In 2007, Caroline Sturdy Colls—then a 21-year-old University of Birmingham graduate student—made her first visit to the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, Poland. As a prospective forensic-archaeology scholar, Sturdy Colls was learning the science of uncovering remains and trace physical evidence to outline the true facts of a crime. As she gazed out across the camp site, studded with pine trees the Nazis had planted to hide evidence of their deeds, Sturdy Colls asked herself a nagging question: What secrets did the forested earth around her hold?
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During the Second World War, Sturdy Colls knew, more than 900,000 Jewish deportees had been killed at the Treblinka death camp, an unassuming site about the size of a suburban shopping mall. After closely guarded boxcars of arrivals passed through the gates of Treblinka or its sister camps, Bełżec and Sobibór, it took less than an hour for camp staff to exterminate them in engine-exhaust gas chambers. All three of the Operation Reinhard camps were located within a few hundred miles of each other in formerly central (now eastern) Poland, and some 500 miles from the notorious Auschwitz death camp. Of the approximately 1.7 million Jewish people who arrived at the three Reinhard camps, scarcely a hundred survived the war, and they only made it because they staged desperate breakouts that succeeded against all odds.
Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka have receded into the historical background compared to Auschwitz, likely because the Nazis razed all three Reinhard camps and buried or burned the corpses long before the advancing Red Army overtook the area. At Auschwitz, Soviet liberators found gas chambers and thousands of inmates, skeletal but still alive; at the Reinhard sites, there was little to see but open fields and twists of barbed wire embedded in trees. Since the Nazis destroyed most written records and so few Reinhard prisoners survived, previous studies of the sites have leaned heavily on the firsthand testimony of just a handful of prisoners and perpetrators—which, while important, conveys only certain aspects of what happened at the camps.
To most people who knew about the camps, it seemed few traces of the Nazis’ crimes remained. But Sturdy Colls, now an associate professor of forensic archaeology at Staffordshire University in the United Kingdom, suspected hidden evidence lurked underground, just waiting to be exposed. “There was a feeling,” she says, “that Treblinka had been erased off the face of the earth. I just couldn’t believe that could actually be true.”
Several years after her initial visit, Sturdy Colls—this time with a trained archaeological team in tow—tackled the herculean task of probing into Treblinka’s buried past. Around the same time, a team of archaeologists from Israel and Poland began carrying out similar excavations at the Sobibór death camp, where the Nazis killed about a quarter of a million Jewish people.
With assistance from noninvasive technologies like low-altitude weather-balloon photography, ground-penetrating radar, the Global Positioning System (GPS), and a remote-sensing method called lidar, archaeologists at places like Treblinka and Sobibór are unearthing a trove of new physical evidence. “The key thing is that we have these methods available to us,” Sturdy Colls says. “If you were a police officer, you would never just go and interview witnesses. You would always go to the crime scene.” At both camps, the teams have found a startling array of everyday items and personal keepsakes, as well as the rubble of the gas chambers where unsuspecting victims met their end. But in their quest to use science to illuminate a dark past, archaeologists have clashed with a diverse set of detractors—Holocaust deniers, as might be expected, but also Jewish religious authorities, memorial planning committees, and scholars concerned about the sites’ integrity and the importance of respecting human remains.