The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 175
years imprisonment is considered the threshold beyond which prison
terms really start wreaking havoc on a defendant’s life. Hence 46 of 69,
that is two thirds of all defendants got away rather cheaply.
Juxtapose this with the prison terms meted out in West Germany for
doubting or contesting the claims made by these West German court
verdicts – that is to say: punishments of Holocaust revisionists, see the
table just underneath the one mentioned previously listing some of the
most prominent cases. One of them, Sylvia Stolz, is actually a lawyer
who was punished for her defense activities on behalf of Ernst Zündel.
From this we can see that today in West Germany the judiciary punishes
a defendant who kills one Jew or even a great many of them with
a similar severity as it punishes a defendant who disagrees with a Jew
(or a German judge, for that matter).
3.7.2. From 1949 to 1959 (4 trials)
3.7.2.1. LG Stuttgart, Verdict of 8 Nov. 1949 & 15 Aug. 1950
During this trial a defendant was prosecuted who had been incarcerated
since war’s end and was to see the light of day no more in his life:
Ferdinand Göhler. In 1941 he was employed in the town administration
of Kalisch, where he was also concerned with the administration of the
camp Bornhagen (Polish: Kozminek), where Polish Jews had been incarcerated.
Although the original indictment of 25 April 1949 accused
him of having been involved in the resettlement of Jews at the end of
November 1941 (p. 190, 217), during which several hundred Jews are
said to have been killed by means of “gas vans,” the court of the first
trial declared this case beyond its jurisdiction. As this decision was confirmed
on appeal, this issue was no longer dealt with in detail during the
retrial of the case in 1950, so no verdict was passed in this regard at all
(p. 191). The court nevertheless made a few statements in this regard,
which I quote:
“The removal was done with a special vehicle, which had the
shape of a moving truck and which could be entered from the back.
Due to its dark paint, it was called ‘black van.’ According to the
opinion of the Jewish witnesses, a gassing device was installed inside
of it, which could be turned on during transit. Nobody could
make specific statements about this […].” (p. 200)