Manusevich, David

David Manusevich was a Jew who, from November 1942 to May 1943, was interned in a camp at Brody some 100 km northeast of Lviv. From there, he was sent to Bełżec Camp. He somehow managed to escape, but got arrested again. He ultimately ended up in the Janowska Camp, allegedly to be executed. Instead, he was assigned in June 1943 to exhume mass graves near the city of Lviv, and to burn the extracted bodies on pyres within the context of what today’s orthodoxy calls Aktion 1005.

He gave a statement on 13 September 1944 to Soviet investigators, which was later introduced as evidence during the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (Document USSR-6(c), IMT, Vol. 7, p. 391). Here are some of Manusevich’s peculiar claims:

• In the Bełżec Camp operated a human soap factory producing “soap from human bodies,” which is a propaganda lie (see the entry on Bełżec). He added that persons were sent for extermination to Bełżec from Italy and France – which is untrue as well.
• At Bełżec, “2 million people were exterminated,” which is almost five times the amount assumed by today’s orthodoxy.
• Manusevich claimed that the pyres he built were 4 to 5 meters high, which is probably an exaggeration, as proper pyres for open-air incinerations are usually only up to 2 m high. Building and maintaining the burning of anything larger is too challenging and impractical: Did the inmates have a crane to get bodies and wood onto layers more than 2 meters off the ground? And how did they prevent this huge pile, which inevitably burned unevenly, from toppling over, spilling embers, burning wood and partially burned body parts all over the place?
• He claimed that all cremation ashes were sifted through a “special sieve,” undoubtedly to separate unburned remains from the ashes. If 100,000 bodies were processed, as the orthodoxy claims, then several thousand metric tons of ashes and unburned remains had to be processed this way by a few dozen inmates within a few months – in sieves that would have clogged with the first load. Moreover, any occasional rainfall would have rendered any burned-out pyre into a moist heap of highly alkaline, corrosive slush that could not have been processed at all. Hence, Manusevich’s tale is pure fiction.
• He moreover claimed that all bones were ground down in a “specially constructed grinding machine.” However, this alleged mill later turned out to have been a road-building device to crush gravel. Since most inmates from the Janowska Camp were deployed in building roads, this is what this machine was used for. A photo taken by a Soviet investigative commission shows Manusevich with two other witnesses (Heinrich Chamaides and Moische Korn) standing next to the claimed machine. This shows that at least these three witnesses knew each other and collaborated as a group with the Soviet commission, meaning that their testimonies were probably harmonized and orchestrated to some degree. (See the entry on bone mill.)
• He claimed a total death toll of some 200,000 for the areas he worked on – in contrast to the 120,000 assumed by the orthodoxy today (based on (Heinrich Chamaides’s claim).
• Due to these gargantuan mass shootings at the Janowska Camp, “an entire lake of blood has formed, measuring 4 x 5 meters and 1 meter deep.”
• Other units of the German Security Service were sent to Janowska Camp to learn the trade of mass executions and take training courses in cremation. There is no trace of any other units, or of any training course of this kind.
• Cremating an average human body during open-air incinerations requires some 250 kg of freshly cut wood. Cremating 200,000 bodies thus requires some 50,000 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering 111 hectares of land, or some 249 American football fields. An average prisoner is rated at being able to cut some 0.63 metric tons of fresh wood per workday. To cut this amount of wood within the six month (160 days) that this operation supposedly lasted would have required a work force of some 500 dedicated lumberjacks just to cut the wood. Manusevich stated that his unit consisted only of 126 inmates, all busy digging out mass graves, extracting bodies, building pyres, sifting through ashes, scattering the ashes, refilling the graves with soil, and planting them with grass seeds and saplings. He said nothing about where the firewood came from.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2022c, pp. 516-518.)