The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

180 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
tration camps. But these jurists all managed to convince the court that
they did not know what was going on in the concentration camps.
Gas vans were not in the focus of this trial. Only on two occasions a
gas van was mentioned, although they are both interesting cases, as they
show how rumors spread and multiply. The first case was attested to by
an unnamed witness:
“When he was in the Monowitz camp, which belonged to Auschwitz,
his health deteriorated so much that he was supposed to be
gassed. He was hauled into a gas van, in which the inmates were
gassed on the way to the crematoria.” (p. 325)
Needless to say that he miraculously escaped his own gassing, because
some physician put a stop to it by claiming that on that day the
camp had to be squeaky clean due to a visit by some delegation of officers.
The problem with this is that even orthodox historians reject this
alleged gas vans deployment in Auschwitz as untrue. Yet the Wiesbaden
court believed the witness, which shows how credulous German
courts are when it comes to believing just about anything a former inmate
tells.
The second case was attested to by a prosecutor working in Linz,
Austria, during the war (p. 354):
“This witness definitely knew about the extermination methods in
the individual camps. But it is telling that he did not find out about it
due to his activity in the office of the attorney general, but incidentally
when working at a German district court in The Haag. […]
In Holland the witness also heard before March 1943 about the invention
of a Berlin police officer. According to this exhaust gases
were piped into hermetically sealed vehicles in order to kill inmates.”
If considering that Holland was a hotspot of Allied propaganda efforts
and mass gassing claims (Kues 2010), we can see where this
“knowledge” came from.
3.7.2.4. LG Köln, Verdict of 20 June 1953
The defendant of this trial was the former SS-Oberführer and Colonel
of the Police Dr. Emanuel Schäfer, who was responsible for the
Semlin Judenlager (Jewish camp) near Belgrade, Serbia. Most of the
verdict deals with considerations about the execution of two hostages,
which is irrelevant in the present context. Since the 7,000+ inmates of
the Semlin camp are said to have been gassed using a Saurer truck es-