The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 21
[…] The total number of the Soviet citizens asphyxiated in ‘murder
vans’ is 7,000.”
Soviet wartime expert commissions are notorious for faking and lying
about their alleged findings, as the Katyn case amply demonstrates
(Sanford 2005). That there is something very fishy about this “expert
report” results from the fact that even with today’s refined forensic
methods, finding carbon monoxide in severely decomposed corpses is
impossible with modern spectroscopic methods, which are far superior
to the crude spectroscopic methods used in the 1940s. Only in 2010 a
method based on gas chromatography was established which allowed
reliable detection of carbon monoxide levels in severely rotten tissue
and blood samples (Walch et al. 2010, p. 23). Hence, how would it have
been possible for these Soviet experts to prove carbon monoxide poisonings
in corpses which have been rotting in their graves for many
Illustration 1: Photograph taken by Soviet commission of corpses
exhumed in 1943 from a grave near Krasnodar. 9 The caption reads:
“Atrocities of German-Fascist invaders in Krasnodar. Photo shows
corpses of children poisoned with carbon monoxide gas by the
German invaders. The dead bodies have been extracted from a pit
for medico-legal examination.”
However, who these victims are, how and when they died, and who
murdered them, if anyone, is completely unknown.
9 http://collections.yadvashem.org/photosarchive/en-us/11290.html; similar but not quite
as clear: …/69350.html, …/69926.html; Yad Vashem does not give an archival source
for these photos.