The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 237
engine exhaust gases through a hose into the interior of the vehicle
in order to kill the locked-up victims.
[…] the number of victims in each case amounted to at least 30
persons.
[…] After that the driver closed the winged door, sat down in the
driver’s cabin, started the engine, which he left running while stationary,
and directed the exhaust gases into the interior of the van.
[…]
The gas van remained in the courtyard of the commando building
with its engine running until no sound could be heard from inside.
Only then did the van leave the courtyard.”
I was not able to verify whether a red card-game heart was indeed
the identification sign of Einsatzkommando 10a. Since this was a rather
small unit of merely some 100 persons (p. 250), I doubt they had any
dedicated sign to begin with. Here, too, the 1943 Soviet show trial
theme of painted windows perseveres, this time even embellished with
curtains, and the lever in the driver’s cabin to turn on the gas is just as
unrealistic. These technical data are said to have been given by the witness
Tho. and were allegedly confirmed by various Soviet witnesses (p.
279), which means that here we have evidence for the convergence of
nonsense.
The defendant has to share a part of the blame for the success of the
Soviet campaign to frame him, because he merely tried to convince the
court that he had nothing to do with those gas van deployments and did
not care about them either, hence had no knowledge about them. He
even claimed that he had heard only from one of his colleagues, Dr.
med. Heinrich Gö., about the mechanics of the gassings (pp. 261f.). It
goes without saying that such a defense strategy for the head of this
commando was doomed to fail right from the start. The judges even
knotted a noose from his statement about his lack of knowledge: because
he didn’t care about the gas vans, he was indifferent to the mass
murder and hence a most callous mass murderer (p. 276).
Dr. Gö., by the way, denied ever having spoken to the defendant,
and during his own earlier trial he had stated to have had no knowledge
about those vans himself (see chapter 3.7.5.3.).
During this trial the common feature of testimonies given by German
witnesses was once more that they had “knowledge” about the gas
van only from hearsay, if at all, or because they happened to have seen
such a van standing around somewhere at some point, though not while