The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 245
4. Critical Summary of Witness Testimonies
4.1. The Witness Problem
Before listing the incongruencies of witness statements about the alleged
“gas vans,” I have to once more return to the challenges posed to
the historian by the general unreliability of witness testimonies. In
chapter 3.4. I already deliberated about the problematic nature of confession
made by alleged perpetrators when facing a situation where “innocence”
is not an option in the eyes of the prosecution, the judges and
the public at large. Now I will address the problems surrounding witness
statements made by victims or alleged neutral bystanders. For this
I will use a recently published paper on a subsection of the issue at
hand: “gas vans” in Serbia.
The alleged deployment of a “gas van” in Serbia poses a challenge
to orthodox historiography, as was recently acknowledged by mainstream
historian Jovan Byford. Whereas the orthodoxy accepts the generally
held view that “gas vans” were deployed in the spring of 1942 to
kill some 7,000 Jewish women and children held in the Semlin camp
near Belgrade (see chapter 1.2.), the claim by numerous witnesses that
non-Jewish Serbs – mostly resistance fighters – held in the Banjica
camp were also killed in “gas vans” is disputed, as there is no corroborating
documentary evidence to support this claim. Byford has done a
thorough analysis as to why false “gas van” claims arose, which I
would like to subsequently quote in lengthy excerpts, as it sheds a
bright light on the poor quality of orthodox historiography of the Holocaust
in general. Byford’s statements are ultimately revisionist in nature
and absolutely devastating for mainstream historiography. One can only
speculate why he did this iconoclastic, taboo-shattering work. I surmise
that his work, which was “part of a research project on the post-World
War II memorialization of the Semlin Judenlager [Jewish camp],” tries
to maintain the Jewish monopoly for horrendous sufferings during
World War II, which requires the debunking of claims about similar
sufferings by new-Jews, here by non-Jewish Serbs in the Banjica camp