Gas van

Magirus-Deutz van in Chełmno extermination camp

The gas van or gas wagon (German: Gaswagen; Russian: душегубка; Serbian: душегупка) was an extermination method devised by Nazi Germany to kill victims of the regime.^[1] It was also rumored that analog of such device was used by the Soviet Union on an experimental basis during the Great Purge^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

Nazi Germany

During trips to Russia in 1941, Heinrich Himmler learned the psychological impact on the Einsatzgruppen killers posed by the shooting of women and children. Hence, he commissioned Arthur Nebe to explore ways of killing that were less stressful for the killers. Nebe's experiments eventually led to the production of the gas van.^[7] This vehicle had already been used in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian Pomeranian mental patients in Soldau, a camp located in the former Polish corridor.^[8]

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. 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 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, delivered 20 gas vans in 2 models (for 30-50 and 70-100 individuals) to Einsatzgruppen, out of 30 ordered. 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 6700 civilians in Krasnodar. The total number of gas van gassings is unknown. One German document dated June 5, 1942 in occupied Minsk indicates that from December 1941 to June 1942 3 gas vans were used to kill 97000 civilians.

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

Soviet Union

According to some journalism publications,^[9] based on rumors^[10] that gas vans were already used on an experimental basis during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s.^[2][3] Moscow NKVD section chief Isay Berg would suffocate batches of prisoners with engine fumes in a camouflaged bread van while on the drive out to the mass graves at Butovo, where they were subsequently buried.^[4]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his controversial historical work Two Hundred Years Together claimed that Isay Berg, the head of the administrative and economic department of NKVD of Moscow oblast, was the inventor of the gas van in Soviet Union in 1937. Solzhenitsyn wrote:

I.D.Berg was ordered to carry out decisions of "troika" of agency of NKVD of Moscow oblast, and Berg was decently carrying out this assignment: he was driving people to the executions by shooting. But, when in Moscow oblast there came to be three "troikas" having their sessions simultaneously, the executioners could not cope with the load. Then the solution was thought about: to undress the victims naked, to tie them up, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck, disguised from outside as a bread van. During transportation the fuel gases came into the truck, and when delivered to the farthest [execution] ditch the arrestees were already dead.^[5]

There is no official, or documentary evidence of such version. At attempt of the formal investigation in 1939, and in 1956 while trying to rehabilitate Berg also any data on this "invention" was not found.^[10]

According to the Russian researcher A. A. Milchakov, however, Berg's connection to the invention of the gas van (already used in 1936) has never been conclusively proven, and Berg himself was summarily executed during the Great Purge in 1939.

See also

• Execution van
• Walter Rauff
• August Becker
• The Holocaust
• Operation Reinhard

References

1. ^ "Gas Wagons: The Holocaust's mobile gas chambers", an article of Nizkor Project
2. ^ ^{a b} Robert Gellately. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf, 2007 ISBN 1400040051 p. 460
3. ^ ^{a b} Catherine Merridale. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. Penguin Books, 2002 ISBN 0142000639 p. 200
4. ^ ^{a b} Timothy J. Colton. Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Belknap Press, 1998. ISBN 0674587499 p. 286
5. ^ ^{a b} Солженицын, А.И. (2002) (in Russian). Двести лет вместе. 2. Москва: Русский путь. p. 297. ISBN 5858871518. 
6. ^ (in Russian) Аргументы и факты. N 17. April 1993. 
7. ^ The path to genocide: essays on launching the final solution By Christopher R. Browning
8. ^ The destruction of the European Jews, Part 804, Volume 1 By Raul Hilberg
9. ^ Е. Жирнов. «По пути следования к месту исполнения приговоров отравлялись газом». Коммерсантъ Власть, № 44, 2007. ; Н. Петров. «Человек в кожаном фартуке». Новая газета, спецвыпуск «Правда ГУЛАГа» от 02.08.2010 № 10 (31).
10. ^ ^{a b} [1] Ходили слухи, что людей травили в автозаках, выводя трубу с выхлопными газами внутрь фургона, где находились осужденные. По поводу этих «душегубок» мнение старшего поколения работников НКВД неоднозначно. Часть из них утверждает, что это бред и такого быть не могло, а часть считает, что это возможно. «Я лично, — заметил полковник Кириллин М. Е., рассказывая о Бутовском полигоне, — не исключаю того, что такую систему могли придумать в целях, так скажем, нейтрализации каких-то активных действий людей, которые догадываются, что их везут на расстрел. Но это только предположение, мы можем опираться лишь на документы». В 1938 году Берг обвинялся, как изобретатель «душегубок», но он тогда на следствии это отрицал. В 1956 году при попытке реабилитации Берга это так же не было доказано. Translation: There were rumors that people were killed in paddy wagons, bringing the pipe with the exhaust gases inside the van, where were convicted. About these "gas vans" view of the older generation NKVD ambiguous. Some of them claims that this is nonsense, and this could not be, some of them believe that it is possible. "I personally - said Colonel Kirillin M.E., talking about Butovo landfill - do not rule out that such a system could come to, shall we say, to neutralize some active actions of people who realize that they were going to be shot . But this is only an assumption, we can rely only on the documents. "In 1938, Berg was accused, as the inventor of the "gas vans", but then he denied it at the inquest. In 1956, while trying to rehabilitate Berg, it's just not been proven

External links

• The Development of the Gas-Van from the Jewish Virtual Library
• Film: Short explanation about the Gas vans at the Nuremberg trials (USHMM)
• NAZI GAS VANS By Rob Arndt