"Then the vehicle drives on for another 10 minutes, and by the time they reach the execution site, the occupants arrive already dead".

The Wehrmacht researcher Sergey Vershinin is currently publishing excerpts from the diary of Johannes Gutschmidt. Gutschmidt (1876-1961) was the commandant of various POW camps. Specifically the topic under the discussion was his time in Smolensk where he was the commandant of the Dulag-231.

In his diary Gutschmidt twice mentions a visit to the building of the Smolensk NKVD, or, more specifically, to the execution cellar where people used to be shot.

He attaches some valuable photos of the cellar. The second visit was on 07.04.1942:

7.4.42. Ganz früh rief mich Oberst Marschall an, ich sollte sofort das Nordlager auf Ausbaumöglichkeit erkunden. Ich fuhr mit Janusch um 8 ab und es zeigte sich, dass das Lager nicht zu gebrauchen ist. Der Oberst kam auch noch heraus und stimmte mir zu. Auf der Rückfahrt besichtigten wir die Hinrichtungszelle und die GPU Gefängniszellen, die jetzt von der Sicherungspolizei belegt sind. In jeder Zelle sassen 4 bis 6 Personen. Bei uns [handgeschrieben: i. e. bei der geheimen Feldpolizei] werden die Leute ebenfalls durch Pistolenschüsse ins Genick erschossen oder sie werden mit einem Gasauto heraus geschafft. Das hält vor der Stadt und schaltet die Auspuffgase so um, dass sie in das Innere des Wagens gelangen. Dann fährt der Wagen noch 10 Minuten weiter und an der Hinrichtungsstelle kommen die Insassen schon tot an und werden sofort in die Gruben geworfen. Nachmittags machte ich in der Hinrichtungszelle einige Aufnahmen mit Böhms Sonne.

7.4.42. Very early, Colonel Marschall called me; I was to immediately scout the North Camp for expansion possibilities. I left with Janusch at 8, and it turned out that the camp is of no use. The Colonel also came out later and agreed with me. On the return trip, we inspected the execution cell and the GPU prison cells, which are now occupied by the Security Police. In each cell 4 to 6 people used to sit. With us [handwritten: i. e. with the secret field police], people are likewise executed by pistol shots to the back of the neck, or they are transported away in a gas car (Gasauto). It stops outside the city and redirects the exhaust gases in such a way that they enter the interior of the vehicle. Then the vehicle drives on for another 10 minutes, and by the time they reach the execution site, the occupants arrive already dead and are immediately thrown into the pits. In the afternoon, I took some photos in the execution cell using a "Böhm's Sun".

The archival source provided by Vershinin is BArch MSG 2/10902, Bl. 209.

The question of the authenticity of the diary (i.e. whether the text is contemporaneous to the events it describes or whether it's a memoir in form of a diary) was analyzed by Christian Hartmann in this article. As he points out, retroactively faking 450 double-sided, detail-filled sheets for an incomprehesible purpose is simply implausible (there are also other arguments). What cannot be entirely excluded, however, is that the diary could have been retyped after 1945. The forensic testing of the materials showed them to have been available throughout the 1940s.This means that in theory some passages could have been deleted or added during the retyping.

That said, the purpose of adding a passage like this after the war eludes me. It would be incriminating, if anything. It also fits with the gas vans having arrived in Smolensk just a couple of months prior to this entry.

German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust. Part 7: Tactical Symbol & Homicidal Gas Van

 German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust

Part 1: Provenance

Part 2: Location

Part 3: Responsibility (I)

Part 4: Responsibility (II)

Part 5: Responsibility (III)

Part 6: Forgery Allegation

Part 7: Tactical Symbol & Homicidal Gas Van 

 

 

If there were still anyone in the world who harbored even the slightest doubt about the authenticity of the film footage showing the Nazi gas killing operation at the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev, those doubts should now be dispelled.

 

Mogilev gassing footage

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part VII: Semantics

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

If we search through the books published before the Second World War, the word Gaswagen has been used with three meanings: a) short for Holzgaswagen (producer gas vehicle), short for Gastransportwagen (vehicle for transporting gas), c) any vehicle with an internal combustion engine (for sources see Mattogno and the Activity & Situation Report of Einsatzgruppe B on its Gas Vans). 

Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis deployed homicidal gas vans with engine exhaust. The vehicles consisted of a closed cargo box mounted on a light to medium truck chassis and can be described as Kastenwagen (box wagon/van). Vergasungen (gassings) were carried out inside the closed box, so the vehicle would be something like a Vergasungskastenwagen. The bulky term can be shortened to Gaswagen (as in Gaskammer/gas-chamber, the prefix Vergasung- can be simplified to Gas-). It is semantically plausible that the Nazis would have called their homicidal gas vans as Gaswagen.

Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans. Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

 Mattogno, his Einsatzgruppen book and the Gas Vans

Part I: A Dilettante at Work

Part II:  Mental Degeneration or Dishonesty, Your Choice!

Part III: Genesis and Pictures That Say it All

Part IV: The "Enormous Contradiction" That Is None

 Part V: Nazi Foreign Office Documents vs. Holocaust Denial

Part VI: Gas Van Arithmetic

Part VII: Semantics

 Part VIII: Little More Than Hot Gas

The genesis of the Einsatzgruppen gas vans can be traced back to Fort VII in Posen. Here, the Nazis conducted mass gassing experiments for the Euthanasia action in Winter 1939/40. One branch developed to stationary gas chambers in the Altreich, the other developed to a gas van in the Warthegau, both types operating with carbon monoxide (CO) from gas cylinders. A killing commando of the Gestapo Posen, Sonderkommando (SK) Lange, employed the CO gas van. The war against the Soviet Union with its extermination policy pushed the development of a new mass killing technique since the mass shooting of people not fit for military service posed a considerable strain on the German paramilitary forces. The method had to fit the use in the wide Russian territory. The carbon monoxide gas cylinders already in use were considered not suitable for logistic reasons. In September 1941, gassing with engine exhaust was tried on a large scale in mental asylums in Minsk and Mogilev, followed by the testing of a prototype gas van with engine exhaust.

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents: Euthanasia 1940/41

Mass Killing Unit of Warthegau

Sonderkommando Lange in German Documents:

 Euthanasia 1940/41

Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents:

Part I: Origin and Foundation

Part II: The Extermination of 100,000 Jews

Part III: Body Disposal (Appendix)

Part IV: Pabianice Sorting Camp

Part V: Funding

Part VI: The Polish Working Detail

Part VII: Motor Pool and Fuel (Appendix)

Part VIII: Drinks and Tobacco (With Excursus on the Extermination of the Sinti and Roma)

Part IX: Farewell (1943)

Herbert Lange (source)

Herbert Lange, born 29 September 1909 in Menzlin in the Province of Pomerania, worked as criminal investigator at the Gestapo in Aachen before the war and took part in the Polish Campaign as member of Einsatzgruppe VI, which settled as Security Police headquarters in Poznan ^[1] (click or hover over footnotes to see references). For a short period of time until 16 October 1939, he was commandant of the Übergangslager (transition camp) Fort VII in Poznan ^[2]. Lange became the leader of a special detail (Sonderkommando) founded by and named after him, which specialized in the killing of mentally ill people with poison gas. In late 1941, he moved on to establish Chelmno (Kulmhof) extermination camp to wipe out the Jews of the Warthegau as well. He was replaced in Spring 1942 as commandant of the extermination camp by Hans Bothmann and employed as investigator in the RSHA. He supposedly died during the battle of Berlin at the end of the war.

Fort VII

Fort VII in Poznan; ref. 2, p. 13

The first Nazi gassings of people took place in Fort VII in Poznan in late 1939. Some experiments with the two most promising killing agents hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide may have been tried in casemates of the camp as early as October 1939. What seems like an experimental gassing with hydrogen cyanide soaked pellets (Degesch's "Zyklon") was mentioned en passant by the RSHA driver Wilhelm F. ^[3] :

"Right after the Polish Campaign I was sent with a group of officers to a town in Poland, I do not remember its name. There was a red haired Untersturmführer, who was called Becker as I now recall. This Becker made experiments with poison gas. A number of people were locked in a casemate and gas was introduced into the casemate through venting pipes. I remember exactly how Becker dropped something into the pipes."

"I have seen that Becker fetched a box with cans. He threw them [into the air shafts]."

From November 1939, mentally ill people were systematically killed with carbon monoxide gas in Fort VII ^[4]. Under the command of Lange the inmates of the asylums near Poznan were driven to the camp, locked in casemates and suffocated with carbon monoxide from pressurized steel bottles. The corpses were buried in mass graves in a forest near Oborniki, 30 km North of Poznan. The handling of the corpses was done by Polish prisoners of Fort VII assigned to Sonderkommando Lange, among those Henryk Mania and Henryk Maliczak, who testified on the killings after the war.

On Mattogno's Hallucination That von dem Bach-Zelewski's Extended Testimony on the Minsk Shooting Is a Jewish Forgery

In a handwritten post-war manuscript, the former Higher SS and Police Leader for Central Russia Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski briefly mentioned the show mass shooting carried out by Einsatzgruppe B on 15 August 1941 for the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in Minsk (NARA Record Group 238, M1270/1/111, p. 41, see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Page five from a declaration of von dem Bach-Zelewski on the "persecution of Jews".

The mass execution was also reported by numerous other witnesses. From a historiographic point of view, what is most significant in von dem Bach-Zelewski's account is that he described how after the shooting and visiting of a mental asylum in Minsk (which are both confirmed by Himmler's appointment diary) Himmler ordered the Einsatzgruppen B leader Arthur Nebe "to make use of a more human method of killing" on the mentally ill people, which links the incident to the subsequent mass killing trials with explosives and poison gas in asylums in Minsk and Mogilev. The connection between the events is supported by von dem Bach-Zelewski's own documented activity on the next day to get a demonstration of the mobile carbon monoxide gas chamber of Sonderkommando Lange (for obvious reasons, he kept quiet about this in his post-war testimony).

A more vivid and detailed description of the Minsk shooting by von dem Bach-Zelewski was published on 23 August 1946 in the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau (Figure 2). The account is somewhat more general with respect to the scope of Himmler's order following the mass execution and asylum visit. He considered that "shooting is not the most human method", ordered Nebe "to think about it and submit a report based on the experiences made" and agreed to try explosives on mentally ill people in Minsk.

Figure 2: Aufbau, volume 12, issue 34, p. 2.

But if it were according to the Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno, von dem Bach-Zelewski's account in Aufbau is a forgery based on his more brief statement from the NARA Record Group 238:

"This anecdote appeared on 23 August 1946 in the New York Jewish newspaper Der [sic!] Aufbau as part of a statement attributed to von dem Bach-Zelewski, but its contents had been massively manipulated by the editorial staff of the newspaper, as is apparent from a comparison with the original statement of this SS officer."

(Mattogno, Inside the Gas Chambers, 2nd edition, p. 58)

Unfortunately for Mattogno, this is rubbish. Upon systematically searching the Yad Vashem Archives digital collection of Yitzhak Stone, who "was a senior aid to the American prosecutor in the Nazi War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg" for interesting material for the blog (and there sure is, so stay tuned), I stumbled across the English translation of an undated, 60 pages long "declaration von dem Bach" (YVA, O.18/90, p. 20ff.). The declaration contains amongst other things also the passages reproduced in German in Aufbau (Figure 3).

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Einsatzgruppe B Activity & Situation Report

 Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans

Part I: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant (update 1, 2)
Part II: Producer Gas

 Part III: The Ford Gas Wagon (update)
Part IV: The Becker Letter (update)
Part V: The Rauff Letter to the Criminal Technical Institute (update 1, 2, 3, cf. on Mattogno & here)

Part VI: The Turner Letter

Part VII: The Schäfer, Trühe & Rauff Telexes

Part VIII: The Einsatzgruppe B Activity & Situation Report (cf. on Mattogno)

Part IX: The Just Memo

Part X: The West-German Trials Against Members of Einsatzkommando 8

Part XI: Einsatzgruppe D in Simferopol

Part XII: Material Evidence

Part XIII: Misreading the Fine Print 

The Einsatzgruppe B report of 1 March 1942 on its gas vans has been already discussed elsewhere, including a rebuttal of denier Mattogno on this source. The following post will look at what his fellow denier Alvarez has written on the subject.