The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

212 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
vamped to serve as radio trucks. They themselves had seen such a radio
truck after its conversion.
What would the critical historian make of this hodge-podge? The
court wasn’t bothered by this muddle, though, and simply mandated (p.
619):
“It has remained unclear who has organized and delivered the
five trucks for the construction of the gas vans. Due to the statements
of both defendants the Jury Court is convinced, however, that it is
certain that these five Saurer trucks were present on some day in the
fall of 1941.”
Not because the evidence says so, but because the dogma cannot be
upheld without it.
The court continued as follows (ibid.):
“Both defendants together visited the vehicle company Gaubschat
Ltd. in Berlin during the fall of 1941. There Pra.[del] discussed
the possibility to equip the 5 ton vehicles with an airtight
cargo box. Due to the ordered secrecy he gave as a reason that the
vehicles were to be deployed for the removal of corpses in case an
epidemic loomed.”
But was it really a ruse to fool the Gaubschat staff, or a mere lie to
assuage the relentless interrogators and judges?
“Initially the Gaubschat company built only one vehicle as a prototype
by equipping one of the five Saurer vehicles with a roughly 2
m high airtight cargo box, which had a fixed, high-domed roof of the
type of railway freight cars. It had a double-leaf door at the rear
opening outward for loading. On the inside the box was lined with
sheet metal, and in its upper corners it had lights protected by iron
screens. The floor was covered by a wooden grate. The driver’s cabin,
equipped with the usual two doors, was detached from the cargo
box. On the outside the vehicle, which had a length of four to five
meters and a width of some 2 meters, was painted field gray. In that
way it looked like a large moving truck.” (Ibid.)
As we can be derived from the Gaubschat documents, the cargo
boxes built by that company were actually only 1.7 m high, not 2 m (in
order to allow for railway transportation of these vehicles), and from
this we have to deduct the height of the wooden grate, so we end up
with a free height of maybe 1.6 m or less (if taken into consideration the
pipes allegedly lying beneath the grate, see below). In addition, the
Gaubschat cargo box alone was 5.8 m long, which would have resulted