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[[Image:Chelmno Gas Van.jpg|thumb|300px|Burned-out [[Magirus|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 were 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),<ref name="ww2today.com">{{cite web | url=http://ww2today.com/16th-may-1942-ss-discuss-the-use-of-mobile-gassing-vans | title=SS use of mobile gassing vans | publisher=World War II Today | work=A damaged Magirus-Deutz van found in 1945 in Kolno, Poland | date=2011 | access-date=April 22, 2013 | quote=''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}};</ref> nevertheless, it gives a good idea about the process.]] |
[[Image:Chelmno Gas Van.jpg|thumb|300px|Burned-out [[Magirus|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 were 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),<ref name="ww2today.com">{{cite web | url=http://ww2today.com/16th-may-1942-ss-discuss-the-use-of-mobile-gassing-vans | title=SS use of mobile gassing vans | publisher=World War II Today | work=A damaged Magirus-Deutz van found in 1945 in Kolno, Poland | date=2011 | access-date=April 22, 2013 | quote=''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}};</ref> nevertheless, it gives a good idea about the process.]] |
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A '''gas van''' or '''gas wagon''' ( |
A '''gas van''' or '''gas wagon''' ({{lang-de|Gaswagen}}) was a truck reequipped as a mobile [[gas chamber]]. During [[World War II]] Nazi Germany developed and used gas vans on a large scale as a [[genocide|extermination]] method to murder inmates of asylums, Romani people, Jews, and prisoners in occupied [[Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)|Poland]], [[German occupation of Byelorussia during World War II|Belarus]], and [[World War II in Yugoslavia|Yugoslavia]].<ref>{{cite book|ref=harv|last=Bartrop|first=Paul R.|editor1=Paul R. Bartrop |editor2=Michael Dickerman |title=The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=u4I2DwAAQBAJ|volume=1|year=2017|publisher=ABC-CLIO|location=Santa Barbara|isbn=978-1-4408-4084-5|chapter=Gas Vans|p=234–235}}</ref><ref>[http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/chelmno/sonderdruck.html "Gas Wagons: The Holocaust's mobile gas chambers"], an article of [[Nizkor Project]]</ref> |
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Similar vans or trucks are reported to have been used by the Soviet [[NKVD]] around Moscow during the [[Great Purge]].<ref name="merridale" /><ref name=colton /> |
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==Soviet Union== |
==Soviet Union== |
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In the 1930s, [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] [[NKVD]] police officer Isai D. Berg is reported to have executed some of his captives by gassing them in the back of his transport van.<ref name="merridale">Catherine Merridale. ''Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia.'' [[Penguin Books]], 2002 {{ISBN|0-14-200063-9}} p. 200</ref><ref name=colton>Timothy J. Colton. ''Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis.'' [[Harvard University Press#Related publishers, imprints, and series|Belknap Press]], 1998. {{ISBN|0-674-58749-9}} [https://books.google.com/books?id=lXM2H6tWHskC&pg=PA286&dq=gas+chamber+butovo&ei=bTrHSpm3EJeIyQSl6p32Aw#v=onepage&q=gas%20chamber%20butovo&f=false p. 286], [http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=1265324 Е. Жирнов. «По пути следования к месту исполнения приговоров отравлялись газом». Коммерсантъ Власть, № 44, 2007. ]</ref> Providing testimony of this when he was himself arrested by the NKVD in 1937,<ref name=kommersant /> Berg stated that he and a team of secret police officers suffocated batches of prisoners with engine fumes in camouflaged cars while transporting them from the [[Taganka Prison|Taganka]] or [[Butyrka prison|Butyrka]] prisons in Moscow<ref name=novgazet>[https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2010/08/02/2213-chelovek-v-kozhanom-fartuke Н. Петров. «Человек в кожаном фартуке». [[Nikita Petrov]], [[Novaya Gazeta]] (ru:Новая газета, спецвыпуск «Правда ГУЛАГа» от 02.08.2010 № 10 (31))] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100806171843/http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/gulag10/00.html |date=2010-08-06 }}.</ref> to the [[Mass graves from Soviet mass executions|mass graves]] at the [[Butovo firing range]], where the prisoners were subsequently buried.<ref name=colton /> Examining documents related to Berg, ''[[Kommersant]]'' reported that Berg had led of the administrative and economic department of the [[Moscow Oblast]] NKVD; Berg stated that he acted on orders from the higher NKVD administration.<ref name=kommersant>[https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1265324 On the way to the place of their execution, the convicts were poisoned with gas (Russian)], by Yevgeniy Zhirnov, [[Kommersant]]</ref><ref name="two-hundred">[[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]] [[Two Hundred Years Together]] (Двести лет вместе), volume=2, Москва, Русский путь, 2002, {{ISBN|5-85887-151-8}}, p. 297 According to [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], "I. D. Berg was ordered to carry out the orders of the [[NKVD troika]] of the Moscow Oblast, and he was decently carrying out this assignment: he was driving people to the executions by shooting. But, when he arrived at the Moscow Oblast, three troikas were carrying out their sessions simultaneously, the executioners could not cope with the load. They hit upon a solution: to strip the victims naked, tie them up, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck which was disguised as a bread van from the outside. During their transportation the fuel gases came into the truck, and when they were delivered to the farthest [execution] ditch the arrestees were already dead."</ref><ref name=novgazet /> |
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FSB officers Mikhailov Alexander Georgievich and Kirillin Mikhail Evgenievich, and author Lydia Golovka, recounted the testimony of one witness at a mass execution site outside Moscow.<ref name=Lipkov>[https://magazines.gorky.media/continent/2005/123/ya-k-vam-travoyu-prorastu.html Александр ЛИПКОВ, "Я к вам травою прорасту…"], Alexander Lipkov, [[Kontinent]], N 123, 2005. "Mikhail Kirillin: The details of everything that happened here, we restored by talking with one person. There were no other survivors who would directly work in the zone. And now he is gone. This is the former commandant of the Moscow administration, who told all the details ... |
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Lydia Golovkova: He told the following: cars loaded with people walked through the forest, up to 50 people were stuffed into a truck. Muscovites have long called these cars "gas chambers." In the case of Berg, who took part in the executions, of which there is his signature, he was accused as the inventor of these murders. |
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Alexander Mikhailov: According to the driver of such a truck, this was due to the fact that it was necessary to somehow exclude the possibility of riot in the car. Naturally, in people who swallowed carbon monoxide, the will is to a certain extent suppressed, and many of them accepted death as deliverance from torment. |
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Lydia Golovkova: The exhaust pipe turned inside the van, and people came already half-conscious. Buses with half-dead people drove up from the side of the forest. There was a tower with a searchlight above the trees, the territory was surrounded by barbed wire, and there was a long wooden hut, where everyone was supposedly brought in for sanitation."</ref> As many as 50 prisoners were loaded into trucks whose exhaust pipes were turned into the trucks, which Muscovites called "gas vans" and which were said to have been invented by Berg. Prisoners were "half dead" when they arrived at the site, where most were subsequently executed.<ref name=Lipkov /> |
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Marek Hałaburda has written that the gas vans were introduced to increase the rate of executions.<ref>Marek Hałaburda, “The Polish Operation”. The genocide of the Polish people in the USSR in the years 1937–1938, Orientalia Christiana Cracoviensia, 2013, v.5, p. 71.</ref> In the book ''KGB: The State Within a State'' [[Yevgenia Albats]] and [[Catherine A. Fitzpatrick]] wrote that: "Owing to the shortage of executioners, Chekists used trucks that were camouflaged as bread vans as mobile death chambers. Yes, the very same machinery made notorious by the Nazis - yes, these trucks were originally a Soviet invention, in use years before the ovens of the Auschwitz were built"<ref name="Albats">[[Yevgenia Albats]] and [[Catherine A. Fitzpatrick]], ''KGB: The State Within a State''. 1995, page 101</ref> |
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According to [[Robert Gellately]], "The Soviets sometimes used a gas van (dushegubka), as in Moscow during the 1930s, but how extensive that was needs further investigation. They used crematoriums to dispose of thousands of bodies, but had no gas chambers."<ref>[[Robert Gellately]], Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, Knopf, 2007, {{ISBN|140003213X}}, p.460.</ref> |
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==Nazi Germany== |
==Nazi Germany== |
Revision as of 19:16, 16 October 2019
A gas van or gas wagon (German: Gaswagen) was a truck reequipped as a mobile gas chamber. During World War II Nazi Germany developed and used gas vans on a large scale as a extermination method to murder inmates of asylums, Romani people, Jews, and prisoners in occupied Poland, Belarus, and Yugoslavia.[2][3]
Similar vans or trucks are reported to have been used by the Soviet NKVD around Moscow during the Great Purge.[4][5]
Soviet Union
In the 1930s, Soviet NKVD police officer Isai D. Berg is reported to have executed some of his captives by gassing them in the back of his transport van.[4][5] Providing testimony of this when he was himself arrested by the NKVD in 1937,[6] Berg stated that he and a team of secret police officers suffocated batches of prisoners with engine fumes in camouflaged cars while transporting them from the Taganka or Butyrka prisons in Moscow[7] to the mass graves at the Butovo firing range, where the prisoners were subsequently buried.[5] Examining documents related to Berg, Kommersant reported that Berg had led of the administrative and economic department of the Moscow Oblast NKVD; Berg stated that he acted on orders from the higher NKVD administration.[6][8][7]
FSB officers Mikhailov Alexander Georgievich and Kirillin Mikhail Evgenievich, and author Lydia Golovka, recounted the testimony of one witness at a mass execution site outside Moscow.[9] As many as 50 prisoners were loaded into trucks whose exhaust pipes were turned into the trucks, which Muscovites called "gas vans" and which were said to have been invented by Berg. Prisoners were "half dead" when they arrived at the site, where most were subsequently executed.[9]
Marek Hałaburda has written that the gas vans were introduced to increase the rate of executions.[10] In the book KGB: The State Within a State Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick wrote that: "Owing to the shortage of executioners, Chekists used trucks that were camouflaged as bread vans as mobile death chambers. Yes, the very same machinery made notorious by the Nazis - yes, these trucks were originally a Soviet invention, in use years before the ovens of the Auschwitz were built"[11]
According to Robert Gellately, "The Soviets sometimes used a gas van (dushegubka), as in Moscow during the 1930s, but how extensive that was needs further investigation. They used crematoriums to dispose of thousands of bodies, but had no gas chambers."[12]
Nazi Germany
The use of gas vans by the Nazis to murder Jews, mentally ill people, Romani people and prisoners in occupied territories during World War II originated with the Nazi Euthanasia Program in 1939. Ordered to find a sutitable method of killing, the Technical Institute for the Detection of Crime ("Kriminaltechnisches Institut der Sicherheitspolizei", abbreviated KTI) of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) decided to gas victims with Carbon monoxide.[13] In October 1939 the Nazis started gassing prisoners in Fort VII near Posen. The first victims were Polish and Jewish inmates of asylums for the mentally ill.[14] Witnesses report that since December 1939, mobile gas chambers were used to kill the inmates of asylums in Pomerania, Eastern Prussia and Poland.[15] The vans were built for the Sonderkommando Lange and their use was supposed to speed up the killings. Instead of transporting the victims to the gas chambers, the gas chambers were transported to the victims. They were most likely devised by specialists from the Referat II D of the RSHA. These mobile gas chambers worked under the same principles as the stationary gas chambers: through a rubber hose the driver released pure CO from steel cylinders into the air tight special construction that was shaped like a box and placed on the carrier. The vans resembled moving vans or delivery lorries and they were labelled “Kaiser’s Kaffee Geschäft” for camouflage. They were not called "gas vans" at the time, but “Sonder-Wagen”, “Spezialwagen” (special vans) and “Entlausungswagen” (delousing vans).[16][15] The Lange commando killed patients in numerous hospitals in the Wartheland in 1940. They drove to the hospitals, collected patients, loaded them into the vans and gassed them while they were driving them away.[17] From 21 May to 8 June 1940 the Sonderkommando Lange killed 1558 sick people from Soldau concentration camp alone.[18]
In August 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler attended a demonstration of a mass-shooting of Jews in Minsk that was arranged by Arthur Nebe, after which he vomited. Regaining his composure, Himmler decided that alternative methods of killing should be found.[19] He ordered Nebe to explore more "convenient" ways of killing that were less stressful for the killers. Nebe decided to conduct his experiments by murdering Soviet mental patients, first with explosives near Minsk, and then with automobile exhaust at Mogilev.[20] Nebe's experiments led to the utilization of the gas van.[21] This vehicle had already been used in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in the Soldau concentration camp.[22]
Gas vans were used, particularly at the Chełmno extermination camp, until gas chambers were developed as a more efficient method for killing large numbers of people. Two types of gas vans were in operation, and they were used by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. The Opel-Blitz, which weighed 3.5 tons, and the larger Saurerwagen, which weighed 7 tons.[23] 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.[24] The gas vans were specifically designed to direct deadly exhaust fumes via metal pipes into the airtight cargo compartments, where the intended victims had been forcibly stuffed to capacity. In most cases the victims were suffocated and poisoned from carbon monoxide and other toxins in the exhaust as the vans were transporting them to fresh pits or ravines for mass burial.
The use of gas vans had two disadvantages:
- It was slow — some victims took twenty minutes to die.
- 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 that were 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 who had been involved in the gassing of 6,700 civilians in Krasnodar.[citation needed] The total number of gas van gassings is unknown.[25]
The gas vans are extensively discussed in some of the interviews in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah.
See also
Bibliography
- Alberti, Michael (2006). Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Wartheland 1939-1945 (in German). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. ISBN 978-3-447-05167-5.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Beer, Mathias (1987). "Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden" (PDF). Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (in German). 35 (3): 403–417.
- Colton, Timothy J. (1995). Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-58749-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Friedlander, Henry (1997). The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-4675-9.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Merridale, Catherine (2002). Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-200063-2.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - Vatlin, Alexander (2016). Seth Bernstein (ed.). Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Pres. ISBN 978-0-299-31080-6.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help)
References
- ^ "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
; - ^ Bartrop, Paul R. (2017). "Gas Vans". In Paul R. Bartrop; Michael Dickerman (eds.). The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 234–235. ISBN 978-1-4408-4084-5.
{{cite book}}
: Invalid|ref=harv
(help) - ^ "Gas Wagons: The Holocaust's mobile gas chambers", an article of Nizkor Project
- ^ a b Catherine Merridale. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. Penguin Books, 2002 ISBN 0-14-200063-9 p. 200
- ^ a b c Timothy J. Colton. Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Belknap Press, 1998. ISBN 0-674-58749-9 p. 286, Е. Жирнов. «По пути следования к месту исполнения приговоров отравлялись газом». Коммерсантъ Власть, № 44, 2007.
- ^ a b On the way to the place of their execution, the convicts were poisoned with gas (Russian), by Yevgeniy Zhirnov, Kommersant
- ^ a b Н. Петров. «Человек в кожаном фартуке». Nikita Petrov, Novaya Gazeta (ru:Новая газета, спецвыпуск «Правда ГУЛАГа» от 02.08.2010 № 10 (31)) Archived 2010-08-06 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Two Hundred Years Together (Двести лет вместе), volume=2, Москва, Русский путь, 2002, ISBN 5-85887-151-8, p. 297 According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "I. D. Berg was ordered to carry out the orders of the NKVD troika of the Moscow Oblast, and he was decently carrying out this assignment: he was driving people to the executions by shooting. But, when he arrived at the Moscow Oblast, three troikas were carrying out their sessions simultaneously, the executioners could not cope with the load. They hit upon a solution: to strip the victims naked, tie them up, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck which was disguised as a bread van from the outside. During their transportation the fuel gases came into the truck, and when they were delivered to the farthest [execution] ditch the arrestees were already dead."
- ^ a b Александр ЛИПКОВ, "Я к вам травою прорасту…", Alexander Lipkov, Kontinent, N 123, 2005. "Mikhail Kirillin: The details of everything that happened here, we restored by talking with one person. There were no other survivors who would directly work in the zone. And now he is gone. This is the former commandant of the Moscow administration, who told all the details ... Lydia Golovkova: He told the following: cars loaded with people walked through the forest, up to 50 people were stuffed into a truck. Muscovites have long called these cars "gas chambers." In the case of Berg, who took part in the executions, of which there is his signature, he was accused as the inventor of these murders. Alexander Mikhailov: According to the driver of such a truck, this was due to the fact that it was necessary to somehow exclude the possibility of riot in the car. Naturally, in people who swallowed carbon monoxide, the will is to a certain extent suppressed, and many of them accepted death as deliverance from torment. Lydia Golovkova: The exhaust pipe turned inside the van, and people came already half-conscious. Buses with half-dead people drove up from the side of the forest. There was a tower with a searchlight above the trees, the territory was surrounded by barbed wire, and there was a long wooden hut, where everyone was supposedly brought in for sanitation."
- ^ Marek Hałaburda, “The Polish Operation”. The genocide of the Polish people in the USSR in the years 1937–1938, Orientalia Christiana Cracoviensia, 2013, v.5, p. 71.
- ^ Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, KGB: The State Within a State. 1995, page 101
- ^ Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, Knopf, 2007, ISBN 140003213X, p.460.
- ^ Beer 1987, p. 405.
- ^ Alberti 2006, p. 326-327.
- ^ a b Beer 1987, p. 405-406.
- ^ Alberti 2006, p. 327-328.
- ^ Friedlander 1997, p. 139.
- ^ Beer 1987, p. 406.
- ^ Longerich, Peter (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life, p. 547, ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6.
- ^ Lewy, Guenter (2000). The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, pp. 204–208, ISBN 0-19-512556-8.
- ^ The path to genocide: essays on launching the final solution By Christopher R. Browning
- ^ The destruction of the European Jews, Part 804, Volume 1 By Raul Hilberg
- ^ 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.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ 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.
- ^ "Gaswagen, from deathcamps.org, in German". 2006. Retrieved 2018-10-06.