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.

Witness/Location	Bodies	Wood Needed [t]	Hectares*	Football Fields*	Days	Lumberjacks†
Gerhard Adametz/Babi Yar	100,000	25,000	56	125	35	1,134
Gerhard Adametz/Riga	≥32,000	≥8,000	≥18	≥40	135	≥94
Szymon Amiel/Białystok	42,800	10,700	24	53	57	298
Semen Berlyant/Babi Yar	70,000	17,500	39	87	35	800
A. Blyazer/Babi Yar	68,000	17,000	38	85		15, ca. 5 years
Isaak Brodsky/Babi Yar	70,000	17,500	39	87	35	800
David Budnik/Babi Yar	120,000	30,000	67	149	35	1,360
Heinrich Chamaides/Lviv	120,000	30,000	67	149	160	300
Momčilo Damjanović/Semlin	68,000	17,000	38	85	36	750
Vladimir Davydov/Babi Yar	70,000	17,500	39	87	35	800
Iosif Doliner/Babi Yar	100,000	25,000	56	125	35	1,134
Yuri Farber/Ponary	38,000	9,500	21	47	75	200
Szloma Gol/Ponary	80,000	20,000	44	100	180	176
Yakov Kaper/Babi Yar	120,000	30,000	67	149	35	1,360
Avraham Karasik/Białystok	22,000	5,500	12	27	57	153
Moische Korn/Lviv	120,000	30,000	67	149	160	300
Vladislav Kuklia/Babi Yar	100,000	25,000	56	125	35	1,134
David Manusevich/Lviv	200,000	50,000	111	249	160	500
Leonid Ostrovsky/Babi Yar	62,500	15,625	35	78	35	700
Stefan Pilunov/Mogilev	30,000	7,500	17	37	16	744
Yakov Steyuk/Babi Yar	50,000‡	12,500	28	62	35	567
Ziama Trubakov/Babi Yar	125,000	31,250	69	156	35	1,417
Leon Weliczker/Lviv	300,000	75,000	167	374	160	750
Matvey Zaydel/Ponary	80,000	20,000	44	100	150	211
Babi Yar	100,000	25,000	56	125	35	1,134
Belzec	434,500	108,625	241	541	120	1,437
Majdanek (Harvest Festival)	≥17,000	4,250	9	21	45	150
Sobibór	≥170,000	42,500	94	212	365	185
Treblinka	≥700,000	175,000	389	872	122	2,277
* On average, a 50-year-old spruce forest yields some 450 metric tons of wood per hectare (100 m × 100 m) or 201 tons per American-Football field (Colombo, p. 161). Fell all trees of such a forest of this size to obtain the required amount of wood. † Number required for the time span claimed, which varies from case to case. Blyazer gave the number of lumberjacks in his team (15), who would have finished their work sometime in 1948. ‡ In a later interview, Steyuk doubled the number of bodies burned. See the values listed for Adametz, Doliner, Kuklia.