 2000, p. 30.]; Information
provided by Richard Krege; M. Weber and A. Allen, "Treblinka," The
Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1992, pp. 133-158; "German Court
Sentences Australian Holocaust Skeptic," The Journal of Historical
Review, July-August 1999, pp. 2-5; Y. Arad, "Treblinka," in I. Gutman,
ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust [New York: 1997], pp.
1481-1488.)
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