In March 1942,
Reinhard Heydrich, head of the
Reich Security Main Office, placed high-ranking SS functionary
Paul Blobel in charge of the
Aktion 1005, but its start was delayed after Heydrich died in early June 1942 from wounds sustained in an
assassination attempt. It was after the end of June that
Heinrich Müller, head of the
Gestapo, finally gave Blobel his orders. While the principal aim was to erase evidence of Jewish exterminations, the
Aktion would also include non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. by
Sonderkommando prisoners in 1944
(secret photo by prisoner Alberto Errera) Blobel began his work experimenting at the
Chełmno extermination camp (Kulmhof). Attempts to use
incendiary bombs to destroy exhumed bodies were unsuccessful, as the weapons set fire to nearby forests. The most effective way was eventually found to be giant pyres on iron grills. The method involved building alternating layers of corpses and firewood on railway tracks. After the pyre burned down, remaining bone fragments could be crushed by pounding with heavy dowels or in a grinding machine and then re-buried in pits. The semi-industrial incineration of corpses at the
Treblinka extermination camp began as soon as the political danger associated with the earlier burials was realised. In 1943, the 22,000 Polish victims of the Soviet
Katyn massacre were discovered near
Smolensk and reported to Adolf Hitler. Their remains were well preserved underground, attesting to the Soviet mass murder. By April 1943,
Nazi propaganda began to draw attention of the international community to that
war crime. Meanwhile, the secret orders to exhume mass graves and instead to burn the hundreds of thousands of victims came directly from the Nazi leadership in April. The corpses that had been buried at Treblinka with the use of a
crawler excavator were dug up and cremated on the orders of
Heinrich Himmler himself, who visited the camp in March 1943. The instructions to utilise rails as grates came from
Herbert Floss, the camp's cremation expert. The bodies were placed on cremation pyres that were up to long, with rails laid across the pits on concrete blocks. They were splashed with petrol over wood and burned in one massive blaze attended by roughly 300 prisoners, who operated the pyres. In Bełżec, the round-the-clock operation lasted until March 1943. In Treblinka, it went on at full speed until the end of July. The operation also returned to the scenes of earlier mass killings such as
Babi Yar,
Ponary, the
Ninth Fort, By 1944, with Soviet armies advancing,
Wilhelm Koppe, head of the
Reichsgau Wartheland, ordered that each of the five districts of
General Government territory set up its own Aktion 1005 commando to begin "cleaning" mass graves. The operations were not entirely successful, as the advancing Soviet troops reached some of the sites before they could be cleared. ==Aftermath==