The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 39
Due to its signator SS-Obersturmführer Willy Just, it is usually referred
to as the “Just document.”
The documents contained in this dossier of the Bundesarchiv are evidently
an indiscriminate mixture of unrelated items, which creates the
impression that they have been picked arbitrarily from various sources
for demonstration purposes. In order to assess their respective import, it
would be necessary to know where each one of them originated, so that
they could be put into the context within which they emerged.
Next there is a letter allegedly written on 11 April 1942 by SS-
Gruppenführer Dr. jur. Harald Turner, who was the head of the wartime
military administration in Serbia. Although it only contains the word
“delousing van,” this word is considered to be a euphemism or “camouflage
word” for “gas vans” by orthodox historians, which is why I will
address this highly suspicious document as well.
Then I will address an “Activity Report” by Einsatzgruppe B of 1
March 1942, which is so far the only known document of the
Einsatzgruppen mentioning gas vans in their motor pool.
Finally I will briefly deal with of a letter by Dr. Erhard Wetzel from
25 October 1941, Nuremberg document NO-365, which is occasionally
mentioned in the context of “gas vans,” although it does not contain this
or any related term.
We ought to have expected to encounter a great number of documents
dealing with the design, construction, and deployment of the gas
vans, but to my knowledge the items mentioned above are the only ones
hinting at the existence of such vehicles – the first group in a poorly
disguised, the second in an absolutely open fashion, and the others only
in the mind of the believer. In the following I will subject all these documents
to a thorough analysis. This will expose the bizarre character of
some of these documents as well as a number of improbabilities which
should not evade the attention of an alert reader. In my opinion these
documents do not only fail to prove the reality of the “gas vans,” but
quite to the contrary they are a grave argument against the thesis that
German units had “gas vans” for homicidal purposes.
The result of these preliminary observations is that no material traces,
no photographs and no documents exist which unequivocally prove
the historical reality of gas vans for homicidal purposes.