Open-Air Incineration in Pits

The situation in Birkenau, however, was drastically different from that. Not only did the witnesses claim that those pits were very wide, 

310 Only small pieces of the skull were left over which were located in a comer of the pit. Communications of Dr. M. Dragan, whom I helped to investigate the carcass remains in June 1999. 

It is known that in Birkenau the corpses which had accumulated during the typhus epidemic of the summer of 1942 were first buried in mass graves. Due to the danger of the contamination of the ground water, however, they had to be exhumed in the spring of 1943. Since the new cremation facilities still were not capable of functioning at that time, it is possible that at least a portion of the corpses were burned on funeral pyres. For this purpose, as a rule, one removes the turf and the upper layer of topsoil in order to preserve them from damage and to absorb the ashes of the wood and the corpses. But holes many meters 

Indeed, one can unearth in excavations west of the Birkenau camp ashes and bone splinters (whether from humans or cattle remains open) to the depth of several decimeters, intensively mixed with all kinds of refuse (glass and porcelain shards, slag, bits of iron, etc.). Apparently this place served as a rubbish heap for the camp under German administration and/or after the war under Polish administration. 

In his detailed study of aerial photos of the Birkenau camp made by the allied surveillance planes, J.C. Ball has revealed that at no point in time in the summer and autumn of 1944 in the camp or in its environs were large incineration pits—and fuel stockpiles necessary for that—to be seen, let alone flames and smoke, as they are repeatedly attested to.311 He did, however, locate the places were mass graves had existed (see Fig. 58).303 

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