The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

36 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
gas, when Berlin was rich in lethal city gas coming straight from the
mains, to name just one source of poison gas readily available?
I finally want to draw the reader’s attention to a photo composition
presented by Alain Decaux on 24 March 1983 in a documentary of the
French TV channel Antenne 2 dedicated to Kurt Gerstein, which was
first exposed by Pierre Marais as a crude forgery. In it one can see parts
of two vehicles, one a small section of the rear end of what appears to
be a simple truck and the other the rear half of a car, from which hoses
emanate running into a wall in the background. The composition apparently
wants to insinuate a combined procedure – a vehicle engine blows
carbon monoxide into a stationary room, in which victims are locked up
– but the picture does not allow discerning anything about any special
equipment of a gas van. This photo composition is a fraud used as early
as 1961 in order to boost the credibility of the Gerstein “confessions.” I
have reproduced it in Appendix 1 as well.
All things considered, there does not exist any pictorial evidence for
the existence of “gas vans.” If photos existed, their owners would most
certainly have published them by now. But since this is not the case, the
only possible conclusion is that the “murder weapon” can just as little
be seen on photographs as in reality, although there is a spate of reports
presenting the gas vans as a proven historical reality beyond any doubt.
2.2. German Contemporary Documents
2.2.1. Introduction
If the gas vans existed indeed, then we need to find out the conditions
under which they were constructed and used. In view of the thoroughness
and the Germans’ talent to organize, some documentary traces
must have been left behind, unless one accepts the improbable thesis,
which is nonetheless systematically invoked by certain historians, according
to which this operation had been carefully camouflaged and
that all traces have been erased.
Although it is relatively easy to construct a vehicle which asphyxiates
its passengers during transit, its manufacture requires certain
tasks to be done in a workshop, which are unimaginable to have been
performed spontaneously. The decision to build such vehicles inexorably
had to come from the top of the hierarchy, and it then had to be