- 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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