Blobel began his work experimenting at Chełmno ( 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 operation officially began at Sobibór extermination camp . The '' Leichenkommando '' exhumed the bodies from mass graves around the camp and then burned them , after which task the workers were executed . The process then moved to Bełżec in November 1942 . The Auschwitz and Majdanek camps had crematoria with furnace rooms on site to dispose of the bodies , therefore the '' Aktion '' 1005 commandos were not needed there . Surplus corpses were burned by their own prisoners '' ( pictured ) '' . The semi-industrial incineration of corpses at the Treblinka extermination camp began as soon as the political danger associated with the earlier burials was realized . In 1943 , the 22,000 Polish victims of the Soviet Katyn massacre were discovered near Smolensk in Russia and reported to Adolf Hitler . Their remains were well preserved underground , attesting to the Soviet mass murder . By April 1943 , the Nazi propaganda began to draw attention of the international community to this war crime . The Katyn Commission was formed to make detailed examinations in an effort to drive a wedge between the Allies . Meanwhile , the secret orders to exhume mass graves and burn the hundreds of thousands of victims instead 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 '' Scharführer '' 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
Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre
Sonderaktion 1005