The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 171
Another trial was in preparation in Austria in 1967 against Herbert
Andorfer for his involvement in the claimed mass murder of Jews held
in the Semlin camp in Serbia (Landesgericht Wien, 27e, Vr 2260/67).
Since Andorfer had immigrated to Venezuela after the war and had received
citizenship there, Austria eventually decided that he is no longer
an Austrian subject. Andorfer was subsequently extradited to Germany,
where he stood trial for the above mentioned charges (see chapter
3.7.4.8.).
3.7. Gas Vans during West-German Trials
3.7.1. Introduction
Since the trials conducted in communist East Germany until its collapse
and reunification with West Germany in 1989/1990 are radically
different from those conducted in the West Germany, I will deal with
the communist trials in chapter 3.8.
All in all 27 trials were conducted in the Federal Republic of Germany
(West Germany) by German courts of law addressing in one way
or other the alleged mass murder committed with gas vans. 91 A summary
of the verdict data is given in Table 4. It is impossible to cover all
of these trials in detail, but I will give a summary of each and discuss
the issues pertinent to our topic. Unless otherwise stated, all page numbers
given in the subchapters of this section refer to the respective volume
as given in Table 4.
Since court verdicts tend to mention primarily the evidence which
justifies their verdict, judging the cases by their verdicts alone results in
a lopsided perspective. Hence, in order to do each case justice, one
would have to read the entire case file compiled by the prosecution during
the time between opening the investigation until right up to the trial.
It goes without saying that these files would also be lopsided, as prosecutors
in such cases frequently tend to merely find culprits for crimes
which are considered self-evident rather than scrutinize the historical
record. Yet still, experience shows that many revealing witness statements
not fitting into the prosecution’s agenda are silently dropped and
are subsequently also not quoted in the “scientific” literature. Today
91
Since some of them are mere retrials of successful appeals, the number of unique cases is
actually only 24.