The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 165
of how these tubes are assembled together). The few witnesses who
saw the ‘Sonderwagen’ from the inside (urawski, Srebrnik,
Grabowski – card 279) concluded that the inlet of the exhaust pipe
in the vehicle’s interior was protected by a kind of metal sieve. On
the vehicle’s floor lay a second floor of wood, as in a streetcar or a
bathroom. It prevented the clogging of the exhaust pipe from the inside.”
So what does the fact prove that several witnesses agreed on some
sort of connection between the exhaust pipe and the cargo box? Since
by 1945 the claim of German murder vans using exhaust gasses to kill
people had been bandied about for some three years, anyone asked to
draw a sketch of the gassing mechanism would have drawn some connection
from the exhaust pipe to the interior of the cargo box. It doesn’t
take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. But the quality of these
drawings clearly reveal them as worthless scribblings (see Falborski’s
sketch on page 353).
The next three paragraphs in Bednarz’s description are about an entirely
new issue: the alleged use of some mysterious additives mixed into
the gas van’s gasoline in order to make it more poisonous (ibid., pp.
25f.):
“It could not be established whether only the vehicle’s exhaust
gas was used for poisoning or whether some other substances were
added to the oil or gasoline in order to accelerate the process of
poisoning. In that regard, there is no sufficiently reliable data. It
was only observed that some balloons and bottles of unknown chemicals
were constantly coming in for the Sonderkommando (witness
Bosiski – card 432).
The driver of SS Dr. Ralf König, Grabowski, testified that he had
once used the gasoline borrowed from the Sonderkommando. When
he turned on the engine – as usual in the garage – he felt that he was
losing consciousness (‘I felt lightheaded and I felt a slightly sweet
taste on the lips’ – card 279). This witness testified further: ‘Dr. König,
when I told him about it, absolutely forbade me to run the engine
in the garage in case the gasoline came from the
Sonderkommando.’
The driver Piaskowski (card 17) testified that during one of the
repairs he had started the ‘Sonderwagen’s’ engine in a closed gar-