The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

258 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
Illustration 9: Saurer truck with
Gaubschat cargo box and exhaust
metal hose; author’s drawing.
Illustration 10: Saurer truck
as moving truck; artwork
(see lllustration 17, p. 278).
This juxtaposition reveals it: the Saurer trucks with Gaubschat cargo
boxes did not resemble a moving truck at all.
truck taken from the artwork shown in lllustration 17 (p. 278). It is
therefore clear that these long Gaubschat cargo boxes were unusually
low. There is no way anyone could have taken those Gaubschat Saurers
for moving trucks.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is that we are dealing here
with a cross-fertilization of the vast majority of testimonies, which may
have been inspired by claims made during the Soviet wartime show trials,
but in particular during the postwar trials in Poland by the evidently
false statements of witnesses like Falborski, who has seen a real moving
truck but assigned a function to it which it never had (see chapter
3.6.2.).
The claims about internal sheet metal lining and wooden grates, on
the other hand, are probably a mere repetition of what can be found in
the extant Gaubschat correspondence and any encounters with the real
Saurer trucks equipped as such. The sheet metal lining could in many
cases also stem from mere cross-fertilizations from witnesses who had
seen the Ostrowski moving truck, whose interior was also lined with
sheet metal and which had been falsely identified as a “gas van” by several
witnesses. Hence finding these features repeated in numerous witness
accounts cannot surprise either.
Omitted from this list are witness claims about gas vans allegedly
deployed in Serbia to kill Serbs, as such claims have been disputed as
inventions by Byford (2010). Also omitted were witness statements
about the characteristics of some very early gas vans allegedly used during
the euthanasia program, which is a different topic altogether. These
are said to have been hermetically sealed trailers with the inscription
“Kaiser’s Coffee Shop” and drawn by a tractor-trailer, using carbon
monoxide from steel bottles as the source of poison gas (Beer 1987, pp.