The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

106 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
some three weeks later, on 16 July 1942, in the British weekly News
Review under the title “Death refined,” which included references to
stationary gas chambers in the Majdanek camp (Lublin) as well as to
gas vans used in Russia to kill partisans (Sharf 1963, pp. 186f.):
“Bringing their tastes for technical refinement into the gentle art
of civilian murder, the Germans are using mobile gas chambers for
execution behind the front, manned by SS and Gestapo men.
First introduced by the Gestapo to get rid of incurably ill people,
gas was taken into special wards and released after patients had received
a dose of sleeping-drug, keeping hospitals clear for wounded
soldiers.
When war started, large gas stations were set up in Poland to kill
off Jews who had been expelled from Germany to Lublin district
[=Majdanek] as well as the Polish Jews who lived there.
No sleeping-drugs were wasted on them. They were just trussed
up and finished off. Last winter gas lorries were taken behind the
Eastern Front to liquidate guerillas.”
The next time a mass murder in mobile devices committed by Germans
was hinted at was in a radio speech given by German writer
Thomas Mann, who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1933 and whose anti-
German propaganda speeches were aired by the British during the war
(Mann 1945). Mann’s speeches clearly spread Allied atrocity propaganda,
as Thomas Kues has shown in his analysis (Kues 2010). To name
just one of his outrageous propaganda lies, Mann claimed for instance
that the Germans were exterminating the French and had a plan of killing
20 millions of them! The “gas vans” occurred in a speech aired on
27 September 1942 (Mann 1945, p. 73):
“In Paris 16,000 Jews were herded together within a few days,
loaded onto cattle cars and sent away. Whither? One who knows is
the German train engineer who has been reported about in Switzerland.
He fled there after several times having to drive trains filled
with Jews, which were halted on an open stretch of track, hermetically
sealed, and then gassed through. The man could not stand it
anymore. Yet his experience is far from exceptional. A precise and
authentic report is available on the killing of not less than 11,000
Polish Jews with poison gas. They were brought to a special execution
field near Konim [correct: Konin] in the Warsaw District, put
inside wagons which had been sealed airtight, and transformed into
corpses within fifteen minutes. We have a detailed description of the