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The first-ever archaeological excavations at the Nazi death camp Treblinka have revealed new mass graves, as well as the first physical evidence that this camp held gas chambers.

The disturbing new findings by a team led by Staffordshire University archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls are revealed in a Smithsonian Channel documentary, Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine, that premiered Saturday, and will be repeated throughout the week.

In just over one year, between July 1942 and October 1943, an estimated 1.6 million people were slaughtered en masse at Treblinka, outside of Warsaw, Poland, mostly in the Nazi gas chambers at the Treblinka II death camp facility. About 900,000 of the victims were Jews HY”D.

The excavations reveal that the Nazis weren’t as adept at covering up their crimes as they believed when they razed the death camp in 1943. Brick walls and foundations from the gas chambers remain, as do massive amounts of human bone, including fragments now eroding out on the forested ground surface.

After the war, the destroyed death camp was designated as a memorial and out of respect for the victims who remained buried there, archaeological digs to uncover the camp’s secrets were prohibited.

Only the recollections of survivors and other eyewitnesses, including some of the guards, have allowed historians to piece together a full picture of how Jews were herded from trains, told they were being taken to a mikva, which was actually a gas chamber where they were murdered by the thousands.

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