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1. Soviet Investigations and Forensic Examinations

"During the work on the terrain, I found no mass graves, which, in connection with the statements by the witnesses Romanowski and Wiernik...

On August 9 and 10, 1946, Łukaszkiewicz, along with the surveyor Trautsolt and the court physician Wakulicz, searched for mass graves in the area of the camp Treblinka I. In the forest by the village of Maliszewa, about 500 m south of the camp, a total of 41 mass graves were found, of which 40 had been desecrated; many bodies were strewn around them. One grave was only partially violated, and from it 10 corpses were able to be recovered. The court physician examined 112 skulls and determined that only in two cases a shot in the head had been the cause of death. The entire surface of the graves amounted to 1,607 m². Concerning the number of the bodies discovered, Łukaszkiewicz wrote:

On this occasion, the surveyor Trautsolt drew a map of the area of Treblinka I, on which he indicated the exact position of the graves. Of these, 17 were aligned in a row in a north-south direction; their total length was approximately 510 m.

This report provokes the following reflections:

1. It may well be that a grave of 2 m × 1 m × 1 m can hold up to six bodies, but these measurements correspond to an entirely normal single grave. If one wished to dig mass graves, these would not have been merely one meter wide. Until evidence to the contrary, it is therefore to be assumed that such a grave contained only one body.

2. These (mass-)graves could have been violated only in the period between October 1944 and August 1946, thus by the Poles, the Soviets, or by both simultaneously - but for what reason?

3. If merely the remains of 122 people were found there, as the Polish judge remarks, where, then, were those of the other ca. 6,400?

The likeliest supposition would be that the bodies were dug up by the local authorities and buried at the cemetery of the nearby village, possibly also in the vicinity of the camp, where there is still a cemetery today. In this case, it would of course have been strange that Łukaszkiewicz had heard nothing of it. But there is yet another, more disturbing explanation, to which we shall later return: the alleged violation was presumably done in order to be able to exaggerate the number of victims of Treblinka I. If one takes the three mass graves found by the Soviets in August 1944 as a comparison, then the 41 graves, at the same density, would have been able to hold at most 3,000 bodies. On the other hand, Łukaszkiewicz had carelessly written in his report of December 29, 1945, that

One further question suggests itself: Who were the dead in Treblinka I? One knows with certainty that a typhus epidemic was raging in that camp in the fall of 1943. In fact, a list was kept with the names of 148 prisoners who for the most part had succumbed to this illness from November 12 to December 20, 1943. The epidemic had broken out some months before, and for this reason a car with 11 tons of calcium hypochlorite was sent to Treblinka I on September 20 from the concentration camp at Lublin (Majdanek), which obviously was supposed to be scattered on the layers of bodies. Since around 10,000 prisoners were interned in Treblinka I during the time of its existence, one can assume that the mass graves uncovered by the Soviets and Poles contained the bodies of all - or nearly all - who died there. That is, further graves or traces of mass cremations were not found.