The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

202 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
quently jumped out of the driver’s cabin and ‘shat in his pants’,
[…].” (pp. 244, 290)
This puerile, probably invented story did not help him, though, as he
willingly complied to perform all the later claimed gassings according
to the court.
Laabs’ alleged horrors are juxtaposed by the alleged reaction of another
purported gas van operator, the defendant Walter Burmeister,
about whom the court writes:
“Conducting the gas van made such a little impression on him
that today he does no longer know when he did it the first time.” (p.
247)
Or maybe he cannot remember because there is nothing to remember?
Similarly calloused, according to the court, was the defendant Alois
Haefele, about whom the court stated:
“[…] not even today the defendant has a feeling of personal guilt
[…]” (p. 248)
So either he still thought during his trial that mass murder is a good
thing to commit, or else he had no feeling of guilt because there was
nothing to feel guilty about in terms of the indictment? The former
would mean that the defendant was and is a human monster. Yet in this
regard the court accepted that, while working at Chemno, the defendant
“prohibited the carrying of whips in order to prevent the guards
from striking the victims, […] he took care that the Jewish workers
had sufficient food, occasionally gave them cigarettes, and on one
occasion stopped the co-defendant Heinl from beating up the Jews.”
(p. 249)
So he was definitely not a callous monster. But why would he then
be utterly unrueful about the crimes he committed or helped to commit?
Walter Burmeister, by the way, tried to rescind his pretrial testimony,
in which he had admitted that he had operated the gas van, to the effect
that he had merely driven the gas vans to the incineration pit after
an unnamed Polish worker had attached the hose to the cargo box, had
started the engine, and thus had performed the execution. Blaming that
which was undeniable in the court’s eyes on some anonymous Polish
guy was too transparent a maneuver to be credible, so the court did not
believe him (p. 299). 112
112 One of the witness during that trial was Sr[ebrnik], who claimed, among other things,
that the defendant Burmeister used denitist tools, incidentally found among the victims’
property, to arbitrarily pull or break some of the witness’s teeth merely in order to torture