The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 115
grating, beneath which there was a pipe that was connected with the
exhaust pipe of the engine. The exhaust gas from the Diesel engine,
which contained a high concentration of carbon monoxide, penetrated
the interior of the van, causing the rapid poisoning and death
from asphyxiation of the prisoners confined in it.
[…] Before being dragged from the cellar the prisoners were
stripped of their clothing; then they were bundled into the murder
van 60 to 80 at a time. The doors of the van were then hermetically
closed and the engine started. After standing with the engine running
for several minutes, the van would drive to an anti-tank trench
which had been dug outside the Measuring Instruments Factory on
the outskirts of Krasnodar. As a rule, the murder vans were escorted
by a convoy of police from the Sonderkommando SS-10-a. By the
time the vans reached the anti-tank trench the people were asphyxiated
by the gas. The bodies were flung into the trench and buried.
Men, women and children were bundled into the van without discrimination.”
(pp. 8f.; all subsequent page no. in this section from
it.)
Just like in all other report and witness statements, the claim is made
here as well that the cargo box into which the persons to be “liquidated”
were herded sealed hermetically, since it makes no sense to seal the
back door(s) hermetically but to leave the rest of the cargo box unsealed.
I have stated several times that the system was not operable under
these circumstances (see chapter 1.3.2.). Furthermore it is simply a
lie to claim that the “exhaust gas from the Diesel engine” “contained a
high concentration of carbon monoxide” “causing the rapid poisoning
and death from asphyxiation of the prisoners confined in it.” I posit that
death by suffocation would occur due to lack of oxygen, which would
occur sooner or later in a space into which 85 persons had been
crammed, even without the need to have the victims inhale Diesel exhaust
gases – under technically highly dubious circumstances.
“Yevdokia Fedorovna Gazhik, who, one day, witnessed the forcible
loading into the ‘murder van’ of an arrested woman and her
five-year-old daughter, stated as follows:
‘Into this “motor bus” the Gestapo men were forcibly dragging a
woman about thirty years of age. The woman refused to go into the
van, resisted, and all the time tried to reach a little girl behind her,
four or five years old, who was crying: “Mummy, Mummy, I want to
ride with you.” Unable to subdue the arrested woman, one of the