Ep. 6: Holocaust Archaeology with Caroline Sturdy-Colls

How do we uncover new evidence about the Holocaust?  In this podcast episode, we look at the fascinating topic of Holocaust archaeology.  Our guest, Professor Caroline Sturdy-Colls has investigated over 50 Holocaust sites including the Treblinka extermination camp where she first identified the location of the gas chamber buildings.

Our conversation ranges from the Soviet Union to the Channel Islands and also touches on issues of ethics, memory, and commemoration.

Professor Caroline Sturdy-Colls is a professor of Conflict Archaeology and Genocide Investigation and director of the Centre of Archaeology at Staffordshire University.

You can find out more about her Finding Treblinka project here.  To learn more about the camps she mentions on Alderney, visit the Occupied Alderney site.

Professor Colls is the author of several books on Holocaust archaeology including:

Sturdy Colls, C. Holocaust Archaeologies: Approaches and Future Directions (2015)

Sturdy Colls, C. and Kevin Colls. 'Adolf Island': The Nazi occupation of Alderney (2022)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman (00:00.47)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Whiteman Bourne. And today I'm really excited to talk about a topic that is probably something that you may not have heard a lot about, but that I think is really important and is becoming even more important as technology advances and that's archaeology of the Holocaust and I have with me probably the best person to talk about that, who is Professor Caroline Sturdy-Coles.

Caroline (00:07.042)
I'm really excited to talk about a topic.

Caroline (00:12.841)
Maybe you made out a pretty lot of money.

Waitman (00:29.45)
Welcome Caroline, how are you doing?

Caroline (00:31.005)
Thank you, Highweight Man. Yeah, I'm doing good. Thank you.

Waitman (00:34.114)
I'm all right, I'm all right. I'm excited to hear, even though I'm the host, I really would, I'm looking forward to just talking about this because I feel like there's so many really interesting stories and insights to come out of this. So can you tell us really quickly before we get started, just a brief introduction, tell us about yourself and how you got into Holocaust archeology.

Caroline (00:55.169)
Sure, yeah. So I'm currently a professor of conflict archaeology and genocide investigation at Staffordshire University, and I'm also the director of the Centre of Archaeology here. And I oversee a team of interdisciplinary experts from archaeology, history, forensic investigation, even fine art, lots of different people from different areas who have a shared interest really in the archaeology of the Holocaust.

of genocides in the 20th and 21st centuries. So I've been working in this area now for more than 15 years, and actually probably even going back, I suppose it goes back 20 years really, to my days at university, because I met a professor there called Professor John Hunter, who had been pioneering the discipline of forensic archeology, which is the search for

missing persons and all the buried remains using archaeological techniques. And he'd been working in Bosnia trying to find the remains of the victims of genocide and also in other places like Kosovo and Iraq. And I was just really inspired actually that you could use archaeological methods to try and help provide answers for families really who had for in many cases decades not knowing what happened to their loved ones.

And so I asked John and another good colleague, Barry Simpson, who was an ex-police officer, if I could join them on some forensic case work. And they actually took me along. You know, as an undergraduate, I was very, very fortunate that they took me along on some cases, which included a review of the Moore's murders cases, which is quite was quite well known case here in the UK. And then after I'd worked on a lot of those kind of cold cases, as we call them, I decided to pair that with my interest in the Holocaust.

which I'd always had, and trying to look in to see whether anybody had actually done any archeology in that context. And I very quickly realized that they had, but that they tried to dig, and that didn't always fit very well with the religious requirements of searching, for example, for Jewish victims. And so I decided that a better methodology was really needed. And so that's really where I started booking work on that as part of my master's and my PhD.

Waitman (03:20.646)
Yeah, and we're definitely we'll talk about some of those techniques, I think, as we're moving forward. It's really it's really interesting to hear because I just remembered my only sort of foray into this many, many moons ago when I was when I was in Iraq in 2003, we were in Kurdistan and we were on the head. The squadron headquarters was on a hill outside this town of Kahnikin.

on the border with Iran. And we noticed after we'd been there for a very short period of time, that the locals started coming out with like earth movers and bulldozers and stuff to where, to literally where we are, the hill where we were at. And it turned out that had been a site where Saddam had murdered the Kurds and had buried the bodies. And we literally had a, I have photographs of this, we had for a couple of days.

We had a CID, a criminal investigations, um, dispatchment, basically the army, military police people came out and did like an excavation and uncovered bodies had covered bones and like, you know, people with their hands tied behind their back and things like this. Um, it's, I don't know. I just popped in my head, but I was, you know, thinking about, um, this idea of digging and not digging and these people really, it's, it was incredibly powerful.

because these people had known for 20 years where their loved ones were buried, but they actually weren't able to do anything about it until Saddam was gone. Not necessarily related to anything we're talking about today, but it just popped into my head as something that I thought was an interesting way of contextualizing this. Historically though, so let's talk about the history. Because as you say,

Caroline (05:01.422)
Yeah, and that's often the case.

Waitman (05:18.29)
you're not the first person to think about doing archeology, archeological investigations. What's the history? What's the background of Holocaust archaeology from, I guess, really 1944 to present?

Caroline (05:35.817)
Yeah, so it's actually got a really long history, although of course it wasn't called that back then. But I mean, all the techniques that we use as forensic archeologists and also anthropologists who are more concerned with the body itself stem from investigations that emerged during and after the Holocaust. Because obviously, particularly in 1943, when the bodies of Polish soldiers were discovered at Katyn,

Caroline (06:05.201)
the authorities were faced with this unprecedented question, how do you find and then recover, and then hopefully, in some cases, identify the remains of victims of genocide, because those victims, and conflicts, of course, as well, in terms of military war crimes or crimes against humanity, but that was something they'd never faced before on that scale.

And so you had doctors, lawyers, medical investigators, who very quickly had to get together and figure out how to deal with this issue. And particularly from 1944, when the Red Army started to move into former areas occupied by the Nazis and begin their own investigations, you see a huge wave of forensic processes emerging.

And so actually, if you look back at the investigations from Katty in 1943 or the investigations, yeah, it was just.

Waitman (07:04.214)
which were actually done by the Nazis, right? Which is already kind of a really interesting historical moment there, right?

Caroline (07:11.137)
Sure, yeah, I mean there were teams from Germany, there were teams from Russia who obviously only decades later admitted that they were the ones who have actually carried out the crimes. There were British pathologists and pathologists from various other countries who were involved in those investigations, who then went on to develop what we now use as the kind of benchmark standards in, for example, projectile analysis for bullet wounds, and they used aerial photography.

for the first time to identify disturbances caused by graves. And many of them also looked at decomposition environments in mass grave settings to see if they could estimate the post-mortem interval, how long somebody had been buried since the moment that they were killed. So this was like really fundamental. And so a lot of Soviet scientists in particular, you know, can be attributed with a lot of these developments.

that emerged and as I say are still very much embedded in investigations today. But really the focus of those investigations was often to prove that a crime happened. So whereas today we have a kind of dual process where usually there's a legal element to it in terms of trying to prosecute offenders. And then there's the humanitarian side where you try and identify victims. Back then the legal side really, you know, was the one that

most of the attention was focused on. And these graves, you know, when you read the reports, it sometimes, it looks quite callous because it looks like, you know, we found a grave, we can prove a crime happened. There we go, you know, we've done our job now. And they didn't necessarily try and identify individuals. And of course that was very difficult and it's easy to be critical now because we have DNA technologies and we have all the methods that can help us. But...

Obviously there were things they could have done back then as well to identify individuals, but that wasn't their focus. It was very much on, as I say, gathering evidence for the conviction of perpetrators.

Waitman (09:15.662)
Well, I suspect there's also a scale issue too, where you have, you know, all across, as the Soviets are reconquering Soviet territory, I mean, literally every town, every village essentially has a mass grave site and you just don't have enough forensic staff to, even if they wanted to sort of do a detailed analysis.

Caroline (09:18.642)
Yeah.

Caroline (09:30.177)
sure.

Caroline (09:37.629)
No, exactly. I mean, so they tended to excavate, you know, partially, they tended to carry out a sample of autopsies to say, you know, these are the types of injuries people sustained, or this is how many bodies we estimate would be in this grave. And then they tended to multiply that based on the number of graves that they found. And yeah, I mean, obviously, it's a challenge today, we have mass disaster.

mass death investigation protocols in the world today. And we know that it's still not a perfect system and that people are not even searched for in many cases. And if they're found, that it's not always possible to identify them. So as I say, it was absolutely unprecedented and it sowed the seeds for major developments that came later. But it wasn't until much later that we actually had like Holocaust archeology per se.

Waitman (10:33.13)
Yes, I mean, I think that's the next sort of stage, right, is what we're talking about now is the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission. For the listeners that aren't familiar, it was a Soviet state government organization whose job was to essentially document every crime that the Nazis committed on Soviet soil, everything from theft of cattle to mass graves and these kinds of things. And so as Caroline's pointed out, right, it has a...

it has a political objective as well which doesn't which doesn't it doesn't mean is propaganda either cuz i've used some of these reports as well and particularly at the lower if you get the first version like the local report actually quite good and often have witness testimony and survivor testimony and but they also are designed to show the world and everybody else that the nazis committed all these crimes so i

I get my sense as a non-expert in this area, is that then there's something different that happens, say from the 50s on. You know, it seems like there's much less investigation in this interim period. And what happens next? What happens? And of course, obviously we're also thinking, we have to think geographically too, because there are Holocaust sites, as we'll talk about, you know, on the Channel Islands and in Germany and in Poland. And so it's not just.

occupied Soviet Union, but what happens in sort of the, this middle period before, if we can think about perhaps a Renaissance of, or the birth of specifically Holocaust archeology, what happens in the meantime?

Caroline (12:10.445)
Yeah, so as you quite rightly point out, there's all these different commissions that were set up, which were usually operating variably from sort of 1944 until about 1948. Some went into the early 50s. But I think, again, scale, money, time, resources, a desire to obviously try and move on and create a new Europe, you know, led to kind of a dwindling level, I guess, of enthusiasm.

in investigating some of these crimes. I think also some kind of, sometimes some issues about who should be investigating, so should it be the country that the victims came from, who initiated the investigations, or should it be the country where the crimes took place, and so you get this kind of back and forth and political tittle tattle about who's responsible for these victims.

And then also in this sort of this intervening period, in the early 50s, there's a fairly important series of events that takes place. So there was a French commission who were tasked with investigating crimes against French citizens. And they traveled across, mostly across Germany, to try and locate mass graves in which French citizens were buried, which obviously is highly problematic because, you know,

they weren't necessarily concerned with all the victims, but rather, you know, how do you therefore determine if it's not possible to identify which bodies were French victims? So they went and they did lots of investigations, but they tried to do work at Bergen-Belsen in the early 50s. And they wanted to excavate some of the mass graves to recover bodies and return them to France. And this caused a huge outcry. And...

What basically happened is that the Jewish community rallied against the commission to say that their methods, which as I say, centered on excavation, disrespected Jewish law, which basically stipulates that apart from in some exceptional circumstances that bodies buried in a grave shouldn't be disturbed. And the very basic, there's very oversimplification, but the reason for that is that Jewish people believe that the body is tied to the soul.

Caroline (14:29.917)
and the earth and the body are tied to each other when a body becomes buried. So if you disturb the earth, you disturb the body and therefore the soul of the person. And so...

Waitman (14:38.358)
And I'm assuming that the exceptions are, you know, if we're talking in a modern context of like a modern crime and someone is murdered, you can excavate and do forensic in order to capture the person who's responsible.

Caroline (14:52.621)
Yeah, so that's an interesting point because actually, of course, Jewish law goes back, you know, to such a time when these kind of laws didn't exist. So actually, you know, taken in its kind of, you know, rule form, as it were, this applies, these rules about non-disturbance apply even if someone's been buried in an illegal grave, even if somebody's been murdered. However, the rule of law usually overrides religious law.

in almost all circumstances and therefore in a modern context, if a crime is committed, then obviously the state rules that a forensic investigation has to take place. And in different countries the rules are very different with regards to the Holocaust as well, because some countries see the Holocaust sites as archaeological sites, some see them as still forensic and more contemporary, and also it differs between different rabbinical views on

interpretation of Jewish law. So it's quite complex but in the 50s you know the rabbinical authorities um you know objected to these excavations even though the purpose was to uncover crimes that had taken place and therefore this commission's activities you know dwindled and I think obviously um that almost you know set a precedent then for um the non-disturbance of mass graves and a lot of this the work of those commissions um as I say started to

started to slow down anyway. And therefore, I think this was sort of the final sort of sticking point really with their work. And therefore, a lot of them closed down and moved on to other things.

Waitman (16:30.59)
And so then when can we think about, I guess, Holocaust archaeology as a discipline coming about? I mean, is there something that happens in the 60s, 70s, 80s? I mean, when do we start to see maybe perhaps a shift from a juridical sort of legal forensic criminology perspective to more of a historical

archaeology if that's even fair to say i don't think it's fair to say that even happened but

Caroline (17:03.737)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, actually, it's interesting, you mentioned the example of Iraq with the families searching for the remains of their victims. And in that intervening period, obviously, a lot of the owners of finding sites, missing persons, fell to the families who still wanted to know even if the authorities had kind of lost interest in that. And that didn't just apply to grave sites, but also, of course, the sites of the camps.

and the ghettos and sites associated with Nazi persecution. And so in the 70s actually you get an organization that emerged in, well, it's an activist group, if you like, emerged in Berlin, who actually excavated one of the former SS headquarters, which we now know as the Topography of Terror Museum. And these were, you know, they weren't archeologists, but they initiated what probably can be seen as the kind of first...

Waitman (17:54.92)
Right.

Caroline (18:01.901)
community archaeology program, if you like, of the Holocaust, because they started to do those excavations because they felt that physical proof was often being overlooked and distorted, and as buildings, of course, were demolished and the city was changing, the Nazi Pass was being erased and they really felt like we need to bring this to light. And if you go to the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin today, you can still see the cells that they excavated.

which was where people of course were tortured. And so that really like sort of sparked a lot of ideas but I think it's the 1980s really where you see archeologists and heritage professionals really starting to adopt archeological methodologies and that acceptance that archeology didn't have to just be about the ancient past. And so it's really the excavations in Helmno which was a death camp.

situated in Nazi occupied Poland where the gas vans were used to murder hundreds of thousands of people. And that really was initiated by the museum so that they could actually generate objects to be shown in the museum. And so that they could really show something on the site, you know, as...

were forefronting the place of mass murder as the important physical evidence of the crimes committed. So the staff there, some of whom had archaeological training, initiated a large programme of excavations which yielded many objects, many new building foundations that were previously covered by earth and then that really sparked then a wave of other archaeologists to get involved in excavations at the other death camps thereafter.

Waitman (19:52.406)
Yeah, I mean, I think you raise a really important point, I think, which is also from the public history perspective. When one is designing a museum exhibit, we can't get around the fact that it's just way more powerful to have an image or an object, right? I went to, I took some friends to Sobibor last summer.

and their museum is amazing by the way for his listeners if you ever get a chance they have a really amazing museum and they were able to do some of these excavations because they built a new museum and in the process of you know building a new foundations for the building etc i think it gave them a good excuse to do archaeology you know to dig the site because they had to dig it anyway and you know

they have amazing objects that they've found in there. So I mean, I think there's something interesting about the desire for sort of materiality from a public history perspective. So Caroline, tell us, we have kind of some background now, I guess, two things. First is, it seems like there's a technological revolution here too that makes this possible.

Caroline (20:57.217)
sure.

Waitman (21:13.802)
or makes things possible that perhaps weren't possible in the 70s and 80s, right? So maybe if you could tell us a little about, maybe what are the methods that one uses in light of the constraints that we work under regarding respect for the dead and things like that.

Caroline (21:31.393)
Sure, yeah, so I mean, actually, just to go back to your first question in terms of how I got into this, actually, one of the major things that, you know, really inspired me to develop a methodology for approaching sites of the Holocaust in the way that I do was the fact that there were some excavations in Belzec in the 1990s. And again, there were excavations, and again, the Jewish community protested against this. And so, by the middle of the 90s, really, archaeology in the Holocaust, like, didn't seem like that they could

fit together in any way because archaeology has always been so centred on excavation. However, you know, in the late 90s, 2000s and onwards, archaeology as a discipline really grew. And archaeology is an area that like always borrows techniques from other fields. So, you know, a lot of the survey methods that we use, a lot of the underground geophysical methods that detect buried remains.

come from engineering or mining or other fields. And so that had all grown up in the 70s and 80s in other fields and then archeology really started to adopt those methods in the 1990s. And so actually this offered a real opportunity to be able to actually reconsider the archeology of the Holocaust without necessarily having to dig or being able to at least target where to dig more appropriately to either avoid mass graves if Jewish victims were present.

or to just, you know, obviously find buildings and other traces of the camps and the ghettos that had been lost over time. And so the methodology that I use, it tends to start with traditional death space research. I spent a lot of time in archives, just as, you know, I consider myself to be a historian and an archaeologist because I spent a lot of time going through witness testimony, German documents.

forensic reports, as we've mentioned, also photographs, maps, plans, sketches that were drawn by witnesses, and collating all of that together, and then starting to build a visual record. So if there are aerial photography, images, or ground-based photography, then that's fundamental, because that helps us to identify often how sites evolved over time.

Caroline (23:50.813)
and if any disturbance can be seen in post-war imagery, for example, that might indicate the presence of buried remains or wartime imagery as well. And then moving kind of into the field, we've obviously seen huge advances in GPS technology, which allows us to record the position of traces that we see, but it also enables us to create topographic, very detailed topographic models of the landscape.

And what this can do is show really subtle changes of depression, of elevation, which may indicate the presence of a buried foundation or a grave, because when bodies decompose in a grave, the ground tends to sink, and therefore you see an actual topographic change. And then we've also seen things like, obviously, drone technology is really developing, so the ability to take, you know,

thousands of photographs from the air and stitch them together into 3D models. And all the technique called LIDAR, which essentially pulses out thousands of laser pulses, hits the ground, and then you measure the distance between the aircraft or the drone and the ground. And again, that gives you this detailed topographic model. And so I've identified many graves, many building foundations using that technology.

And so that's been like really, really fundamental, particularly for forested areas, because you can strip away the tree layer and get a kind of bare earth model. So you see the ground in a way that it probably hasn't been seen since the second world war in some cases, if those trees have been planted since. So that's been really fundamental. And then moving beneath the grounds, obviously geophysical technologies have enabled us to then sort of start to see the things that we can't see with the naked eye.

and the things that ordinarily you would have to excavate in order to find. And although they're not X-ray machines, they can't show you exactly what is beneath the ground. They can show you what we call anomalies. They can show you that there's a rectangular feature that measures 30 by 10 meters. And when you compare that to aerial images, obviously you can make an interpretation about whether that might be a building foundation or in other cases, mass graves. So all of this combined,

Caroline (26:12.617)
and you layer all this data together, you know, and you validate one source against another, builds up a really detailed picture. And it also enables you essentially as well to cover a much bigger area than you would, of course, be able to do with excavation. So that's really transformed the way that we look at Holocaust landscapes, rather than just features within Holocaust landscapes.

Waitman (26:34.002)
Yeah, there was a, I mentioned to you before we started recording this potential project. And one of the presenters at the seminar mentioned even an ability, and I'm trying to remember now what the, what the name of the technology was, but basically.

they could even begin to identify anomalies of iron from blood in the soil, or some kind of chemical radiological analysis. Does that make sense? Is that something that actually exists? Am I describing that correctly?

Caroline (27:09.305)
Well, I mean, if you do soil sampling, then of course, yeah, you can start to identify all sorts of different, you know, different particles that are present in the soil. You could identify whether there's lipids in the soil, which can be sometimes there because of decomposition. You can detect, you know, in some cases, blood. I mean, I'm not I'm not going to profess to be, you know, a scientist and to know the micro level detail. But certainly, you know, I know that if you if you are taking samples, then you can.

You can detect all sorts of different trace elements that may indicate certain types of buried remains. Again, that's obviously slightly evasive, but I mean it's permissible in some areas, you know, away from graves for example.

Waitman (27:43.146)
And there's also, yeah.

Waitman (27:48.494)
And there's also, right, even just the types of plant life can indicate this potentially, you know, sites are further investigation, is that right?

Caroline (28:01.581)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, that's something that really kind of grew up in this sort of, I guess, like again, 90s, this area of study called forensic tephonomy. And that basically enables you to evaluate plant growth, which sometimes can indicate the addition of chemical elements in the soil that make certain types of plants grow better.

or maybe might make just the plants that are already there grow more because the soil is suddenly nutrient rich. And then in other cases, the burial of bodies will deprive plant life of the nutrients that they need, particularly if bodies are covered up, for example. So you'll get reduced vegetation growth. And so all those things are visible in aerial photography.

as well, you can see obviously that kind of ground disturbance and also when you're walking on the ground a lot of what I do is kind of mapping different vegetation types because often where you see nettles for example, that can be as a result of there being human remains present and that's been kind of a well tested methodology that's used by forensic archaeologists in individual missing persons cases around the world as well as obviously in mass

mass death investigation.

Waitman (29:28.578)
Cool, cool. So, I mean, let's get into your work, right? Because you've, I mean, one of the reasons that it's so great to have you on here is because you have so much experience in this. Tell us about, let's start with Treblinka. Tell us about your work at Treblinka, because you've done some of the pioneering archeological research there. How did you get into that particular site and what did you do and then what did you find?

Caroline (29:56.073)
Yeah, so I started working at Treblinka as part of my masters course actually, we're going back to 2007, 2008 now. And so that my dissertation at that point proposed this idea that you could use these non-invasive archaeological methods as a way of meeting the needs of Jewish law with regards to the burials, but also as a say, kind of giving this bigger approach to be able to identify.

and categorize sites that are much larger scale than had previously been possible. And then for my PhD, I wanted to examine sites where we could try and see if this methodology would really work. And the first time I ever went to Treblinka, I was just really shocked by the fact that this is the second largest killing site of the Holocaust. But it's not like Auschwitz-Birkenau.

there aren't surviving buildings that are obvious to see in the extermination camp area. There's a really powerful memorial, which contains 17,000 stones commemorating the towns and villages from which people came. But it's in the middle of a forest and it's, you know, it's, you know, quite frankly, with the right weather, it's really like a beautiful forest environment. And you would have no idea what happened there. And so I really felt that it was impossible.

that a site like that, I mean, there's between 800,000 and a million people who are known to have been killed at Treblinka. And it's impossible that all the traces of that crime could have been erased. But that was the narrative that had been built up around the site, that the Nazis had managed to destroy everything. And they'd cremated all the bodies and there was no buildings because they demolished them in the summer of 1943. So I really felt like if, you know,

if you could show that this methodology worked on a site where the Nazis had gone to such lengths to hide their crimes, then its potential at sites where that hadn't necessarily happened to the same extent was obviously even greater. So I guess I probably started at the hardest place that you could possibly have done that. But I also felt it was huge injustice that site hadn't been examined and that those victims' stories had been eradicated because of this narrative that everything had been destroyed.

Caroline (32:16.017)
So when I first did field work there in 2010, we used many of the methods I've just mentioned, so particularly survey technologies, we mapped the plant life around the camp, we looked at where the boundaries of the camp might have been, and actually that was looking at the way that the trees grew and the plants grew and comparing to aerial imagery.

we could see that the boundary that was currently marked by memorial stones was actually in the wrong place. And the northern boundary of the camp actually needed to be about 50 metres further north, which obviously then had implications for where everything else in the camp probably was. And one of the big questions, of course, was where were the gas chambers? Because they'd been knocked down, blown up, you know, demolished. And everybody thought that they were under this huge...

Waitman (32:49.867)
Hmm

Waitman (32:58.956)
Right.

Caroline (33:12.141)
megalith that forms part of the memorial. And that's still what tour guides tell people, even now. The courtesy of Claude Landsman's Shoah film where he said that in the film. So we really wanted to kind of identify where all the different structures within the camp were, but particularly to find the gas chambers. So we used ground penetrating radar. We used another method called resistance survey.

Waitman (33:23.735)
Right.

Caroline (33:41.833)
which looks at electrical impulses that pass through the ground. And we combined all that with the archival research and maps and aerial imagery. And that enabled us really to pinpoint where we thought the gas chambers were likely to be, both the old gas chambers, the very first ones that were built and the newer gas chambers, and also to identify where the mass graves were most likely located.

And so that enabled us really to build up a really detailed picture of the death camp area. And then in the reception camp, we identified where some of the structures were, including the Lazarus, which was a fake field hospital behind which people were shot into a pit. And again, even though the one of the commissions after the war, the Central Commission had looked into that, it wasn't really known where those sites were. So, so that was that was 2010. And then and then in 2013.

we were given permission to then carry out some excavations in the area of the gas chambers to confirm that that's what they actually were. And the reason that we were allowed to do that was because we'd already identified where the mass graves were, so therefore it was, you know, we knew we weren't going to be digging in those areas, we didn't seek to dig in those areas, but the museum felt that it was really important that we validated where the gas chambers were.

And similar to Helmno, similar to Belzec, they didn't have many objects from the camp at all. And they also wanted to be able to show visitors to the site more about what happened. So they were very keen on those excavations and we had permission from the chief rabbi of Poland to carry them out because we could say safely that we'd excluded the areas of mass graves.

Waitman (35:27.762)
Yeah, I just have a quick question, because it's something that I've always been curious about as well. You know, the extent to which the prohibition on exhumation or excavation is specific to where it's most likely, you know, that you would find human remains versus the possibility that there might potentially be someone.

buried there. I mean, I think about Birkenau and Auschwitz II, which is considered a cemetery. If you're an observant Jew, then it's basically a cemetery space, the whole thing. But of course, there most likely aren't bodies buried in the vicinity of the barracks and things like that. But it seems like that often the prohibition for excavation covers sort of

Caroline (36:00.06)
Mm-hmm.

Caroline (36:09.023)
Yeah.

Waitman (36:25.522)
is a blanket thing. Is that, I mean, can you make the argument that, you know, it's okay to dig, even though we're within the boundaries of the camp, it's okay to sort of do forensic or scholarly archeological digs in places that aren't likely to have actual human remains, even though, you know, they are clearly still the site of human suffering and that kind of thing.

Caroline (36:48.929)
Yeah, I mean, that raises a lot of other issues that we had to grapple with. And, you know, very fortunate to have the Chief Rabbi of Poland and his colleagues who mass graves across the whole of Poland to give me lots of advice on that. And nothing was done without, you know, their kind of collaboration and their final permission. And this it raised a really interesting point when we when we obviously discussed whether to excavate the gas chambers, because

Obviously, we'd been told, you know, you can't excavate where the mass graves are. We could rule out mass graves being located there. But I still was unsure whether or not it was appropriate or whether it be permitted to do excavations for the reasons you've just said. However, the chief rabbi actually, you know, in those conversations, raised an interesting point that, you know, if we were to find scattered remains in Treblinka, which.

is entirely possible given the fact that the Nazis spread the remains across the site, we know that. Then actually those remains were not buried in a grave and therefore they should be recovered and buried in one. So actually a site like Treblinka, where the whole landscape is actually scattered, you know the...

Waitman (37:57.775)
Mm, OK.

Caroline (38:06.889)
it's an interesting conundrum about what happens to those remains, because actually people are walking over those areas every day without knowing that they're working over remains and those bones are not buried in a grave. So the chief rabbi said, scattered bones should be buried in a grave. And so therefore, actually, when we did find remains in the course of those gas chamber excavations, which were small fragments, also we found teeth and dentures, his advice then was that a representative from the commission would come and then.

we would bury them in a grave in an area that we felt wouldn't contain human remains, which we did. And then we actually did find more remains where we were buried and that was scattered as well. So his theory that the whole site was covered, you know, was that was absolutely correct. So there's all these kind of unprecedented ethical challenges that we had to navigate, and that any archaeologists working on these sites will have to navigate.

Waitman (38:38.367)
Hmm.

Caroline (39:00.801)
But we just tried our very best to make sure that we were not going to be disturbing actual graves and that once remains were found that they were treated with obviously the respect that they deserved in accordance with the rabbinical advice.

Waitman (39:14.262)
and so we did this what one what did you find and you know what evidence was that the gas chambers at triplinka

Caroline (39:20.325)
So, I mean, as soon as we really started to take off the top layer of earth, what was so surprising given the narrative about TripLinker was that we encountered objects and parts of the gas chamber structure straight away. So there were tiles that we came across, both orange and yellow ones, which had the manufacturing logo of a company called Joubulski and Lang on the bottom and a star, which was their company logo. We found that out after.

the excavations. And these tiles had been on the floor and the walls of the gas chamber. And we have lots of vivid descriptions by survivors who did see inside about these terracotta tiles, orange tiles, yellow tiles. And then we found personal objects as well. So we had items of jewelry, including a rose-shaped brooch and a very small gold pendant.

which we didn't expect to find there because people had their belongings taken from them in the reception camp area. But obviously, you know, we do also know that people tried to smuggle items into the camp and hold on to them. We also, of course, know that, you know, that the members of the Sonderkommando, the members of the SS, the Traveniki men were taking items as well from the huge piles that were supposed to be sent back to Germany.

But it was still a surprise to see those items there. And it really gave us a very stark reminder of the individuals who'd passed through that building and being killed. We found lots of remains, structural debris, so lots of bricks, roof tiles, lots of plaster work from the walls of the building. And then eventually we actually found part of the intact foundation of the structure.

And that was buried at about 85 centimeters below the surface that we started to find the actual kind of, the real in situ foundations. And that's because the Germans had covered over the whole area with the sandbanks that were around the areas of the camp to try and hide the nature of their crimes. And so that had effectively sealed this building for us to find more than 70 years later.

Caroline (41:48.253)
So that was quite remarkable. As I say, we also found.

Waitman (41:51.862)
Because presumably they were too lazy to actually, they're not going to, they're not going to dig up the foundations of the building. You know what I mean? Like it's, it's not, as you say, the narrative that these sites are completely destroyed is not, is not necessarily accurate because you know, the, the Germans and Nazis were, were people and they were probably too lazy in a hurry to literally excavate foundations that are buried in the ground.

Caroline (42:00.859)
Yeah, I mean, they...

Caroline (42:20.169)
Sure, yeah. I mean, and of course we could see the efforts that they'd gone to try and cover everything up. I mean, as I say, all this material was highly fragmented and damaged, and you could see that these buildings had really been, you know, kind of knocked about to try and crush them. But they had these huge sandbanks, which they'd built for concealment anyway, to stop people arriving in the transport, seeing into the death camp area. So, you know, why not, why not use that? It's a, you know, it's very common in, you know, the sort of field of criminal

You know, we know that basically the perpetrators will take the past path of lease effort. And so they had all this material, so they could just, they could just kind of push that all over the top. That said for the new gas chambers, which was the bigger of the two buildings in which many more people were killed, they actually really do appear to have tried to strip out the remains of that structure because there we didn't find any in situ foundations. We actually just found.

like post holes, which were probably like the building itself because of the sand had to be built on kind of like almost like stilts to keep the building, the foundations anchored. And so we found those traces and we found kind of, you know, the soil had been stained if you like, because it like changed the texture and everything where the foundations had been infilled. So we could see the outline shape of where the building was but not the actual remnants of the building itself.

It's interesting to see that there was a lot more effort invested into destroying that structure versus the smaller gas chambers which had actually kind of fallen out of use by the time the camp closed anyway.

Waitman (44:01.022)
Yes, I mean, what do we learn from what sort of do we know now about Treblinka, perhaps, that we didn't know before you started doing archaeological investigations of it?

Caroline (44:16.073)
Well, I think there's different layers. Yeah, yeah, I mean, in a broader sense, I mean, I think, you know, there's obviously the things that we now know that challenge that well established narrative. That, you know, the Nazis didn't hide all the traces of their crimes. That those structures are still there. Even, you know, for example, the idea that all the victims were cremated.

Waitman (44:17.494)
I mean, some of the things you've mentioned already, but.

Caroline (44:42.693)
some of the scattered remains that we found in the traces of the gas chambers, you know, weren't cremated at all. And some were, but they weren't, you know, they were still identifiable as human remains. And there's often this kind of assumption that they somehow managed to eradicate all the traces of the people, you know, in name and in a bodily sense. And actually, so the workplace are really, for me, one of the really important things is that, you know, it disproves that. People can't commit crimes and eradicate.

all the traces. And I think that's a really important message, you know, that people need to hear. And also, I think people tend to think of the, you know, the Nazis as sort of, you know, these kind of super humans who were able to carry out these industrialized crimes and hide everything that they did. And, you know, that gives them a form of credit that actually is completely unjust because they didn't, they were people like everybody else. And actually, probably what's more scary about Treblinka is that...

at times, it was total chaos. And they didn't anticipate particularly in the first phase, having to handle that amount of people. And so, you know, they, they managed to kill that many people by actually being quite, you know, bad at what they were doing and inefficient at it. And, and so that's terrifying when you and you actually think that there was a sort of more primitive much, you know, just

Waitman (46:03.95)
Well, I think I'm correct, right? Because wasn't a guy named Ermford Eberle the first Comanatra Blinka who Franz Stangl then relieves? But when he first gets there, as you mentioned, he says it's like chaos and there's money blowing about on the ground. And Eberle was completely overwhelmed with the task that he was doing.

Caroline (46:15.359)
Yes.

Caroline (46:24.135)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (46:31.698)
I think it's a good point they're making, you know, that this is not this is not the sort of surgical, you know, sterile, efficient method, right? Which is also, I think in many ways, the narrative of the Nazis themselves wanted people to believe. And even when after the fact, you're listening to their testimony, you know, they're often saying about sort of how efficient this was and how...

Caroline (46:42.782)
Yeah.

Caroline (46:51.538)
Yeah, sure.

Waitman (46:58.466)
how Jews went calmly to their deaths, et cetera, et cetera, which is all part of this myth that Nazis themselves are perpetrating that everything went fine, and it was just a very sort of humane in their eyes, a humane process.

Caroline (47:16.913)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And actually, I mean, Erbil fell victim to his own desire for a sort of clinical efficient system, because he actually, he wanted to try and impress so much. He wanted to try and kill as many people as possible. And he just clearly hadn't thought about what that meant in terms of the number of bodies that he would have to handle. And so then everything just fell into chaos. And, you know, he, he was a doctor and he was part of the T4 euthanasia program and he

He was commended for his work in that area and he tried to implement the same approach and it just, it didn't work. And so, you know, again, you end up with the Germans then having to go back. Well, not that they actually ever, this is another thing about Jabalinka, they never actually abandoned the other methods of killing they'd been using. All the way through the camp's period of operation, they were still carrying out mass shootings. They were torturing people. They were, you know, coming up with these horrible.

sport-like activities to enable them to murder victims in groups and as individuals. And so, you know, another thing that my research has definitely shown is this very much interpersonal violence that was still happening at Treblinka. And it's even though the camps were set up, you know, in parts to try and give that distance between the people who were carrying out the crimes and their victims.

Actually, many of these SSS men and Traveniki men chose not to go down that route and kept their own specialist forms of violence that they, you know, tried to perfect and play out in that landscape. And so I think, you know, what's been really shocking, particularly about the archival research that I've done is that level of sadism and that level of enjoyment that a lot of these guards got from this process. And it was anything but sanitized. And, you know,

there was no indirect contact there. It wasn't just a machine pushing people through to murder them. People were killing people very, you know, kind of up close and personal. So I think that, you know, obviously, apart from the things I've already mentioned with the way that the gas chambers looked, the way that they were constructed, you know, there's also this sort of...

Waitman (49:29.93)
Well, and also the even the route to the gas chambers, right, in both Sobibor and Treblinka, if I'm if I if I'm remembering correctly, you know, you can tell by the way the ground is packed. Like that was where lots of people had walked over to get from point A to point B.

Caroline (49:33.354)
Mm-hmm.

Caroline (49:47.845)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so a lot of what I've been doing is looking at the kind of spatiality of the camp and the where people were sent based on, I mean, we know some of this witness testimonies already that for example, the old and the sick and children in particular weren't taken to the gas chambers at all. But you know, I found maps created by Travneke men where they've said, these are the guards that helped the SS.

that they stood in a certain position and this is where we would shoot victims who were running from one part of the camp to another. Or this is where we would beat people, or this is where we'd shoot people from the watchtowers. So they almost created their own spatial maps of the camp and the camp was very much designed to allow this kind of flow of people towards the gas chambers, but also there were points at which people split off.

and therefore their experiences at the camp were also very different. And I've also looked a lot at the reception camp area and the kind of dynamics between the work, the very small number of Jews who were kept behind to work there, and their accounts of the objects that they were finding. And I've also used that as a kind of way of really tapping into the biographies of individual victims because...

sometimes from their accounts and also from some of the objects that were found after the war, you can actually identify individuals. And obviously the whole purpose of Treblinka was completely to eradicate people and mean that individuals became an anonymous mass. And so looking at objects and kind of looking at the materiality of the camp has really enabled me to kind of really reverse that a little bit and actually try and tell some of those individual stories of...

those people's lives before Triple Inca as well.

Waitman (51:40.362)
Yeah, I mean, like this is one of those places where I have sort of this unreasonable desire to see sort of a full excavation of, for example, the reception camp, you know, to identify. I would love to see a site where you can literally see, like if you go to Treblinka too, where, you know, many of the foundations are still there and you can sort of get a sense of where things are. It would be amazing if you could do that.

in the reception camp, obviously, you know, in light of all the considerations for, you know, ethical excavations, those kinds of things. Because I suspect that, as you mentioned, there are lots of things to find to unearth, to, in a certain sense, bring back to life from the victims as well. But to do a massive shift, because I know we're running a little bit...

towards the end of our discussion, but I want to also move us all the way back to the Channel Islands because I know that's another big project that you've been working on Alderney. And so can you tell us, tell us a little about what you're doing there? And I guess for many of our listeners may not even be aware that there was essentially a concentration camp on the Channel Islands.

Caroline (52:58.309)
Yeah, so actually this is a project that we're kind of, I sort of wrapped up a couple of years ago now, although I am currently sitting on a UK government review panel that's looking into the number of deaths and the number of people who were sent to the island. But again, this was another case study for my PhD. So at the absolute opposite end of the spectrum from Treblinka, I chose to look at Alderney because

not many people knew that obviously that Nazi persecution and crimes of the Holocaust were committed on British soil. And it was a tiny site, the island is three and a half miles wide, sorry, three and a half miles long by one and a half miles wide. And yet it had more than 20 camps on it, my research found out. So it was reasonably well known that there were four named camps on the island.

and that two of them actually, one of them was completely ruled by the SS and then another one, the SS were part of the administration of that camp in 1943. So there was some knowledge about this amongst certain circles but I wouldn't say that it was very well known amongst even the British population that these camps were built on the island.

And so initially the reason that these camps were put there was because Alderney formed part of the Atlantic wall. And so an organization called Organization Todd were responsible for shipping workers to the Channel Islands, including Alderney. And then these workers had to build fortifications, so bunkers, trench systems, anti-aircraft installations, for example. And they were subject to terrible living and working conditions. They were kept in camps like

just the same, literally the same design, same kind of idea, same administration as you would find elsewhere on mainland Europe. And then as I say, in 1943, the SS came in and bought with it a brigade of prisoners as well. So these sites were largely forgotten, after the war and also,

Caroline (55:14.645)
demolished the huts, the prefabricated huts were taken down. There were some foundations, kind of remains of fence posts and things that were there. But it was a very difficult history for both the local islanders to deal with, but also the British government, because the idea that the Nazis had been on, you know, British soil, and that they built these kinds of camps, including these ran by the SS.

it just didn't chime with the idea that Britain, you know, had won the war and they were the victors and not the victims. And so actually, apart from a few investigations that did take place in the immediate post-war period, there was largely attempts to kind of cover up what happened and for that not to be well known. So my project was really about trying to look at these sites to find the remains of the camps and to also identify and examine the grave sites that we knew about, but also

potentially additional unmarked graves on the island as well.

Waitman (56:16.878)
And so how many people were in these camps and how many potentially died there as well? And who are the people that were sent out there?

Caroline (56:27.209)
So in the first instance, the organization Todd workers were really like there was a real mixture. So in the very first phase, they were people who were coming from mainly from Western Europe. So we have Dutch prisoners. These are all forced laborers. Yeah. So they're coming from the Netherlands, coming from Germany, from Belgium. There's a group of Spaniards who were sent.

Waitman (56:42.262)
And these are all forced laborers, I'm assuming. Yeah.

Caroline (56:54.217)
over as well, who'd been captured by the Germans. So, and then also some local Channel Islanders as well, some of whom, you know, there's a very weird line, blurred line between who, you know, volunteers versus forced laborers. But some people were genuinely volunteers who went there responding to job adverts and the like, and then others were forced laborers because their only choice was to go or obviously face the alternative, which in many cases was death.

And that was particularly true for Eastern European workers. So from about February 1942 onwards, you see huge contingents of people from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia being essentially recruited and sent to Alderney. So many of them had spent time in other camps elsewhere in France or Germany or their own countries even before, but they were sent there often as I say, as an alternative to being.

to being killed. The SS prisoners were a group called Bow Brigade One, and these were prisoners that had been working, again, they'd been subject to undertaking forced labourers, but they were actually really classified as more as slave labourers or even less than slave labourers because they didn't get paid, they didn't have any ability to take any holiday time to leave the camps.

didn't have any, you know, they just didn't have any rights, they didn't have any basic human rights, they had to do everything, obviously, that their overseers said that they had to do. And actually, that was true of a lot of the forced laborers as well. You know, there's often a distinction made between the ones who were under the governance of the SS and the OT. But actually, a lot of the ones under the OT were treated just as badly. There was also a group of French Jews who were sent to the island as well.

some earlier in the war but then particularly in 1943 when Drancé camp was being altered and lots of the of lots of the French well they were called French Jews but actually a lot of them just happened to be Jewish and be in France at the time but so you get a lot of people obviously coming via France so yeah so a real mixture really so there are up to 30 nationalities of people who were sent there.

Waitman (59:06.662)
in France. Yeah.

Caroline (59:21.197)
We don't know the exact number. Most scholarly studies have placed a number somewhere around about 7,000 people who were sent there and that research is ongoing. As new archives open up we're constantly finding new information. Officially there was just less than 400 people who were buried in two cemeteries on the island.

Caroline (59:49.533)
My most recent research and research by others has put the figure somewhere around about 700. But again, as part of the review, we're re-evaluating that, we are finding a few more names. And we know, even though we haven't got... That's how many people we can name, so that's kind of a minimum number. Or we've got death certificates for them, we've got a burial site for them, someone saw their body.

and said that they were definitely, you know, had been killed. But we know we have got lots of witness testimonies that talk about large shooting actions that were taking place in and around the concentration camp silt. We have other, you know, accounts of people dying in, you know, huge typhus outbreaks or because they've been beaten. So we know that number is higher. But, you know, it's obviously so it's an ongoing process to try and see if we can actually identify individuals.

who actually did perish there. Unfortunately, again, because those investigations, I mean, there were investigations after the war, but because those investigations ultimately were handed over to the Soviet Union, who didn't really carry on with those investigations, a lot of evidence was lost. So I think that it's very difficult now to paint a detailed picture in the absence of a lot of evidence.

Waitman (01:00:49.291)
And so.

Waitman (01:01:07.938)
So what have you found and what are you allowed to do? Because it's interesting, it's almost like the fact that we know there were French Jews there adds an additional level of constraint perhaps that wouldn't have existed if we could be certain that there weren't Jewish victims there in terms of what you can do and what you can't do.

Caroline (01:01:30.613)
Yeah, so in Alderney actually, I mean, one of the reasons I used the non-invasive methodology for a couple of reasons. One is because I knew that obviously French Jews and Jews from other parts of Europe were sent to Alderney and there were Jewish burials that took place within the cemetery on G-Commond that were marked and actually they'd been exhumed after the war. But obviously, you know, particularly at the very beginning of the project, like it was unclear as

those individuals had been killed. But also because the history was so sensitive and difficult, you know, there was a lot of people who saw excavation of those sites as physically and metaphorically digging up a very difficult path. And so actually the non-invasive methods, you know, were welcomed more. You know, I've never been given permission to excavate on Alderney.

Caroline (01:02:27.637)
in the camp areas, because it's just too sensitive. It's still a very painful history. And so actually, again, I use the same methods. So I was able to basically find the remnants of most of the structures within Silk Concentration Camp and also Nordonee, which was an OT and then later a concentration camp. So we could create very detailed maps

sites looked like at different periods in their history. The same with many of the other camps. We were able to use a lot of aerial photography. There are literally thousands of aerial photographs of Alderney because when the Allies were taking imagery they started the film over the Channel Islands and then they finished the film off on the way back. So you have these images which even if they weren't deliberately collected are very, very useful. And so we were able to, you know,

Waitman (01:03:14.658)
Right, yeah, yeah.

Caroline (01:03:25.141)
Often when you talk about camps, people produce one map and then that's it, but we were able to build a very detailed sort of view of how these camps evolved over time and how that corresponded to the movement of the different prisoner groups to the island. I was also able to survey the cemetery on Longy Common. As I say, there were exhumations in the 1960s that saw a lot of the bodies of the victims removed, but there were rumours in the 40s.

and after that there was a mass grave, or maybe even several mass graves, in the cemetery and in its environs. And so we did geophysical non-invasive survey in that area and we used aerial reconnaissance imagery and we found several areas within and outside of the parameters of the cemetery that suggest that there are additional burials still there that probably were not exhumed in the 1960s or at any other time.

Looking at death certificates and the burial registries and the archaeological data combined, really demonstrated that the Nazis essentially created a show cemetery on Longy Common. They put up a fence, some crosses, made it look like they were burying individual victims in an orderly fashion. But in reality, that was a way for them to hide a higher number of deaths. And prisoner numbers were recycled so that when someone died, their number was given to somebody else so it didn't look like.

you know, another victim had perished. And, you know, they tried all sorts of other things, like they took the crosses down at certain points, put them back up again, changed the names on them. They didn't create death certificates for everyone. So it was a completely, again, chaotic, completely chaotic system, completely goes against the kind of view of this organized approach. And it showed again that there were very much conscious efforts to hide.

crimes that were perpetrated. And I looked a lot at the post-war investigations that took place and used a lot of archival material as well as that in-field investigation to really try and retell the history of the occupation through this kind of, you know, through the physical evidence that it left behind really.

Waitman (01:05:34.878)
And so I think, I think one of the things that's been really interesting about this conversation is the way that history, archeology and memory connect. Um, because ultimately when you do, when you do an archeological investigation, you identify something or you unearth something either metaphorically or physically, and then we're faced with the question of what, what do we do with it?

And, you know, what do we do with that knowledge? What do we do with the fact that we know that this particular space is a mass grave, for example? Um, so is there, is there a memorial now, um, on Alderney, you know, is there, is there an attempt to, to now mark the places that you've discovered or do they only remain discovered in sort of the, the scholarly world of, you know, your work and.

Caroline (01:06:12.255)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (01:06:33.994)
and a map that you've created, but in the sense of if someone visits, you know, do we because I know even if even a Treblinka today, when you visit Treblinka, the landscape is just as it would have been, I guess, what in the 60s when they built when they put the stones in and the monolith and all that kind of stuff, you don't with the exception of the tube, the path to the gas chambers and the and the arrival ramp, which is identified by sort of an artistic

railroad track, even then there's really no marking of the places that you've actually found that would be really useful to sort of say like, here is the gas chamber.

Caroline (01:07:03.996)
Mm-hmm.

Caroline (01:07:14.273)
Yeah, sure. I mean, it's really interesting actually to compare this to the work that we've done, you know, sort of trying to find killings sites, you know, in Ukraine or outside of the camps in Poland, because often when you find an individual mass grave in a forest somewhere, then there will often be that drive to create a memorial. And there are lots of organizations that are doing incredible work to actually make this happen, who have then subsequently done that when we found

There's often debates at sites like Treblinka, that the monument itself is an incredible monument. It's a registered monument. It's incredibly evocative, but it doesn't really convey what happened there, but as a cemetery, which Treblinka is often also considered to be a cemetery, it's an incredibly powerful memorial. And so actually any kind of interventions to uncover the traces that...

of those foundations, for example, or to sort of mark certain areas would consider it being considered to sort of interfere with that aesthetic of that memorial. So there've been some interesting debates about whether or not that should happen. And up to

Waitman (01:08:28.845)
And of course the ultimate example of this is Belzec, where they've essentially paved the entire site and covered it with, I mean it's more or less uninterpretable as an historic location, with the exception of sort of that dug in path which is supposed to represent the path to the gas chambers. But otherwise, it's all memorial. It's all commemoration.

Caroline (01:08:31.786)
Mm-hmm.

Caroline (01:08:46.176)
sure.

Caroline (01:08:56.397)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that's kind of, I guess, the sort of sign of those sorts of times in terms of there's a whole history there, obviously, to the development of memorials. I also think because they genuinely thought at Treblinka that there is nothing to see, then obviously it had to go for quite a different approach. Although, ironically, they were finding remains whilst they were digging to install the memorial, but that's a whole other story.

Waitman (01:08:58.67)
historical reference.

Waitman (01:09:05.887)
Yeah.

Caroline (01:09:25.201)
But yeah, and then obviously like with places like on Alderney, I mean, there were some, there were some memorials that were erected, you know, memorial plaques that were erected in some of these locations, usually by private individuals. So that there is, there is a memorial called the Hammond Memorial, which was erected by a family at the top of the road down to where you go down to where an Alderney camp was.

It doesn't specifically reference that was the location of the camp, but it does commemorate the different nationalities of the victims. And it's silt on one of the surviving gate posts. There is a plaque that was put there in 2008 by one of the former inmates. And there's another small plaque on the side of the Alderney Museum, which shows the locations of the four named camps. So there were some memorials already.

on the island that have been the focus of some commemorative efforts by local people because there have obviously been lots of local people who have been interested in this history and have tried to keep that memory alive for a long time. But there isn't currently an extensive network of memorial markers that show exactly what was there. There have been some information boards that have recently been erected on Longy Common.

and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the UK delegation to that, which is headed up by Lord Eric Pickles, have been working with the states of Alderney and resulting from that, there have been some new information boards that have been erected. But currently, most of these sites are not marked. And I mean, I've only mentioned the camps, of which I said there were more than 20. Obviously, there's these...

burial sites, but then there's also all the fortifications, which were the products of forced and slave labour. And some of them are, you know, are marked and there are some information panels in there. But most of them aren't, a lot of them are in private ownership. And so the yeah, there isn't for visitors today, it's still quite difficult to actually see that. And so, as I say, at different sites for different reasons.

Caroline (01:11:35.473)
it's still the case that often those archaeological findings are not necessarily then translated into the memorials, you know, or educational resources or markers. So I do a lot to try and make sure that does happen and at Treblinka I've contributed to the permanent exhibition that is there currently and you can see the objects from the excavations for example, but sometimes for various reasons it is very difficult.

actually to take that material and actually have it accepted in any arena other than an academic one. So that's an ongoing sort of personal pursuit of mine is to try and make sure that we share the information about the work that we've done more widely than just academic circles, because actually it's not academics, I mean of course academics are interested, but it's the families of the victims, the descendants of the victims who want to know this information, and it's the visitors to the site who...

want to know and so yeah I'm very much committed to trying to make sure that we do move beyond just those academic circles.

Waitman (01:12:40.086)
Yeah, this is one of those things, I mean, I agree, this is one of those things that I am, I'm super interested in, you know, spatiality because when we visit any of these places, what the first thing we wanna know is where am I standing? What am I looking, you know, where am I in relation to other things? You know, I mean, it's all spatial, it's all relative. Okay, so before we close, really quickly, two questions. One is just what are you working on now? What's the latest project?

Caroline (01:12:56.564)
Mm-hmm.

Caroline (01:13:07.957)
Yeah, so I've just actually started a really large project which is examining the site of Travnikie. So you've heard me mention the word Travnikie a few times, I think in the last hour or so, but this is the place where the Travnikie men, the men who were helping the SS run the camps and round up Jews outside of the camps, where they were trained and where obviously, of course, a lot of them lived in the process of that training.

and in the course of their work. And then also it was a site for Jews, a Jewish forced labor camp. And that story is often overshadowed by the fact that it was this training facility. And the site itself is often overshadowed by the stories of the men who were housed there. And so actually I really wanted to do a place-based study because it enables us to really look at this kind of juxtaposition of these.

these men who became perpetrators of the Holocaust, who actually often were first victims of Nazi persecution, and then the victims of the Holocaust, whose stories have been completely overshadowed. And so I'm taking a team in April to do field work at Travnikie, and we are going to be continuing to map the site, and we're creating a very detailed 3D model of the camp, which we've already worked on.

as part of a smaller pilot project. And we'll be creating a digital open access book in which you'll be able to actually view full testimonies, explore the 3D model to see what the site looks like now. You'll be able to look at maps and plans and all of that. We really wanted to kind of bring the source material to life in a way that you can't necessarily do in a traditional book. And the idea is that it'll be a new spatial, historical and archeological account of life in Trageniki.

and it will include a lot of the biographies of the individual victims. And our campaign this field season is really to try and locate some of the buildings that were demolished, but most importantly, the mass graves that were built in, sorry, that were dug in and around the camp, because we know this was also used as a killing site, a burial location, and then also somewhere to dispose of the ashes and bodies of victims killed elsewhere. So.

Caroline (01:15:28.905)
The project is called Travniki Nexus of the Final Solution because actually this was where, you know, really the facilitation of the Final Solution, the Nazi persecution of Jews took place. And it's also a Holocaust site in its own right from, you know, 1941 through to 1944. So that'll be the next couple of years.

Waitman (01:15:46.878)
Yeah, I mean, and I have a connection there too, because the some of the first guards for the Inowska camp that I just finished a project on came from Travniky along with their trainers. Like the guy, one of the guys, one of the SS men worked at Travniky and then he literally was transferred with his students, I guess, to Inowska. And of course, as you point out, Travniky is not just a training facility, there's actually a sort of concentration camp.

Caroline (01:16:10.47)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (01:16:16.658)
next door as part of it and the guards were actually at least some of testimonies from that i've come across you know the guards sort of final exam was they had to go into the camp and often kill people as part of their sort of to prove that they were ready to be a guard and caroline thank you so much for coming on i really appreciate it and i think it's been a fascinating discussion i was one close with our with our question which is

Caroline (01:16:38.465)
You're very welcome.

Waitman (01:16:45.322)
If you could suggest one book on the Holocaust that you found particularly meaningful, enlightening, useful, what would it be?

Caroline (01:16:56.197)
So actually this is a book that really kind of inspired me to start my work. I mean, if you listen to many of my lectures, you've probably heard me say this many times before, but I think it's a really powerful book for many reasons. So it's called From the Heart of Hell, Manuscripts of a Sonderkommando Prisoner Found in Auschwitz. So this is actually a later publication of the earlier version of the book, which I actually first discovered in the university library when I was...

designing, you know, thinking about my master's topic. And this is letter, these are letters that were written by Jewish workers who were kept alive to help with the various processes connected to the killings in Auschwitz-Birkenau. And one in particular is Alman Grudovsky. He wrote a letter and basically these men, they buried them in the ground.

And one of the letters that he wrote, he basically pleaded, you know, with future generations to dig the earth, to find the traces of the victims who were murdered, and to tell the world about what had happened. And so, you know, he actually uses this kind of phrase, like, you know, to dig for the traces of millions of men who were murdered.

And so as an archaeologist, that really like, you know, that struck a chord with me. And as you've seen, you know, I didn't necessarily go down the path of digging all the time, but certainly that realization that victims at the time wanted future generations to find the traces of these crimes so that they wouldn't be forgotten, you know, really spoke to me. And I think as, you know, as a powerful piece of testimony, these letters.

given incredible insight into what life was like in Auschwitz-Birkenau. And as acts of resistance, they give an incredible insight into the risks that people were prepared to take in order to ensure that these crimes were forgotten. And therefore they remind us why we must never forget them. And also I think, I know from my other research, there were thousands, it's hard to put a number on it, but of people who were

Caroline (01:19:08.053)
doing the same thing in other camps and those letters have never been found. And so it also kind of gives inspiration to, you know, as I say, to sort of start looking at other sites and trying to find more information about them as well. So it's published by the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau and as I say, as a newer edition, and it's available on their website if anybody is interested in following up on that.

Waitman (01:19:34.282)
Yeah, I mean, and that's a great suggestion because it's sort of archaeology, it's archaeology inception, right? Because it's both metaphorical and actual and like, you know, his actual manuscripts, as you point out, are dug up because he buried them. And so it works sort of on all levels. Caroline, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Caroline (01:19:41.209)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Caroline (01:19:48.157)
Yeah.

Caroline (01:19:52.981)
So does, yeah. I'm so glad to be here, I really appreciate it. Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks so much, Waichman. All right.

Waitman (01:19:58.034)
And for everyone else, again, thanks for listening. If you have a chance, it would be great if you could go on Apple or Spotify, give us a rating, give us a comment. I will put links to Caroline's work on the show notes as always, along with a link to the reading list so you can catch up with not only the books that she's recommended, but also the books of our other guests.