The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

234 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
lever in the driver’s cabin, the exhaust gases were blown through a
pipe into the cargo box.”
The gassing procedure during transit is said to have lasted 15 to 20
minutes (p. 663).
The Soviet Union did indeed produce Ford trucks equipped with
gasoline engines prior and during the war, made under license from the
U.S. Ford company. It is doubtful, though, whether the Germans could
have located the required amount of sheet metal for such a project, considering
that, in the summer of 1944, supplies at the eastern front were
extremely scarce and that the German lines were overrun by Soviet
troops only a few weeks later. Regarding the described gassing mechanism,
however, I think it can be excluded with certainty that a complex
lever mechanism operable from within the driver’s cabin would have
been designed and constructed for such a makeshift gas van merely designed
to execute a few partisans (the court assumed as certain only the
execution of four (4!) partisans in this way).
The source of this story is not known. The verdict merely states that
the defendant did not contradict this description, which probably means
that he didn’t say anything about it at all. Six other witnesses mentioned
in the verdict merely claimed to have “heard” about this makeshift gas
van from others. Hence the entire story sounds more like a rumor than
an established fact.
In deviation from other court verdicts dealing with gas van murders,
this court came to the conclusion that the execution with carbon monoxide
was not cruel (pp. 664f.). The expert witness testifying about the
way death occurs during CO poisonings even referred to poison gas executions
in U.S. gas chambers with hydrogen cyanide, which he considered
to be relatively humane as well (p. 665).
3.7.5.6. LG München I, Verdict of 15 Nov. 1974
Of the two defendants on trial, only the case of Walter Keh.[?] is
linked to the deployment of an alleged “gas van.” As an interpreter of
Einsatzkommando 12a within Einsatzgruppe D, which operated in
southern Ukraine, he is said to have been involved in the gassing of
Jews while stationed in Simferopol on the Crimean Peninsula.
The bogus nature of this entire case becomes clear when considering
the British trial against German General Field Marshal Erich von Manstein
in 1949. Manstein, who during the war was the commander in
chief of Germany’s 11th Army operating on the Crimean Peninsula,