The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

238 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
in operation (pp. 277-280). This raises once more the question how the
witnesses could have known at that time that the van or truck they saw
standing around was indeed a “gas van” in terms of a vehicle for mass
murder with poison gas? The court does not seem to have been interested
in finding out, since the German witnesses were generally suspected
of not being truthful, hence were rather irrelevant witnesses anyway. Or
as the defendant expressed it succinctly when the prosecutor pointed out
to him that he should behave himself because he is a defendant (p. 276):
“But only because we have lost the war!”
The court used this statement also against the defendant as proof that
he only regrets to have lost the war, but not to have killed innocent people.
Yet that statement by the defendant cuts the other way as well, because
due to Germany’s total defeat and the total domination of all
kinds of Allied atrocity propaganda stories ever since, an effective defense
against bogus claims has become almost impossible for a German
defendant involved in controversial events during World War II. It has
become self-evident on a global scale that Germans were the chief villains
of World War II. Every German defendant, the incarnation of evil
as such in the eyes of the public at large, the prosecution and usually also
of the judges, was confronted with that incontrovertible, insurmountable
dogma.
The defiant Christmann was ultimately sentenced to ten years imprisonment.
3.8. Gas Vans during Communist East German Trials
3.8.1. General Remarks
Except for the last verdict studied here (see the list below), each one
was handed down against merely one defendant for “war crimes and
crimes against humanity according to article 6, letters b and c, of the
Statute of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg of August
8, 1945.” This means that, by the very laws applied, all these trials were
legal extensions of the Nuremberg Trials. This shows even in the fact
that at times the verdicts of the IMT and of respective NMTs as well as
evidence presented during those trials were quoted as evidence (see e.g.
case 1024, pp. 640f.; case 1044, p. 283).