The Holocaust Historiography Project

Holocaust Encyclopedia

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Geysers of Blood, from Mass Graves

Some witnesses have claimed that mass graves filled with murdered Jews emitted geysers of blood. It ought to be unnecessary to provide scientific proof for this to be physically impossible. Among those who claimed this are:

Related, but not quite as extreme, are claims that the victims buried in mass graves had soaked the soil with so much blood that one waded through bloody mud (Moshe Garbarz), that an entire lake of blood had formed (David Manusevich), or that the blood rose to a grave’s surface and ignited there, as if it were oil (Chil Rajchman). Albert Hartl, an official of Germany’s Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), claimed the following about a huge mass grave he once claimed to have seen (Sereny, p. 97):

At one moment — we were driving along a long ravine. I noticed strange movements of the earth: clumps of earth rose into the air as if by their own propulsion — and there was smoke: it was like a low-toned volcano; as if there was burning lava just beneath the earth.

When Hartl was interrogated by U.S. investigators after the war, they added a remark to his file stating that Hartl is known as a boaster of the highest order. (See Mattogno 2021c, pp. 69f.). He was not the only one. The sad thing is that witnesses telling such tall tales are still taken seriously by orthodox scholars.