The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

272 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
I will not argue here that carbon monoxide would not have been a
good choice for the Germans – or anyone else intending to kill with a
toxic gas. Any other, more potent agent always has the severe drawback
that it is also very dangerous for the perpetrator. But not CO, if a few
safety rules are observed. In addition, CO can be generated easily and
cheaply, is easily applied, and is easy to discard. Once released into the
environment, it quickly dilutes down to harmless concentrations and is
rapidly oxidized to innocuous CO2.
The question is: how would the Germans, ingenious engineers and
chemists as they were back then, have constructed a “gas van”? I do not
wish to go into details here, but will focus mainly on the source of carbon
monoxide. The attentive reader might already guess what I am getting
at: producer gas vehicles. Already after World War One this technique
was developed in Germany, and during World War Two the
Germans improved that technique to a high standard and produced hundreds
of thousands of these devices.
Hence, if the Germans had used the Saurer trucks mentioned in the
Gaubschat exchange as gas vans – or any other truck – they would have
been equipped with wood gas generators, and this very gas – before(!)
entering the engine – would have been used to kill the inmates locked
up on the cargo box. I have prepared a drawing of such an operational
hypothetical Saurer gas van; see Illustration 27 (p. 379).
Illustration 26 (p. 378), on the other hand, shows a draft of an impossible
“gas van” as described in the pertinent literature using the exhaust
gases of a Saurer Diesel engine, piped into the cargo box’s floor
via a metal hose. The vehicle’s dimensions are based on the Gaubschat
correspondence (cargo box height to length ration 1.7:5.8). The problems
with such a design are insurmountable. Such vans could simply
not have served the function ascribed to them.
Today, after several decades of extended and exhaustive archival
and forensic studies, we know with a probability bordering at certainty
that there never were any stationary “gas chambers” for the mass murder
of human beings. 127 Is the situation identical with regard to the “gas
vans”? Back in 1994 Pierre Marais concluded in his tome that his studies
did not yield any evidence for their existence. Although I have been
127 For this see the various studies: Berg 2003; Crowell 2000/2011; Graf/Kues/Mattogno
2010; Mattogno/Graf 2005; Leuchter/Faurisson/Rudolf 2011; Mattogno 2004a&b,
2005a&b, 2010, 2011b; Rudolf 2011.