The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

178 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
3.7.2.2. LG Karlsruhe, Verdicts of 15 Dec. 1949 & 7. Oct. 1951
During this trial Adolf Rübe was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment
plus 15 years for murder and 26 cases of manslaughter, which
he is said to have committed between late 1942 and summer 1943 while
doing an office job for the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst). The
verdict relies heavily on the IMT, whose determinations about the alleged
National-Socialist measures for the physical extermination of the
Jews the court considered to be facts “notorious to the court” (p. 13), or
in other words: they were not subject to discussion.
Before we turn to the German trial, I want to briefly discuss Rübe’s
role during the Nuremberg trials. Rübe had been arrested by the Allies
right after the war and was made to write an affidavit, in which he related
the following atrocity story, among other things (NMT, vol. 4, p.
473):
“‘On the occasion of an exhumation in Minsk, in November
1943, Obersturmfuehrer Heuser arrived with a Kommando of Latvians.
They brought eight Jews, men and women, with them. The Latvians
guarded the Jews, while Harter and Heuser erected a funeral
pyre with their own hands. The Jews were bound, put on the pile
alive, drenched with gasoline and burned.’ (NO-5498.)”
This is said to have happened at a time when the Germans were retreating
at all fronts and are said to have been in the process of excavating
hundreds if not thousands of mass graves in Russia in order to cremate
the remains of their mass murders in an attempt to destroy material
evidence. That is also the background why those eight Jews are said
to have been burned on a pyre instead of simply being shot. However,
considering that one needs some 200 kg of wood per person for a successful
cremation, that therefore the suggested pyre for eight persons
had to contain some one and a half metric tons of wood, how likely is it
that two German officers did the job all by themselves, while their Latvian
helpers just stood by and watched? This gives a clear indication
about the truthfulness of Rübe’s statements made under the duress of
Allied incarceration. His statement clearly served merely to incriminate
his superiors and to buy himself freedom from prosecution.
In his NMT statement Rübe also details the events of an alleged
mass shooting of 1,800 Jews in the Sluzk ghetto in February 1943
(ibid., pp. 564f.). At the end of his statement he mentions his then superior
SS-Obersturmbannführer Strauch, who was one of the defendants