The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

206 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
The defendant was not alone with this lack of any knowledge. Although
the court considered the existence and deployment of the gas van
an immutable fact, it could not help but express its surprise about the
complete ignorance of many witnesses in this regard: (pp. 356f.)
“It was striking that many witnesses knew nothing about the existence
of the gas van. Even the witness Ric.[chter], during whose
time as leader of the Einsatzkommando 8 the gas van had been deployed,
stated to have found out only during the interrogations that
there was a gas van in his detachment. The witness Ste., who otherwise
gave detailed statements, knew nothing of a gas van either.”
The verdict discusses in detail the court’s difficulties to refute the
defendant’s claims, as the only evidence against him was other witness
testimony. With a lot of healthy skepticism, which is rare among judges
dealing with such cases, the court argued why it could not rely on many
of these witness testimonies:
“During the interrogation of witnesses, difficulties resulted primarily
from the fact that the witnesses’ memory has faded substantially
– the events about which they had to report are now already
24 years ago. […]
Another difficulty was that the majority of witnesses heard by the
court have been interrogated repeatedly during the past years in
several investigation and penal cases – in one case thirty times. It
lies within the nature of the matter that the witnesses are confronted
with claims during theses interrogations, so that in the course of
time a witness can no longer distinguish knowledge based on his
own experience from knowledge based on what he has learned later
on.”
Needless to say that this is true for the majority of the trials conducted
after the war – the more so, the later they took place.
Due to these and other “insurmountable difficulties,” many of the
defendant’s claims could not be refuted with certainty. 113
In this context it is interesting to note that the existence of several
gas vans is documented for Sonderkommando 8, see chapter 2.2.8.
(provided the document is authentic). As described there, it is by no
113 The verdict’s revocation by the court of appeals was based on a technicality: Since the
verdict had mentioned that the defendant had considered the execution orders he had received
as legally binding, the court had to either acquit the defendant for “mistake of
prohibition” or refute his claim.