Lumberjacks

Several German wartime camps claimed to have been the site of mass murder, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek and Stutthof, had coke-fueled cremation furnaces which steadily burned the remains of inmates who had died for whatever reason. However, several other camps which supposedly were pure extermination camps, such as Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, had no cremation facility at all. Furthermore, no cremation devices were at the disposal of the German Einsatzgruppen and other units who are said to have mass-murdered thousands of Jews in the temporarily German-occupied Soviet territories. Due to the lack of cremation options in these cases, the victims of German atrocities are said to have been initially buried.

However, when the tide of war changed, the German authorities allegedly decided to exhume and burn the victims in order to erase the traces of their crimes. This operation presumably bore the code name Aktion 1005 (see the entry on this.) In order to burn these corpses with open-air incinerations on pyres, a certain amount of wood had to be available.

Most witnesses reporting about the alleged activities of exhuming and burning the victims buried in mass graves did not mention where the wood came from. They seem to have assumed that the wood was simply there. If witnesses gave a breakdown of how many inmates did which job, felling trees and chopping them up is usually not included. Very few inmates mentioned that some of their teammates were tasked with getting firewood, yet the number of inmates having done this is hugely inappropriate for the gigantic task they would have faced.

In the upper part, the following table gives an overview of data claimed by several witnesses regarding corpse-burning scenarios at various alleged crime scenes of the Holocaust. The lower part adds five crime scenes with data following the current orthodox narrative.

The second column lists the claimed number of bodies allegedly cremated on open-air pyres. The third column list the amount of freshly cut wood (in metric tons) that would have been necessary to cremate these bodies, based on an average need of some 250 kg of fresh wood per body. The fourth column gives the surface area of an average 50-year-old spruce forest that would have had to be completely felled and chopped up in order to obtain the amount of wood required, based on an average yield of 450 metric tons of wood per hectare for such a forest, which equals some 201 metric tons of wood growing on an area the size of an American-Football field. The fifth column is intended to help the reader visualize the vast forest area needed.

The sixth column has the number of days which each open-air incineration event is said to have lasted. The last column lists the number of dedicated inmate lumberjacks, working seven days a week, who would have been required to fell and chop up that wood, assuming a daily performance of 0.63 metric tons of wood per inmate.

Note that the inmate team size supposedly involved in these exhumation and cremation activities of the upper part of this table rarely reached 100, and most if not all of them supposedly were (or would have been) busy opening mass graves, extracting bodies, building pyres, sifting through ashes in search of valuables and unburned remains — with handheld flour-type sieves! — and crushing unburned bones with pestles. No one would have had time to get firewood.

In case of the three pure extermination camps listed in the lower part of the table, the number of inmates involved in acquiring wood is also said to have been well below 100 persons in each case.

For Auschwitz, witnesses have made disparate statements about the features of outdoor cremations, thus making calculations difficult. These claims are discussed in the section Holocaust Scenarios of the entry on open-air incinerations.

Note that self-immolating bodies are not part of the scientific literature, as none have ever been discovered during single-body or large-scale cremations. Therefore, the scenarios described by these witnesses, or agreed upon by orthodox scholars, are simply technically impossible.

For details, see the entry for each of these witnesses and places, as well as the entries on open-air incinerations and Aktion 1005.