Lumberjacks

Several German wartime camps claimed to have been the site of mass murder, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek and Stutthof, had coke-fueled cremation furnaces which steadily burned the remains of inmates who had died for whatever reason. However, several other camps which supposedly were pure extermination camps, such as Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, had no cremation facility at all. Furthermore, no cremation devices were at the disposal of the German Ein­satz­grup­pen and other units who are said to have mass-murdered thousands of Jews in the temporarily German-occupied Soviet territories. Due to the lack of cremation options in these cases, the victims of German atrocities are said to have been initially buried.

However, when the tide of war changed, the German authorities allegedly decided to exhume and burn the victims in order to erase the traces of their crimes. This operation presumably bore the code name “Aktion 1005” (see the entry on this.) In order to burn these corpses with open-air incinerations on pyres, a certain amount of wood had to be available.

Most witnesses reporting about the alleged activities of exhuming and burning the victims buried in mass graves did not mention where the wood came from. They seem to have assumed that the wood was simply there. If witnesses gave a breakdown of how many inmates did which job, felling trees and chopping them up is usually not included. Very few inmates mentioned that some of their teammates were tasked with getting firewood, yet the number of inmates having done this is hugely inappropriate for the gigantic task they would have faced.

In the upper part, the following table gives an overview of data claimed by several witnesses regarding corpse-burning scenarios at various alleged crime scenes of the Holocaust. The lower part adds five crime scenes with data following the current orthodox narrative.

The second column lists the claimed number of bodies allegedly cremated on open-air pyres. The third column list the amount of freshly cut wood (in metric tons) that would have been necessary to cremate these bodies, based on an average need of some 250 kg of fresh wood per body. The fourth column gives the surface area of an average 50-year-old spruce forest that would have had to be completely felled and chopped up in order to obtain the amount of wood required, based on an average yield of 450 metric tons of wood per hectare for such a forest, which equals some 201 metric tons of wood growing on an area the size of an American-Football field. The fifth column is intended to help the reader visualize the vast forest area needed.

The sixth column has the number of days which each open-air incineration event is said to have lasted. The last column lists the number of dedicated inmate lumberjacks, working seven days a week, who would have been required to fell and chop up that wood, assuming a daily performance of 0.63 metric tons of wood per inmate.

Note that the inmate team size supposedly involved in these exhumation and cremation activities of the upper part of this table rarely reached 100, and most if not all of them supposedly were (or would have been) busy opening mass graves, extracting bodies, building pyres, sifting through ashes in search of valuables and unburned remains – with handheld flour-type sieves! – and crushing unburned bones with pestles. No one would have had time to get firewood.

In case of the three pure extermination camps listed in the lower part of the table, the number of inmates involved in acquiring wood is also said to have been well below 100 persons in each case.

For Auschwitz, witnesses have made disparate statements about the features of outdoor cremations, thus making calculations difficult. These claims are discussed in the section “Holocaust Scenarios” of the entry on open-air incinerations.

Note that self-immolating bodies are not part of the scientific literature, as none have ever been discovered during single-body or large-scale cremations. Therefore, the scenarios described by these witnesses, or agreed upon by orthodox scholars, are simply technically impossible.

For details, see the entry for each of these witnesses and places, as well as the entries on open-air incinerations and Aktion 1005.

 

Witness/Location

Bodies

Wood Needed [t]

Hectares*

Football Fields*

Days

Lumberjacks†

Gerhard Adametz/Babi Yar

100,000

25,000

56

125

35

1,134

Gerhard Adametz/Riga

≥32,000

≥8,000

≥18

≥40

135

≥94

Szymon Amiel/Białystok

42,800

10,700

24

53

57

298

Semen Berlyant/Babi Yar

70,000

17,500

39

87

35

800

A. Blyazer/Babi Yar

68,000

17,000

38

85

15, ca. 5 years

Isaak Brodsky/Babi Yar

70,000

17,500

39

87

35

800

David Budnik/Babi Yar

120,000

30,000

67

149

35

1,360

Heinrich Chamaides/Lviv

120,000

30,000

67

149

160

300

Momčilo Damjanović/Semlin

68,000

17,000

38

85

36

750

Vladimir Davydov/Babi Yar

70,000

17,500

39

87

35

800

Iosif Doliner/Babi Yar

100,000

25,000

56

125

35

1,134

Yuri Farber/Ponary

38,000

9,500

21

47

75

200

Szloma Gol/Ponary

80,000

20,000

44

100

180

176

Yakov Kaper/Babi Yar

120,000

30,000

67

149

35

1,360

Avraham Karasik/Białystok

22,000

5,500

12

27

57

153

Moische Korn/Lviv

120,000

30,000

67

149

160

300

Vladislav Kuklia/Babi Yar

100,000

25,000

56

125

35

1,134

David Manusevich/Lviv

200,000

50,000

111

249

160

500

Leonid Ostrovsky/Babi Yar

62,500

15,625

35

78

35

700

Stefan Pilunov/Mogilev

30,000

7,500

17

37

16

744

Yakov Steyuk/Babi Yar

50,000‡

12,500

28

62

35

567

Ziama Trubakov/Babi Yar

125,000

31,250

69

156

35

1,417

Leon Weliczker/Lviv

300,000

75,000

167

374

160

750

Matvey Zaydel/Ponary

80,000

20,000

44

100

150

211

Babi Yar

100,000

25,000

56

125

35

1,134

Belzec

434,500

108,625

241

541

120

1,437

Majdanek (Harvest Festival)

≥17,000

4,250

9

21

45

150

Sobibór

≥170,000

42,500

94

212

365

185

Treblinka

≥700,000

175,000

389

872

122

2,277

* On average, a 50-year-old spruce forest yields some 450 metric tons of wood per hectare (100 m × 100 m) or 201 tons per American-Football field (Colombo, p. 161). Fell all trees of such a forest of this size to obtain the required amount of wood.
† Number required for the time span claimed, which varies from case to case. Blyazer gave the number of lumberjacks in his team (15), who would have finished their work sometime in 1948.
‡ In a later interview, Steyuk doubled the number of bodies burned. See the values listed for Adametz, Doliner, Kuklia.

You need to be a registered user, logged into your account, and your comment must comply with our Acceptable Use Policy, for your comment to get published. (Click here to log in or register.)

Leave a Comment