The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

248 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
Byford summarizes the problems of witness statements in the Banjica
case as follows:
“As we have seen, some authors contend that the vehicle was
used at the camp solely for the murder of Jews, or more specifically,
Jewish women and children. Others claim that it was used against
all categories of prisoners, including captured partisans and communist
activists. The presence of the gas van at the camp is sometimes
narrowed down to specific dates and selections of prisoners
(for instance the execution on May 9, 1942), while in other instances
it is said to have been used periodically throughout the occupation.
The gas van is mostly referred to in the singular, but some of the
sources claim that Germans had several such vehicles at their disposal.”
(p. 14)
“Thus, in addition to the problem of variability among the witness
accounts, many of the claims and descriptions found in them
are directly contradicted or proven impossible by other forms of evidence
pertaining to the gas van’s mission in Serbia. Given that we
know that there was only one gas van in Belgrade, which was deployed
for a limited period (around six or seven weeks), between late
March and early May 1942, there clearly could not have been two
or more gas vans, the vehicle could not have been seen at Banjica in
early March 1942, nor could the victims have walked out of it alive.
[…] In other words, survivors claim to have witnessed the killing
process itself. Their version of events, however, contradicts what is
known about the modus operandi of the mobile gas van in Belgrade.
At Semlin, the van never even crossed the camp perimeter, and the
gassing began after the vehicle crossed the pontoon bridge over the
river Sava.” (p. 18)
What Byford overlooks is that all of his claims about what we
“know,” which is not founded in the documents analyzed in the previous
chapter, is itself based on witness accounts, primarily made by defendants
during numerous German trials. Their reliability isn’t higher
than those collected by Yugoslav commissions and historians either.
Byford next tries to explain why nobody ever scrutinized these witness
statements and revealed their unreliability:
“And yet, institutions that played a dominant role in shaping official
history and collective memory in postwar Yugoslav society did
not reflect on the variability apparent in the testimonies or the inconsistencies
found in them. They were, similarly, not troubled by