Gas van

A gas van or gas wagon (Russian: душегубка (dushegubka); German: Gaswagen) was a vehicle equipped as a mobile gas chamber. The vehicle had an air-tight compartment for victims, into which exhaust fumes were transmitted while the engine was running. The victims were gassed with carbon monoxide, resulting in death by monoxide poisoning and suffocation. The gas van was invented and used by the Soviet secret police NKVD in the late 1930s during the Great Purge. It was later widely implemented as an extermination method in Nazi Germany to kill those the regime deemed enemies of the state, mostly Jews.

The gas van was invented in the Soviet Union in 1936, by Isay Berg, the head of the administrative and economic department of the NKVD of Moscow Oblast which suffocated batches of prisoners with engine fumes in a camouflaged bread van while on the drive out to the mass graves at Butovo, where the prisoners were subsequently buried. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,

I. D. Berg was ordered to carry out the decisions of the NKVD troika of Moscow Oblast, and Berg was decently carrying out this assignment: he was driving people to the executions by shooting. But, when in Moscow Oblast there came to be three troikas having their sessions simultaneously, the executioners could not cope with the load. They hit upon a solution: to strip the victims naked, to tie them up, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck, disguised from the outside as a bread van. During transportation the fuel gases went into the truck, and when delivered to the farthest [execution] ditch the arrestees were already dead."Note: Berg denied that he was the inventor of the gas van.

During trips to Russia in 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler learned the psychological impact of shooting women and children on the Einsatzgruppen. Hence, he commissioned Arthur Nebe to explore ways of killing that were less stressful for the task forces. Nebe's experiments eventually led to the utilization of the gas van. This type of vehicle had already been used in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in Soldau, a camp located in the former Polish corridor. Another source states that the vans were first tested on Soviet prisoners in Sachsenhausen.

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