The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 103
the van. Hence any use of producer gas for homicidal gassing purposes
would have been very difficult during transit. Either the gas could be
used for fueling the engine or for gassing people. Using the gas for both
operations at once, that is to say, splitting it between engine and cargo
box, would have reduced the engine’s power even more and up to a critical
point. Therefore this potential ersatz theory to rescue the “gas van”
claims founders in view of the fact that all witness statements speak of
the exhaust gas being piped into the cargo box during transit, as we will
see later. (For a hypothetical design of such a producer gas murder van
see Ill. 27 on p. 379.)
Berg has not only shown that half a million of Germany’s trucks and
vans were equipped with these generators during the war, but also that
every truck and van driver had to be specifically trained to use these
generators, as their gas was extremely dangerous. So any truck driver in
Germany would have known how to quickly get access to cheap poison
gas for mass murder. And not only the truck drivers, but also the entire
elite of the Third Reich, who were involved in campaigns to promote
this technology in Germany’s desperate attempt to keep its rolling fleet
mobile in the face of an extreme dearth of petroleum (Rudolf 2003, pp.
459-467).
So how come that anyone could come up with the ridiculous claim
that Diesel engine exhaust gas was used for mass murder instead of
producer gas? Well, the producer gas technology had been a recent
German development and had probably not sunk into the consciousness
of those spreading the story. The Diesel engine, in contrast, was a German
invention of the late 19th century und was therefore well-known
Illustration 4: Saurer BT 4500 with producer gas generator. A
Saurer truck similar to this type allegedly was used for mass murder
in Kulmhof/Chemno – not with producer gas, but incredibly with its
exhaust gas (Rudolf 2003, p. 461).