The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 229
Regarding the uselessness of those criss-crossing pipes underneath
the wooden grate and the unlikely use of a thread in the exhaust pipe to
affix a hose I have made ample remarks before, so I will spare the reader
a repetition. In addition, is there a need to point out that a pipe tapering
off conically cannot have a functioning thread? Also, a cargo box of
7 m length and 2 m minimum width has a surface of at least 14 m². Allowing
for a mere five persons per square meter would already result in
70 people for the entire van. Cramming ten persons on a square meter
would permit 140 people to fit into the cargo box. Were the judges unable
to perform such simple basic multiplications?
New about the gassing procedure claimed by the defendant is that all
gassings are said to have been conducted at night “in order to avoid unsettling
the local populace” (p. 285). There is no supportive evidence
for such a claim, though.
Although it is claimed by various verdicts that the perpetrators devised
various schemes to lull the victims into believing that the tour
they were about to embark on served to resettle them to another town or
camp, or else to drive them to some delousing procedure, this verdict
claims that from a certain point in time onward all victims had to undress
themselves prior to entering the van (p. 285), which would have
nixed any attempt at making them believe the ruse they had been told
by their malefactors. To top it off, the verdict states that the victims
even had, “among other things, their golden dental prosthesis broken
out” before embarking on their supposed final journey (p. 286). However,
dentures do not need to be broken out of one’s teeth, nor are they
ever made of gold, as gold is too soft a metal for dentures; but crowns
and fillings were and are frequently made of an alloy containing gold,
and they had to be broken out of one’s teeth. But breaking crowns or
fillings out of the teeth of living victims without consent and anesthesia
is no small feat, to say the least. We can glean from this that the judges
seem to have believed just about any nonsense the defendant and/or the
witnesses told them.
The verdict describes the defendant as a “truth-loving, sensible person,
yet mentally not very flexible” (p. 292), or in plain English: he was
a simpleton whose memory could easily be fooled. That may be the root
cause of all the nonsense this defendant told during his various testimonies
and interrogations, and it may also be the reason why he, during a
different trial, had exclaimed that he is no longer certain whether what
he is telling is “the truth or poetry” (see p. 226). But one truth is certain: