Open-Air Pyre Cremations Revisited

Introduction

Almost one third of all six-million Holocaust victims claimed by the orthodox narrative are said to have been killed in just three camps: Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. All these victims are said to have been burned outdoors on pyres, leaving behind only ashes. Another set of slightly different open-air pyre cremations is said to have occurred at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp as well. At least a few hundred thousand victims are said to have been reduced to ashes on those pyres. The structure and operation of these open-air pyres were described by various witnesses, and summarized in court verdicts and historiographic accounts. Among other sources, revisionist critiques of these accounts cite data from single-corpse pyre cremations as they have been performed traditionally for centuries in India, and from mass cremations of deceased and culled livestock during major livestock epidemics. Neither of these data sets were collected during strict scientific experiments, hence are to some degree anecdotal in nature and therefore to some degree questionable. A new scientific study on fuel requirements of open-air pyre cremations for the first time fills many of our knowledge gaps with empirical and hence much-more-reliable and probably reproducible data. This will allow us to better assess witness accounts of pyre cremations in German wartime camps.

Orthodox Narrative and Its Critique

The Orthodox Narrative: Auschwitz

As the typhus epidemic at the Auschwitz camp complex escalated in the spring and summer of 1942, mass exterminations of Jews in the so-called bunkers of Birkenau are said to have escalated as well, with Bunker 1 starting its operations in March, and Bunker 2 in July of 1942. The only crematorium operational at that time was the old facility at the Auschwitz Main Camp. Its six muffles could not even cope with the number of victims of the epidemic, let along those who are said to have been gassed to death. Moreover, this crematorium became inoperable in late spring of 1942 due to a damaged chimney that had to be rebuilt. That reconstruction was finished only in late July/early August of that year. As a result, tens of thousands of victims both of the typhus epidemic as well as those presumably gassed could not be cremated. The latter, having been killed near the fledgling Birkenau Camp some two miles away from the Main Camp, were therefore initially buried in local mass graves. However, due to the high groundwater level, those graves had to be exhumed again to prevent polluting the regional drinking-water supply. Hence, as many as 150,000 rotting corpses were supposedly burned on open-air pyres starting in late September 1942.

The orthodoxy claims that, in this context, an official of the Auschwitz Construction Office traveled to the Chełmno Camp in September of 1942 in order to learn how to efficiently build so-called field furnaces requiring considerable construction material. Hence, they evidently consisted of some kind of structure. The pyres later described by witnesses, on the other hand, are said to have consisted simply of alternating layers of wood and corpses stacked up in pits several meters deep, with no structure at all.

The same kind of simple pit pyres are said to have been constructed at Birkenau again in late spring and summer of 1944 during the claimed extermination of the Jews deported from Hungary. It is unclear how many victims were cremated on them. Considering the limited cremation capacity of the Birkenau crematoria and the number of Hungarian Jews claimed to have been killed, the likely numbers is somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000, on the orthodox view. (See Czech and Długoborski/Piper for the standard account.)

The Orthodox Narrative: Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka

The claimed gassing victims at all three camps are said to have been buried initially. Later, all buried corpses are said to have been exhumed and burned on pyres, with new victims killed after that point in time being cremated right away. The times at which this switch from burial to burning is said to have occurred varies from camp to camp:

While Bełżec presumably saw no further killings in 1943, hence all victims had first been buried and then cremated, Sobibór and Treblinka still had a considerable number of gassing victims after the switch, hence some of the bodies were cremated right after the alleged murder.

In contrast to the simple wood-and-body pyres allegedly operated at Auschwitz, the cremation pyres at these three camps are said to have consisted of concrete pillars some 50 to 100 cm in height, upon which a grate consisting of railway tracks was erected. Firewood was placed beneath that grate, and the corpses to be burned were placed on the rail-track grate in multiple layers. Once the pyre was built, it was set aflame and left to burn out before the remains were processed. (See Arad, Donat and Harrison et al. for the standard orthodox account.)

Revisionist Critique

The critique of Holocaust skeptics regarding the claimed open-air cremations at the above-mentioned camps addresses various aspects. (See the studies listed in that section of the list of sources.) These most pertinent of them can be summary as follows:

• For Auschwitz-Birkenau, the high groundwater level would have prevented any pyre in deep pits to have been lit.
• Air photos taken during the alleged extermination of the Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau show no sign of any large-scale outdoor cremations, such as large amounts of stored firewood; large areas of ground disturbances due to moving corpses, fuel and ashes; large smoke plumes blanketing the affected area.
• If firewood is mentioned at all by witnesses, the minimal amount of it claimed to have been needed for these pyres would have resulted in a mere charring of the corpses, but not in their destruction.
• The short times claimed for building, burning, and processing the remains of a pyre are unrealistically short.
• The true amount of firewood needed would have required a huge workforce of lumberjacks felling large swaths of the surrounding woods, or huge deliveries of firewood by a fleet of trucks or trains, but there is no trace of either.
• The amount of ashes and inevitably unburned remains (charred wood, charcoal and body parts, among them teeth and large bones) would have been gargantuan, but forensic investigations have demonstrated nowhere near the expected amount of such physical evidence.

2018 Australian Experiments

A team of researchers from the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, led by Luis Yermàn conducted a “series of experiments, using pig carcasses as surrogates for human bodies,” in order “to establish the conditions that will result in total destruction of organic matter in the cremation of bodies by means of an open pyre,” with a main focus on the amount of dry pine wood needed for an almost complete destruction of the carcasses investigated. They published the results of their experiments in 2018 (Yermán et al.). Due to its importance, the Bradley Smith Charitable Trust, aka CODOH, obtained a license to republish the entire article in Inconvenient History, where it is featured in the same issue as this present article.

The results of this study pertinent to the historical context here reviewed can be summarized as follows:

1. A self-sustained burning of corpses on open-air pyres is not possible. Under all circumstances investigated, corpses are always heat sinks in a fire, hence require fuel to burn.
2. The denser corpses are packed on a pyre, the less efficient a cremation is. Best results are obtained with only a single layer of corpses, with the corpses spaced apart to allow the fire to develop fully, and thus flames to engulf the corpse.
3. Fuel efficiency is highest when only a part of the firewood is placed beneath the corpse, and the rest then added gradually with the progressing cremation, to keep the fire lively and the corpse engulfed. With these conditions, “a minimum of 5 times the weight of the body in dry wood is necessary to achieve almost complete destruction of all organic matter (<10%).”
4. If all wood is stacked beneath the corpse, and the pyre is then left unattended, the fuel requirement increases to a “minimum of nine times the weight of the body in dry wood is necessary to achieve almost complete destruction of all organic matter (<10%).”
5. A complete destruction near 100% would have required additional firewood.

Parallels and Differences

Yermàn et al. conducted their experiments with freshly euthanized pigs. Pigs are known for their similarity to humans in terms of size and the composition of their bodies. For the present purpose, it needs to be kept in mind that the combustibility of a pig’s carcass as well as a human corpse greatly depends on its body-fat contents. While today’s average body-fat percentage of humans may be similar to that of pigs, this assumption is most likely incorrect when talking about the impoverished and often famished Jewish masses who were deported to German wartime camps in 1942 and 1943. This is especially true for Treblinka and Bełżec, whence almost exclusively Jews from Polish ghettos were deported. These Jews had lived for years in ghettos where mal- and undernourishment was a rampant problem. It may therefore be assumed that the average body-fat percentage of these Jews was well below what is considered healthy (12% to 20% for men, and 20% and 30% for women; Abernathy/Black). This means in practice that the corpses of these Jews would have required more fuel to burn than results from the experiments of Yermàn et al.

Furthermore, many corpses burned in the German wartime camps had not been “freshly euthanized.” During the initial phases, these allegedly murdered humans were buried, and then, several months later, their partly decomposed bodies were presumably exhumed and burned. Hence, the consistency of these bodies greatly diverged from that of the pigs cremated by Yermàn et al. Since primarily protein and fat decompose, hence gradually lose their calorific value, while the water content may decrease only slightly, if at all – depending on the soil moisture of the burial site – decomposition has only a slight effect on the fuel requirement for graves in the moist soil of central Europe.

Yermàn et al. built their pyres by having a fine, ┌─┐-shaped iron steel grill at the bottom, with a clearing to the ground of maybe 10 cm. Beneath it, flat pans with a mixture of kerosene and heptane were used to light the firewood placed on top of the grill. The grill’s fine mesh size of maybe one centimeter or two allowed only ashes and small embers to fall through. This made sure that large embers and burning wood stayed close to the carcass.

In contrast to that, the Auschwitz pyres had no means of lighting them from below or removing ashes. While that would have been detrimental to starting and operating the fires, it would still have been a feasible operation. The pyres reported for Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, on the other hand, are said to have had their firewood beneath a grill made of railway tracks, which inevitably would have had large gaps, allowing smaller corpse parts to fall into the fire below. However, only the flames reaching above the burning wood would have reached exclusively the underside of the lower layer of bodies, and that only initially. As the wood burned down, less and less flames would have reached the lower layer of bodies. This is an arrangement that might be conducive for grilling meat, and maybe for charring one side, if the meat is not turned over. It would have been impossible to completely burn even the lowest layer of bodies this way, however. Such an arrangement would have done close to nothing to higher layers.

Interspersing more firewood between several layers of bodies could have aided in burning higher layers, although lighting them would have been challenging. Much more challenging would have been to maintain such a multi-layered fire, which inevitably would have burned unevenly, resulting in uncontrolled pyre collapses. Since multi-layered corpses on a pyre result in an increased need of firewood per corpse compared to separate single-layer pyres, such an operation would have been more wasteful as well.

The pyres reported for Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka are said to have been huge in size. Hence, prolonged physical work near them would have been borderline impossible without heat-protection gear (which was not available to the crew working the pyres). Refueling these pyres with more wood would have been extremely challenging, and possible only at the edges of the pyre. However, refueling would not have overcome the problem that none of the corpses on top of the grill would have been in direct contact with the burning wood and glowing embers beneath.

Yermàn et al. also tried to evaluate whether it is possible to burn pig carcasses on a pyre without the need for any additional fuel, once the carcass, wrapped in cloth to imitate human clothes, had been “lit.” The thought behind this is that the carbonized skin and clothes act as a wick, enabling subcutaneous fat to maintain the combustion similar to a candle. However, as mentioned earlier, this has proven to be illusory. Pyre cremations require considerable amounts of fuel under any circumstances. Of course, the victims of the gas chambers are said to have been undressed before being killed, and then dumped into mass graves or later burned directly on pyres without wearing any clothes. While witness tales of self-immolating human bodies for these camps are quite common, they can be dismissed as entirely unrealistic.

The mass of dry pine wood required per mass of body to be cremated is considerably higher than what revisionists have assumed to be true so far. In his latest revisionist work on the matter, Carlo Mattogno lists a need for some 3.6 kg of dry wood per kg of organic mass for fairly normal bodies (as presumably deported to Sobibór from all over Europe, most of which were cremated right after having been murder) up to 13 kg for heavily emaciated bodies (as deported to Treblinka from the Warsaw Gheto) which were in their majority partly decomposed (Mattogno 2021, p. 282). While the last value is near the findings of Yermàn et al. of 9 kg of dry firewood per kg of non-decomposed organic mass of normal pigs (and thus humans) for a non-attended pyre, the 3.6 kg seem unrealistically low.

While Yermàn et al. used dry pine wood, the source of the wood presumably used at the German wartime camps, if mentioned at all, were trees freshly felled in the surrounding woods. Since fresh wood has a calorific value roughly half of that of dry wood, this would double the amount of wood needed for open-air pyre cremations to some 10 kg per kg of organic matter for refueled pyres, and some 18 kg for unattended pyres, provided normal bodies were cremated, which was not the case. The emaciated bodies cremated in many if not most cases of the German wartime camps would have had an even larger firewood requirement. For the attested-to unattended pyres, this would mean a firewood requirement of at least some 20 kg of fresh wood per kg of organic matter.

If this is true, the amount of wood required is staggering. At Auschwitz, most of the perhaps 500,000 victims cremated on pyres had been killed recently. Assuming an average body mass of men, women and children of 40 kg, the camp would have needed (500,000 × 40 kg × 18 =) 360 million kg of fresh wood, 360,000 metric tons. At Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, the statistics are even more incredible. Including children in our considerations of the famished massed shipped to these camps, we may assume an average mass of a starved-person’s partially decomposed corpse of 30 kg. With this, each body would require (20 × 30 =) 600 kg of fresh wood. This would result in the following requirements of freshly cut wood in metric tons:

Spruce trees were dominating the woods of eastern Poland during WWII. With a 50-year-old spruce forest on average yielding some 50,000 metric tons of wood per square kilometer (Colombo, p. 161), this would have required the deforestation of some 15.7 square kilometers, 6 square miles or almost 4 million acres of land.

Consequences

The simple wood-pile pyres reportedly used at Auschwitz were perfectly feasible, albeit not in deep pits. Since large numbers of victims of the 1942/1943 typhus epidemic could neither be cremated nor permanently buried, it is very likely that witness reports about these pyres are in fact based on real events of 1942. Massive open-air cremations for the year 1944, however, are clearly refuted by air photos.

The situation is different for witness reports about the pyres at the camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. These were presumably built using railway tracks on concrete posts. Such as setup would have been unable to cremate even the first layer of bodies, let alone any additional layers. Claims about this alleged design can be safely dismissed as untrue.

The firewood needs for open-air cremations have been the subject of much speculation and extrapolation from conflicting data derived from a variety of sources of mixed value. A first-ever empirical study of this issue brings clarity to the problem. The firewood requirements so far assumed by revisionists – Mattogno assumed some 250 kg of fresh wood, or some 125 kg of dry wood per human body (Mattogno 2021, p. 282) – is at the low, conservative end of what these new scientific experiments suggest. The actual value might be considerably higher than that.

Since it was logistically impossible to procure and process the needed firewood for the scale of operations claimed for Auschwitz, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, it must be assumed that any such open-air cremations, if they happened at all, had a scale of at least an order of magnitude smaller, and most certainly used other setups than those claimed for Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. These assumptions are also consistent with archeological findings on the grounds of these former camps (see Mattogno 2021).

Acknowledgments

My gratitude goes to James Mawdsley who has ferreted out the paper by Luis Yermán, and to Thomas Dalton for critically reviewing this paper.

Sources

Referenced Studies

• P. Abernathy, D. R. Black, “Healthy body weights: an alternative perspective,” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 63, No. 3, March 1996, pp. 448S-451S; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002916523192343?via%3Dihub/.
• Guiseppe Colombo, Manuale dell’ingegnere civile e industriale, Enrico Hoepli Editore, Milan 1926.
• Luis Yermán, Harrison Wall, Jerónimo Carrascal et al., “Experimental study on the fuel requirements for the thermal degradation of bodies by means of open pyre cremation,” Fire Safety Journal, Vol. 98, 2018, pp. 63-73; https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/2022-01/Fire Safety Journal (2018).pdf.

Mainstream Narrative

• Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor,  The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1987.
• Alexander Donat (ed.), The Death Camp Treblinka, Holocaust Library, New York, 1979.
• Danuta Czech, Ausch­witz Chronicle, 1939-1945, H. Holt, New York, 1990.
• Wácław Długoborski, Franciszek Piper (eds.),Ausch­witz 1940-1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, Ausch­witz-Birkenau State Museum, Oświęcim, 2000.
• Jonathan Harrison, Roberto Muehlenkamp, Jason Myers, Sergey Romanov, Nicholas Terry, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard, A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues, A Holocaust Controversies White Paper, http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com, December 2011.

Revisionist Critique

• Academic Research Group (ed.), Holocaust Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., Bargoed, Wales, UK, 2024.
• Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues, Carlo Mattogno, Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2020.
• Heinrich Köchel, “Outdoor Incineration of Livestock Carcasses,” Inconvenient History, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2015; https://codoh.com/library/document/outdoor-incineration-of-livestock-carcasses/
• Thomas Kues, “Tree-felling at Treblinka,” Inconvenient History, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009; https://codoh.com/library/document/tree-felling-at-treblinka/.
• Carlo Mattogno, Ausch­witz: Open-Air Incinerations, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016.
• Carlo Mattogno, The “Operation Reinhardt” Camps Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec: Black Propaganda, Archeological Research, Expected Material Evidence, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2021.
• Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp, 4th ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Bargoed, UK, 2023.
• Carlo Mattogno, Thomas Kues, Jürgen Graf.The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”: An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers, 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2015.