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.
No indication of mass graves
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.
"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 said. "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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