The Historiography of the Holocaust

236 Andrew Charlesworth
gas vans with some minor technical adjustments. In East and West Prussia and
the Warthegau it was the Kaiser’s coffee vans that were converted to kill
asylum inmates. In the area around Bel4ec the local post van was adapted for
killing, bringing the bodies for disposal at the camp. In the 1970s Michel
Podchlebnik, one of the two survivors of Chelmno, described the gas vans as
like cigarette vans then seen in Israel. 44 At Sobibor a recycled Russian tank or
tractor engine became the source of the carbon monoxide to kill the prisoners. 45
Even when more obviously barbaric methods were employed, the setting may
have been utterly up to date. There is, for example, the petrol filling station at
Kaunas where Lithuanian nationalists beat Jews to death shortly after the Germans
arrived in the city. At Ponary the Soviets had started to construct a fuel depot
with large circular tanks (figure 17). These were seized by the Germans and
adapted to be the mass killing sites and graves, principally for the Jews of the
Vilna ghetto. 46
Perhaps most indicative of the two sides of modernity that Nazism exemplified
is a landscape Alfred Kantor sketched in Germany towards the end of the war.
Having survived a death march from Auschwitz to Germany he was placed in
a slave labour complex serving an electronics factory. What he sketched is the
camp with barracks and barbed wire fences barely concealed by a perimeter of
fir trees from the cars speeding past on the adjacent autobahn. 47 To a party
member passing by there was no contradiction in the juxtaposition of the two
Figure 17