Santiago Alvarez: The Gas Vans – A Critical Investigation
2nd revised edition, Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2023

When it comes to the “Holocaust,” terms like “gas chambers” or “gas ovens” dominate the public’s mind. “Gas vans” are usually absent from the discourse. What percentage of the general populace has ever heard that the Nazis are said to have deployed mobile gas chambers as well, which historians usually call “gas vans”? This lack of knowledge is excusable, because even in orthodox historiography the “gas vans” have played only a minor role. To this date no monograph has appeared on the topic written by a mainstream historian, and the papers published about the topic are dismally superficial and show a total lack of any critical attitude. Witness testimony is not scrutinized, documents are not subjected to source criticism, and physical, tangible evidence is never even considered. Santiago Alvarez has remedied the situation with his new tome, which asks all the questions the orthodoxy fears like the devil fears holy water: Are the witness statements reliable? Are the documents genuine? Where are the murder weapons? How did they operate? Could they have operated as claimed? Where are the victims’ corpses? Were they indeed murdered as claimed?

In order to get to the truth of the matter, Alvarez has scrutinized all known wartime documents and photos about this topic; he has analyzed a huge amount of witness statements as published in the literature and as presented in more than 30 trials held over the decades in Germany, Poland and Israel; and he has examined the claims made in the pertinent mainstream literature. The result of his research is mind-boggling. 2nd, revised edition of 2023.

414 pages, paperback, illustrated, bibl., index (Holocaust Handbooks, Volume 26)