Treblinka – The Forensic Examination Fails
Published by Max Musson on December 2, 2013 | 34 Comments
By Max Musson:
This weekend my attention was caught by adverts for a repeat showing of Channel 5’s documentary, ‘Treblinka: Inside Hitler’s Secret Death Camp’, part of their ‘Genius and Genocide’, series featuring no less than six, 90 minute documentaries trawling once more over the alleged ‘facts’ and ‘diabolical nature’ of the Nazi Third Reich.
Publicity material for the documentary claimed that it would be, “… following a team of British archaeologists who have been granted unprecedented access to investigate and excavate Hitler’s most notorious death camp.”
It was declared that forensic archaeologist, Dr Caroline Sturdy Colls and her team, would, “carry out the first ever comprehensive forensic investigation of Treblinka”, and the publicity blurb went on, “Between 1942 and 1943, the Nazis murdered more than 800,000 people at Treblinka in north east Poland, brutally exploiting many more as slave labour. Today no visible traces of those atrocities remain. The Nazis dismantled the camp in 1943 in an attempt to conceal what had happened there.”
“This film follows Caroline and the team as they get to work at Treblinka, uncovering the location and remains of the camp and detailing its key structures, including the processing rooms, gas chambers and burial pits. Drawing on testimony from one of the last survivors of the camp and newly-discovered documentary sources, the programme provides a new, visceral and compelling narrative of one of the darkest chapters in human history.”
While I don’t usually concern myself with the pro’s and con’s of the Holocaust, this programme interested me for two reasons:
Firstly, because it rather admitted up front that hitherto, no physical evidence has been established as proof of the claimed exterminations of large numbers people at Treblinka during World War II; and
Secondly, because the programme claimed to comprehensively provide that missing proof.
For someone such as I, who is aware of the controversies that exist and the way in which the propagation of the traditional Holocaust narrative has been used to denigrate nationalists, I was interested that someone apparently well qualified in forensic investigation, had at last conducted a ‘comprehensive’ examination of the two sites forming the Treblinka concentration camp complex. Surely we would now get to the truth, one way or the other!
In the programme, Caroline Sturdy Colls introduces herself as a forensic archaeologist, stating, “I work with police forces investigating murder cases and cases of missing individuals who may be buried” and this creates the expectation that the investigation will be dispassionate and unbiased, because for someone such as Dr Sturdy Colls, the uncovering of grisly human remains must be an almost routine experience and her police work must have instilled in her the discipline to avoid jumping to conclusions prior to an examination of the evidence found.
In this respect however, we are quickly disappointed as Sturdy Colls declared her desire to find the evidence needed to fit a predetermined outcome.
As the narrator of the documentary explains, of the two sites forming the Treblinka complex, Treblinka 1 has traditionally been regarded simply as a slave labour camp, while Treblinka 2 is believed to have been the extermination camp, he states that Caroline has long believed that Treblinka 1 was also a place, “of large scale systematic murder”.
Caroline is then shown stating, “Just because Treblinka 1 was smaller and just because Treblinka 1 wasn’t branded as an extermination camp, that doesn’t make the crimes that happened there any better.
“It’s the part of the site that gets completely forgotten because everybody talks about the history of the death camp, and what I really want to show with my work is that actually, Treblinka was one large landscape that comprised of the death camp and the labour camp, and all these places, whatever form it took, the executions were all equally a brutal and equally horrific as each other.”
The investigation begins with aerial photography with special imaging that enables an image of the land surface to be generated with all trees and vegetation removed. The resultant image showed a number of depressions in an area ten minutes walk south of Treblinka 1 and Caroline decided to dig two exploratory ‘trenches’ at a couple of these sites.
During the digging the remains of an old leather shoe are found and Caroline immediately declared, “This is the shoe of someone who was buried in a mass grave”, despite the fact that a shoe could have been discarded in any number of ways and for any number of reasons.
Then a number of bone fragments were unearthed, some of which, although not all were obviously human, the most significant of which appeared to be an adult arm bone and the jaw-bone of a child, and immediately Caroline is heard exclaiming, “Seeing all this, I get so angry, its not just bones, it’s a person!
“What could they have possibly done to make the Nazis want to treat them this way?”
Without stopping to think that during World War II the front line would have passed across this area at least three times and that the people to whom those bone fragments belonged might have been killed by either side, Caroline assumed that the bones must have been those of concentration camp inmates murdered by the Nazis.
With just a small number of bone fragments discovered from possibly just two individuals, Caroline declared, “We have enough to prove that this is a mass grave!”
Furthermore, just to emphasise the ‘overwhelmingly’ distressing nature of these findings, we were treated to the sight of Caroline sobbing and being comforted by a male member of her team. It would seem that finding these few bone fragments was too much even for an experienced forensic archeologist – even one who one would suppose would have been hardened by all of the grisly police work she must have undertaken over the years.
It apparently did not cross Caroline’s mind that the bones may have resulted from a common murder, or from the murder of Polish people oppressed by the Communists after the war. No, she was certain they were the bones of people murdered by the Nazis, and she declared, “This whole landscape is part of Treblinka’s killing machine essentially, this is the area where Nazis came to hide their crimes that they perpetrated.”
The investigation then shifted further north to the site of Treblinka 2, the alleged extermination camp in which between 800,000 and 900,000 people are claimed to have died, despite the narrator of the programme admitting that, “The remains of the 900,000 people who died have never been found.”
Today there is a memorial covering most of the site of Treblinka 2, consisting of a large stone structure bearing the inscription, “Never again!” in several languages, and an assemblage of 17,000 smaller, roughly hewn standing stones set in concrete.
There is also an imitation ‘grill pit’, an imitation of one of the long pits that the Nazis are alleged to have used to burn the large number of corpses that had accumulated. It is a long rectangular pit filled with basalt, which is meant to symbolize the charred wood used to burn the bodies.
Caroline and her team stopped by the side of it and reaching down to examine the sandy bank to the pit Caroline picked up some tiny fragments barely millimeters across and declared, “These are fragments of human bone!”
There was obviously no time to waste on DNA analysis, Caroline could apparently tell for certain, just by rubbing it between her fingers.
Caroline then set about digging two ‘trenches’, which were more like 1.5 metre square holes, in the lawns set between the standing stones and after a couple of days digging the team found just a few fragments of hair combs and dentures and cheap jewelry in one hole and in the other, several pieces from terra cotta ceramic tiles.
The tiles each had a smooth glazed surface and on the other side a dimpled surface bearing the manufactures mark, which consisted of a capital ‘D’ next to a circle containing a six pointed star, which coincidentally looked rather like a Star of David.
Caroline immediately decided that these were tiles from the floor of a gas chamber and that they featured the Star of David motif in order to lure the Jews into a false sense of security.
“What immediately springs to mind when I see this”, she declared, “is that witnesses who were allowed in the gas chamber area, talked about the Star of David actually being on the outside of the gas chamber buildings to build up that illusion that people were going to somewhere that was safe.”
It didn’t occur to her to consider that the dimpled side of the tiles was almost certainly designed to form a surface for tile cement to bind to and that only the glazed side of the tiles would have been visible in whatever building they were used to form the floor surface.
It also didn’t occur to Caroline that Pavel Leleko, one of the survivors of the concentration camp, had earlier in the programme described how camp guards and their Ukrainian helpers would forcefully herd the Jews, naked and hysterical, into the gas chambers by hitting them with clubs and whips, and it would be doubtful therefore that the existence of a Star of David emblem on the external wall of the gas chamber would do much to alleviate their panic, let alone tiny Star of David motifs on the floor tiles inside.
As Caroline and her team dug deeper in the hope of finding more substantial and convincing evidence of a gas chamber, they realized that there was a one metre deep layer of quarried sand covering the site – sand containing fossilised sharks teeth.
Again Caroline jumped to the conclusion that the quarried sand had been put there by the Nazis in an attempt to cover up their misdeeds, ignoring completely the fact that after Treblinka was closed and the Germans demolished the concentration camp buildings, a farm complex was built on the site, until that too was demolished after the war to make way for the building of the memorial that exists there now.
It did not occur to Caroline consider whether the sand layer could have been put there by Polish workers who would have wanted to level the site for the memorial and who might have used sand to mix the concrete into which 17,000 standing stones are set. Instead, her team dug down until they had located some larger stones beneath the sand and then declared that they had identified the location of a gas chamber!
During the programme we were informed that the gas chambers at Treblinka were capable of killing as many as 5,000 people in twenty minutes, yet as the programme concluded, Caroline stated, “For the men within eight to ten minutes of arrival in Treblinka they would be dead and they would be killed in the gas chambers, and for the women, it was more like 15 minutes, because of the fact that they had to have their heads shaved before they actually took that walk into the gas chamber themselves”.
Neither Caroline nor the programme makers realised the contradictions in their statements, nor how ludicrously premature their assumptions were given that this was supposed to be a scientific investigation into Treblinka by a doctor of forensic archeology experienced in police work.
The publicity material for this programme stated “This film follows Caroline and the team as they get to work at Treblinka, uncovering the location and remains of the camp and detailing its key structures, including the processing rooms, gas chambers and burial pits. Drawing on testimony from one of the last survivors of the camp and newly-discovered documentary sources, the programme provides a new, visceral and compelling narrative of one of the darkest chapters in human history.”
In fact, all that was achieved is that they discovered a number of bone fragments in circumstances which don’t provide any clues as to who they belonged to nor how they came to be buried in the woods c. 300 yards from Treblinka 1, and in Treblinka 2, Caroline’s team merely discovered a few fragments of personal artifacts, half a dozen broken floor tiles and some large stones.
If this was going to be an investigation that would silence the tongues of so called ‘Holocaust deniers’, Caroline Sturdy Colls has fallen a long way short of the mark, and I have a feeling it will probably have the opposite effect and will instead re-ignite the debate. Certainly if the comments left by those who have viewed websites promoting the programme are anything to go by.
By Max Musson © 2013
