The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

280 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
Illustration 20: A “gas van” according to Alain Decaux. Alain Decaux
has taken this photo composition from Saul Friedländer’s book
Kurt Gerstein et l’ambiguïté du bien, whose version is shown here
(1967, between pages 16 and 17). It bears the following fraudulent
caption, misleading the reader to believe that this is what he sees:
“Gas chamber ‘foundation Hackenholt’ at Belzec. The inmates were
exterminated within 32 minutes by means of exhaust gas of a Diesel
engine (car in the foreground of the photo). Gerstein, who assisted
in this operation, has described its functioning in his report.
Hackenholt was the inventor of the installation, and it was he who
made the engine operate.”
As a matter of fact, the room in the upper right is the morgue of the
former crematorium in the Auschwitz main camp, which is today
presented to tourists as a homicidal “gas chamber” (see Mattogno
2005a, p. 130). The cars shown are of an unknown origin and have
nothing to do with what Friedländer claims. Apart, Gerstein had
claimed that a separate Diesel engine fed the gas into the chamber,
not a truck engine.