Brive1987 wrote: ↑
VickyCaramel wrote: ↑
Brive1987 wrote: ↑
No Vicky. Gas vans haven’t been wished away. They were pretty effective at Chelmno for the (relatively) low transport rates coming out of the Wartheland. And they had been equally effective in cleaning out the sanatoriums under T4.
I dare you to try an imagine how a gas van would actually work without picturing a clown car and Benny Hill music.
Brive1987 wrote: ↑
Finding tabloid level post war excitement isn’t a golden ticket for denial.
Tabloid level.... yeah I'll definitely go with that. It wasn't in the tabloids though was it?
It’s normally considered good form to allow for a perspective gap between events and writing proper (as opposed to partisan) history. I can understand why that gap may have been ignored after WWII. I can also see the development of a massive and very serious scholarship over the past twenty years. I only see sober sourced based investigation in the mainstream. And yes, hard Jewish intionalists have been pretty much shown the door as overly emotional and un-nuanced.
Re the vans, if you can get past the URL, there are 114 references below to non Jewish sources supporting the presented primary evidence.
A few more than the electric floors get.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/gas-vans
But then you have to untangle it all.
Sure the Germans used CO to euthanize prisoners and mental patients. Sure they tried to repeat this in the Soviet Union, sure they experimented with exhaust fumes... which was largely unsuccessful. There is quite a lot of evidence for this, good solid irrefutable evidence.
And then from the other direction you have a shit load of rumours floating around during the war. Some of them come from inside the German occupied areas (human soap etc), other posted by Russian bots on Tumblr (or the 1940s equivalent). There are "investigators" going in immediately behind liberation forces to document Nazi War crimes, and it's highly likely they are specifically trying to confirm all these rumours. Then you have the Denazification propaganda units churning out stuff about how bad the Nazis are to show to the German people... this included dramatic re-enactments of some of their crimes (it's possible that the photo you posted earlier is the product of this). I have no doubt that investigators led witnesses, possibly told them exactly what to say (we have a load of evidence of that kind of thing going on) and I have no doubt that they would be more than happy to fabricate or destroy evidence because they weren't sent in to uncover the truth, they were sent in to Nail the Nazis... and they had Stalin to answer to.
And the Americans with their shrunken heads were probably no better.
That's the perspective gap. Or are we going to pretend that the propaganda effort ended on VE day and started again when Hillary decided to run for election?
"Gas Vans" were fairly ubiquitous in Germany... we even have evidence of them showing up along with diesel powered trucks in Italy and Tunisia which caused quite a stir as they shouldn't have been there. I have heard that they were even producing coal-gas at Auschwitz, the idea of using carbon monoxide as a vehicle fuels was hardly unknown even among the inmates of concentration camps. It certainly wasn't unknown outside of the Nazi areas of occupation either as everybody was short of fuel.
And we know that there were mobile gas vans for decontamination towards the end of the war... we even have some photos including one showing the racks inside for hanging clothes.
However, the idea of mobile gas vans for killing people is frankly absurd. It is absurd when you consider the descriptions of the people who supposedly built and maintained these vehicles because the Nazis own experiments show this would be ineffective, and it is absurd when we try to conceive of a possible way to construct the ideal mobile killing machine. Exhaust fumes take way too long, CO from a solid fuel burner is too flamable, and playing around with cyanide gas in the back of a van would be suicidal for the operators. And why would they need to be mobile at all if they were to kill "hundreds of thousands" of people at a fixed location?
Lets face it, the idea of gas vans is just to explain away the lack of gas chambers.
There may have been "very serious scholarship over the past twenty years" but it started with the conclusion and tried to find the evidence to fit it, or come up with hypothesis why there is a lack of evidence, weeded out much of the nonsense embarrassing testimony, they even revised down some of the numbers. It's not impressive.