White Breasted Nuthatch

by | Dec 20, 2017 | Nuthatches

How Can We Help?
You are here:
< Back
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
Roches (talk | contribs)
Extended confirmed users
2,680 edits
→‎Nazi Germany: Redlink and link to the German article. Kaiser’s Coffee was a well known chain between the 1880s and 2018, but the context, particularly with the word “Kaiser”, might lead readers to think it was a false or deliberately mocking name. The link may clarify that it was an attempt at camouflage.
→‎Soviet Union: Per WP:REDFLAG, removed an extraordinary claim that has not been supported by multiple high quality sources. See the talk page, as well as a recent discussion at the Gas chamber talk page.
Line 13: Line 13:


Marek Hałaburda has written that the gas vans were introduced to increase the rate of executions.<ref>Marek Hałaburda, “The Polish Operation”. The genocide of the Polish people in the USSR in the years 1937–1938, Orientalia Christiana Cracoviensia, 2013, v.5, p. 71.</ref> In the book ''KGB: The State Within a State'' [[Yevgenia Albats]] and [[Catherine A. Fitzpatrick]] wrote that: "Owing to the shortage of executioners, Chekists used trucks that were camouflaged as bread vans as mobile death chambers. Yes, the very same machinery made notorious by the Nazis - yes, these trucks were originally a Soviet invention, in use years before the ovens of the Auschwitz were built"<ref name="Albats">[[Yevgenia Albats]] and [[Catherine A. Fitzpatrick]], ''KGB: The State Within a State''. 1995, page 101</ref> According to [[Robert Gellately]], "The Soviets sometimes used a gas van (dushegubka), as in Moscow during the 1930s, but how extensive that was needs further investigation. They used crematoriums to dispose of thousands of bodies, but had no gas chambers."<ref>[[Robert Gellately]], Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, Knopf, 2007, {{ISBN|140003213X}}, p.460.</ref>
Marek Hałaburda has written that the gas vans were introduced to increase the rate of executions.<ref>Marek Hałaburda, “The Polish Operation”. The genocide of the Polish people in the USSR in the years 1937–1938, Orientalia Christiana Cracoviensia, 2013, v.5, p. 71.</ref> In the book ''KGB: The State Within a State'' [[Yevgenia Albats]] and [[Catherine A. Fitzpatrick]] wrote that: "Owing to the shortage of executioners, Chekists used trucks that were camouflaged as bread vans as mobile death chambers. Yes, the very same machinery made notorious by the Nazis - yes, these trucks were originally a Soviet invention, in use years before the ovens of the Auschwitz were built"<ref name="Albats">[[Yevgenia Albats]] and [[Catherine A. Fitzpatrick]], ''KGB: The State Within a State''. 1995, page 101</ref> According to [[Robert Gellately]], "The Soviets sometimes used a gas van (dushegubka), as in Moscow during the 1930s, but how extensive that was needs further investigation. They used crematoriums to dispose of thousands of bodies, but had no gas chambers."<ref>[[Robert Gellately]], Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, Knopf, 2007, {{ISBN|140003213X}}, p.460.</ref>

Gas vans were reportedly used also in the cities of [[Omsk]] and [[Ivanovo]] in the Soviet Union. According to high-ranking NKVD officer [[:ru:Шрейдер, Михаил Павлович|Mikhail Schreder]], they were used in the city of [[Ivanovo]] similar to that in Moscow: "When a closed truck arrived at the place of execution, all convicts were dragged out of cars in an unconscious state. On the way, they were almost killed by exhaust fumes redirected through a special tube into the closed cargo compartment of the truck."<ref>[https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2047681 Хроника событий 1937 года (Chronicle of the events of the year 1937)], by Evgeniy Zhirnov, [[Kommersant]], №42, 22.10.2012, page 10.</ref><ref>Шрейдер М.П. (Shreider M.P) [http://www.urantia-s.com/library/shreider/nkvd НКВД изнутри: Записки чекиста. (NKVD from within. Notes by Chekist )], Moscow: Возвращение, 1995. – p.78, [https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=book&num=940 full text online]</ref> Soviet dissident [[Petro Grigorenko]] described in his memoirs a story told by his close friend and former prisoner of Gulag Vasil Teslia. He described killings of "[[kulak]]s" in a prison in [[Omsk]]. According to him, more than 27 people were loaded to a truck, which moved away from the prison, but soon returned. "When the doors were opened, black smoke poured out and corpses of people rained down." The corpses were then placed into the basement. Teslia watched such executions during whole week.<ref>Григоренко П.Г. В подполье можно встретить только крыс… ([[Petro Grigorenko]], "In the underground one can meet only rats") — Нью-Йорк, Издательство «Детинец», 1981, page 403, [https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=page&num=9485 Full text of the book (Russian)]</ref><ref>[http://old.kr-eho.info/index.php?name=News&op=article&sid=8849 Газовые душегубки: сделано в СССР (Gas vans: made in the USSR)] by Dmitry Sokolov, ''Echo of Crimea'', 09.10.2012</ref>


==Nazi Germany==
==Nazi Germany==

Revision as of 21:21, 17 December 2019

Burned-out Magirus-Deutz furniture mover van near Chełmno extermination camp, type used by the Nazis for suffocation, with the exhaust fumes diverted into the sealed rear compartment were the victims were locked in. This particular van had not been modified, as explained by Office of the United States Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality (1946),[1] nevertheless, it gives a good idea about the process.

A gas van or gas wagon (Russian: душегубка, dushegubka, literally "soul killer"; German: Gaswagen) was a truck reequipped as a mobile gas chamber. The gas vans were first used by the Soviet NKVD in 1930s. During World War II Nazi Germany developed and used gas vans on a large scale as a extermination method to murder inmates of asylums, Romani people, Jews, and prisoners in occupied Belarus, Poland, Yugoslavia, and other areas of the Nazi-occupied USSR.[2][3]

Soviet Union

Starting in 1937, Soviet NKVD officer Isai D. Berg reportedly supervised execution of prisoners by gassing them in trucks.[4][5] Providing testimony of this when he was himself arrested by the NKVD in August 1938,[6] Berg stated that he and a team of secret police officers suffocated batches of prisoners with engine fumes in camouflaged cars while transporting them from the Taganka or Butyrka prisons in Moscow[7] to the mass graves at the Butovo firing range, where the prisoners were subsequently buried.[5] Examining documents related to Berg, Kommersant reported that Berg had led of the administrative and economic department of the Moscow Oblast NKVD; Berg stated that he acted on orders from the higher NKVD administration.[8][9][7]

FSB officers Alexander Mikhailov and Mikhail Kirillin, and historian Lydia Golovkova, recounted the testimony of one witness at a mass execution site outside Moscow.[6] As many as 50 prisoners were loaded into trucks whose exhaust pipes were turned into the trucks, which Muscovites called "soul killers" and which were said to have been invented by Berg. Prisoners were "half dead" when they arrived at the site, where most were subsequently executed.[6]

Marek Hałaburda has written that the gas vans were introduced to increase the rate of executions.[10] In the book KGB: The State Within a State Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick wrote that: "Owing to the shortage of executioners, Chekists used trucks that were camouflaged as bread vans as mobile death chambers. Yes, the very same machinery made notorious by the Nazis - yes, these trucks were originally a Soviet invention, in use years before the ovens of the Auschwitz were built"[11] According to Robert Gellately, "The Soviets sometimes used a gas van (dushegubka), as in Moscow during the 1930s, but how extensive that was needs further investigation. They used crematoriums to dispose of thousands of bodies, but had no gas chambers."[12]

Nazi Germany

The use of gas vans by the Nazis to murder Jews, mentally ill people, Romani people and prisoners in occupied territories during World War II originated with the Nazi Euthanasia Program in 1939. Ordered to find a suitable method of killing, the Technical Institute for the Detection of Crime ("Kriminaltechnisches Institut der Sicherheitspolizei", abbreviated KTI) of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) decided to gas victims with Carbon monoxide.[13] In October 1939 the Nazis started gassing prisoners in Fort VII near Posen. The first victims were Polish and Jewish inmates of asylums for the mentally ill.[14] Witnesses report that since December 1939, mobile gas chambers were used to kill the inmates of asylums in Pomerania, Eastern Prussia and Poland.[15] The vans were built for the Sonderkommando Lange and their use was supposed to speed up the killings. Instead of transporting the victims to the gas chambers, the gas chambers were transported to the victims. They were most likely devised by specialists from the Referat II D of the RSHA. These mobile gas chambers worked under the same principles as the stationary gas chambers: through a rubber hose the driver released pure CO from steel cylinders into the air tight special construction that was shaped like a box and placed on the carrier. The vans resembled moving vans or delivery lorries and they were labelled Kaiser’s Kaffee Geschäft (de) (“Kaiser's Coffee Shop”) for camouflage. They were not called "gas vans" at the time, but “Sonder-Wagen”, “Spezialwagen” (special vans) and “Entlausungswagen” (delousing vans).[16][15] The Lange commando killed patients in numerous hospitals in the Wartheland in 1940. They drove to the hospitals, collected patients, loaded them into the vans and gassed them while they were driving them away.[17] From 21 May to 8 June 1940 the Sonderkommando Lange killed 1558 sick people from Soldau concentration camp alone.[18]

In August 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler attended a demonstration of a mass-shooting of Jews in Minsk that was arranged by Arthur Nebe, after which he vomited. Regaining his composure, Himmler decided that alternative methods of killing should be found.[19] He ordered Nebe to explore more "convenient" ways of killing that were less stressful for the killers. Nebe decided to conduct his experiments by murdering Soviet mental patients, first with explosives near Minsk, and then with automobile exhaust at Mogilev.[20] Nebe's experiments led to the utilization of the gas van.[21] This vehicle had already been used in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in the Soldau concentration camp.[22]

Gas vans were used, particularly at the Chełmno extermination camp, until gas chambers were developed as a more efficient method for killing large numbers of people. Two types of gas vans were in operation, and they were used by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. The Opel-Blitz, which weighed 3.5 tons, and the larger Saurerwagen, which weighed 7 tons.[23] 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 SS used the euphemisms Sonderwagen, Spezialwagen or S-wagen ("special vehicle") for the vans.[24] The gas vans were specifically designed to direct deadly exhaust fumes via metal pipes into the airtight cargo compartments, where the intended victims had been forcibly stuffed to capacity. In most cases the victims were suffocated and poisoned from carbon monoxide and other toxins in the exhaust as the vans were transporting them to fresh pits or ravines for mass burial.

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, had delivered 20 gas vans in two models (for 30–50 and 70–100 individuals) to Einsatzgruppen, out of 30 that were ordered from that company. 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 who had been involved in the gassing of 6,700 civilians in Krasnodar.[citation needed] The total number of gas van gassings is unknown.[25]

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

See also

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ "SS use of mobile gassing vans". A damaged Magirus-Deutz van found in 1945 in Kolno, Poland. World War II Today. 2011. Retrieved April 22, 2013. Source: Office of the United States Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality: Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression – Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Office, 1946, Vol III, p. 418;
  2. ^ Bartrop, Paul R. (2017). "Gas Vans". In Paul R. Bartrop; Michael Dickerman (eds.). The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 234–235. ISBN 978-1-4408-4084-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  3. ^ "Gas Wagons: The Holocaust's mobile gas chambers", an article of Nizkor Project
  4. ^ Catherine Merridale. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. Penguin Books, 2002 ISBN 0-14-200063-9 p. 200
  5. ^ a b Timothy J. Colton. Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Belknap Press, 1998. ISBN 0-674-58749-9 p. 286, Е. Жирнов. «По пути следования к месту исполнения приговоров отравлялись газом». Коммерсантъ Власть, № 44, 2007.
  6. ^ a b c Александр ЛИПКОВ, "Я к вам травою прорасту…", Alexander Lipkov, Kontinent, N 123, 2005. "Mikhail Kirillin: The details of everything that happened here, we restored by talking with one person. There were no other survivors who would directly work in the zone. And now he is gone. This is the former commandant of the Moscow administration, who told all the details ... Lydia Golovkova: He told the following: cars loaded with people moved through the forest, up to 50 people were stuffed into a truck. Muscovites have long called these cars "dushegubka [soul killers]." In the case of Berg, who took part in the executions, of which there is his signature, he was accused as the inventor of these gas vans. Alexander Mikhailov: According to the driver of such a truck, the gas was used to prevent the possibility of riot in the truck. Naturally, the people who swallowed carbon monoxide have been suppressed, and many of them accepted death as deliverance from the torment. Lydia Golovkova: The exhaust pipe turned inside the van, and people came already half-conscious. Buses with half-dead people drove up from the side of the forest. There was a tower with a searchlight above the trees, the territory was surrounded by barbed wire, and there was a long wooden hut, where everyone was supposedly brought in for sanitation."
  7. ^ a b Н. Петров. «Человек в кожаном фартуке». Nikita Petrov, Novaya Gazeta (ru:Новая газета, спецвыпуск «Правда ГУЛАГа» от 02.08.2010 № 10 (31)) Archived 2010-08-06 at the Wayback Machine.
  8. ^ On the way to the place of their execution, the convicts were poisoned with gas (Russian), by Yevgeniy Zhirnov, Kommersant
  9. ^ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Two Hundred Years Together (Двести лет вместе), volume=2, Москва, Русский путь, 2002, ISBN 5-85887-151-8, p. 297 According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "I. D. Berg was ordered to carry out the orders of the NKVD troika of the Moscow Oblast, and he was decently carrying out this assignment: he was driving people to the executions by shooting. But, when he arrived at the Moscow Oblast, three troikas were carrying out their sessions simultaneously, the executioners could not cope with the load. They hit upon a solution: to strip the victims naked, tie them up, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck which was disguised as a bread van from the outside. During their transportation the fuel gases came into the truck, and when they were delivered to the farthest [execution] ditch the arrestees were already dead."
  10. ^ Marek Hałaburda, “The Polish Operation”. The genocide of the Polish people in the USSR in the years 1937–1938, Orientalia Christiana Cracoviensia, 2013, v.5, p. 71.
  11. ^ Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, KGB: The State Within a State. 1995, page 101
  12. ^ Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, Knopf, 2007, ISBN 140003213X, p.460.
  13. ^ Beer 1987, p. 405.
  14. ^ Alberti 2006, p. 326-327.
  15. ^ a b Beer 1987, p. 405-406.
  16. ^ Alberti 2006, p. 327-328.
  17. ^ Friedlander 1997, p. 139.
  18. ^ Beer 1987, p. 406.
  19. ^ Longerich, Peter (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life, p. 547, ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6.
  20. ^ Lewy, Guenter (2000). The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, pp. 204–208, ISBN 0-19-512556-8.
  21. ^ The path to genocide: essays on launching the final solution By Christopher R. Browning
  22. ^ The destruction of the European Jews, Part 804, Volume 1 By Raul Hilberg
  23. ^ Ernst. Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess (1991). "The gas-vans (3. 'A new and better method of killing had to be found')". The Good Old Days: The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Konecky Konecky. p. 69. ISBN 1568521332. Retrieved 2013-05-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  24. ^ Patrick Montague (2012). "The Gas Vans (Appendix I)". Chełmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler's First Death Camp. Univ of North Carolina Press. p. Appendix I: The Gas Van. ISBN 0807835277. Retrieved 2018-09-15.
  25. ^ "Gaswagen, from deathcamps.org, in German". 2006. Retrieved 2018-10-06.

External links

Categories
Table of Contents