The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

198 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
It goes without saying that this event, if it happened in the first
place, must have occurred prior to the authoring of the Just letter (if
both explosion are identical). Since the day on which this letter is
claimed to have been written – the fifth of June 1942 – was entered by
hand (presumable by the author), 110 it can be assumed that the document
itself was actually written one day or even several days prior to the entry
of the date. If considering the length of the document, which is a
fairly detailed technical report, one may rightly assume that it is based
on a manuscript whose drafting must have required some time. Since
the author in Berlin could not possibly have learned immediately about
this explosion in Poland, which during times of war was nothing extraordinary,
one can safely assume that this explosion at
Kulmhof/Chemno must have occurred at the end of May 1942 at the
latest, when considering all the necessary steps involved, as this hypothetical,
but realistic inverse chronology shows:
5 June: signing of the letter;
3 June: typewriting of the letter;
1 June: begin of drafting the manuscript;
28 May: reception of the news about the explosion;
25 May: explosion at Chemno.
The verdict of the German court at Bonn states that the explosion at
Chemno occurred “at the end of May.” Hence both documents seem to
agree on the time when the event is said to have occurred, and there is
no a priori reasonable doubt as to the event’s reality, since the verdict
mentions injuries suffered by one of the defendants (pp. 240, 259, 326
of the verdict).
I should mention here that Ingrid Weckert disagrees on this point. In
a letter to P. Marais she wrote:
“If the explosion had occurred only a few days earlier, then the
news about it would not even have reached Berlin by June 5, let
alone that someone had given ‘special orders’ to other ‘concerned
departments.’ German red tape has never reacted that fast, and most
certainly not during the war and at the RSHA, which had other preoccupations.
Hence the fabricated letter of 5 June 1942 was typed
considerably later and by people who knew about the explosion.
Since this was an internal affair, one has to look for the forger
among this small group of people.”
110 This procedure can be found in other German documents of this era as well.