Damjanović, Momčilo

Momčilo Damjanović was evidently the only person to testify in front of a Yugoslavian war-crimes commission about the alleged exhumation and cremation of bodies from mass graves containing the victims of German atrocities in Serbia during World War II. His declaration is dated 7 February 1945, and contains the following peculiar claims:

• He claimed that 69,400 bodies were buried near the Semlin Camp, although the orthodoxy’s current claim is that only some 12,000 bodies were buried there.
• Of the 12,000 buried bodies, 68,000 were supposedly exhumed and cremated by the time Damjanović managed to escape after 36 days of working on this task.
• He claimed that his team of some 100 inmates took 700 bodies out of a grave and piled them up like cordwood to a height of 2.5 meters. Only afterwards did they build a pile of wood half a meter high, and the bodies cremated on that. This clearly indicates that Damjanović had no experiences at all with building a pyre.
• Damjanović very clumsily described a device that, judging by the function he describes, would have been an excavator built on a railway car. It was supposedly used to transport two corpses at a time from a mass grave on rails to a burning pyre, onto which the two bodies were deposited. However, reaching with an excavator’s shovel into a burning fire would have destroyed any hydraulics connected to it, so this is obviously mere fantasy. Again, this shows that Damjanović had no idea that one builds a pyre with alternating layers of wood and bodies first, and then sets it ablaze.
• Damjanović claimed that the location of the pyre was moved each time a new mass grave was opened. In other words, the railcar had to be moved as well, to a new set of tracks, via an intermediate set of moving tracks. No sane person would have used a railcar excavator for such a task.
• Damjanović claimed that this magical machine allowed them to burn 1,200 bodies a day. For this, the railroad excavator had to move 600 times forth and back between grave and pyre. For an 18-hour workday, this amounts to not even two minutes for an entire round trip.
• Cremating an average human body during open-air incinerations requires some 250 kg of freshly cut wood. Cremating 68,000 bodies thus requires some 17,000 metric tons of wood. This would have required the felling of all trees growing in a 50-year-old spruce forest covering almost 38 hectares of land, or more than 85 American football fields. An average prisoner is rated at being able to cut some 0.63 metric tons of fresh wood per workday. To cut this amount of wood within five weeks (36 days) that this operation supposedly lasted would have required a work force of some 750 dedicated lumberjacks just to cut the wood. Damjanović claimed his unit consisted only of some 100 inmates, all busy digging out mass graves, extracting bodies and building pyres. He said nothing about where the firewood came from.

This testimony relates to one of many events claimed to have been part of the alleged German clean-up operation that the orthodoxy calls Aktion 1005. The above exposition demonstrates that Damjanović’s scenario is detached from reality. Its claimed features and dimensions cannot be based on experience, but on mere propaganda, imagination and delusion.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2022c, pp. 701-705.)