Technology Points to Missing Graves
February 08, 2012
New York (JTA) -- Scientists using ground-probing electronics may have discovered the missing mass graves at the site of Treblinka, one of the Nazis' most notorious death camps.
No actual bodies were found and the graves were not excavated, in keeping with Jewish law, but bones and bone fragments were discovered in the ground, according to Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist at Straffordshire University in Britain who headed the research.
The underground structures detected by her equipment outlined what most likely are the graves.
Historians believe as many as 850,000 people, mostly Jews and some Roma, or Gypsies, died at Treblinka.
Although eyewitnesses told of the existence of mass graves, the Germans did everything they could to cover up their crimes, and the inability of researchers to find them was used by Holocaust deniers to claim large-scale murder did not occur at Treblinka.
Sturdy Colls used aerial photographs from the 1940s, satellite imagery, GPS mapping devices and new ground-penetrating radar. The radar could not detect corpses but could detect differences between the ground and disturbances and inconsistencies in the ground, such as buried objects, in 11 areas.