Cremation propaganda

Imagining one’s body burn is a veritable nightmare for us all. Hence, the cremation of the human body is a prime topic for propaganda stories, because it is easy to make an audience exposed to such stories shudder in horror. For this reason, the cremation of alleged victims of claimed German wartime atrocities is a prime target for distortions, exaggerations and inventions.

As the entries on crematoria and open-air incinerations document, cremations both in furnaces of various types and on outdoor pyres occurred indeed in German wartime camps, and maybe even outside of them. Hence, witness accounts of such events can have a real background. The challenge is to find documental, forensic and technical constraints that permit to separate the truth, or at least that which would have been possible, from distortions and exaggerations.

Open-Air Incinerations

Large-scale outdoor cremations are easily detectable in real time by the local populace, and they are clearly visible on air photos, either due to the smoke they develop, or due to the scorched earth they leave behind. As explained in the entry on air photos, such photos are available for two cases of claimed large-scale outdoor cremations: Auschwitz-Birkenau during late spring and summer of 1944, and Babi Yar near Kiev in September 1943. In both cases, these air photos demonstrate incontrovertibly that the claimed events cannot have happened.

Another way large-scale outdoor cremations can be verified is by forensic examinations of the traces they must have left behind. Large areas of scorched earth, inevitably mixed with ashes, charred wood, and incompletely burned human remains must have littered the area. For the scale of operations claimed, huge amounts of ashes and incompletely burned cremation remains must have been deposited somewhere.

These issues are discussed in the entries on the Aktion Reinhardt Camps (Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka, but also Chełmno) and on Aktion 1005. The latter is said to have been the code name for operations of German units to erase the traces of their mass murders on temporarily occupied Soviet territories — by burning their victims’ bodies on innumerable gigantic outdoor pyres. Many witness accounts about these events contain assertions that make them suspicious. For a list of witnesses with an entry in this encyclopedia discussing these issues, see the section Aktion 1005 in the entry on witnesses.

The entry on open-air incinerations defines technical parameters for outdoor cremations. Based on this data, we can define how a large outdoor pyre would have looked like, and how much space, time, and fuel — here mostly firewood — would have been needed to operate it. For ease of building and maintaining such a pyre, as well as eventually clearing out its burned-out remains, they are best kept some two meters wide, and not higher than a man can reach.

While there is some flexibility regarding the shape and size of a pyre, other constraints are less flexible. One of them concerns claims that outdoor cremations were conducted in deep pits. If the area for which such pits are claimed had a high groundwater level, potentially intruding groundwater would have put a limit to the depth such a cremation pit could have had. This applies to the Birkenau Camp, where the groundwater level was quite close to the surface. Witnesses claiming cremation pits several meters deep certainly did not tell the truth. (See the entry on groundwater level for more details.)

Another inflexible constraint concerns the fuel needed to burn a body on a pyre. The entry on lumberjacks gives an overview of the firewood that would have been needed to burn the number of corpses alleged by witnesses or by the orthodox narrative for various claimed Holocaust crime scenes. The table contained in that entry also gives an idea of how many trees would have had to be felled to obtain that much wood, and how many dedicated lumberjacks would have had to be employed for this. The discrepancy between claims and material reality is striking.

One attempt at evading the insurmountable problem of a lack of fuel is the claim that the Germans found a way to burn corpses without any fuel. This myth is covered in the entry on self-immolating bodies, which also contains a list of witnesses who made such false claims.

Furnace Cremations

The list of witnesses asserting self-burning bodies also contains cases relating to furnace cremations in crematoria. However, witness statements about the amount of fuel (wood, coke, coal) required to cremate a certain number of bodies in a cremation furnace are otherwise virtually non-existent.

The situation is different regarding assertions as to how many bodies were inserted concurrently into a cremation muffle, and how long it took for such a load to burn to ashes. On the Auschwitz cremation furnaces, many witnesses have made claims in this regard. These assertions can be compared with verifiable data, thus giving us a yardstick to assess the trustworthiness of a witness. See the data listed in the table.

As is documented in the section Simultaneous Cremation of Multiple Bodies of the entry on crematoria, the muffles of the Auschwitz cremation furnaces were designed to accommodate and incinerate only one corpse at a time. This process moreover took roughly one hour. Although it would have been possible to insert two corpses concurrently, this would have lengthened the cremation time considerably, with little if any advantage compared to burning these two corpses consecutively instead.

As the table demonstrates, this is a striking case of a convergence of evidence on a lie. Across the board, witnesses have vastly exaggerated the Auschwitz crematoria’s capacity by claiming physically impossible numbers of corpses stuffed into these small muffles concurrently, and by giving ludicrously short cremation times per body of only a few minutes.

The background of this convergence on a lie is the urge of most witnesses in the immediate postwar era to confirm the Soviet, in fact the victorious Allies’ atrocity-propaganda claim that at least four million inmates were killed and cremated at Auschwitz. Instrumental in achieving this convergence was Polish investigative judge Jan Sehn, among others, who interrogated many of these Auschwitz witnesses at war’s end. It stands to reason that he coached them to adjust their claims to match the expected truth. (See the entry on Jan Sehn.)

Later witnesses simply copied what earlier witnesses had claimed. For instance, Filip Müller, who plagiarized Miklos Nyiszli’s 1946 tales, copied Nyiszli’s cremation figures as well.

The only exception from the rule are the two engineers of the Topf Company who had designed and built the furnaces. Although they were certainly not treated gently while in Soviet captivity in Moscow, they nevertheless both independently stuck to the truth in this respect when interrogated by Soviet officials. They confirmed what documents and technical data indicate: It took one hour to cremate one body per muffle in these furnaces.