The Gas Vans A Critical Investigation

 Preface

The present study is the result of a confluence of several coincidences. As a matter of fact, its author never intended to write a book on the topic. He merely wanted to translate the book written by another author, and maybe edit it and update it a little where required. But that was not meant to be.

At the beginning there was the idea in early 2010 of translating into English Pierre Marais’s French study Les camions à gaz en question (The Gas Vans Scrutinized), which had been published as early as 1994. This was meant to fill a gap in the series Holocaust Handbooks, which at that point did not have a monograph on the topic of the elusive “gas vans.” In 2008, Marais’s study had been translated to German by Swiss translator Jürgen Graf, who made some minor updates to the text.1 At that time, I was supplied with both Graf’s German translation as well as the French original. The text part itself had only some 100 generously formatted pages, and together with the recent updates prepared for the German edition, it looked like a project which could be wrapped up swiftly, or so I thought.

Although initially by far no expert regarding the “gas vans” of the Third Reich, I had read several papers about this issue in the past permitting me to have a fairly good grasp of the state of the art. Hence, while translating Marais’s work, I noticed numerous errors of facts, flawed and missing arguments, and, worse still, so many omissions of important documentary and anecdotal material, a great deal of which had become generally accessible only during the past 15 years, that I decided to give it a complete work over. Well, the more I worked on it, the more material turned up, so I ended up both increasing the book’s volume by at least 100%, and rewriting, replacing or even deleting sizeable sections of Pierre’s own text, which had become in need of revision and updating due to the added content and the many corrections.

At what I thought was the end of my editing efforts, I had in front of me a book that by 80% of its content was no longer Pierre’s, but mine, and in which the parts that still were Pierre’s at times read like alien remnants clearly written in the style of a different author and sometimes awkwardly misplaced by the book’s new structure. There could be no doubt that this would have to be smoothed out as well.

Under these circumstances, could the book still be presented to the original French author – or the public – as a translation of his work? Hardly. Would he accept all the changes made? Well, I was afraid to ask, and when getting in touch with Pierre’s literary agent, he balked and suggested to not even submit this typescript to the then 90-year-old Monsieur Marais, as he might have a hard time getting over this unscrupulous gutting and rewriting of his work. Therefore, the decision was made to make the rewrite complete and publish it under my name instead.

Yet in spite of all the rewriting done, this present book still owes a lot to Pierre’s original work. First it is the very reason for its existence. Next, some of the basic structure of this book still follows Pierre’s lead, and many of his arguments can still be found in it, even if they have been rearranged, rephrased, and at times reevaluated. And last but not least, Pierre’s book was a trail blazer at its time, a foundation upon which the present study erects its larger, more thoroughly argued edifice. Pierre’s book has been my stepping stone to the present study; his tome is the giant, the pioneer work of the first hour, without which this present book would not be.

Although this book may be regarded as a clear improvement in comparison to Pierre’s work – a natural progress to be expected after almost two decades have passed – it is still far from complete, as much archival material held by the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg, Germany, is currently difficult, if not impossible, to access by critical researchers due to German censorship laws. Hence any of this study’s conclusions must necessarily be considered provisional in character, and the discussion will remain open.

In addition to Pierre Marais, the present study owes much to the support by Thomas Kues, who tirelessly supplied me with all kinds of documents, some of them on my request, but also many which had been hitherto unknown to me.

Carlo Mattogno helped to improve the book as well by critically reading an earlier version of it, and indirectly by his own research for his book on the Chełmno Camp, about which I was continually informed, so that the present book could profited considerably from this.

I also thank all my other helpers, who for safety reasons will remain unnamed.

Introduction

When it comes to the “Holocaust,” the alleged mass murder of European Jews by the Third Reich, most people think they “know.” Of course we all “know” that it happened. We “know” that six million died. We “know” that the Nazis pushed the Jews into the gas chambers and gas ovens, that they burned them, dead or alive, in gigantic crematories and on huge pyres. Our knowledge is so certain that anyone uttering disbelief is swiftly ostracized. In many countries people even call the police and have doubters arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison. He who doubts what everybody knows to be true must be evil, indeed.

Most readers perusing the above sentences might not even notice that it contains a typical error, a falsehood even acknowledged by orthodox historians. This error has to such a degree become a fixed part of the cliché which we consider to be “knowledge” that it passes unnoticed.

There were no gas ovens.

The term makes no sense.

Mainstream historians claim that there were gas chambers on the one hand, designed to quickly asphyxiate hundreds, if not thousands of people at a time within mere minutes.2 On the other hand everybody agrees that there were crematory ovens, designed to reduce deceased camp inmates to ashes (although the inmates’ cause of death and the crematories’ capacities are disputed3). In the mind of the public at large, though, gas chambers and crematory ovens have merged to some ominously sounding “gas ovens.” The public discourse about the Holocaust is replete with that nonsensical term, even though what it describes never existed.

So much about “we know.”

Listing and explaining all the false clichés prevailing in the public about the “Holocaust” would fill a separate book, so I will abstain from doing it here. The point I was trying to make is that, although we all have some basic grasp about what is meant by “the Holocaust,” most people are quite unfamiliar with even general aspects of the topic.

While gas chambers dominate the public’s mind when the specter of the “Holocaust” is raised, “gas vans” are usually absent from the discourse. What percentage of the general populace has ever heard that the Nazis are said to have deployed mobile gas chambers as well, which historians usually call “gas vans”?

This lack of knowledge is excusable, because even in orthodox historiography the “gas vans” have played only a minor role. To this date no monograph has appeared on the topic written by a mainstream historian. Mere articles published in journals or anthologies exist, and most of them do not even focus on the gas vans themselves but instead on some location like the Chełmno Camp in Poland or the Semlin Camp in Serbia, on certain German armed units, in particular the German anti-partisan Einsatzgruppen behind the Russian front, or events where they are said to have been used, like the euthanasia action, to name a few. We will encounter many of these papers in the present study. But before doing this, I want to discuss the one mainstream paper which comes closest to a study of the gas vans as such. By so doing we will recognize the dire need for a much more thorough and critical study.

In 1987 German historian Mathias Beer published a paper whose German title translates to “The development of the gas vans for the murder of the Jews.” In it he tries to describe, based on 14 documents and many more testimonies, how National Socialist Germany developed this murder weapon. Right at the beginning of his paper he admits that all extant documents are from a late phase of these vans’ deployment, hence could elucidate little about their development. To remedy this, he resorts to verbal claims made by various persons asserting to have witnessed something, most of whom were interrogated during some criminal investigation or trial. Knowing that by relying on such statements Beer enters shaky territory, he declares that “due to their peculiarities testimonies” need to always be linked to, that is to say supported by, some documents, and that those documents themselves need to be “subject to thorough source criticism” (all on p. 404).

I agree with this, as this is a standard method of historiography. Yet Beer has missed two important issues here: first of all, each testimony, whether supported by a document or not, needs to be subjected to criticism as well. A medieval testimony claiming that the devil rode by on a broom stick having sex with a witch, supported by a medieval document claiming to document that very “fact,” might fulfill Beer’s criteria, but it does not constitute truth. The creator of a document can err and lie just as much as a witness. Next, Beer completely omits the most important group of evidence: physical, tangible evidence. Where is the flying broomstick? Where is the devil? Did the devil leave his semen in the witch?, etc. are all very important questions to be asked.

In our context these questions would be: Where are the vans? Where are the corpses? Where is the poison in their body?

Beer is completely mute on all accounts: no scrutiny of the witness testimony performed, no material traces requested, no questions asked about the construction and operational mode of these vehicles. And worse still: he fails his own criterion that document criticism is pivotal, because his paper does not contain any critical discussion of any of the documents he cites or at least a reference to such a discussion (which does not exist among orthodox historians, I may add).

Hence Beer’s paper is a complete failure already on formal grounds. But that is not the end. His self-defined goal to trace the development of the gas vans within the framework of documents falls flat as well. As Mattogno has shown (2017, Chapter 1), Beer’s lengthy “reconstruction” of how the gas vans allegedly came into being is not based on any documents, as Beer himself admitted. What remains are the testimonies on which Beer relies heavily. We will encounter most of them in this study, where we will subject their statements to critical scrutiny. The result is shocking: many of the important witness statements used by Beer can be demonstrated to be highly implausible (see, for instance, two of the persons allegedly responsible for the vans’ development: August Becker, Chapter 3.7.3.3., and Albert Widmann, Chapter 3.7.4.6.).

While doing his research for his own 1994 study on the gas vans, Pierre Marais had noticed Beer’s complete lack of a critical attitude, as a result of which he wrote him a letter with several questions, to which Beer responded accordingly. I have reproduced this exchange with Marais’s comments in Appendix 10 (p. 368). Although Marais’s questions to Beer weren’t as hard-hitting as I would have formulated them, Beer’s subsequent refusal to continue the exchange shows who of the two is a dogmatic ideologue and who a critical freethinker.

Any decent researcher would have taken such critical inquiry as a reason to look into his own research again and to amend it where necessary. But such an open-minded approach does not seem to be Beer’s cup of tea, for when he had a slightly abridged and updated version of his 1987 paper published in a 2011 anthology (Morsch/Perz/Ley, pp. 154-165), it exhibited the same deficiencies of superficiality. Here again, Beer’s references to documents and witness accounts serve only to once more uncritically repeat what he has read. In addition, this new version of Beer’s paper also lacks any reference to – and discussion of – any topical criticism made during the past two decades (mainly Marais 1994 and Weckert 2019). Hence Beer, like most mainstream Holocaust authors, has proved to be impervious to critique, which means that he is insusceptible to the scientific method.4In view of the total failure of orthodox historiography to appropriately address the issue of the “gas vans,” Pierre Marais 1994 monograph on the “gas vans” was a sorely needed study indeed. Unfortunately it remained without any reaction from the historiographic establishment.

The present study will start by including and summarizing what Marais has already revealed and by carrying the topic farther and deeper.

The Toxicity of Diesel Exhaust Gas

As mentioned before, it was repeatedly mentioned during Soviet show trials that in the gas vans used by German units in the East, murder was committed by means of exhaust gases from diesel engines. During this study, we will encounter this claim repeatedly. 

Before investigating the question what type of vehicles with what kind of engines are said to have been used, we need to clarify first why this matters.

Whether one can commit murder with Diesel engine exhaust within the time spans claimed is a forensic question. U.S. engineer Friedrich P. Berg has done thorough research about this, which he first published in 1984 and, in his latest revised and expanded form, in 2019. Berg also elaborated in detail about the toxic effects of carbon monoxide and other constituents of Diesel engine exhaust gases. I will not repeat any of this here, as it would be repetitive and would lead us too far afield. The interested reader might either consult Berg’s paper or any handbook of toxicology from any library directly.

Whereas gasoline engines operate with a dearth of oxygen and therefore produce rather high amounts of toxic carbon monoxide, Diesel engines always operate with a huge excess of oxygen, as a result of which its exhaust gases contain only minor amounts of carbon monoxide, the lethal compound in engine exhaust gases.13 Although not impossible, it is rather difficult to increase the amount of carbon monoxide in Diesel exhaust gases. If a Diesel engine runs idly or with only a minor load, it must even be considered impossible to produce an exhaust gas whose composition can become acutely dangerous to persons with an average health within the time span of interest here (up to half an hour).

In contrast to this stands the drastically larger carbon monoxide content in the exhaust gases of gasoline engines, which can be manipulated in various ways to increase it even more, for instance by closing the idle-mixture adjustment screw of the carburetor. For this reason gasoline engines would have been the self-evident choice for the construction of “gas vans” (as also for the generation of carbon monoxide for the stationary “gas chambers”).

Did the Germans know about the difference between Diesel and gasoline engine exhaust? Both engines had been invented in Germany,14 and the record shows that German engineers and scientists were very well aware of that difference long before World War Two. Once again it was Berg who has documented the use of Diesel engines early on in coal mines in Germany exactly because their exhaust gases were relatively harmless (Berg 2019, pp. 453-456). Mattogno and Graf have shown in turn that German scientists had made thorough exhaust gas composition analysis of a broad variety of gasoline engines, which was for instance published in a 1930 book dedicated to the toxicology of gasoline engine exhaust gases (Mattogno/Graf 2020, pp. 123-125; cf. Keeser/Froboese/Turnau 1930).

In 1994 Berg drew attention to a forensic study conducted by British scientists who had conducted a test gassing of rabbits, mice, and guinea pigs with Diesel engine exhaust gases. They “succeeded” in killing all their animals only after going to the engine’s limit and after more than three hours of exposure (Pattle et al. 1957; Berg, in Gauss 1994, p. 333; Berg 2019, pp. 458f.). In this context it deserves emphasis that Diesel exhaust gases have other features than delivering small amounts of carbon monoxide which need to be considered. In particular old engines produced a lot of smoke (particulate matter; see Berg 2019, pp. 451f.), which consisted not only of soot but also of a mixture of highly irritating, smelly chemicals. And like all exhaust gases, Diesel exhaust gases are hot when exiting the tail pipe: well beyond 100°C (200°F). Although the toxic effect of Diesel exhaust gas is moderate at worst, the combined effect of irritating chemicals, smoke, heat, noxious gases and oxygen deprivation will kill most people locked up in an enclosed space filled with such gases after an extended period of time. But as the above experiment shows, it would take hours of horrific suffering.

This proves that attempts at mass gassings with Diesel engines would have been a disaster at best.

Friedrich Paul Berg has not only pointed out that the use of Diesel engine exhaust gases for mass murder would have been absurd, but that the use of any exhaust gas is absurd when considering that the Germans, suffering from lack of petroleum during WWII, had retrofitted almost their entire truck fleet during the war, step by step, with so-called producer-gas generators. I will elaborate on this more in Chapter 2.4. when discussing wartime documents, as the extant documentation about this technology stems primarily from that era.

Surprisingly, this finding of the general unsuitability of Diesel engines for a swift and efficient mass murder was recently confirmed by an orthodox anthology on the Holocaust, where the toxicologist Achim Trunk writes in a paper entitled “The lethal gases” (Morsch/Perz/Ley 2011, pp. 35f.):

“It can be derived from the animal experiments [by Pattle et al.] that it is possible in principle to murder human beings with Diesel exhaust gases – even many simultaneously. In order to generate highly toxic exhaust gases which kill within a maximum of 20 minutes, however, Diesel engines in the facilities for gas murder would have had to be operated under heavy load, i.e., they had to be slowed down. Such a slowing, power-consuming device (such as a dynamometer) was much less simple and cheap to obtain than the large engine from a destroyed vehicle wreck. Slowing down a powerful Diesel inside a gas murder facility would have meant moreover that the engine would have become much noisier and would have vibrated much more intensively. Its exhaust gases would have contained a lot of soot. Whether such features have been observed (or whether clues to power consuming devices exist) is no longer a question to toxicology but rather to the sources and source criticism. According to this author’s knowledge, no clues in that direction exist.

A different explanation is more likely, according to which the murder weapons were all gasoline engines. […] That gasoline engines were indeed deployed in the extermination camps of the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ derives from reliable sources. Rudolf Reder, for instance, one of the very few survivors of the Belzec extermination camp, spoke of an engine fueled with gasoline located in a small room next to the gas chamber. It is said to have consumed 80 to 100 liters of gasoline daily. For the later-day extermination camp Sobibór, where one could apply the experiences gained in Belzec, exact statements by the perpetrators exist that the murder device was a gasoline engine; […] In the case of Treblinka, which was the latest of the extermination camps of the ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ to be built (and the biggest), science has so far assumed that a Diesel engine was used. This raises the question why, from the point of view of the murdering institution, a successful method should have been replaced by a different, technically much more difficult.”It is worth noting in this context that Reder, in his testimony about Belzec, expressly and in various ways stated that the engine’s exhaust gases were not used for murdering the victims, but that it was vented directly outside (see Mattogno 2021b for details). The other star witness of orthodox historiography for the alleged exhaust gas mass murders in Belzec, the mining engineer Kurt Gerstein, speaks repeatedly of a Diesel engine providing the poisonous gas.15 He, as a mining engineer, certainly knew to tell a Diesel from a gasoline engine. However, contrary to what Trunk wants us to believe, neither Reder nor Gerstein are reliable witnesses, as both their testimonies are riddled with absurdities and impossibilities (see Mattogno 2021b).

With regard to the Sobibór Camp, the situation is by no means as clear-cut as Trunk would have his readers believe, for in this regard there are statements concerning both a gasoline and a diesel engine (see Berg 2019, pp. 439). Finally, one must not forget that in German colloquial language used by laymen, the terms “gasoline” (“Benzin”) and “gasoline engine” (“Benzinmotor”) are sometimes used summarily for all types of internal-combustion engines, regardless of whether they run on alcohol, gasoline, diesel, or kerosene, just as in English a “gas engine” certainly includes a Diesel engine. Hence, while one can be fairly certain that someone means a Diesel engine when they use the word Diesel, it is not at all clear that someone means a gasoline-fueled, spark-plug-equipped carburetor engine when they refer to a Benzin engine.

I may also mention in passing that it is not at all trivial to run a stationary gasoline engine, as they – in contrast to Diesel engines – tend to overheat quickly. They require special cooling devices to be kept operational.

Trunk’s last sentence quoted above about the anachronistic reversal to an imperfect method is of course valid. It also applies to the gas van issue. Here the first generation of gas vans consisting of a mixture of makes, models and equipment with usually undefined engine types, some of which may have been gasoline engines, are said to have been replaced with a more sophisticated “second generation” of vans which, judging by the brand, were most likely equipped with Diesel engines (more on this in the next section) This fact is glossed over by Trunk who erroneously or deceptively writes (Morsch/Perz/Ley 2011, p. 37):

“Reports about the killings with gas vans explicitly give gasoline engines as the source of the lethal gas.”

Trunk is definitely disingenuous when he writes (ibid., p. 37):

“The claim by revisionists is wrong that it is impossible in principle to commit mass murder with Diesel engines.”

Trunk, who quotes Fritz Berg’s 1984 paper on Diesel gas chambers (his footnote 27, p. 33), hence knows about Berg’s work, has used many of the sources and arguments from Berg’s various papers, yet he has failed to acknowledge that Berg’s claim is not that mass murder with Diesel exhaust engines is impossible, but rather that it is extremely cumbersome and absurd, especially when considering the available alternatives – just as Trunk has concluded.

[←1]      It was published by an Italian publisher; see Marais 2008.

[←2]      Revisionists contest that notion, though, see primarily the numerous entries for Mattogno in the bibliography.

[←3]      On the only existing scientific-technical study of the cremation furnaces at Auschwitz see Mattogno/Deana.

[←4]      Beer has added an inconspicuous deception to this paper which is common among mainstream Holocaust authors: He quoted Becker’s letter to Rauff with “since December 1941, for example, 97,000 were processed with 3 deployed vehicles” (Morsch/Perz/Ley, p. 164), i.e. with a lower case “since,” thus giving the false impression that this statement is to be found somewhere in the middle of the letter, whereas it is actually its very (absurd) beginning. See Chapter 2.2.4.1.

[←13]      It must be kept in mind that the CO contained in the exhaust gases is an incompletely combusted item resulting from a lack of oxygen.

[←14]      The four-stroke gasoline engine was first patented by the German watchmaker Christian Reithmann on 26 October 1860 (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Reithmann); today these engines are frequently called Otto engines due to the first car engine built by Nikolaus Otto of the Deutz engine factory in Cologne, employing as technical directors for engine construction Gottlieb Daimler (later of Daimler-Benz) and Wilhelm Maybach; the Diesel engine was patented in 1893 by German engineer Rudolf Diesel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine)

[←15]      On this see next to Mattogno 2021b also Roques’s PhD thesis 1985, two volumes, plus: Roques 1986 & 1989, Chelain 1989.

Santiago Alvarez

The Gas Vans A Critical Investigation

With major contributions by Pierre Marais