The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

128 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
3.5. Gas Vans during the IMT and NMTs
3.5.1. The Soviet Background
The gas van claim played only a minor role during the International
Military Tribunal (IMT) and the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMTs)
after the war. Not just with respect to this claim, these trials were an extensions
of the Soviet wartime show trials discussed before. This is not
just proven by the first reference of “gas vans” during the IMT, which
occurred in the indictment with indirect reference to the claims made
during the Soviet show trials in Krasnodar and Kharkov (IMT, vol. 1, p.
49; shortly thereafter repeated by the Soviet prosecutor Ozol, vol. 2, p.
63):
“In Krasnodar some 6,700 civilians were murdered by poison
gas in gas vans, […].
In Kharkov about 195,000 persons were either tortured to death,
shot, or gassed in gas vans.”
In addition to these show trials, Soviet prosecutor Smirnov presented
the minutes of a Soviet court-martial – of all things – held on 29 October
1944, which claims the “annihilation of Soviet citizens in Smolensk
in May 1943, by means of asphyxiation through carbon monoxide in
gas vans.” The “information” gathered by Soviet court-martials were
most certainly not more but rather less reliable than those gathered during
the above discussed Soviet show trials (vol. 7, p. 465). The attempt
of defense lawyer Dr. Kurt Kauffmann to have this obvious propaganda
material excluded failed, though, because Art. 21 of the London Charter
defining the rules of the IMT stated clearly that all evidence created by
the victorious powers has to be accepted at face value (vol. 1, p. 15), or
in legalese expressed by the court’s presiding judge Lord Geoffry Lawrence
(vol. 7, p. 453):
“Article 21 is perfectly clear, and it directs the Tribunal to take
judicial notice of the various documents which are there set out, and
expressly refers to the records and findings of military or other tribunals
of any of the United Nations.”
Other similar Soviet claims about “gas vans” were similarly based
on the “findings” of investigations conducted by Soviet commissions
(vol. 7, pp. 503, 544, 556, 571-575). In this context the Soviet prosecution
quoted from a deposition allegedly made by a German soldier
named E.M. Fenchel who is said to have been a PoW of the USSR. This
deposition had been published in 1943 by the Soviet Embassy in the