Erich Gnewuch testifies about gassings in Nazi-occupied USSR, 1942-3
[Quoted in "Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the
Use of Poison Gas", edited by E. Kogon, H. Langbein, and
A. Rueckerl, Yale University Press, 1993, p. 57-9]
On orders from my department, I too drove a gas-van from Berlin to Minsk. These vans had been constructed with a lockable cargo compartment, like a moving van...
I was detailed with the gas-van to about twelve convoys of arriving Jews. It was in 1942. There were about a thousand Jews in each convoy. With each arrival I made five or six trips with my van. Some of the Jews were shot. I myself never shot a single Jew; I only gassed them...
A ghetto operation took place in the autumn of 1943. I was put into action only once with the gas-van. I made three trips with it to the execution site. I gassed about 150 to 180 people.
Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power in Germany in 1933 and lost power in 1945 -- only 12 years. And yet, by the end of the Hitler regime, the world had been plunged into a global world war, Europe was in shambles and nearly 30 million died. Among the dead were over 6 million Jews -- men, women and children --who were systematically and efficiently slaughtered for no other reason than that they were Jews.
Additionally, an estimated 5.5 million non-Jews, including hundreds of thousands of Romani (Gypsies), Polish nationals, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, political criminals and others, were systematically murdered. While many of these might, perhaps, be classified as executions of criminals and enemies of the state on political or military grounds, this was clearly not the case for Jews and Romani who were classified by the Nazi regime as "racially" inferior and, therefore, as "life unworthy of life."
This event has come to be called THE HOLOCAUST. In the view of this writer, the term "Holocaust" must be reserved for this specific time and set of events. Certainly there have been numerous atrocities against humankind throughout history, horrible cases of genocide directed against innocent people -- 10-20 million black Africans who died during the 200 years of the international slave trade, the decimation of nearly 12 million Native American Indians in North America between 1600 and 1850, and the more recent events in Bosnia and Rwanda.
It is not the intent of this essay to lessen the horror of any of these instances of "man's inhumanity to man." However, there has been ONLY ONE HOLOCAUST. The event described in these pages stands alone in human history for several reasons:
The unanswered questions regarding the Holocaust far outnumber those for which we have answers and the gap between them grows. The facts are relatively easy to obtain -- millions of pieces of documentary (much of it as yet unanalyzed) have produced a virtual flood of scholarly historical works documenting every aspect of the Holocaust. But, the more we study it, the more we know about it, the less comprehensible it becomes. We still seek an answer to the most important questions: Why did it happen? How could it have happened? How could it happen in an advanced, civilized modern nation? Can it happen again? How can its recurrence be prevented? The material presented in these pages is disgusting, brutal, offensive, and shocking. But it is all true and it is the one truth in modern history that the world cannot afford to forget!
United Nations Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
The Final Solution
Holocaust Websites Resources
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