What measurement are you using?
Density, calculated from your claimed figures.
Mass graves are not similar to garbage dumps. Human bodies have strong bone structure and when crammed in burial pits its resist to high quantity of pressure.
Mass graves certainly
are similar to garbage dumps. Like garbage, human corpses decompose and leak fluids.
Decomposition in high rate only occurs with bodies not crammed and exposed to open air environment. Human corpses buried and crammed have a low decomposition rate.
This is a handwave.
The first bodies were buried in March 1942, victims from the Lublin and Lwow ghettos. Exhumation to cremate the bodies did not even take place until the end of 1942, more than 9 months later.
Roberto specifically modelled this, and you have yet to discuss that model.
Bodies distributed in 33 burial pits during circa 8 months indicates that a pit was filled and covered at least each 8 days. So there was no condition to a high rate of decomposition.
This ignores the evidence of swelling and falling in the mass graves reported by witnesses. It
also ignores the archaeological evidence of layers of corpses sometimes up to 2m thick in the graves which were themselves not much more than 5m deep. Evidence from other camps utilising mass graves suggests that the bottom-most layers were so decomposed that they could hardly be exhumed. All this is discussed in the mass graves chapter.
The "conservative" formula developed by Roberto Muehlenkamp is deceitful
You still don't get it.
Roberto used Bay's model and correlated with the average weights for the height of men in Bay's model. He then used a figure that was
lower than the actual average weight of a man of that height. In fact, his figures are very close to one of the 27-year old adult males in
Provan's experiment, who was 67 inches tall and weighed 62kg clothed, not 68 inches tall like a 'Vitruvian man' and not 66kg naked like the contemporary average weight for a man 68 inches tall.
So your claim of 'deceit' is actually entirely counterproductive, because Roberto was being conservative. You just shot yourself in the foot, again.
and the estimation of the weight is a sheer exaggeration.
No, it's not.
I disagree since you did not provided any calculation or evidence to support your assertion.
The evidence was already stated: garbage dumps have optimum densities of 0.8 to 1.2 tons per cubic metre. One can easily compare these figures with the figure produced by multiplying the average weight of 'Vitruvian men' by the modelled calculation of 10.7 such 'Vitruvian men' per cubic metre. This produces a density of 0.66 to 0.7 tons/cubic metre.
Those figures are lower than found in garbage dumps.
A further checksum can be generated by taking the total number of Belzec victims and the hypothesised average weight of 34kg, to produce a figure of 14,773.272 tons. Divided by the 21,310 cubic metres of grave capacity, the hypothetical density would thus be 0.693 tons/cubic metre.
Can this be achieved? It is exceeded in garbage dumps routinely. It would be achieved on the basis of Bay's model. Decomposition would certainly help pack the graves more tightly over the course of many months, in all cases after swelling lifted up the pile of bodies over the grave surface before collapsing down again, a phenomenon reported from many other mass graves of animals as well as humans.
Charles A Bay used a hypothetical model.
Yes. So? Hypothetical models are perfectly valid starting points to establish parameters.
His experiment is not based on a physical test like the one did by Charles D Provan.
Yet the results of the hypothetical model and Provan's physical experiments converge perfectly well. Bay's hypothetical model implies a density of 0.66 to 0.7 tons/cubic metre. Dividing this weight by the average weight of a Belzec victim produces a figure of 19.5 bodies per cubic metre instead of 10.7 bodies per cubic metre.
What Roberto did, as should be obvious to any sentient person, is apply a
cross-check on this calculation (which operates in only one dimension, weight) by also looking at Provan's experiment, which offers another perspective since it looked specifically at volume.
The two perspectives converge because Provan's experiment proved that 18.2 people (American, healthy, clothed even!) could fit into a cubic metre. It is plain as day that there is not much difference between 18.2 and 19.5. Thus, the one-dimensional calculation using only weight is not nearly as inaccurate as you claim.
Moreover:
you yourself used the 0.44 cubic metre dimension of the experiment in your pseudoscientific calculation, yet ignored the patently obvious conclusion that if 8 clothed people (a mix of adults-children-toddler) who are breathing can fit into 0.44 cubic metres, then 18.2 clothed people (also a mix of adults-children-toddlers) who are breathing will fit into a whole cubic metre.
But your calculations ended up producing a different figure, because your equations were designed to obfuscate.
You just repeated the inaccurate formula of Roberto Muehlenkamp:
x = (217000*z)/(327*y)
y = Body Mass (Kg)
z = Burial Pit Volume (m^3)
And you haven't demonstrated that there is actually anything inaccurate in Roberto's simple calculations. Adding xyzs obfuscates what is plain as day from the model and the experiment.
Charles D Provan provided results from a physical experiment, Charles A Bay did not.
Yet the results converge very closely.
The calculation I made respect the proportions of adults, children and a toddler inside Charles D Provan box.
But the proportions of Provan's subjects still produced a density of 18.2 people per cubic metre. Your calculations are clearly wrong.
Roberto Muehlenkamp calculations and you completely ignore this fact:
107 (...) Applying Polish ghetto weights to Provan's test-group members (i.e. 43 kg for each of the three adults and 16 kg for each of the five children), the average weight would be [(3x43)+(5x16)]÷8 = 26.13 kg, and the calculated concentration would be 663.40÷26.13 = 25.39 corpses per cubic meter. This means that, if the age and sex distribution of half-starved Polish ghetto Jews deported to Belzec had been like that of Provan's test group, the 21,310 cubic meters of grave space estimated by Kola could have taken in over 540,000 dead bodies.
LOL. Roberto proceeded on the very rough assumption of two adults (of equal weight) to one child. Provan had 3 adults and 5 children (including one toddler), all being healthy Americans in the 1990s and not starved Polish ghetto Jews of the 1940s. They averaged 33.25kg per person.
If two adult Polish Jews weighed on average 43kg and a child 16kg, as you "accepted" for the purpose of trying to refute the calculation based on 34kg, then if there are three adults and 5 children (which rounds up the toddler), the average weight is indeed no longer 34kg but 26.13kg per person. This is exceedingly simple arithmetic.
And yes, Roberto then proceeds to apply the same single-dimension comparison regarding weight to the hypothetical model to produce an expression of potential, 540,000 bodies in the grave space. Which is more than 100,000 more bodies than needed to be buried, since only 434,508 Jews were deported to Belzec.
Incidentally, the deportees were the subjects of negative selection, since able-bodied Jews were held back in large numbers for forced labour, or succeeded in escaping; one might add that a small minority of healthy young men and women jumped from trains after breaking out, some being shot en route and buried elsewhere and some escaping and either being caught later or actually in rare cases, surviving. So there never were
precisely 434,508 Jews buried at Belzec. The ones that were buried, however, were going to be the runtiest and feeblest of all, and thus smaller on average.
