The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

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hitherto unpublished details, which appear to indicate that the author,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?