The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

200 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
All this seems utterly incredible and hence proves in my view once
more that the Just document was drafted and typed long after 5 June
1942 and was then antedated – always assuming the Chemno explosion
did indeed happen at the claimed time. Plus it must be emphasized that
the author of the Just document changed the nature of the explosion,
which the witnesses claimed to have occurred in the basement of the
Chemno Castle, by falsely bringing it into the context of a gas van operated
outside the building.
Aside from the fact that the document itself gives rise to so many
points of critique, this additional point does certainly not support its authenticity!
If the Just document is indeed a forgery, the fact that the date of the
explosion at Chemno is not mentioned in it is perhaps not without relevance,
because this omission averts the risk that a reader insufficiently
familiar with the details becomes suspicious due to the two dates being
too close together. On the other hand: If the date of this accident is considered
to be relatively well established, the questions rises why the author
has not avoided such critique right from the start by choosing a later
date for the letter more consistent with the chronology of the events. I
may surmise that either he did not know the exact point in time of this
alleged explosion or that he probably didn’t realize that the chain of
multiple events involved would have delayed the typing of such a document
much more than he had anticipated.
As to the reason of such an explosion, one can only speculate. If the
explosion occurred in the castle’s basement as claimed by the witnesses,
then the gas vans could not have been involved. If positing that these
homicidal gas vans were real and that it was an actual gas van that
caused it (not in a basement, though), it could be that it was not really
an explosion but merely a bursting of the cargo box as a result of an extreme
pressure inside of it caused by it being hermetically sealed, as so
many witnesses claim. However, if the vans’ cargo boxes were hermetically
sealed indeed, this bursting would inevitably have occurred already
during the very first attempted gassing (i.e. in late 1941), after
which pressure release openings would have been included immediately
in all such vans in order to prevent such an event in the future – and not
only after having processed “97,000” without any other problems, as
the Just document claims. It would have been impossible to process
even one person without such openings.