The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

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SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 355 Translation and Comments by P. Marais Dear Sir, 4 May 1987 Your obstinacy leaves me perplexed... You tell me that I cannot have seen flames shooting out of the chimney of the crematory in Mauthausen. If I wrote this, then I did so because effectively, together with my comrades, notably Claude Lemaître, Senator and Mayor of Châteauneuf sur Loire, Jean Biondi, vice president of the Socialist party before the war and later minister for public services, Jean Bernier, etc.... we keep the ineffaceable memory of that night when we saw with horror the bright flames coming from the crematory chimney which reddened the sky. This is a fact to which we can attest with all due respect for the total truth. With what right can you contest this? Regarding the Vernichtungslager, even if my secretary forgot an s, the expression was part of the official camp vocabulary. Himmler himself has divided the camps into four categories, the last of which was destined for the hopeless cases who had to be liquidated, purely and simply. Regarding the gas vans, there were several categories. What is certain is that those who entered them in Mauthausen, arrived as mere corpses in Gunsen [sic] or in Hartheim. What astounds me is the confidence you have in the Rassinier’s claims, but that you contest the innumerable witness statements contradicting him. With my best regards Father Michel RIQUET Comments by Pierre Marais During an exchange of letters with pastor Riquet [see previous page], a former inmate of the concentration camp Mauthausen who had published an article in the Paris daily Le Monde on 5 October 1986, he sent me a publication about the problem of the gas vans. It is a special reprint of the numbers 123 and 124 of Le Monde juif, the periodical of the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center) located in Paris, which had been deposited
356 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS in the first trimester of 1987 “as legal evidence.” Chapter III of this publication bears the title “Assassinats par gaz dans des véhicules spécialement aménagés (Sonderwagen)” (gas murders in especially equipped vehicles). On the one hand it is a mere summary of the arguments as published in the anthology Les Chambres à gaz, secret d’État (the French edition of Nazi Mass Murder), but on the other hand it contains hitherto unpublished details, which appear to indicate that the author, Pierre-Serge Choumoff, who had written the chapter on Mauthausen in said anthology, managed to obtain new information. First of all I need to emphasize that Choumoff translated the German term “Sonderwagen” erroneously as “camion spécialement aménagé” (especially equipped van), which gives the impression that the German prefix “Sonder-” gives the term a suspicious meaning. In the caption of Choumoff’s illustration 4 (p. 40) “Sonderwagen” is even shamelessly translated as “gas van.” 128 Choumoff distinguishes between two types of allegedly used “gas vans” (p. 37): “exhaust gas vehicles” (sic) and “gas vans operated with Zyklon B.” I will not dwell on these definitions, which make no sense from a technical point of view. When describing the vehicles of the first category, the author quotes court verdicts, confessions and other witness statements, and he names the following decisive feature of these “gas vans” (p. 35): “It was a hermetically closed van, in whose interior exhaust gases, but certainly also other gases were piped.” So out of nothing we are told about the existence of “multi-gas vans”! Choumoff writes (ibid.): “Soon [this van] drove around within the [Mauthausen] camp [...], until its human load was no longer alive, upon which it drove this load to the crematory.” This latter claim gives rise to two questions: a) What was the reason to drive the van around within (or maybe also outside of) the camp – allegedly to generate the needed exhaust gas to kill the victims – if the same volume could have been produced just as efficiently – or maybe even more efficiently – with a stationary van (provided it had a gasoline engine), which would also have saved precious fuel? 128 Kogon et al. (1984, p. 79) mistranslated the term “Der S-Wagen” as “Le camion à gaz” (the gas van) when quoting document 501-PS. If that isn’t a forgery, what is?
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The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

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