Soldiers also mentioned cases in which the corpses of murdered Jews were exhumed and burnt. The operation took place under the command of SS Standartenführer Paul Blobel in summer 1942 and was given the code name “Action 1005.” In it, Jewish concentration camp inmates were forced to dig up the bodies and burn them. In order to destroy the victims’ remains more efficiently, Blobel came up with special types of bonfires and devices for grinding up bones. The idea was to destroy evidence of the mass murders, but the secret still got out:
MÜLLER-RIENZBURG: At LUBLIN the fellows told us they were in a blue funk that the foreign powers would hit upon their communal graves, so they dug out the corpses with dredgers. Near LUBLIN there’s another of those large burial grounds.
BASSUS: German burial grounds?
MÜLLER-RIENZBURG: Yes. It reeked of human flesh for weeks. Once they had to fly over there in an aircraft and they actually smelt the smell of burning in the air.
BASSUS: Was that near LUBLIN?
MÜLLER-RIENZBURG: At some concentration camp or other in POLAND.
DETTE: He (IO) said: “Do you know how many Poles have been shot? Two million.” That may be true.229
Other soldiers speaking on different occasions also discussed the details of the extermination of European Jews:
ROTHKIRCH: The gas facilities were all in Poland near LEMBERG.230 There are large gas facilities there. I know that, but I don’t know anything else. Look here, gassing isn’t the worst thing.
RAMCKE: I’ve only heard of such things here in the POW camp.231
ROTHKIRCH: I’m an “Administration General” and the people here have already interrogated me. It was near LVOV. Actually we washed our hands of it all because these atrocities took place in a military area. At LVOV in particular I was always receiving reports of these shootings and they were so bestial that I wouldn’t care to tell you about them.
RAMCKE: What happened?
ROTHKIRCH: To start with the people dug their own graves, then ten Jews took up their position by them and then the firing squad arrived with tommy-guns and shot them down, and they fell into the grave.
Then came the next lot and they, too, were paraded in front of them and then fell into the grave and the rest waited a bit until they were shot. Thousands of people were shot. Afterwards they gave that up and gassed them. Many of them weren’t dead and a layer of earth was shovelled on in between. They had packers there who packed the bodies in, because they fell in too soon. The SS did that, they were the people who packed the corpses in.232
Children represented a particular problem at mass executions because they often didn’t follow instructions or die quickly enough.233 The descriptions of the executions of children are among the most grisly events recorded in Holocaust literature and research. It is no wonder, therefore, that Edwin Graf von Rothkirch expresses his disgust.
At a somewhat later point in time, he continues his story with a further episode:
