Long ago, there was a small place in the Polish countryside where, it was said, up to 1 million human beings met their demise over the course of some 10 months. This small place, comprising only around 50 acres of land, was located about 1.5 miles from the small village of Treblinka (population circa 300). At this remote location, a handful of Germans built a facility in 1942—a transit camp, they called it—intended to temporarily house people undesirable to the German state, to disinfest them of dangerous disease-bearing pests, and then to ship them onward to various locations distant from that state; some of these people died in the camp, some would later be put to forced labor, and others would be simply released in far-flung regions. Sadly, due to the tremendous military struggle of that time and to the eventual defeat of the German state, nearly all of these people were lost to the Western world, never to be heard from again.
As a result of these unfortunate events, the Treblinka Durchgangslager became known to the world as the Treblinka “death camp”—a place where as many as 1 million people (nearly all Jews) were said to have been killed by engine exhaust in specially-designed “gas chambers.” This action, it was said, was a direct consequence of an alleged German policy to kill every Jew in Europe. Thus, this small encampment became a central aspect of the (Jewish-designated) “Holocaust” in which, it is said, some 6 million Jews perished at the hands of the evil Germans.
It is a remarkable story. But is it true? On the face of it, the story seems incredible: An average of some 100,000 Jews killed per month—around 3,300 per day—every day, rain or shine, in cold and snow, for 10 solid months. At times, it was worse than this: Fully half of the overall death toll allegedly occurred in just the first three months of operation (July to September 1942), which implies an average of more than 5,500 per day for those first 90 days.
During those three months, the camp supposedly had three gas chambers (three gassing rooms within one building), with each room measuring only 15 feet by 15 feet—the size of a large bedroom. Therefore, each room had to process some 2,000 people per day, every day, for three months. And since each person takes about 1 square foot of area, the gassing rooms could only hold about 225 people each; thus, the Germans would have had to run something like eight or nine batches per room, per day. And this is not to mention the difficulty of herding hundreds of naked and scared people into a tight little room, over and over again. Incredible.
Finding this facility inadequate after only three months, the Germans allegedly built a “new” larger gas chamber building, with 10 rooms, each roughly 22 by 22 feet; this would have increased the gassing capacity by a factor of seven or more. More than enough, surely.
The killing method was, allegedly, poisonous gas—not the cyanide used at Auschwitz, but something simpler: exhaust gas from diesel engines. This sounds plausible until we learn that diesel engines emit very little of the poisonous carbon monoxide that kills people (unlike a gasoline/petrol engine, which produces a lot). And any engine, of any kind, cannot simply pump exhaust gas into an enclosed, “air tight” room; the back-pressure would increase until the engine stalled. Consequently, any alleged “diesel gassing” procedure collapses on its face.
And then, what to do with the bodies? If the Germans somehow managed to kill a million Jews in just 10 months, they then had to dispose of all those bodies. As the story goes, the Germans first buried all the bodies in mass graves, and then, changing their minds, dug them all up and burned them all to ash on open-air pyres. This is unbelievable on several levels: the need for absurdly-huge pits to bury one million bodies; the difficulty of digging up all those decaying, rotting corpses; the difficulty of stacking them up on “railroad rails” to burn them; the outrageous amounts of wood required to burn those rotting bodies to ash; the tremendous amounts of ash produced (wood and human); and the difficulty of getting rid of all that ash. Incredible to the extreme.
And even if, by some miracle, all that happened, we would expect to find extensive physical evidence of such a monumental crime: remains of gas chambers, disturbed earth to hold one million bodies, and, somewhere, millions of pounds of ash. Not to mention finding unburnable human remains, such as large bones and teeth, again numbering in the millions. Yet, in the now 83 years since the camp was abandoned, no one has found more than the smallest fraction of such things. Once again, an incredible situation. And if it is incredible, why should we believe it?
BBC: Holocaust medal of honour awarded to Treblinka archaeologist
Wikipedia: The Dan David Prize, founded in 2000 by Dan David, is an international group of awards that recognize and support outstanding contributions to the study of history and other disciplines that shed light on the human past. Nine prizes of $300,000 are awarded each year to outstanding early- and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines. The Prize has an annual purse of $3 million, making it the largest history award in the world, including $300,000 funding an international postdoctoral fellowship program at Tel Aviv University, where the Prize is headquartered. The Prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation
A Heroine Arrives
Fear not; into this mirky quagmire rushes a would-be savior: a female British archeologist named Caroline Sturdy Colls. Already in 2010, even before earning her PhD, the then-24-year-old (!) researcher was granted approval for the “first ever forensic and archeological investigation” of Treblinka. She performed further studies in 2012, 2013, 2017, and 2019, using a variety of techniques: Lidar, ground-penetrating radar, differential GPS, laser scanners, and associated technologies. Eventually, limited excavations were performed. All this was done in an attempt to “find Treblinka”—that is, to find the key elements of the story: the gas chambers, the mass graves, and the human remains. Sturdy Colls published a handful of inconsequential papers on her findings between 2012 and 2018, and then—nothing.
Nothing, that is, until now. In July of 2026, fully seven years after completing her on-site investigations, she has finally published, with Cornell University Press, the new book Finding Treblinka: Forensic and Archeological Discoveries. Here she unveils her long-awaited evidence, of finding the gas chambers (both “old” and “new”), finding the mass graves, and finding human remains. It would be a remarkable accomplishment, if it were true. Sadly, and predictably, it fails to achieve its aims. Worse, it calls into serious question her, and others’, motives and intentions regarding Holocaust research.
To put her work here into perspective, let me quickly outline the history of the Treblinka facility. “Treblinka” actually consisted of two distinct areas: a “penal labor camp” known as Treblinka I (T-I) and an “extermination camp” known as Treblinka II (T-II). T-I came first; it was constructed in early 1941 and ready for use by September. It ran until mid-1944, when the advancing Soviets overran the territory. In all, some 20,000 people passed through the labor camp, of whom, we are told, about half died or were killed. Notably, the camp held both Jews and non-Jewish Poles, so it is unclear to this day how many Jews died there; presumably it was in the range of 5,000. Such a figure, however, pales in comparison to the alleged 900,000 or 1 million deaths at T-II, so most Holocaust historians simply by-pass this camp altogether.
But not Sturdy Colls. She spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the labor camp: its history, construction, administration, and various (alleged) heinous killings there. In fact, she dedicates the first five chapters (of 11) to this camp and her findings there, comprising about 40% of her entire book. All this, to address perhaps 0.5% of the alleged “Treblinka” Jewish deaths. This alone is highly revealing; it shows that she is desperate to fluff up her findings, to inflate her data, and to find a “mountain” in this “molehill” of results. Clearly she has so little of substance to say about the main topic—Treblinka II—that she feels the need to offer pages of trivial and inconsequential information that not even conventional Treblinka scholars would bother with.
Indeed, her “findings” in T-I are truly embarrassing. Using her Lidar and other remote sensing, Sturdy Colls’s team identified several areas that “may have been mass graves.” At three of these locations, she conducted “minimally invasive excavations” (p. 133)—Jewish law, it turns out, forbids the desecration of Jewish remains, which also conveniently blocks researchers from learning the full truth. In an area of interest that was 7.4m x 6.5m in size, she dug a shallow trench (EX1). Finding a handful of bones, she “confirmed that a minimum of two individuals were buried there” (p. 134). Not two thousand, or two hundred, but…two. In a second area, of size 9.2m x 6m, she dug trench EX2, again confirming that “human remains of a minimum of two individuals were present (one adult and one child).” A third area, the largest (19m x 17m) revealed bone fragments, partial shoe leather, and a bullet—underwhelming, to say the least.
On to the Extermination Camp
Then finally in Chapter 6, Sturdy Colls gets around to the main target: Treblinka II. Located about a mile from T-I, this alleged extermination camp was begun sometime in spring of 1942, and accepted its first arrivals in July. The claimed numbers are staggering; in July, around 180,000 Jews reached T-II, all immediately gassed. In August, another 140,000. And in September, another 170,000. Sturdy Colls clearly accepts such fantastic figures; she states, without comment, that the “latest research suggests between 800,000 and 1 million people [all Jews] were murdered” there (p. 150).
Chapter 6 then recalls the basics of the early postwar investigations by the Soviets and the Poles. A Soviet report on the camp from August 1944 called it “a huge factory of death,” complete with a cremation trench “200-300m long, 20-25m wide, and 5-6m deep” (p. 152). The Soviets stated with confidence that “about 3 million people were killed” there—an overestimate by at least a factor of three, and more likely a factor of 100.
A year later, an investigation by Polish judge Lukaszkiewicz accepted a gassing time of 15 minutes and asserted that “between 1.3 million and 1.5 million people were murdered at Treblinka II” (p. 166). In November 1945, his team conducted actual excavations at the camp, digging trenches up to 15m long and 2m deep, but finding only “undisturbed soil layers.” (Sturdy Colls adds that, “most likely, the investigators narrowly missed what we now know to be the location of the gas chambers by a few meters” [p. 169]—bad luck!) In sum, the Polish team found “no evidence of mass graves,” and their report observed “there is almost nothing left. … There is no evidence that there was such a large camp here.” This was in 1945; Sturdy Colls thinks she can do better today.
Then in 1947, a survey by the Central Jewish Historical Commission found, incredibly, major items that the Polish team had somehow overlooked, including (says Sturdy Colls) “the 4m long rails used as burning pyres” (p. 174), and more incredibly, “the remains of the gas chambers, including pipes, wires, and ducts.” Sadly, however, there are neither physical remains nor photographic evidence of such things; we must simply take their word.
Chapter 7 takes us through the early conception and construction of T-II, from early 1942 through the first few weeks of operation in July and August of that year—a period Sturdy Colls calls “phase 1” of the camp. Notably, she correctly cites the infamous Wannsee Protocol of January 1942, in which it states that the “final solution” to the Jewish problem will be deportation: “The evacuated Jews will first be taken to so-called transit ghettos, in order to be transported further east from there” (p. 181)—which in fact is precisely what happened. This likely would have been a trigger to establish the T-II transit camp. Her Figure 7.4 (p. 193) provides a sketch of the probable layout of the camp in phase 1, including a walkway (“the tube”) going from the arrival area to the “gassing area,” incorrectly labeled “death camp.” Here we see the “old gas chambers” which allegedly comprised three rooms, each connected to a nearby diesel engine.
Now, we need to be clear about the actual process that would have occurred there, in such a transit camp. Arriving Jews came in dirty, unwashed, and possibly harboring dangerous ticks and lice that could carry the deadly typhus disease—feared by the Germans, not so much for the Jews’ sake, but because they had no interest in allowing a general pandemic to break out. And of course, one cannot use the Jews for labor if they are sick or dying, so there was a double interest in keeping them healthy. So, incoming “dirty” Jews would have been screened, divided into small groups, and routed to a place where they could be washed and disinfested—an area with actual showers and with actual delousing “gas chambers.” Notably, Sturdy Colls admits that there were precisely such delousing chambers in the labor camp T-I (pp. 48-49); so why not here also? The showers were for people, and the “gas chambers” for their clothes, personal items, and linens. Once clean, these Jews would not be allowed to mingle with or contact the “dirty Jews” in the incoming zone; they would have been isolated, detained for a short time, and then sent on to the east, to labor camps there or to other evacuation zones, perhaps even released there. From the perspective of the remaining Jews, such people were gone, vanished, disappeared, “exterminated.”
Obviously, when transiting thousands of people in rough conditions during a major war, there were many problems; plenty of Jews would have died, either in transit to Treblinka or at the camp. They would have died from natural causes (old age, sickness, injury), suicide, communicable diseases; others would have been shot trying to escape or to fight. The camp organizers apparently were expecting some, but not many, such deaths, because they did not build a crematorium to dispose of the dead bodies, as they did at Auschwitz. Apparently they planned to simply dump the bodies into nearby mass graves, cover them over, and leave it at that. This would have sufficed for several thousand such deaths—say, less than 10,000 over the presumed life of the camp—which was apparently all that they anticipated.
Thus, we read in Sturdy Colls’s book that large diggers were brought in to prepare the burial pits. She quotes one source saying that the pits “were several dozen meters long, about 15 meters deep, and about 10 meters wide” (p. 200). She adds that “some were reportedly as large as 50 x 25 x 10m.” But these seem to be gross exaggerations, as we will see.
We can do some quick calculations here. With a mix of corpses large and small, one could likely fit, on average, about eight bodies in a single cubic meter of space. If, say, the Germans anticipated 10,000 deaths, they would have needed (10,000 / 8 =) 1,250 cubic meters of pits to hold these bodies (plus a bit more, to cover them up). This is, frankly, not very large. The Germans could have dug, for example, a single large pit of 12m x 12m, and 10m deep. Or perhaps three shallower ones, each 8m x 10m and just 5m deep. Allowing for sloped sides and space between them, three such mass graves would have only covered around 1/10th of an acre—trivial in a camp of 50 acres. One can see why they never would have bothered building a crematorium.
Reality Sets In
But once the camp began operation in July 1942, all prior calculations fell aside. Deportees immediately began pouring into the camp; that first month alone saw something like 175,000 arrivals, we are told. On Sturdy Colls’s view, all these people were gassed: “5,000 to 7,000 killings per day” at first, “rising to 10,000 to 12,000 per day in the weeks that followed” (pp. 202-203). Above I noted the procedural difficulties with allegedly gassing 6,000 people each day; now double that figure—incredible. On the more rational view, such numbers were of people arriving at the camp, needing to be cleaned, and then shipped out. Of course, more arrivals also meant more deaths, far more than planned. Rather than taking a year to reach 10,000 dead, this figure likely occurred within just two months (assuming a 2% to 3% death rate). Camp commandant Eberl was clearly overwhelmed, as we read from his letters: “the pace is truly breathtaking,” he said. Apparently he was not up to the task; he was removed from his leadership role in September.
The newly-arriving commandant, Franz Stangl, encountered open mass graves and unburied bodies, as the small camp staff struggled to dispose of 200 or 300 corpses per day, along with cleaning and deporting some 5,000 live people per day.
One of Stangl’s first priorities was to increase the disinfestation process, which could no longer keep up with the pace of arrivals. He thus proceeded to build a new delousing facility (“new gas chambers”) with 10 separate rooms; this was active already in October of 1942. Stangl made other improvements to the camp, increasing its overall efficiency and effectiveness. Sturdy Colls provides a modified map of the camp in this new phase (Fig. 8.4, p. 215).
All this was propitious, since, between October and November, nearly 300,000 more Jews passed through the facility, yielding another 6,000 to 9,000 dead bodies.
Into 1943, the pace of arrivals, and burials, declined dramatically from the previous highs. January and February had perhaps 40,000 arrivals each month, which dropped further to around 15,000 in March, 10,000 in April, and 5,000 in May. And then arrivals ceased for good. The reason surely had to do with Soviet advances beginning in early 1943 as the tide was turning and they recaptured eastern territory from the Germans. The front was still far from Treblinka, but the signs were ominous, and Jews could likely no longer be shipped much further to the east. As the ability to deport vanished, so did the need for the camp.
Still, we can agree that perhaps as many as 1 million Jews were sent to Treblinka. If the death rate was, say, 3%, then we can estimate that a total of 30,000 Jews died there. This was likely triple the initial estimate, and required some 3,800 cubic meters of grave space—large, but still manageable.
Contrast this with the requirements to bury a full one million victims, as Sturdy Colls and the orthodox historians would have us believe. Above I showed calculations to bury 10,000 bodies in three modest-sized graves (8 x 10 x 5m). If we must now bury 100 times as many bodies, we need 300 such mass graves. And what, in smaller numbers, consumed only 0.1 acre now will require fully 10 acres—nearly the entire area of the so-called death camp! The total volume would be enormous: some 125,000 cubic meters. If Sturdy Colls wished to find the location of the mass graves, she need only walk around at random, poke a stick into the ground, and the chances are very high that she would have found one. Hundreds of mass graves are very easy to find—if they are there.
But there is a huge twist to this story, as I noted at the outset. According to the conventional account, the Germans decided in April 1943 to dig up those 1 million or so dead bodies and burn them all to ash on railroad rails in the open air. The sheer folly of even attempting such a thing beggars belief and is yet more evidence of the falsity of the standard view. Sturdy Colls wisely defers this whole topic as long as possible; in fact, it is not until some 300 pages into her book that she raises this sticky matter in a serious way.
Diesel Gassing?
But first, she has a more important task: “finding the gas chambers” (Chapter 9). She begins the chapter by again reciting the standard view: that “gas chambers provided the means by which 1.7 million Jews…were exterminated in the Operation Reinhard death camps—Treblinka [ca. 1 million], Belzec [ca. 500,000], and Sobibor [ca. 200,000]” (p. 246). She recounts without dispute some alleged key figures: each of the original three chambers was 5m x 4m (or perhaps 5m x 5m), hermetically sealed, and with a hole in the ceiling. She adds that, into each of these tiny chamber rooms, “estimates vary between seventy-five and eight hundred people” (!) were pushed (p. 253). Above I noted that one average adult requires about 1 square foot of area in which to stand, and these tiny chambers had only, at most, 270 square feet. Thus, it would seem impossible to squeeze more than, say, 300 people into such a room; and yet Sturdy Colls accepts without question the idea that 800 people—about three per square foot—could fit into each room. Incredible.
Sturdy Colls then displays her grasp of technical matters by describing, and implicitly accepting, preposterous claims about the gassing. Asphyxiation, she says, was achieved both by “drawing air out of the chamber and pumping in carbon monoxide” (p. 254). This did the job, she says, in “as little as five to eight minutes.” This idea of drawing air out recalls early claims that a “vacuum” killed the Jews—a claim quickly dropped after the war, along with other equally-preposterous means, such as “steam.” But Ms. Sturdy Colls never once mentions these early, now-abandoned methods; she certainly does not want the reader to begin to doubt those many witnesses whose testimonies are so vital to the whole story.
But the central problem here, as I mentioned, is that the gassing engine is most typically described by witnesses as a diesel, and diesel engines put out very little CO gas. A Google AI summary says this: “Diesel exhaust gas is mostly harmless air components, dominated by nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and carbon dioxide. Less than 1% of the gas mixture consists of harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons. … [Carbon monoxide is] present in small amounts (typically 10 to 500 ppm) due to slight incomplete combustion.” Diesels, therefore, are utterly unsuited for homicidal gassing. Regarding this question of engine type, Sturdy Colls says:
An abundance of testimonies describe how an “engine” or “motor” was used to generate the [CO] gas; while some survivors and guards suggested this engine belonged to a (Soviet) tank [and thus likely a diesel], others referred to it as a “diesel engine” or “tractor engine” [again, a diesel].
She then quotes from a testimony, given under torture, by a Russian SS man, Nikolay Shalayev, who claimed it was a Russian-made “ordinary four-cylinder engine that ran on petrol,” meaning ordinary gasoline; this indeed produces enough CO to be fatal. But this, of course, conflicts with all the diesel claims of witnesses. Sturdy Colls is clearly aware of this whole issue, since she takes some pains to explain all the ways that it might have actually been a gasoline engine. But it is telling, I think, that the word ‘diesel’ appears only twice in the entire book (pp. 255, 272). Clearly this is a sensitive issue for orthodox researchers; it undermines the alleged gassing deaths of 1.7 million Jews, after all. She clearly does not want the reader to start asking troublesome questions about engine type.
Finally, I have to note the obvious: If indeed the Germans were able to pack 300 or more people into a tiny, air-tight room, then they didn’t need any gas at all. Just close the door, wait an hour, and everyone would be dead from oxygen depletion. The whole engine-gassing scheme collapses under scrutiny.
For all this, the occasional bit of truth slips from her pen. “It is extremely perplexing,” she says at one point, “as to why individuals directly involved in building the camp might offer such different accounts of the gas chambers’ appearance” (p. 257). Actually, not perplexing at all: There were in fact no homicidal gas chambers, and people who felt compelled to describe such things naturally would vary in their remarks. They might recall a small barrack or power station shed, and having seen such real things, could easily incorporate elements of them into imagined “gas chambers.” This, combined with the occasional outright liar, can easily account for the many conflicting descriptions of such chambers.
Striking Paydirt
Where, then, are the remains of the gas chambers? This is the big question and the main reason for Sturdy Colls and her work. So we are gratified when, finally, on page 258, she begins to provide her “archeological findings” on the chambers. The next ten pages are dedicated to her results related to the “old gas chambers” and their alleged engine room. First she located a large subsoil depression in the large grassy field near the present-day obelisk; there she found brick fragments which, to her, are a good sign because “the only buildings constructed from brick were the gas chambers.” Using her GPR, she identified an area 22m x 15m, “consistent with structural remains.” She then dug a small trench, finding “an abundance of personal items”—of the sort that victims might “clandestinely” take to the gas chambers, so she says.
Finding more brick samples, she collected them and sent them off to a chemistry lab for analysis. The lab found that the bricks “had a higher emission rate of carbon monoxide, [which] may indicate the presence of chemically bound CO” (p. 263). In other words, the lab supposedly found that the bricks had been exposed to “artificial” rather than “natural” CO, implying—a gas chamber! On its face, it seems highly dubious that baked-clay bricks can retain signs of their CO exposure after laying in the ground for 80 years. And indeed, Google AI confirms that this is impossible; CO is a volatile gas that does not form lasting chemical bonds with clay minerals. Is she (or her lab) lying to us?
Ironically, both soot and complex hydrocarbons would form a lasting bond with brick, and could be detected decades later; so too would lead from the leaded diesel used at that time. But Sturdy Colls did not look for these! (I wonder why…)
A second trench was dug in the same area, searching for the engine room. She found tile fragments, wire fragments, more personal belongings, teeth, and dentures. Nothing was found, however, to indicate the presence of any gassing engine—or any engine of any sort, for that matter.
On, then, to the “new” enlarged gas chambers. Regarding this most-important of topics and Sturdy Colls’s long-awaited archeological findings, we are sorely disappointed: she offers us only four pages of discussion. Four pages! In a book of nearly 500 pages. Arguably the single most important revelation she has to offer, the primary reason for her years of work—and the alleged cause of the demise of some 500,000 Jews—all reduced to four pages.
In the lead-up to these results, she again recounts witness testimony, including a “curious detail”: that the new chambers apparently took “at least 45 minutes” to kill, versus the “15 to 20 minutes” for the old. Despite this inefficiency, she states that, “on average, it appears that around 10,000 to 12,000 people were killed per day” during the latter part of 1942. Even for a chronic exaggerator, this is impossible; it would imply between 300,000 and 360,000 per month, or between 1.2 and 1.4 million, just for the final four months of that year. Ridiculous—apparently, even basic math skills elude Ms. Sturdy Colls.
As to the results themselves, she begins with a large area of “reflective material” in the ground, measuring 44m x 20m, which was again “consistent with structural remains.” Unfortunately, excavations from 2013 “did not identify any in situ building remnants” (p. 274). Two further trenches were dug there in 2017, yielding “very few objects.” She did, however, find remains of old “post holes,” suggesting that the ground level there was once much lower than today. Exasperated, Sturdy Colls ends this most-vital discussion by noting that “T-II was entirely leveled when the Nazis liquidated the camp,” which is why she found nothing. Trying to put a positive spin on things, she speculates that “some of the masonry and items from the area believed to be the Old Gas Chambers could, in fact, have belonged to the New Gas Chambers” (p. 277). Sadly, “[German] efforts to hide the newer killing facilities appear to have been much more extensive than at their earlier counterpart.” Well! Those nasty but clever Nazis did such a good job at erasing the evidence that this only proves their cleverness and evilness! For Sturdy Colls, the absence of evidence proves, not that such things never existed, but only that they were fiendishly eliminated. Take that, you deniers!
And yet, in the very next paragraph, she has the gall to state: “Historical and archeological research undertaken at T-II … was able to confirm the exact location of the Old and New Gas Chambers for the first time” (p. 277). So the lying, deceptive Ms. Sturdy Colls is hell-bent on giving us exactly what her sponsors paid for: the Treblinka gas chambers.
More Vanished Evidence
The final fiasco in this book of fiascoes comes in Chapter 10: “Hidden Crimes.” Here we arrive at the final stage of the alleged destruction of the Jews. After burying some 1 million bodies between July 1942 and April 1943, the Germans allegedly had a change of heart and decided to dig up and burn all the bodies—and they allegedly did so, in a period of just four months, using only wood fires and open-air incineration, according to orthodoxy. This is ludicrous on several counts, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume this happened. As the story goes, the Germans then dumped the ash of those 1 million corpses back into the empty pits and then filled them with dirt, leveling it all over and planting flowers and vegetables; the end result, after 80 years, is the open green field we see today in Treblinka. (I have been there twice, and walked those fields myself.) Finding these pits is of huge significance to the overall Holocaust story, arguably even more important than finding gas chambers.
If in fact this happened, there would remain today—and easily detectable—disturbed earth corresponding to the many pits that were dug and refilled—a total of some 125,000 cubic meters, as we recall from above. As I noted, these refilled pits would have to exist all over the present-day grassy field, such that one could scarcely avoid finding them, especially with ground-penetrating radar. And any core sample would reveal extensive ash (human and wood), bone fragments, and teeth. This alone could prove the conventional case: just finding anything close to 125,000 cubic meters of disturbed earth refilled with bone fragments and ash. Case closed!
So, what did Sturdy Colls actually find? Chapter 10 opens with more history, followed by discussions of train arrivals, mass shootings, “revenge killings,” “slow death in the gas chambers” (allegedly, some people spent 24 or even 48 hours in the gas chambers, and were still alive!), violence against women, etc. On page 292, she reiterates the burial history and procedure, citing witness claims of large graves of 80m x 20m, or pits that were 30m or 40m across. Again frustrated, Sturdy Colls notes that “the exact number of mass graves that were created … is difficult to discern” (p. 294). (Why? You have a GPR system!) She cites more witnesses, concluding that the likely number was quite small, perhaps only three or four large graves.
Now, if we assume four graves, in order to hold the 1 million bodies, each would have to be over 30,000 cubic meters in size. If we assume a depth of 10m, then the area of each would have to be something like 150m x 20m. This, frankly, is huge: a 60-foot-wide trench, 30 feet deep, and 1.5 times the length of an American football field. And there would be four such monstrosities—all refilled with dirt and ash, and easily detectable. Easy to find, easy to confirm—case closed!
But before revealing her precious archeological evidence, she takes yet more time to explain to the reader the origins of the cremation process. Camp survivor Szmul Rajzman explains that the German SS decided that burying all those bodies was “not such a good idea, because someday those ditches would be dug up” and the evil deed exposed. Sporadic burnings began, she says, in mid-1942, but things did not really heat up until April of 1943, when the Germans allegedly went full-bore on the cremations. Five or six “grates” (or “furnaces,” or “roasts”) were built with railroad rails, each 10m long, and situated just 0.5m above the ground, to allow space for firewood.
Sturdy Colls then asserts, along with witnesses, that between 1,000 and 3,000 bodies were laid on each pyre, meaning that “12,000 bodies could be burned at once” (actually, if 6 pyres held 3,000 bodies, that would be 18,000 at a time—but Ms. Sturdy Colls is unbothered by such arithmetical technicalities). The pyres supposedly burned for just five hours before fully consuming their victims.
Lest we be too gullible here, we need to check her assertions. On such a metal pyre, one can place about four corpses per meter of length; a 10m-long rail grid could therefore hold about 40 bodies on one layer. If we tried to stack 1,000 bodies, we would need (1,000 / 40 =) 25 layers—meaning a stack about 25 feet high (about one foot of height per average body). If the reader thinks this is actually possible, I have a bridge to sell you. In reality, five or six layers of decomposing bodies are all that could possibly be stacked up. If we think that the Germans could have placed 3,000 bodies on a single pyre, they would need 75 layers, which is sheer fantasy. Sturdy Colls is passing along nonsense to us in the guise of truth.
She then imparts more nonsense: the Germans allegedly developed new burning techniques, “such as layering women on the bottom of the piles (because they burned faster)” (p. 296). This is absurd and has no basis in reality; it is mere wartime propaganda. She continues, noting that at first the Germans considered using fuel from the gas chambers to aid the burning, but they discovered that “it was easier to burn exhumed corpses without it.” Under no circumstances do corpses burn themselves; they always need a fuel source, such as wood, oil, or diesel fuel. (The wood requirements, incidentally, would be gargantuan—something like 175,000 tons of wood to consume a million corpses; but I set that whole issue aside.)
Of the millions of unburned bones (and teeth) that would have inevitably resisted open-air incineration, Sturdy Colls has an explanation: an “ash brigade” was tasked with “crushing burnt bones.” The bones were “milled and ground into a flour-like powder,” placed in “special bags,” and reburied in the pits. Really? Of one million bodies? One million skulls, ground to powder? Two million femurs? Thirty-two million teeth, ground to dust? In four months? A reply is scarcely necessary; her credibility is zero.
The Findings…
Finally, on page 299, we arrive at the “forensic archeological evidence” for all this digging, burning, and re-burying—again, arguably the single most decisive bit of proof that she might present. Unsurprisingly, we are again disappointed. Sturdy Colls offers us a mere three pages of text, along with a few diagrams.
She begins this small section with a welcome surprise: an open admission of the many difficulties of mass open-air burning. I quote her at length:
In a conversation described by [Jewish survivor] Glazar, the work-Jews at Treblinka II considered the problems associated with the complete cremation of human bodies: “they are trying to find ways to hide the traces; they are burning the corpses. But they aren’t going to find it so easy—even one corpse doesn’t burn easily, hundreds of thousands of corpses?” Certainly, popular misconceptions exist regarding cremation, in terms of the belief that a body will be totally reduced to ash. As Steven A. Symes et al. note, “during combustion and with increasing damage to soft tissue and bone, a full spectrum of color changes are observed and range from natural beige, to carbonized (black), gray with blue tints, gray, and then to white, with the last representing full calcination.” Numerous studies by forensic scientists have demonstrated that total eradication of bone requires extremely high temperatures and prolonged exposure to fire. For example, single bodies (of an average weight and height) in indoor crematorium settings typically require temperatures of between 1,600 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit for a period of at least two to two and a half hours, after which they still need to be pulverized by well-engineered cremulators to reduce them to ash. Hence, multiple bodies require higher temperatures and/or longer exposure to achieve full calcination, after which they too will require further interventions to make them unidentifiable as bone. (p. 299; footnotes deleted)
All this constitutes a remarkable concession; revisionists have been saying exactly this for years. She continues:
Additionally, Christophe Snoek and R. J. Schulting have shown that the temperatures and duration required for full calcination (turning white) of remains are unlikely to be achieved on outdoor pyres due to the influence of wind, rain, the position of the body on the fire, accelerants used, etc. Surgical implants and teeth are also more likely to withstand hotter and more prolonged burning and thus are more likely to survive. Site visits and archaeological surveys have provided evidence that confirms such trends. (ibid.)
So: We have here an explicit admission, backed by technical footnotes, stating that, practically speaking, it is nearly impossible to quickly incinerate masses of human bodies, let alone decomposing bodies. And yet, she implies, it happened all the same—a literal miracle there in the Polish countryside.
But what did she actually find? Areas of “distinctive lichen” covering the ground in the forested parts of the camp (it turns out that her fancy scanning devices are useless in forests); “these areas may well represent ash disposal sites.” Sure.
Out in the open grassy areas, she found “a large pit measuring 26m x 17m” (p. 301). Sadly, the depth could not be determined because it exceeded the four-meter limit of her electrical imager and GPR. But this is more obfuscation. I am not a scanning specialist, but I know that the effective depth of GPR systems depends on their frequency; high-frequency scanners are limited to perhaps 4 or 5 meters, but lower-frequency units can go much deeper, to 30 meters or more. Could Sturdy Colls, with her wealthy sponsors, not afford the appropriate scanner?
Let’s help her out. If her 26 x 17 pit was 5m deep, it could hold about 17,000 bodies; if 10m deep, about 35,000 bodies. Even at the 10m-depth, the Germans would have needed 29 such pits to accommodate their 1 million corpses. Once again, easy to find, if they are there.
She then found five more pits, with combined surface area of 1,385 square meters (depth again undetermined). If, as before, all five were 10m deep, they could hold about 110,000 bodies altogether—perhaps 10 percent of the required total.
Crucially, however, she inspected none of these, sampled none, and had no depth measurements. Of these alleged sites, she has literally no evidence whatsoever. She is reduced to pleading with the reader to believe her:
Given their location in the area thought to contain most of the mass graves, their size, and their proximity to the memorial, there is a compelling case for arguing that they represent body disposal sites. While it could be argued that they might represent areas of postwar looting activity, their linearity suggests that they likely predated such actions even if they were later affected by them. (p. 301)
This is virtual surrender. She has nothing.
On the next page, she begs forgiveness of the reader: “Without intrusive activity, it is not possible to conclusively determine the nature of these pits.” And “intrusive activity” is prohibited by Jewish law, so it won’t be happening any time soon at Treblinka or any other alleged death camp. How terribly convenient.
She closes the chapter with resignation: “For several reasons, it will never be possible to fully chronicle the violent acts and efforts to hide the corpses of the victims at Treblinka-II” (p. 307). In other words, we will never find the requisite evidence, so we simply must have faith that it is true.
The Death Knell for Treblinka
In the end, despite a large budget and years of effort, Caroline Sturdy Colls was unable to find or present definitive evidence of any of the key features of an extermination camp: the gas chambers, the burial pits, or the ash and bone remains. Finding a “gas chamber” was doomed to failure from the start; even if she found intact remains of a brick building with three (or 10) rooms, its purpose would remain speculative. Her attempt to find traces of “exhaust carbon monoxide” on brick fragments is a bad joke at best.
Her study of burials and human remains fares no better. By my rough assessment, her collective evidence shows that, indeed, many thousand people (presumably Jews, although we are uncertain) died in the camp (due to unknown causes), many were buried, and many were cremated. But the combined evidence points to some tens of thousands, at most. We can accept that perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 Jews died at Treblinka, none of whom were killed in a diesel-exhaust gas chamber. While tragic, these deaths are just 2% or 3% of the claimed figures. If the entire “Holocaust” should turn out comparably, then we might have, say, 100,000 or 200,000 total Jewish deaths, rather than “6 million.” For any rational person, this would be good news. For a guilt- and power-obsessed Jewish Lobby, however, it is a nightmare.
I think we can see now the fatal flaw in Sturdy Colls’s entire project. She never really undertakes to find out what actually happened. Instead, she presumes what she is trying to prove: she unquestioningly accepts the entire conventional Treblinka story, with its diesel chambers and 1 million victims. And she then sets out to prove her assumptions—but fails miserably.
Any good detective or crime-scene investigator would go into such a situation objectively and neutrally. Take the measurements, collect the data, consult with witnesses and experts, and then independently construct a likely chain of events. This is what any competent police department does on a daily basis. It gives credibility and impartiality to the outcome. But here, the outcome is already established: “diesel gas chambers,” “1 million dead,” “buried then burned.” No other conclusion is permissible. Thus, when the actual data makes a mockery of this fiction, the investigator—Ms. Sturdy Colls—is left looking like a fool or a stooge. Or both.
As I suggested in my title to this essay, truth, in the end, was not lost; it was found. Sturdy Colls has failed her Jewish sponsors but done a great service for humanity. She has driven the final nail into the Treblinka coffin. A 16-year-effort to confirm the orthodox story has come to naught; all critical evidence is lacking; the story collapses. Any tales of homicidal gas chambers or of hundreds of thousands of murder victims at Treblinka are nonsense. They lie in the realm of fantasy-fiction. And anyone pushing this fable as the truth—or worse, enforcing it at gunpoint—are contemptible at best and criminal at worst.
We need never accept this fiction as truth, and we need never feel any guilt, or make any amends for it, ever again. Things are looking up—thanks to the intrepid Caroline Sturdy Colls.
David Skrbina, PhD, is a former professor of philosophy from the University of Michigan, Dearborn. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including The Jesus Hoax (2nd ed., 2024), The Metaphysics of Technology (Routledge, 2015), and Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, 2017).
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