Mass grave uncovered that remained Nazi secret
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Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered some six million Jews across Europe. They killed roughly two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population as the Nazis operated more than a thousand concentration camps in German-occupied Europe. The murders were carried out in a number of different ways, including extermination through labour in concentration camps, and in gas chambers and gas vans at extermination camps.
Among the extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, which comprised more than 40 different concentration and extermination camps, Majdanek and Treblinka.
All three were in German-occupied Poland.
Archaeologists were granted permission to work at the Treblinka site for the Smithsonian Channel documentary ‘Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine’.
Excavations revealed four tiles in different colours that matched eyewitness descriptions of the floor of the gas chambers.
Each tile was stamped with what they believed to be a Star of David, thought to have been part of the Nazis’ deceit that the building was in fact a Jewish-style bathhouse.
Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist also working at the site, told the documentary: “What immediately springs to my mind when I see these is that witnesses who were allowed in the gas chamber area talked about the Star of David actually being on the outside of the gas chamber buildings to build up that illusion that people were going somewhere that was safe.”
It has, however, been suggested that the star was not the Star of David, but instead a manufacturer’s logo.
The letters D and L on the sides of the star have been suggested to be those of Jan Dziewulski and brothers Józef and Władysław Lange, founders of a Polish ceramics factory manufacturing floor tiles.
The logo, others have argued, would have appeared on the underside of the tile and would have not been visible.
Treblinka was one of the deadliest extermination camps.
Situated in a remote forest north-east of Warsaw, it operated between July 1942 and October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the codename for Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate Polish Jews.
Historians estimate between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka, as well as a further 2,000 Romani people.
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More Jews died at Treblinka than at any other camp besides Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Until recently, everything known about Treblinka had been based on eyewitness accounts.
The Nazis thought they had destroyed all evidence of the site, as they knocked down buildings, levelled the earth and planted hundreds of trees.
Yet Prof Colls suspected much evidence of the Nazi horrors remained hidden underground, and a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) survey confirmed her suspicions.
She told LiveScience in 2014: “Treblinka had never been looked at since the period after the war.
“And everybody had assumed that because the history books said it was destroyed, it was.”
The documentary confirmed hard evidence of the existence of the gas chambers. Further research also confirmed that the site where they were excavating was where the gas chambers once stood.
Brick wall sections and foundations confirmed that they were excavating above the gas chambers — they were the only brick buildings in the death camp.
Other excavations at the site found human bones, leading them to uncover three previously unknown mass graves.
Jewish rabbinical law forbids the disruption of a gravesite, so the bones were reburied.
Prof Colls sought input from Jewish authorities the entire time due to the sensitive nature of the work being carried out.
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