Abstract
At the extermination camp at Treblinka, the Nazis murdered between 800,000 to one million people. When they abandoned the camp in 1943, they tried to hide the traces of their crimes. This resulted in the popular perception that the camp had been destroyed and no systematic attempt was made to locate the evidence of the crimes or to find the graves of the victims. However, this paper will outline how historical and archaeological research has demonstrated that a considerable amount of evidence from the camp does survive. The results of search for the first (old) gas chambers at Treblinka will be outlined and it will be demonstrated how, through the use of a range of interdisciplinary state-of-the-art techniques, a more accurate picture of the camp is emerging. The implications of this work for enhancing education, commemorative, and visitor experiences will also be discussed.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the staff at the Museum of Struggle and Martyrdom in Treblinka, especially Dr Edward Kopówka, for their assistance during the Finding Treblinka project. For their specialist advice about Halacha, thanks are due to Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, Agnieszka Nieradko, and Aleks Schwarz. The authors are grateful for the assistance of those involved in the archaeological fieldwork at Treblinka and data post-processing, especially Ivar Schute, William Mitchell, Dr Dante Abate, Janos Kerti, Czelsie Weston, Laura Thomas, Iwan Witt, Joanna Zasłona, Dr Pavel Vareka and students from the University of West Bohemia. The fieldwork would not have been possible without funding from Staffordshire University, University of Birmingham, Furneaux and Edgar Productions and Channel 5. The 2017 fieldwork was funded by, and formed part of, the “Accessing Campscapes: Inclusive Strategies for Using Europe’s Conflicted Heritage” (iC-ACCESS) project, financed by HERA Uses of the Past Call (Grant No. 649307).
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Sturdy Colls, C., Colls, K. (2020). The Heart of Terror: A Forensic and Archaeological Assessment of the Old Gas Chambers at Treblinka. In: Symonds, J., Vařeka, P. (eds) Archaeologies of Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism, and Repression . Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46683-1_5
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