The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

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SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 19 fact, no information exists about a location where one could investigate a wreck of such a gas van or even only some instructive traces of the special retrofitting which inevitably would have been required for the deployment of these vehicles for homicidal purposes. The Soviets, however, are said to have captured some of those responsible for the homicides in gas vans, which they put on trial in 1943 (see chapters 3.2. and 3.3.). How do they explain the fact that they managed to catch some of those who had operated the trucks, but that the vehicles themselves simply vanished? Mainstream historians, like Mathias Beer, are wont to respond to this glaring lack of any material trace of these elusive vans by coming up with a pseudo-explanation (see Beer’s letter to P. Marais, p. 365): “It would not be surprising if no gas vans had been found after the war, because the gas vans, like all other traces left by the extermination of people, were destroyed as best as possible in the rush.” This does, however, render Beer’s position even worse, as this claim also requires supportive evidence – this time to prove that the Nazis did indeed manage to erase all those traces, and how this was possible. After all, the lack of evidence does not prove a claim to be true, which is what Beer tries to argue here. If anything, the lack of evidence refutes the claim. As we will see, the operation of a truck suffocating humans locked inside of it is rather easy. There are no difficulties constructing it, and its production a posteriori would doubtlessly have been quite easy. That no such attempt was ever made makes the whole issue even more mysterious. The claim that thirty vehicles retrofitted for mass gassings, which would have served as a vivid example of the “Nazi barbarity,” have simply disappeared tracelessly ineluctably had to raise certain doubts about their very existence. Unless new information surfaces, one cannot but conclude that the “murder weapon” in form of these infamous “gas vans” could not be produced to this very day. There are absolutely no tangible material items: no truck, no part of a truck, no drawing or blueprint of a truck. 7 As we will see during the analysis of the existing documents, not even a technical study of these ostensible gassing vehi- 7 In the above-mentioned letter Beer claimed that a gas van wreck actually exists as a memorial in the town of Konin, Poland, near the former Chemno camp. But an inquiry by P. Marais with that town’s authorities exposed this claim as false; see Appendix 10, page 370.
20 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS cles exists, and it is incomprehensible how such a vehicle could have been constructed without a corresponding technical drawing. 1.2. Material Traces of the Victims Both the Serbs and the Soviets conducted forensic investigations by exhuming mass graves allegedly containing victims of “gas van” mass gassings. The Soviets conducted their investigations right after they had reconquered territories from the Germans in early 1943. A summary of the findings were published during the war in a booklet containing a summary of two trials staged in 1943, where the defendants had been accused, among other things, to have participated in the mass murder of Soviet citizens with “murder vans.” 8 I will analyze the horrific circumstances of these Soviet wartime show trials in chapters 3.2. and 3.3. Here I will address only the forensic findings of the Soviet investigating committee, which were quoted as follows in the booklet The People’s Verdict (1944, p. 13; similar on p. 32): “[…] 623 [exhumed corpses] were examined by medical experts […]. On the basis of the thorough medical, chemical and spectroscopic investigation which was carried out, a Committee of Experts consisting of Dr. V. I. Prolorovsky […] arrived at the conclusion that the cause of death in 523 of the cases examined was carbon monoxide poisoning. […] In their report the Committee of Experts stated that the carbon monoxide could undoubtedly have had lethal effect if the waste gases from the Diesel engine penetrated the closed van. The Commission stated: ‘If the outlet for the carbon monoxide (including waste gases) is in closed premises, the concentration of carbon monoxide in those premises increases very rapidly and may cause death even in the course of a few minutes (from five to ten).’ 8 There exists another instance of a claimed Soviet forensic investigation: 214 exhumed, former mentally sick children who are said to have been killed in a gas van. This forensic expert report, also dating from 1943, was introduced as evidence for the prosecution during a West-German court of law in 1972 (see chapter 3.7.5.3.). I have so far not been able to obtain a copy or even a summary of this expert report. Maybe the exhumed children shown in Illustration 1 are from that source.
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The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

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