Sources on a Gas Van in Belzec Extermination Camp

According to the member of the Belzec staff and later commandant of Treblinka, Kurt Franz, a homicidal gas van existed in Belzec prior the operation of the stationary gas chambers. Lorenz Hackenholt is supposed to have been involved in the construction of the gas van, which Franz described as a converted parcel van. Some corroboration can be found in the testimony of Anna Fuchs - the former wife of the gassing device specialist Erich Fuchs -, who stated that her former husband drove a closed parcel van during his Euthanasia time and wrote her from Belzec that he drove a gas van.

Sketches of German Homicidal Gas Vans

So far, there are eight witnesses known to have produced drawings of homicidal German gas vans or parts therof. A sketch of a gas van operating in Minsk made by the Wehrmacht soldier Erich W. on 18 September 1962 for West-German investigators can be examined only in the Niedersächsische Hauptstaatsarchiv, NDS. 721 Hannover Acc. 97/99 Nr.10/28, p. 191. The remaining seven drawings are reproduced in this posting. 

2nd Update on Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant

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)

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

Three further additions on gasoline engines in the Saurer or other gas vans showing that the "Diesel issue" is just irrelevant. 

Zenon Rossa, car mechanic at the Kraft company in Kolo:

"The engine was a 6-cylinder from the company Saurer, on gasoline [benzyne]."

(interrogation of 15 June 1945, Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej GK 165/271, tom I, p. 43)

Rudolf Sch., Einsatzkommando 11b:

"The gas van was a 3.5 or 5 tons truck with a gasoline engine [Benzinmotor]."

(interrogation of 23 July 1962, Bundesarchiv, B162/1053, p. 1226)

Friedrich Pr., head of the motor pool department of the Security Police:

"The first vehicles were 5 Saurer from Hauptsturmführer Ga., the other 10 Saurer vehicles came from Bal. [...] I still remember that Ju. once asked asked me what should happen with these vehicles. I replied that the vehicles are not suitable for service in Russia, at most they could be used in Germany; but this could pose problems, because these gasoline vehicles [Benzinfahrzeuge] had a volume of 5 liters."

(interrogation of 26 September 1961, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, NDS. 721 Hannover Acc. 97/99 Nr.10/13, p. 4)

German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust. Part 6: Forgery Allegation

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

The Mogilev homicidal gassing footage discussed in the previous parts has been subjected to doubts about its authenticity. Interestingly, these were not limited to the usual suspects, but included a German public prosecutor investigating Nazi atrocities and Holocaust Museum staff. In any case, the suspicion that the footage was faked by the Allies is unsubstantiated in the light of the available evidence.

German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust. Part 4: Responsibility (II).

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

In the previous parts of this series, it was established that the gassing footage (shown below as titled compilation and without the sound added after the war) was taken during an action by Einsatzkommando 8 in the Mogilev asylum. In this part, we will look more closely on the circumstances of what may picture the scene.

 (attention: graphic video!)

German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust. Part 2: Location.

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

Having established the gassing film's provenance we shall now take a look at the issue of where the film was shot.

Note: this post contains lots of images.

It is usually claimed that the scene depicts a gassing in Mogilev. However there were also some testimonies about similar early gassings elsewhere (Minsk), so we should make sure that we have the right location. In order to do this we should examine photos of the Mogilev psychiatric hospital, specifically of the location where the gassing is claimed to have taken place.

German Footage of a Homicidal Gassing with Engine Exhaust. Part 1: Provenance.

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

The only known German footage of a homicidal gassing can be seen in the documentary Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (1948), partially available, among other places, at USHMM's website, 0:44-1:21. The USHMM description reads:

CU pipes from a German police car bearing a license plate POL-28545 and a German police truck with license POL-51628 (as well as military unit markings: 7 circle-with-flag IX). Apparently metal piping is directed into the brick work of a small brick building, in an area that appears to be a bricked up window or door. Projected against the wall is what appears to be the shadow of a man in uniform. Five emaciated men pass on an open farm cart/wagon to a wooded location; a tall naked emaciated man and two emaciated children (different from those seen first) are led by a man and a woman in white lab coats to the building. Small red cross appears on man's white coat sleeve. The man and woman put blankets around the patients' shoulders as they are led toward the building (and over a child lying on the cart). A uniformed man - probably German - is visible in the background, along the fence, watching the scene. CU car and pipes connecting the car exhaust to the building. [Scene is consistent with descriptions of September 1941 experimental killings by Einsatzgruppe B of patients from a local asylum in the area of Mogilev, Belarus. Corresponding still images were used in evidence at the trial of Albert Widmann.]

The question of what the events on the tape correspond to will be addressed by Hans in parts 3 to 5 of this multi-part article. In this part we'll take a look at the issue of the provenance of this footage.

Update on Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant

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)

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

According to Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant, the German homicidal gas vans were running on gasoline, Saurer chassis were not always Diesel and the gasoline-driven Saurer homicidal gas vans were obtained from German-occupied France. In the mean time, I obtained some more sources entirely confirming this finding, which are worth to highlight in a separate posting. 

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Becker Letter

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

August Becker obtained his PhD in 1932 at the University Gießen, where he worked in the field of physical chemistry and photochemistry under Prof. Karl Schaum. In December 1939, he was assigned as gassing specialist to the Euthanasia action in Germany and in December 1941 to take care of the gas vans deployed to the Einsatzgruppen. In the following year, he toured through the occupied territories in the East to inspect the operation of these vehicles.

On 16 May 1942, he wrote a preliminary report on his activities to Walther Rauff, who was responsible for technical matters in the RSHA, including motor vehicles. The letter openly discusses the killing of people in gas wagons ("I ordered that during application of gas all the men were to be kept as far away from the vans as possible...the persons to be executed suffer death from suffocation")

The document cannot be explained away as describing something other than German homicidal gas vans and accordingly it is dismissed as a forgery by Holocaust deniers. However, there is not a single piece of evidence or comprehensible and well-founded reason to support the forgery allegation; to the contrary: it is clearly an authentic contemporary German document radically debunking the central dogma of Holocaust denial that there had been no systematic gassings.

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: The Ford Gas Wagon

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

The verdict of the regional court Kiel on the former member of Secret Field Police Heinz Rie. of 14 June 1974 claimed the use of a Ford chassis as a homicidal gas van. I've ignored this in a previous part discussing the chassis of the German gas vans since the Holocaust denier Santiago Alvarez presented the case as somewhat unreliable - and I believed him! But after reviewing the full verdict, it becomes clear that the construction and use of a Ford gas van by the German forces is actually conceivable. And too bad for Revisionists that the truck is supposed to have had a gasoline engine, and so the Diesel issue continues to be irrelevant for the gas vans. 

Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant

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

One of the main arguments by the Revisionist Santiago Alvarez against German homicidal gas vans is that most of the vehicles (namely those with Saurer chassis) were supposed to have had Diesel engines combined with the claim that Diesel engine exhaust - as opposed to gasoline engine exhaust - is not suitable for killing.

This posting presents evidence that the homicidal gas vans based on Saurer chassis were fabricated with gasoline engines in German-occupied France. In fact, all brands identified as possible gas vans by the most reliable sources were either most likely or at least possibly using gasoline engines. Furthermore, the available testimonial evidence strongly supports gasoline engines over Diesel. Therefore, the "Diesel issue" is indeed irrelevant as far as the reality of homicidal gas vans is concerned.

Meanwhile, on the "CODOH Revisionist Forum" ....

... Friedrich Paul Berg indulges in some of his hilarious wishful thinking, as he writes the following:

HC Reference Library

No hay mal que por bien no venga, says a Spanish proverb. There is nothing bad that doesn’t also bring some good.

Wilfried Heink lies

In a recent thread on the RODOH forum, Wilfried Heink ("neugierig"), the rabid old Nazi who together with Thomas Kues runs the Inconvenient History blog, disgraced himself by falsely claiming that a recent German research publication endorses the notion of homicidal gassing with diesel exhaust.

Meanwhile, it seems that this writer ...

... figures prominently in the obsessions and nightmares of another prominent "Revisionist".

Mattogno freaks out

In his latest article published on the blog spot hosted by one of his admirers, Aryan blonde Franziska (also known as "hcn", the lady who proclaims that, unlike the Jew Primo Levi, she is fond of blue eyes and blond hair), Carlo Mattogno goes rambling over more than 46 pages (MS Word, letter type Times New Roman, letter size 10) against a number of insolents who dared to criticize the coryphée of "Revisionism".

The oh-so-unreliable Rudolf Reder

One of the very few survivors of Bełżec extermination camp, Rudolf Reder is considered an unreliable witness by British researcher Michael Tregenza, who wrote that Reder's account is contradictory and contains inaccuracies such as a greatly exaggerated number of victims, wrong measurements of the mass graves and the camp and the participation of Romanians and Norwegians in the extermination (Tregenza, "Bełżec – Das vergessene Lager des Holocaust", in: Jahrbuch Fritz Bauer Institut 2000, p. 242).

Truck Driver Killed By CO from Diesel Exhaust

Death by diesel exhaust was proven in this case, which presented a blood test showing a 67% concentration of carboxyhemoglobin in the victim's blood. It also admitted "testing by Bredemeyer and Miller on a Freightliner truck with a Detroit Diesel engine, Series 60" which showed "that the truck could produce enough carbon monoxide to kill a person." Furthermore, Berg's site has this study, which states that "The available literature concerning the CO content of diesel fuel recognizes its potential lethality under certain circumstances." Berg himself agrees that "carbon monoxide levels in Diesel exhaust can kill under heavy engine loads (Buchanan is mistaken in this regard)", although he thinks that it is absolutely absurd to use diesel exhaust for mass murder.

Consequently, although we still regard the diesel issue to be irrelevant, we can categorically state that diesel exhaust can kill humans, contrary to the claims made by Pat Buchanan, Arnulf Neumaier and your average CODOH chimp [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. This does not prove that diesel kills as efficiently as gasoline, nor does it prove the timescale of killing, but it removes the simplistic canard often seen on Internet forums that diesel cannot kill at all. This accidental death by diesel exhaust also makes it harder to claim that diesels could not have been adapted for mass gassings (although we don't claim they were).

Sobibor survivor Thomas Blatt sets the record straight

On 17.01.2010 there appeared a news item on The Independent's site, in which the Sobibor revolt participant Thomas (Toivi) Blatt is quoted as follows:

"We heard the whine of the generator that started the submarine engine which made the gas that killed them. I remember standing and listening to the muffled screams and knowing that men, women and children were dying in agony as I sorted their clothes. This is what I live with," he said.

The mention of the submarine engine was, of course, seized on by Holocaust deniers. Supposedly a submarine engine would be a diesel engine and that is a big no-no for deniers (most other people find this irrelevant). To date only Eichmann mentioned the use of such an engine for gassings in regard to Christian Wirth's early gassing experiments, and it was hearsay and probably also an example of distorted memory.

Mr. Blatt never claimed to be in the extermination zone proper, so even if he would say such a thing, that would be but a speculation. But did he say that? I contacted Mr. Blatt, and here is his response, which he kindly permitted me to post online:

Dear Mr. Romanov

This is the first time I heard about submarine engine in Sobibor.
It was a Tank engine.
Must be a mistake by the journalist.

Why the "diesel issue" is irrelevant

Note: a more complete treatment of the evidence can now be found here.

According to a widespread meme, the Nazis used diesel engines to gas people in Aktion Reinhard(t) camps (either in all, or in some of them) and in gas vans. Many sources repeat this claim and many courts (inculding the West-German and Israeli ones) also accepted that diesel engines were used for homicidal gassings.

Holocaust deniers have been disputing this detail for a long time. The main critic of the "diesel story" is an American denier Friedrich Berg (his site is http://www.nazigassings.com/).

Berg strives to prove, through detailed technical discussion, that diesel engines cannot used for mass gassings efficiently. Therefore, there were no diesel gas chambers. Therefore, there was no Holocaust.

Read more!

I'm not qualified to dissect Berg's technical arguments. Roberto may wish to post some details, as he has been dealing with Berg's arguments for years. Apparently, diesel engines can be used for gassings in stationary chambers with some tweaking, though it seems the same does not apply to gas vans. It also seems to me that it is simply not feasible to use diesel engines for gassings, even if they can kill, when one has access to petrol engines.

The point of this posting is that if Berg is correct about technical infeasibility of using diesel engines for mass gassings, this in no way constitutes an argument against the historicity of the gas chambers in which these engines were supposed to be used.

First of all, one must explore the source of the identification of homicidal engines as diesels.

The most prominent source is, of course, Kurt Gerstein's testimony. Or, rather, testimonies. His testimonies certainly contain the core of truth. Yet, they contain many implausible details and internal contradictions as well. One simply cannot take any detail of Gerstein's testimony and use it without corroboration - as has been done (unfortunately) by some historians. Christopher Browning characterizes Gerstein thus:

Many aspects of Gerstein's testimony are unquestionably problematic. Several statements he attributes to Globocnik are clearly exagerrated or false, and it is not clear whether Gerstein or Globocnik was the faulty source. In other statements, such as the height of the piles of shoes and clothing at Belzec and Treblinka, Gerstein himself is clearly the source of exaggeration. Gerstein also added grossly exaggerated claims about matters to which he was not an eyewitness, such as that a total of 25 million Jews and others were gassed. But in the essential issue, namely that he was in Belzec and witnessed the gassing of a transport of Jews from Lwow, his testimony is fully corroborated by Pfannenstiel. It is also corroborated by other categories of witnesses from Belzec.

It is not even clear if Gerstein ever saw the engine himself. So Gerstein's testimony alone cannot be used to establish the type of the engine.

But what about Prof. Pfannenstiel's testimony? He traveled with Gerstein to Belzec, and later testified about the gassing he had witnessed. He told about the diesel engine which was used for gassings, and which he saw with his own eyes. Interestingly, he told about it without any imaginable coercion involved, to no less that a patriarch of Holocaust denial, Paul Rassinier, who described their meeting in one of his books. Here's how Rassinier relates the part about the engine:

My interlocutor told me that, upon being informed of the expected train, he decided to stay. Accompanied by Wirth and his S.S. aide, he again visited the little house that had been fixed up for exterminations, and he described it to me. It had a raised ground floor, and a hallway with three small rooms on each side, which he did not measure, but which he thought had an area of surely less than 5 x 5 meters, perhaps 4 x 5 maximum, and all of them were rectangular, not square. At the end of the hall was the room where the Diesel motor was located in the center on a cement base and a little below floor level. I asked about this motor and how it was connected up to exhaust outlets in each of the six rooms. It was a truck motor, about 1.50 meters long, a little less than 1 meter wide, and a good meter in height, including the concrete base. Its power he did not know; perhaps it had 200 horsepower, he said. I pointed out to him that it was said to have been a marine engine, and, therefore, it must have been much bigger if it had been built for a ship. "Surely not," he said. "it was a truck motor, at least its dimensions led me to visualize it on a truck." He remembered the number of cylinders, six in one row. As for the connection with the exhaust pipes, in order to proceed faster, he made a drawing for me, which showed that the motor exhaust was introduced into each room by means of a pipe that was connected to an outlet in the floor.

Given that this testimony was given voluntarily, by an unsympathetic witness (just read his other comments to Rassinier; Pfannenstiel also wrote to Rassinier that fiction in Gerstein's report prevails over reality), we can be certain that it corroborates Gerstein's basic description about the Belzec gassing. It does not corroborate many details of this description, but it also mentions the diesel engine used for gassings. But, considering that Pfannenstiel was an outsider, and a hygienist, not a technician, one may suppose that he could have gotten the type of the engine wrong.

Yet another witness who testified about the diesel engine in Belzec was Karl Alfred Schluch. Carlo Mattogno quotes him in his Belzec book as follows (p. 68):

For the gassings an engine was started up. I cannot give a more detailed description of the engine, because I never saw it. I am not a specialist, but I would say that, judging from the sound, it was a medium-size diesel engine.

This description speaks for itself.

So, the above testimonies for the type of engine at Belzec are not iron-clad evidence on this specific issue. There is also a testimony of Rudolf Reder, who described the Belzec gassing engine as running on petrol. Mattogno cites an early testimony of Reder, which is quite problematic in its description of the homicidal apparatus (if the translation is correct, that is), so Reder might not qualify as a good witness on this issue. But in any case, at worst we don't have any hard data about the type of engine. It could be either petrol or diesel engine. So Berg's technical arguments don't affect this camp in any way. That the witnesses might have gotten the type of engine wrong does not necessarily discredit the rest of their testimonies (this is decided on a case-by-case basis).

(I don't discuss Eichmann's submarine engine claim here, since Christopher Browning plausibly argues that it was not Belzec that Eichmann visited, as is usually assumed, but rather an experimental gassing site nearby. Eichmann's claim about the type of engine is only a hearsay, and is not worth much either way.)

Now let's move to Sobibor. Luckily, we have a testimony of the person who had personally installed a gassing engine there. It was SS-Scharfuehrer Erich Fuchs, who testified on April 8, 1963:

We unloaded the motor. It was a heavy Russian benzine engine, at least 200 horsepower. We installed the engine on a concrete foundation and set up the connection between the exhaust and the tube.

So, in case of Sobibor we have unequivocal evidence that the engine ran on petrol.

Now Treblinka. Jewish inmate Eli Rosenberg told in 1947 affidavit about "exhaust fumes of a single diesel engine". At least two Ukrainian guards - Leleko and Malagon - also said that diesels were used.

It is important to remember that, just as in case of Belzec, none of these people testifying about diesels were directly involved with them. So, in principle, they could have been easily mistaken. Especially when one considers that there was a diesel engine for generation of electricity, which could have been mistaken for the homicidal engine.

There are also testimonies about Soviet tank engine being used. Yankel Wiernik writes in A Year in Treblinka:

A motor taken from a dismantled Soviet tank stood in the power plant. This motor was used to pump the gas, which was let into the chambers by connecting the motor with the inflow pipes.

Note that he did not say "diesel engine". Erich Fuchs claimed that his engine was also from a Soviet tank (though this was disputed by Erich Bauer, who said it was a Renault engine), and yet it was a petrol engine. In fact, quite a lot of Soviet tanks had petrol engines.

I have also seen claims that T-34 tank's engine was used. I have seen this claim ascribed to Kurt Franz, though I can't tell if the reference is true. I've seen deniers argue that since T-34 tanks had diesel engines, the Treblinka engine had to be diesel too. For the sake of the argument, let us assume that Treblinka engine was indeed from T-34 tank. Now, it is simply not true that all T-34s were diesels. Because of shortage of V-2 diesels in the autumn of 1941 it was ordered to implement the ways to install old carburetor engines M17-T in T-34 tanks (I. Shmelyov, "Tank T-34", Tekhnika i vooruzhenije, no. 11-12, 1998). Another author confirms that some T-34s had M-17, a powerful aviation motor, installed (E. Zubov, Dvigateli tankov (iz istorii tankostrojenija), 1991).

Now, if you visually compare petrol M-17 and diesel V-2, both used in T-34s (though the latter used in the majority of them), you will see why some people might confuse the two. Further source of confusion might stem from that incorrect belief that T-34s had only diesel engines.

As a general rule, the people who did not operate or install the engine could have been mistaken about the type of engine.

If the people who installed/operated the engines were to testify about them being diesels and Berg's technical arguments are true, that would present a problem. But we have already seen Fuchs testifying about a petrol engine. More information comes from German historian Peter Witte:

In this case even three former Gasmeister (“Gasmasters” / Erich Bauer, Erich Fuchs, and Franz Hödl), who must have really have known the facts, since they all killed with the same motor, confirmed in court that it was definitely a petrol motor. Bauer and Fuchs, having been professional motor mechanics, simply quarrelled during the trial about whether it was a Renault motor or a heavy Russian tank motor (probably a tank motor or a tractor motor) having at least 200 PS. They also disputed whether the method of ignition was a starter or an impact magnet, which diesel motors obviously do not have, being self-igniting...

He adds:

Hödl reported that they once tried a Diesel motor for the the gas chambers, but it did not work!

Witte's claims should be checked, of course, but in any case Berg's diesel arguments simply don't work for Aktion Reinhard(t) camps - the people that really mattered apparently testified only about petrol engines. All the witnesses who mentioned diesels would be simply mistaken, and there's nothing surprising or sinister about that.

Deniers also like to point to the two 1943 Soviet gas vans trials in Krasnodar and Kharkov. It was claimed by the Soviets that the gas van engines were diesels. Nick checked out the published English translations of trial transcripts (The People's Verdict), and found only one place where a witness mentions specifically diesel engine (p. 17, interrogation of accused Tishchenko). Given the Soviet propensity for tampering with the published transcripts, one should check the unedited version to see if it mentions "diesel" in this place. Anyway, one swallow does not make a summer, and Tishchenko wasn't even a gas van driver. The rest of the mentions were prosecution's statements, etc. - not the relevant kind of evidence.

Now let's see what other evidence we have, to establish the types of engines used in gas vans. Roberto supplies us with the following information: Zalman Levinbuck testified about the petrol engine ("The people are poisoned during the drive by gases and exhaust fumes that are created by the combustion of gasoline in the motor.", Kogon/Langbein/Rückerl et al., Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, p. 91); Friedrich Jeckeln "mentioned too high gasoline consumption" as one of the problems with gas vans (Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p. 767); Chelmno gas van driver Walter Burmeister testified about "Renault trucks with Otto engines" (i.e. petrol motors; Kogon et al.); SS-Oberscharfuehrer Walter Piller who served in Chelmno mentioned "gases that had been created by the gasoline motor" (Kogon et al., p. 138).

And it seems that most witnesses simply don't mention the engine type. But the preponderance of evidence is clearly on the side of petrol engines.

Finally, we know that some gas vans were Saurers. Denier Ingrid Weckert states:

What the writer claims with regard to the problems encountered during 'gassing' must be read in conjunction with Friedrich Berg's chapter in this volume. For as long as there is no proof that the RSHA's Saurer vehicles were not equipped with Diesel engines, as was normally the case, the gassing tales cannot be given any credence.

Well, it's easy, then. Since we do know from extensive documentation and eyewitness statements that there were gas vans, and if we assume that Berg is correct, then Saurer gas vans were Saurers with petrol engines.

Also, Nick pointed out that old, 1920s models had petrol motors, so maybe old RSHA vehicles were converted. Otherwise, it is also possible that only Saurer chassis were ordered, and petrol engines were installed afterwards.

Be that as it may, it is clear that until deniers will dig up eyewitness statements of the people who were "in the know", who simply had to be informed about the type of engine (such as those who ran the engines in the camps, or gas vans and gas chambers inventors), and who mention the alleged successful use of diesel motors, they have no case whatsoever. They still haven't found any such statements. Thus, the "diesel issue" is moot.

Update: Nick provided me with the following document:

'Motor Wkw Pol. 51140 ausbauen und nach Lublin schaffen. Reparatur wird von hier veranlasst'

SSPF Lublin an Aussenstelle Minsk, Stubaf Dolp, 1.11.41, GPD 438 (10.11.41), item 21, PRO HW 16/32

I'm quoting it only to show that engines for the camps did not have to come from Poland proper - they could have come from any of the occupied territories.

Update 2: Previous version of this article (including one of the updates) relied on two unreliable sources from a usually reliable site. Authenticity of these sources is in question, so I have removed references to them. The sources insisted on diesel engines in Treblinka, so their initial inclusion would not help my thesis in any way, so don't complain. Maybe I will tell a more detailed story about these sources some time...