Chamaides, Heinrich

Heinrich Chamaides was a Jew who claimed to have been forced by German units in 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.

In a statement of 21 September 1944 to Soviet investigators, Chamaides claimed that some 120,000 bodies had been exhumed and burned by him and his unit, which is a figure assumed by the orthodoxy as correct.

Chamaides 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 bigger 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?

Chamaides moreover claimed that all bones were ground by a special mill. 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 Chamaides with two more witnesses (Moische Korn and David Manusevich) 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.)

Furthermore, wood-fired pyres burn unevenly and leave behind lots of unburned wood pieces, charcoal, and incompletely burned body parts, not just ashes (80% of leftovers would have been from wood, not corpses). Those remains could not have been crushed or ground down in mills. If 120,000 bodies were processed, then several thousand metric tons of cremation leftovers had to be processed.

Cremating an average human body during open-air incinerations requires some 250 kg of freshly cut wood. Cremating 120,000 bodies thus requires some 30,000 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering almost 67 hectares of land, or some 149 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 300 dedicated lumberjacks just to cut the wood. Chamaides claimed 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.

While there are a few numerical and temporal discrepancies between this account and the one by Leon Weliczker, the main witness on these alleged events, the more revealing aspect of Chamaides’s is the following crude atrocity propaganda:

As an eyewitness, I experienced how a violent German criminal, whose name I do not know, shattered an eight-year old boy and threw him into a fire. Several one- and two-year old children were thrown into the fire alive. The criminals gave the victims a glass filled with water to hold and conducted their target practice by shooting at the glass: If they hit the glass, the victim was allowed to live. If they hit the victim’s hand or arm, however, they went up to him, told him he was unfit for work, and as a result would have to be shot, after which they shot him right there on the spot. Small children were thrown into the air and shot while falling.

(For more details on Heinrich Chamaides, see Mattogno 2022c, pp. 513-515.)