The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 141
I quoted this sentence in order to avoid accusations of omitting decisive
passages. Since gas chamber claims are not a topic of this book, I
merely want to point out that Austrian orthodox historians established
in 1995 the complete lack of any traces of killing devices at the concentration
camp Mauthausen. They also determined that the gas chamber
shown to visitors in that camp is a post war fabrication with no relation
to reality (Freund/Perz/Stuhlpfarrer 1995).
Immediately afterwards we find the following statement:
“Apart from that a specially built automobile commuted between
Mauthausen and Gusen, in which prisoners were gassed while travelling.
The idea for the construction of this automobile was Dr.
Wasiczki’s, SS-Untersturmfuehrer and pharmacist. I, myself, never
put any gas into this automobile, I only drove it, but I knew that
prisoners were being gassed.” (ibid.)
This, too, is made up. If there ever were any “gas vans,” then they
were the brainchild of people higher up in the hierarchy of the RSHA,
like Walther Rauff. Apart, Rauff’s letter of 26 March 1942 (see Appendix
4), if dealing with “gas vans,” would be an indicator that the Mauthausen
camp had requested such vans from the German Institute for
Criminological Technology in Berlin. Hence no “gas vans” were ever
invented by some little SS-Untersturmführer personally known to
Ziereis.
Ziereis’ claim to have driven the van himself is utterly unbelievable.
The boss of a network of prison camps comprising 50,000 inmates and
more – numerous “satellite labor camps” were also under Ziereis’
command – most certainly did not spend his precious time commuting
in a van between two camps.
Furthermore the expression “I, myself, never put any gas into this
automobile” indicates that those vans did not use their exhaust gas but
required the addition of some other gas. This is probably the origin of
the legend that some of these vans actually used Zyklon B to kill people.
I will return to this claim in chapter 5.1., where I discuss claims
made by French orthodox historian Pierre-Serge Choumoff about Mauthausen.
At the end of his “confession” Ziereis is said to have claimed the following:
“SS-Gruppenfuehrer Gluecks gave the order to classify weak
prisoners as mentally deranged and to kill them by a gas plant which