[WW2] Raul Hilberg

Along with the mass shootings, the Germans are supposed to have killed people in mobile gas vans. As has already been mentioned in our Introduction, Hilberg does not show asingle picture of these gas vans. Even the well-known volume Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, which devotes no less than 64 pages to the gas vans, contains no photograph. There is a good reason for this: no man has ever laid eyes on one of these legend-shrouded vans.
This is our final result: Hilberg makes no attempt to provide material evidence for the murder of some 1.2 million Jews behind the eastern front.

Varför då kritisera Hilberg att han inte hade med någon bild på en sådan gasvagn i sin bok?

The gas-van is a special product of the Third Reich, it is a van with a gas-tight cabin/container-box/superstructure mounted on its chassis/understructure used to kill people by the motor-exhausts led into that cabin. The designation was coined only later: "Gaswagen [Gas-van] - that was the common word only afterwards/later".

In the contemporaneous documents the designation doesn't arise. There the words Sonder-Wagen, Sonderfahrzeug, Spezialwagen and S-Wagen [Special van, special vehicle] are used. In a letter dating from April 11th 1942 with hindsight to camouflage the word Entlausungswagen [delousing-van] is used.

There are in all fourteen documents related to that complex, allowing to assess which types of vans were transformed/rebuilt into gas-vans and providing technical data on the container/cabin/superstructure. The documents give informations about the producers/vendors of the vans, about technical improvements due to practical experience, about the operation and the operating locations of different vans, moreover the responsible official services and individuals in charge of the employment of gas-vans are named. Hence a rather detailed picture emerges which is, however, not exhaustive/complete as documents are available only for the timespan/period starting in 1942 when gas-vans were already in use for the killings of human beings.

"---The magical "gas chamber" is the central pillar of the "Holocaust" religion. It is not the revisionists but rather the adherences of this religion who make such a fuss about the gas chambers. Consequently, we must ask them for some explanation for their attachment to the gas chamber. Of course, they must cling to this, for without a specific means of destruction, it becomes impossible to prove the existence of a systematic and specific destruction of the Jews. Without the gas chamber, there is no genocide. And, without genocide, the history of the Jewish community resembles the suffering of all others in the community of mankind endured in the Second World War.---"

The many hundreds of thousands already buried posed a psychological problem. Ministerialrat Linden is quoted by an SS man as having remarked on a visit to the Lublin District that a future generation might not understand these matters [101]. The same consideration had prompted the Gestapo chief Müller to order Blobel, commander of Einsatzkommando 4a, to destroy the mass graves in the eastern occupied territories [102]. Blobel and his "Kommando 1005" also moved inte Kulmhof to investigate what could be done with the graves there. He constructed funeral pyres and primitive ovens, and even tried explosives [103].

In addition to these devices, Kulmhof had a bone crusher (Knochenmühle). On July 16, 1942, the deputy chief of the Gettoverwaltung, Ribbe, sent a letter to "Eldest of the Jews" Rumkowski requesting a canvass of the Lodz Ghetto for a bone crusher, "whether manually operated or motor driven". He added openly, "The Sonderkommando Kulmhof is interested in this crusher"[104]. The ghetto apparently had no such machine, for a few moths later Biebow sent to the Lodz Gestapo the papers concerning the purchase of a mill from the firm Schriever and Company in Hamburg. Biebow asked the Gestapo to keep the sales record. "For certain reasons" he himself did not wish to keep it [105]. When Höss visited Kulmhof, Blobel promised the Auschwitz commander that he would send him a mill "for solid substances" [106]. Höss, however, preferred to destroy his bone material with hammers [107].

By 1942-43 exhumations were in progress at all of the killing centers. In Kulmhof Jewish work parties opened the mass graves and dragged the corpses into newly dug pits and into a primitive oven [108]. In Belzec the process was begun in the late fall of 1942 within a firing area of the camp capable of destrying 2000 corpses per day. A second somewhat smaller firing position was was started a month later, and the two were used concurrently, day and night, until March 1943 [109]. Excavators appeared in Sobibor and Treblinka, where the corpses (moved by narrow-gauge railway in Sobibor, and dragged in Treblinka) were stacked and burned on firing grids built with old railway tracks [110].

(noter +100)

1. Statement by Gerstein, May 4, 1945, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 (1953): 189. Also affadavit by Gerstein, April 25, 1945, PS-1553.
2. Affadavit by Blobel, June 18, 1947, NO-3947.
3. Affadavit by Höss, January 11, 1947, NO-4498-B
4. Ribbe to Rumkowski, July 26, 1942, Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 3, p. 279.
5. Biebow to Fuchs, March 1, 1943, ibid.
6. Report by UStuf. Dejaco (Auschwitz administration) on trip to Kulmhof, September 17, 1942, NO-4467.
7. Affadavit by Höss, March 14, 1946, NO-1210.
8. Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager, pp. 273-74.
9. Ibid., pp. 142-43.
10. Ibid., pp 173, 205-6. See also statements by Kurt Becker (Ostbahn, Warsaw), October 15, 1968, Case Ganzenmüller, vol XVII, pp. 119-24.