SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 137
Pratt has monitored this for up to 25 months after the burial of the carcasses.
401 466,312 carcasses were buried between the end of March and
7 May 2001 in Cumbria (northern England), and a system for the recovery
of the body fluids was installed. Even as late as 2006 some 240
cubic meters of leachate were collected in a week. 402
During the process of decomposition the soft parts of the carcass
turn into body fluids, and this phase of the process often goes on for
over a year. 403 This process also affects the proteins and the triglycerides
(body fat), which decompose into glycerol and fatty acids. 404
From the point of view of heat technology, the body will lose not only
water – which, when it comes to combustion, would be an advantage
– but also combustible substances, which represents a disadvantage.
Assuming that the human body consists on average of 64% water,
14% fat and 15.3% proteins, 405 a corpse of 60 kg contains 34.80 kg of
water, 8.40 kg of fat, and 9.18 kg of proteins.
The heat consumption for the evaporation of body water and the superheating
of the steam to 800°C thus amounts to [640+(0.493×700)]
� 986 kcal for 1 kg of water. Animal fat has a heating value of some
9,500 kcal/kg, hence, in the thermal balance the heat added by 1 kg of
fat is equal to the heat lost by the vaporization of (9,500÷986=) 9.6 kg
of water. For the proteins with a heat value of about 5,400 kcal/kg this
ratio is roughly 1:5.5 in terms of weight.
Therefore, even assuming an extreme case where the alleged corpses
at Sobibór would have lost their total water content over a period of 4
months, the heat of vaporization thus saved would have been
38.4×[640+(0.493×700)] � 37,800 kcal for each corpse.
401
D. Pratt, “Environmental Impact of Livestock Mortalities Burial,”
http://library2.usask.ca/ theses/available/etd-05212009-
160732/unrestricted/DyanPrattMScThesis.pdf
402
“Foot and Mouth Disease in Cumbria – 2001,”
www.visitcumbria.com/footandmouth htm.
403
Giorgio Canuto, Sergio Tovo, Medicina legale e delle assicurazioni, Piccin, Padova
1996, p.73.
404
“The decay process,”
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/65/04700127/0470012765.pdf; Shari L.
Forbes, “Decomposition Chemistry in a Burial Environment,” in: Mark Tibbert, David
O. Carter (eds.), Soil Analysis in Forensic Taphonomy, CRC Press, Boca Raton (FL)
2008, pp. 205-209.
405
Douglas J. Davies, Lewis H. Mates (eds.), Encyclopedia of Cremation, Ashgate, London
2005, p. 134.