Burial space, part 1: comparison with Katyn

UPDATE: the scale on the map of Katyn used in this post is inaccurate. See corrections here.

How much space does it take to bury a given number of bodies? This has typically been argued between revisionists and anti-revisionists in terms of volume, but I want to focus on something even simpler: surface area. How much space do mass graves take?

Let’s take Sobibor as an example, which offers the anti-revisionists their strongest position out of the three Reinhardt camps. This is what the Sobibor mass graves are supposed to look like (we’ll ignore the question of the (in)accuracy in the representation of the archaeological data):


Let’s highlight the burial area:


Using the scale from the hectare grid (which unfortunately isn’t quite consistent, which introduces a few percent uncertainty, but it really doesn’t matter), we can calculate (via pixel counting software) that this region has an area of 1.11 hectares.

Now let’s compare this with the graves in Katyn forest, which held a little over 4,000 bodies.


We’ll ignore the outlying grave 8, and focus on the area of the rest:


Using the scale given and pixel counting, it comes to 1.65 hectares. But the area containing the Sobibor graves was only 1.11 hectares. Therefore if the Germans were equally efficient in their burials as the Soviets, we would expect them to be able to hold ~2,800 bodies. Now, the Katyn graves were not shallow (bodies were buried up to 12 deep), but the deeper depth of the Sobibor graves might still account for a factor of, say, 3 or 4 of difference in grave capacity. But if the holocaust story is correct, the Germans buried 80,000 bodies in the graves at Sobibor, which is 80000/2800 = ~28.6 times more efficient than the Soviets!

These numbers will be even more extreme at Belzec and Treblinka. For example, at Treblinka the entire upper camp was only ~4 hectares, or ~2.5 time the area of the Katyn burial area. Even if we use 700,000 as an absolute minimum figure for Treblinka upper camp burials, that means that even if the Germans used the entire upper camp for burials (so no space for the gas chambers, the cremation pyres, the barracks…) then they were 700000/(2.5*4100) = 68 times more efficient than the Soviets in their use of burial space!

The findings of Sturdy Colls only make this far, far worse for the hapless exterminationists…

Remember all those early reports of Treblinka that said that it was a few square kilometers in size? The people who invented them knew what they were doing, because they realized that burying many hundreds of thousands of people takes a lot of space.


2 Responses to Burial space, part 1: comparison with Katyn

  1. Pingback: Burial space, part 1a: Katyn corrections | Holocaust History Channel

  2. Pingback: Burial space: the Reinhardt camps vs the real world - Stormfront

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