The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

34 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
thickness of the car’s wooden body was 7 cm, of the door – 8 cm.
The walls, door, ceiling and floor were covered from the inside with
the 2 mm sheet iron. The car was painted in grey-lead color. Under
this paint the inscription was seen on the door of the cab: ‘Otto
Koehn Spedition [27] Ruf 516 Zeulen.....da i.TH’.
I cite all these details to make possible the further comments to
the story of this van. It is my feeling that there are some unclear
points in this story. Nobody explained for what purpose this van was
used? Its door was tightened with an impregnated canvas. What for?
Some witnesses had seen this car in the area of the forest of Chemno
starting from the spring of 1942. It is possible that it belonged to
the SS-Sonderkommando Kulmhof, too. I came across a version that
this van was used for a disinfection of victims’ clothes but there are
no grounds for it.
In 1945 the prosecutors came to the conclusion that this van was
not a gas van of Chemno. The van was left incomplete and not serviceable
in Ostrowski’s factory at least till 1950. The last known
documents (a correspondence between the Association of Combatants
‘ZBoWiD’ in Kolo and the Main Commission) of April 1950 inform
that there was an idea to move this van to the museum in
Auschwitz or Majdanek (till 1990 there was no museum in the
Chemno forest; first monument was erected there in 1964). Those
plans were not accomplished and the van was scrapped, probably.
Thus, there is no reliable graphic illustration of the gas vans
used in Chemno.”
This statement speaks for itself. I will address the topic of clothes
disinfection or disinfestation in chapter 2.3.
Today the Chemno Museum shows one of the photos discussed
above in its exhibition with a truthful caption reading: “Vehicle found
after the war at Koo on the grounds of the Ostrowski factory.” The
connection to the gas vans is not made explicitly, but the mere fact that
it is exhibited will inevitably lead the visitor to think that this must have
been such a vehicle. This disingenuous trick is typical for museums of
that kind.
Since the advent of the Internet, “photoshopped” images of alleged
gas vans can be found on many websites. The website www.deathcamps.org
has created(!) several such images, which, together with their
27 Möbelspedition is the German term for a moving company.