The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 265
Polish Majdanek specialist Tomasz Kranz 123 maintained that “gas vans”
had really been deployed at Majdanek, although he referred only very
vaguely to “circumstantial evidence” in support of this claim
(Morsch/Perz/Ley 2011, p. 219). This shows that the Holocaust orthodoxy
itself is mightly confused about this issue.
The same absurdity can be observed regarding the Auschwitz camp.
Although Auschwitz is said to have been replete with stationary gas
chambers and therefore shouldn’t have had a need for mobile ones,
there is an abundance of witnesses claiming the use of gas vans in that
camp as well. 124 One of those witness claims about a warning sign
“dangerous stinker on the road” I have quoted in chapter 4.2.3. (p. 256).
An even greater nonsense is claimed for the Mauthausen camp, were a
stationary gas chamber was also said to have been in use (see chapter
5.1. for more details).
The problem is that one can prove just about anything with eyewitness
testimonies about events of the Second World War. A case in point
is the eyewitness account by German citizen Hilde Sherman-Zander,
whose testimony already sticks out because she claims to have seen not
one, not two, but actually a long file of gas vans deployed to help clear
the Riga ghetto (1984, p. 49):
“K. and his helpers spoke uninterruptedly. ‘You will be fine. You
will go to a fishery village, Dünamünde, close to here. There will be
easy work for you in closed rooms. In the canning factory. You will
have to mend nets and… you will be fine…’
Suddenly a motorcade drove into the ghetto: refrigerator trucks
which, completely insulated, are used to transport meat. But these
carried a huge red cross. […] The refrigerator truck left the ghetto
in a long row.”
Note that the Red Cross sign is not attested to by any other witness
as far as I know. The witness may have derived that from the various
published images in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel (see chapter
2.1.). The witness continues (p. 50):
“What the Latvian men told us made our blood freeze in our
veins: No fishery village Dünamünde ever existed. No canning factory.
The refrigeration trucks with the Red Cross were mobile gas
123
Kranz is currently the head of the research department at the Majdanek camp museum;
see Kranz 2007.
124
See www.deathcamps.org/gas_chambers/gas_chambers_auschwitz_testi.html; cf. Robert
J. van Pelt’s elaboration on that in Morsch/Perz/Ley, p. 215f.