The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

144 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
Even though prosecutor Bar-Or tried to repair this damaging testimony
by stating that this “is not a reference to gas chambers,” since we
“know from other evidence that gas vans were sent to Serbia,” but that
does not change the fact that with this statement the divergence of witness
accounts on those alleged gas vans received yet another – stationary
– dimension.
3.6.2. Poland
3.6.2.1. General Remarks
The Polish trails against Germans during the immediate postwar
time are infamous for their Stalinist character. They were prepared and
conducted during a time when Poland had not only been forcibly turned
into a Stalinist state due to its occupation by the Red Army, but in addition
it was dominated by a rabid anti-Germanism which in those years
had turned genocidal, manifested by the greatest ethnic cleansing the
world has ever seen (de Zayas 1993) and by extermination camps into
which German civilians were pressed and subjected to a cruel regiment
leading to the death of many thousand inmates (Sack 1993). In those
years Poland desperately needed a reason to “justify” its unfolding genocide
and a tool with which to secure for the future its robbery of 20%
of Germany’s territories. The Stalinist show trials staged after the war
were the vehicles with which this goal was to be achieved. They were
charged with producing the evidence of an unprecedented genocide
committed by Germans on Polish soil, which was to justified or at least
make understandable any anti-German measure after the war. While the
IMT and the NMTs only scratched the surface by making mainly unsubstantiated
claims about the alleged genocide committed by the Germans
during the war, the Polish judiciary subsequently set out to fill in
the framework given by the Allied tribunals.
The most prominent of these trials is the Krakow trial against the
guards of the former German concentration camp at Auschwitz. Mattogno
has thoroughly documented (2010), how the extant German wartime
documents were twisted and maliciously misrepresented by the
court in order to form a base upon which, with the help of mendacious
witness statements and coerced confessions, the legend of the extermination
camp was erected, which to this day forms Poland’s, if not the
world’s stranglehold on Germany’s (and Austria’s) self-perception.