Gas van

Burned-out Magirus-Deutz furniture mover van near Chełmno extermination camp, of the type used by the Nazis, with the exhaust fumes diverted into the sealed rear compartment where 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] but gives a good idea about the process.

A gas van or gas wagon (Russian: душегубка, dushegubka, literally "soul killer"; German: Gaswagen) was a truck re-equipped as a mobile gas chamber. During World War II and the Holocaust, Nazi Germany developed and used gas vans on a large scale to kill inmates of asylums, Poles, Romani people, Jews, and prisoners in occupied Poland, Belarus, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and other regions of German-occupied Europe.[2][3] There are several documented cases of gas vans used by Soviet NKVD during the Great Purge.

  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; Dickerman, Michael, eds. (2017). "Gas Vans". The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. pp. 234–235. ISBN 978-1-4408-4084-5.
  3. ^ "Gas Wagons: The Holocaust's mobile gas chambers" Archived 2011-10-11 at the Wayback Machine, an article of the Nizkor Project