Johannes Gutschmidt's Diary

[fireofice]

Commandant Johannes Gutschmidt of POW camps says this about Dulag-231 in his diary:

7.4.42. Very early, Colonel Marschall called me; I was to immediately scout the North Camp for expansion possibilities. I left with Janusch at 8, and it turned out that the camp is of no use. The Colonel also came out later and agreed with me. On the return trip, we inspected the execution cell and the GPU prison cells, which are now occupied by the Security Police. In each cell 4 to 6 people used to sit. With us [handwritten: i. e. with the secret field police], people are likewise executed by pistol shots to the back of the neck, or they are transported away in a gas car (Gasauto). It stops outside the city and redirects the exhaust gases in such a way that they enter the interior of the vehicle. Then the vehicle drives on for another 10 minutes, and by the time they reach the execution site, the occupants arrive already dead and are immediately thrown into the pits. In the afternoon, I took some photos in the execution cell using a "Böhm's Sun".

https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... er-10.html

This appears to be a description of the gassing process by a commandant. For some context we can see Christopher Browning's statement:

Many Jews were killed in the Minsk area by firing squad, but there is no record that the Germans actually erected gas chambers there. Kube must have known about the gas chambers elsewhere and used the Italian inquiry about the piles of Jewish baggage to present the Italians with as graphic, complete and convincing information about the killing of the Jews as he could. Whatever the veracity of the incident in Minsk, it is clear that rumors of the gas chambers circulated unofficially through the German bureaucracy and that Rademacher was privy to such rumors.

Notice how he never explicitly says he saw the gassing process himself. This was just something he reported others did, but didn't tell us where he got this information. The "with us" isn't him claiming to be a witness, but contrasting the fact that the secret field police is now in control of it as opposed to the Soviet GPU which previously did. He also says he took pictures, but this isn't a general statement about him generally "taking pictures" after an execution, but what he did on that day. We can't say for sure that he "took pictures" of gassed bodies. In fact, the pictures he took in the cell were almost certainly of those shot, since he describes the process of gassing as taking them somewhere else.

So in my estimation, he might be relying on rumors and not know this for sure. At the very least, it's not strong enough to establish the existence of gas vans on its own. It has to be looked at in the context of other evidence.

[Hektor]

It's proof for that kind of rumor circulating, which I have no problem believing. Now one can claim that those rumors circulated, because it was true. Well, there is a far better explanation. And that's that the rumors were actually started by Allied atrocity propaganda.

[Stubble]

This is quite the rabbit hole FoI.

[Archie]

NO-844 is an interesting example or rumors finding their way into German documents.

http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/transc ... e?seq=1687

In places where there are mental institutions, and in their vicinity, sometimes, however, even in whole districts like for instance in the Rheingau constant talk is going on regarding the question of extermination of life unfit to live. The vehicles which transport the patients from their institutions to transient stations and from there to extermination stations [liquidationsanstalten] are known to the populace. I am told that even children call out when such transport cars pass. There are some more to be gassed. It is said that on the way from Weilmuenster to Hadamar daily 1 to 3 large busses pass through Limburg with covered windows which bring the inmates to the extermination institution Hadamar. The story goes that the arrivals are at once entirely undressed, paper shirts are put on them, and they are then taken into a gas chamber where they are liquidated with prussic acid and an additional narcotic gas. The bodies are said to be taken on a conveyer belt right into a cremation room, six at a time into one oven; the ashes are distributed into 6 urns and sent to the relatives. Every day one can see the thick smoke from the cremation hall over Hadamar. There is further talk that in some cases the heads or other parts of the bodies are cut off in order to have them anatomically examined.

This mentions gassing with prussic acid which of course was said to have been employed at Auschwitz in the form of Zyklon B. But this document is dated 16 May 1941 which is before Zyklon B was said to have been used to executions. So the rumors are ahead of actual usage under the official story.

The document NO-365 has been interpreted as referring to gas vans in Riga and/or Minsk. It seems they were not able to argue for a stationary gas chamber, so the theory eventually shifted to gas vans.

https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/docum ... le-missing

Samuel Crowell comments,

There is no question that the prosecution at Nuremberg considered the docu
ment to be about building homicidal gas chambers in Riga. No one connected to
the document has ever confirmed this. Early postwar accounts of Nazi atrocities,
including Poliakov’s Harvest of Hate and Reitlinger’s Final Solution, both assumed
the document pertained to homicidal gas chambers. Only in the late ’50s was the ar
gument made that the document referred instead to “gas vans” and this only on the
strength of the fact that gas vans were supposedly in Riga. However, there is no way
to get “gas vans” out of “der erforderlichen Unterkünfte sowie der Vergasungsapparate”
without a completely arbitrary mangling of the German language.
Further research that I have conducted over the years confirms that there were in
fact gas chambers in Riga; however, these were fumigation vaults or other spaces
that had been converted for the fumigation of clothing and furniture. (Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes, pg. 311)