Gas van

Burned-out Magirus-Deutz furniture mover van near Chełmno extermination camp, type used by the Nazis for suffocation, with the exhaust fumes diverted into the sealed rear compartment where the victims were locked in. This particular van had not been modified, as explained by Office of the United States Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality (1946),[1] nevertheless, it gives a good idea about the process.

A gas van or gas wagon (Russian: душегубка (dushegubka); German: Gaswagen) was a vehicle reequipped as a mobile gas chamber. The vehicle had an air-tight compartment for victims, into which exhaust fumes were transmitted while the engine was running. The victims were gassed with carbon monoxide, resulting in death by carbon monoxide poisoning and suffocation. The gas van was used by the Soviet secret police in 1930s.[2] During World War II Nazi Germany used gas vans on a large scale as an extermination method to kill inmates of asylums, Romani people, Jews, and prisoners in occupied Poland, Belarus, and Yugoslavia.[3][4]

Soviet Union

The first case of gas van usage was documented by the Soviet Union in the 1930s.[2] A team of secret police officers was suffocating batches of prisoners with engine fumes in a camouflaged bread van while driving out to the mass graves at Butovo, where the prisoners were subsequently buried.[2] The use of gas vans was supervised by Isay Berg, the head of the administrative and economic department of the NKVD of Moscow Oblast.[2] Berg himself was arrested and convicted by the NKVD in 1937.[5]

Nazi Germany

In August 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler attended a demonstration of a mass-shooting of Jews in Minsk arranged by Arthur Nebe, after which he vomited. Regaining his composure, Himmler decided that alternative methods of killing should be found.[6] He turned to Nebe to explore more "convenient" ways of killing that were less stressful for the killers. Nebe decided to try experimenting by murdering Soviet mental patients, first with explosives near Minsk, and then with automobile exhaust at Mogilev.[7] Nebe's experiments led to the utilization of the gas van.[8] This vehicle had already been used in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in the Soldau concentration camp.[9] Another source states that the vans were first tested on Soviet prisoners in Sachsenhausen.[10]

One application of the Nazis' gas vans became known in 1943 after the trial of members of crimes against humanity committed in the territory of the Krasnodar Krai of the USSR, where about 7,000 civilians were killed by gas poisoning. It was a vehicle with an airtight compartment for victims, into which exhaust gas was piped while the engine was running. As a result, the victims were gassed with carbon monoxide, resulting in death by the combined effects of carbon monoxide poisoning and suffocation. The suffocations usually occurred as the gas van was carrying the victims to a freshly dug pit or ravine for mass burial.

Gas vans were used, particularly at Chełmno extermination camp, until gas chambers were developed as a more efficient method for killing large numbers of people. There were two types of gas vans in operation, used by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. The Opel-Blitz, weighing 3.5 tons, and the larger Saurerwagen, weighing 7 tonnes.[11] In Belgrade, the gas van was known as "Dušegupka" and in the occupied parts of the USSR similarly as "душегубка" (dushegubka, literally (feminine) soul killer/exterminator). The SS used the euphemisms Sonderwagen, Spezialwagen or S-wagen ("special vehicle") for the vans.[12]

The use of gas vans had two disadvantages:

  1. It was slow — some victims took twenty minutes to die.
  2. It was not quiet — the drivers could hear the victims' screams, which they found distracting and disturbing.

By June 1942 the main producer of gas vans, Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke GmbH, had delivered 20 gas vans in two models (for 30–50 and 70–100 individuals) to Einsatzgruppen, out of 30 ordered from that company. Not one gas van was extant at the end of the war. The existence of gas vans first came to light in 1943 during the trial of Nazi collaborators involved in the gassing of 6,700 civilians in Krasnodar. The total number of gas van gassings is unknown.[13]

The gas vans are extensively discussed in some of the interviews in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "SS use of mobile gassing vans". A damaged Magirus-Deutz van found in 1945 in Kolno, Poland. World War II Today. 2011. Retrieved April 22, 2013. Source: Office of the United States Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality: Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression – Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Office, 1946, Vol III, p. 418 ;
  2. 1 2 3 4 Komsomolskaya pravda, October 28, 1990; this source has been cited by several other authors: (i) Catherine Merridale. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. Penguin Books, 2002 ISBN 0-14-200063-9 p. 200; (ii) Timothy J. Colton. Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Belknap Press, 1998. ISBN 0-674-58749-9 p. 286, (iii) Солженицын А.И. Two Hundred Years Together (Двести лет вместе), volume=2, Москва, Русский путь, 2002, ISBN 5-85887-151-8, p. 297, (iv) Yevgenia Albats, KGB: The State Within a State. 1995, page 101., (v) Е. Жирнов. «По пути следования к месту исполнения приговоров отравлялись газом». Коммерсантъ Власть, № 44, 2007. , (vi) Н. Петров. «Человек в кожаном фартуке». Новая газета, спецвыпуск «Правда ГУЛАГа» от 02.08.2010 № 10 (31). Archived 2010-08-06 at the Wayback Machine..
  3. ↑ Bartrop, Paul R. (2017). "Gas Vans". In Paul R. Bartrop; Michael Dickerman. The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 234–235. ISBN 978-1-4408-4084-5.
  4. ↑ "Gas Wagons: The Holocaust's mobile gas chambers", an article of Nizkor Project
  5. ↑ The man in the leather apron (Russian), by Nikita Petrov, Novaya Gazeta
  6. ↑ Longerich, Peter (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life, p. 547, ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6.
  7. ↑ Lewy, Guenter (2000). The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, pp. 204–208, ISBN 0-19-512556-8.
  8. ↑ The path to genocide: essays on launching the final solution By Christopher R. Browning
  9. ↑ The destruction of the European Jews, Part 804, Volume 1 By Raul Hilberg
  10. ↑ Saul Friedländer. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, HarperCollins, 2007, p. 234 ISBN 978-0-06-019043-9
  11. ↑ Ernst. Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess (1991). "The gas-vans (3. 'A new and better method of killing had to be found')". The Good Old Days: The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Konecky Konecky. p. 69. ISBN 1568521332. Retrieved 2013-05-08.
  12. ↑ Patrick Montague (2012). "The Gas Vans (Appendix I)". Chełmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler's First Death Camp. Univ of North Carolina Press. p. Appendix I: The Gas Van. ISBN 0807835277. Retrieved 2018-09-15.
  13. ↑ "Gaswagen, from deathcamps.org, in German". 2006. Retrieved 2018-10-06.
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