The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 47
2.2.2.4. Analysis of the Content
– 2nd to 4th, 6 th , and 7th sentence: The last two sentences are pointless
repetitions of the first three. Would anyone believe that a truck can
be completely incapacitated after just half an hour of rain?
The author of these lines might be hinting at the difficulties the
German army faced in the east, but that had little to do with certain
trucks skidding about. Road conditions in the Soviet Union were generally
catastrophic during the war. There were hardly any paved roads
outside of major cities. In addition, the German army was not prepared
for the Russian winter, so their motor pool, as everything else, came to
a freezing standstill in November 1941. Diesel vehicles in particular, if
not filled up with special winter Diesel or alternatively equipped with
heated Diesel tanks, fuel lines, and injection pumps (which they
weren’t), could not move due to the fuel being frozen solid. When the
winter finally ended, the upper layer of the frozen soil thawed, yet lower
layers stayed frozen for weeks to come. As a result any melt water
and rain did not drain, so the entire unpaved road system of the Soviet
Union turned into a huge quagmire, in which the German army got literally
stuck. It was not before April or May 1942, depending on the region
we are talking about, that weather and soil conditions enabled the
German army to deploy their vehicles again with some reliability.
Of course everybody involved in the war knew this, as this catastrophic
first Russian winter halted the initial German thrust and was
one major reason why the Soviet Union did not collapse in late
1941/early 1942.
It is very strange that the Becker document does not even hint at any
of this. Instead, already mere humid weather conditions are claimed to
have rendered the trucks useless because of skidding, when in fact getting
stuck in the mud had been the big problem of all German vehicles.
If what the Becker document insinuates here was German army standard
during that war, they wouldn’t have gotten much farther than Warsaw
with that kind of equipment!
– 8th sentence: According to the author of this letter, sometimes the
executees had to walk to the execution site, but at other times they were
carried there by a vehicle. From this it has to be concluded that the executees
and the gas van were at times brought separately to this spot. If
the reason for this was that the respective gas van could not drive, then
how did the van get to the execution site? Was it left there overnight?
And if this gas van couldn’t move about, how did the other “normal”