The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 143
“Carbon monoxide is released by the driver into the closed back
of the car. The apparatus can be installed with the simplest means
and can be removed again immediately. After considerable difficulties
a suitable vehicle has now become available.”
From the proceedings themselves it can be gleaned that Deboisse
was indeed assassinated (vol. 21, p. 501), but it is unclear by which
means, as two more options (shooting, poison) were laid out in these
documents. I am quoting this document in order to highlight that the
German authorities considering this assassination did not plan to pipe
exhaust gases into the passenger compartment, but rather to use a separate
device, probably bottled pure, odorless CO gas. Anything else
would have been technically too complicated, plus it would have caused
the intended victim to become suspicious and cause trouble.
Himmler, of course, would also have been the driving force behind
the “gas van” mass murders in Eastern Europe. If these mass murders
had taken place in the preceding years, wouldn’t the masterminds of
this crime have thought similarly then and employed something more
suitable than hardly toxic, but highly irritating Diesel fumes?
3.6. Gas Vans during Postwar Trials Outside of
Germany
3.6.1. Yugoslavia
In 2010 Byford published a critical study about gas van claims made
by the Yugoslavian judiciary after the war. Since his critical method of
assessing witness statements is of central importance to the present
study, I will abstain from reinventing the wheel and direct the reader’s
attention to Byford’s paper as well as my remarks about it in chapter
4.1.
I want to indicate here, though, that one witness about the Semlin
camp near Belgrade testified that the Jews there were killed by all kinds
of means, among them not a gas van but a gas chamber. This account
was mentioned during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (State of Israel
1993, session 46, part 6; 19 May 1961):
“I know that part of [the Jews…] were suffocated in gas chambers.”