The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

264 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
This raises the question: What was the point of a mobile gas chamber,
if it was used while stationary only? Or as the Dortmund District
Court put it in its verdict of 16 Jan. 1969 regarding the claimed gas van
murders in the Semlin camp in Serbia (case 700; Rüter et al. 1968ff.,
vol. 31, p. 683):
“There was finally no plausible reason to commit the killing in
the camp [while stationary] and to let the engine run for an extended
period of time, if a longer driving route was available.”
It must also be kept in mind that the vast majority of gas vans were
Saurer trucks with Diesel engines, which, when running idly, will not
kill anyone within half an hour, and even when moving they would
need a heavy load to accomplish that, if at all possible. This would have
required continuously driving up a steep mountain, for instance, but
such mountains are far and between in most Soviet areas occupied by
the Germans during WWII.
4.2.8. The When, Where, and How Many
Since by definition “gas vans” are mobile, they could have been deployed
just about anywhere, and so we can find witnesses claiming to
have seen them pretty much at any time and any place, so we gain little
by analyzing witness statements in this regard.
Many witnesses do not specify when and where exactly they made
their observation. Usually witnesses claim to have seen only one such
vehicle at a time. In some cases time and location of such an observation
can be derived indirectly from the biographic data of alleged perpetrators,
as it can usually be determined when they were deployed in
which region with which unit. Although Kogon et al. try to determine
with such data how many gas vans had been deployed by which German
unit (1993, pp. 56-70), this attempt is necessarily futile in the face
of the contradictory and unreliable nature of the anecdotal evidence
used. It is finally turned ad absurdum when Kogon et al. claim that a
gas van was even deployed at the concentration camp Majdanek (p. 72),
which allegedly had numerous stationary gas chambers and hence no
need for mobile ones. And indeed, in her orthodox monograph about
the Majdanek camp, the German orthodox historian Barbara Schwindt
claimed that the Majdanek “gas van” story is untrue and merely based
on the “spreading of errors” caused by a lack of knowledge about the
camp’s history (Schwindt 2005, p. 13). However, just six years later the