The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 223
“As camp commandant he had worked for more than a month
with the camp’s ‘self-administration’ and [had] become personally
acquainted with about 50 of the prisoners. By his own account he
had even drunk coffee and played cards with some of the prisoners
in the camp administration after they had learned not to fear him.”
(Ibid., pp. 78f.)
And after all this, when faced with the alleged order to kill these inmates,
he simply complied. Is that credible?
The verdict also has a forensic glitch when it states (p. 681):
“The corpses’ faces had a reddish-pinkish color throughout,
which indicated a poisoning with carbon dioxide.”
Carbon dioxide poisoning leads to a bluish skin color, a sign of oxygen
deprivation. Carbon monoxide would result in a reddish skin discoloration,
a sign of oxygen over-saturation, yet a Diesel engine driving
with a low engine load across a city wouldn’t produce sufficient
amounts of carbon monoxide to cause such a discoloration.
3.7.4.9. LG Kiel, Verdict of 11 Apr. 1969
This trial was held against two defendants: Heinz R.H. Richter as
head of Einsatzkommando 8 within Einsatzgruppe B during summer
1942 while deployed in the vicinity of Mogilev, and Hans Karl A.
Ha.[?] as the head of this Einsatzkommando’s external services. They
both were sentenced for their alleged involvement in the mass shootings
and gassings in gas vans of Jews. Richter was sentenced to seven years,
Ha. to five and a half years.
Interestingly the court used, among many other documents, not only
the written statements of numerous witnesses who never appeared during
this trial, but also the affidavits of witnesses who had died long before
even the investigations for this trial had started (pp. 8f.), a practice
which is considered illegal under Anglo-Saxon law.
The unusual feature of this trial is the fact that both defendants had a
long track history of having been philo-Semites before and at the beginning
of the war. Richter had a relationship with a Jewish woman and
helped her escape, just as he helped numerous other Jews in various
ways (pp. 11, 14). Furthermore, as a prosecutor in France during the
German occupation Richter also showed no reluctance in prosecuting
superiors and other high-ranking Germans who had committed illegal
acts against Jews (pp. 13f.). The second defendant was no less eager to