Gas van
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The gas van or gas wagon (German: Gaswagen) was an extermination method devised by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union to kill victims of the regime.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Gas vans in Nazi Germany
During trips to Russia in 1941, Heinrich Himmler learned the psychological impact on the killers posed by the shooting of women and children. Hence, he commissioned Arthur Nebe to explore less stressful ways of killing. 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]
Main strategic reason for gas vans was obviously to speed up killing of prisoners. Because shooting, even when shooting several victims with one bullet, was time consuming and economically not feassable.
It was a vehicle with an air-tight compartment for victims into which exhaust gas was transmitted 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.
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" (murder-room or murder-van) and in the occupied parts of the USSR similarly as "душегубка" (dushegubka).
The gas vans are extensively discussed in some of the interviews in Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah.
Gas vans in Soviet Union
Gas vans were already used on an experimental basis during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930's.[2][3] Moscow NKVD section chief Isai D. 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 Isaiah Berg, the head of the administrative and economic department of NKVD of Moscov 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 flue gases came into the truck, and when delivered to the farthest [execution] ditch the arrestees were already dead.[5]
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.
Russian social-political newspaper Arguments and facts wrote in 1993 in an answer to a reader:
- Is it true, that the "dushegubka" [gas van], which was used by Germans during the Second World War is a Soviet invention?
I. Reinhold, from Irkutsk
The question is answered by colonel of Main Agency of Security of Russian Federation A. Oligov.
Indeed, the father of "dushegubka" - specially equipped van of the type used for transportation of bread with the fluegas pipe lead inside - was the head of the administration and economy department of NKVD Agency for Moscow oblast I. D. Berg. In its direct purpose - for extermination of people - "dushegubka" was first used in 1936. In 1939 Berg was executed by shooting on allegations of conspiracy of NKVD personnel against leaders of the country.[6]
See also
References
- ^ "Gas Wagons: The Holocaust's mobile gas chambers", an article of Nizkor Project
- ^ a b Robert Gellately. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf, 2007 ISBN 1400040051 p. 460
- ^ a b Catherine Merridale. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. Penguin Books, 2002 ISBN 0142000639 p. 200
- ^ a b Timothy J. Colton. Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Belknap Press, 1998. ISBN 0674587499 p. 286
- ^ a b Солженицын, А.И. (2002). Двести лет вместе (in Russian). Vol. 2. Москва: Русский путь. p. 297. ISBN 5858871518.
- ^ a b Аргументы и факты (in Russian). Vol. N 17. 1993.
{{cite book}}:|volume=has extra text (help); Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - ^ [http://books.google.com/books?id=L1O2ZvS29DYC&pg=PA117&dq=gas+van+nebe+invent#v=onepage&q=&f=false 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
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