The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 105
3. Court Files of the War and Postwar Period
3.1. Early Media Reports
Before turning to court files, I would like to start this chapter with
several reports in British mass media hinting at the existence of mobile
gassing devices for mass homicide. Both reports have the touch and
smell of the products of Allied psychological warfare, hence may be
nothing more than propaganda.
The first one is at once one of the first media reports ever about alleged
German massacres of Jews. It appeared in the notoriously anti-
German London Daily Telegraph, which had spread (false) gassing rumors
already during the First World War. 63 On June 25, 1942, the following
article could be found on page 5 of this newspaper:
“GERMANS MURDER 700,000
JEWS IN POLAND
TRAVELLING GAS CHAMBERS
DAILY TELEGRAPH REPORTER
More than 700,000 Polish Jews have been slaughtered by the
Germans in the greatest massacre in world history. […]”
These charges were very general and were subsequently not substantiated.
Today orthodox historiography assumes that in Poland gas vans
were primarily deployed in the Chemno camp, although the maximum
claimed death toll amounts to merely half of what the Daily Telegraph
claimed in 1942. 64
A somewhat more detailed account, probably based on the same
British “intelligence” (psychological warfare) sources, was published
63 Daily Telegraph, March 22, 1916, p. 7: “ATROCITIES IN SERBIA: 700,000 VICTIMS.
[…] The Governments of the Allies have secured evidence and documents […] proving
that Austria and Bulgaria have been guilty of horrible crimes in Serbia […]. Women,
children, and old men were shut up in the churches by the Austrians and either stabbed
with the bayonet or suffocated by means of asphyxiating gas. In one church in Belgrade
3,000 women, children, and old men were thus suffocated. […]”; see Aitken 1991; the
first mainstream historian to mention this newspaper article was Walter Laqueur 1980, p.
9.
64 The claimed Chemno death toll actually ranges between 34,000 and 1,300,000, depending
on the author; see Mattogno 2011a, chapter 11.