Tag Archives: Gas vans

Arthur Nebe—Responsible For At Least 45,000 Deaths

There are some in Germany and in other countries who portray all of those involved in the 20 July plot as heroes. I believe this is a misinterpretation. Firstly they are not heroes because they did not succeed, and secondly, there were quite a few of them who had no issues with the Nazi policies but had more of an issue with Adolf Hitler.

Arthur Nebe was one of the plotters. He was to lead a team of 12 policemen to kill Himmler, but the signal to act never reached him. After the failed assassination attempt, Nebe fled and went into hiding.

Prior to this part in the plot, Nebe rose through the ranks of the Prussian police force to become head of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei; Kripo) in 1936, which was amalgamated into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in 1939.

In an August 1939 speech, he defined crime as “a recurring disease on the body of the people.” This disease was supposedly passed hereditarily from criminals and “asocial individuals” to their children. In the Nazi state, asocials were people who behaved in a way considered outside of social norms. The category included people identified as vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, pimps, and alcoholics; the arbeitsscheu (work-shy); and the homeless. This category also included Roma. The Nazi regime viewed Roma as behaviorally abnormal and racially inferior. Defining crime as a disease connected to certain groups radicalized Kripo’s practice.

Kripo officials from the KTI developed early techniques to gas people en masse. In October 1939, Nebe instructed the KTI to experiment with methods of killing people with mental and physical disabilities. This effort was conducted in cooperation with the Euthanasia Program. A KTI chemical engineer and toxicology expert, Albert Widmann, tested possible killing methods. He ultimately suggested carbon monoxide gas. In the fall of 1941, Widmann helped create gas vans. The vans used carbon monoxide gas generated from exhaust fumes.

Planners of Operation Reinhard killing centers adopted this development. At Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, large motor engines were used to generate carbon monoxide gas for the gas chambers.

In 1941 during operation Barbarossa, Nebe volunteered to serve as the commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe B, one of the four mobile death squads of the SS. During Nebe’s tenure, this deadly unit was responsible for the mass murders of 45,000 people in the areas around Bialystok, Minsk, and Mogilev. Many of these victims were Jews. Nebe was not forced to take control of this Unit, he volunteered.

In July 1941, Arthur Nebe reported that a “solution to the Jewish problem” was “impractical” in his region of operation due to “the overwhelming number of the Jews”, as in there were too many Jews to be killed by too few men. By August 1941, Nebe came to realize that Einsatzgruppe’s resources were insufficient to meet the expanded mandate of the killing operations, due to the inclusion of Jewish women and children since that month. This mean, seem to some as a person with a conscience, but the only reason he said these things, is not because he didn’t want to kill more Jews, he said it because he did feel he didn’t have enough men to do the job. Just let that train of thought sink in for a minute.

In late 1941, Nebe was posted back to Berlin and resumed his career with the RSHA. Nebe commanded the Kripo until he was denounced and executed after the failed attempt to kill Adolf Hitler in July 1944.

Nebe was arrested in January 1945 after a former mistress betrayed him. He was sentenced to death by the People’s Court on 2 March and, according to official records, was executed in Berlin at Plötzensee Prison on 21 March 1945 by being hanged with piano wire from a meat hook, in accordance with Hitler’s order that the bomb plotters were to be “hanged like cattle.”

sources.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-july-20-1944-plot-to-assassinate-adolf-hitler

https://www.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/database/hyperlinks/arthur_nebe.html?width=600&height=450

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nazi-kripo-criminal-police-1

Arthur Nebe

Arthur Nebe

The last few days I have seen articles about the German government commemorating those who were involved in the  20th July 1944 assassination plot.

In a way I can understand it why they are doing this, but having that said I don’t agree with it.

Yes it is true these men planned to kill Hitler but not because they didn’t believe in his policies, because all of them had signed up to Nazi ideology one way or another. They wanted to kill them because they didn’t agree with the way he was conducting the war and the consequences of that.

Some of them had actively and willingly participated in the killing of innocent lives..

None more so then Arthur Nebe. he was a key figure in the security and police apparatus of Nazi Germany and a Holocaust perpetrator.He  was  given command of Einsatzgruppen B between June and November 1941, an extermination unit whose headquarters were in Minsk, and  also covered the area of the Moscow front.During this period of five months,he was responsible  for  46,000 executions.

Minsk

In a  report he issued on July 23,1941 , Nebe stated the idea of a “solution to the Jewish problem” being “impractical” in his region of operation due to “the overwhelming number of the Jews”; there were too many Jews to be killed by too few men. By August 1941, Nebe came to realize that his Einsatzgruppe’s resources were insufficient to meet the expanded mandate of the killing operations, resulting from the inclusion of Jewish women and children since that month.

During visits to Russia in 1941,  Himmler learned the psychological impact of shooting women and children on the Einsatzgruppen. He therefore commissioned Arthur Nebe to explore ways of killing that were less stressful for the task force.

Nebe decided to try experimenting by murdering Soviet mental patients, first with dynamite near Minsk, and then with automobile exhaust ,gas vans,at Mogilev. These vans had already been used before  in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in Soldau.

However the Gas van was not a Nazi but a Soviet invention.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.

vans

In March 1944, after the “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp, Nebe was ordered by Heinrich Müller, to select and kill fifty of the seventy-three recaptured prisoners in what became known as the “Stalag Luft III murders”.Also in 1944, Nebe suggested that the Roma interned at Auschwitz would be good subjects for medical experiments at the Dachau concentration camp.

Nebe was was executed in Berlin at Plötzensee Prison on 21 March 1945, because of his involvement in the July 20 plot.

 

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Sources

Traces of War

Holocaust research project

Bundesarchiv

 

Harald Turner- Evil business as usual.

Turner

Despite his English sounding name, Harald Turner was born in the town of Leun in the district of Hesse in Germany in 1891. He served as an SS commander in Serbia during WWII.

His description of some crimes he had been involved in are truly chilling, not so much because of the horrific crimes themselves but more in the business as usual kind of way he described them. Below are some examples.

“Already some months ago, I shot dead all the Jews I could get my hands on in this area, concentrated all the Jewish women and children in a camp and with the help of the SD got my hands on a “delousing van,” that in about 14 days to 4 weeks will have brought about the definitive clearing out of the camp…” Dr. Harold Turner’s letter to Karl Wolff, dated April 11, 1942

The  “Delousing” van he referred to were Gas vans.

gas vans

Between 16 September 1941 and 2 December 1941, Franz Böhme,as Commanding General and Commander of Serbia,  ordered the reprisal executions of 2,000 civilians in Kragujevac after a partisan assault on 22 soldiers of the 421 Korps-Nachrichten-Abteilung.

Bohme

It was not only for the partisan assault but also for what Böhme saw as the betrayal and the backstabbing by the Serbians which caused so much German blood in 1914. The civilians were to be Jewish and Gypsies.

On October 11 ,Harald Turner reported the following.

“After thorough exploration of the square and preparation, the first shooting took place on October 9, 1941.

The prisoners were picked up from their camp in Belgrade at 5.30 am with their emergency luggage. Providing them with  spade and other tools, for a job which was faked. Each vehicle was guarded by only three men, to hide the fact of what really was about to happen

The transport took place without any difficulties. The mood of the prisoners during transport and preparation was good. They were happy about the distance from the camp, because their accommodation had not been to their liking as of yet. The prisoners were set to work 8 kilometers from the shooting site and afterwards taken to the site.  The shooting took place by rifle at a distance of 12 meters. For each prisoner 5 marksmen were ordered to shoot. Additionally , two marksmen were available to the doctor, who had to kill the prisoners via head shots  as instructed by the doctor.”

That day 180 men were murdered.

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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Sources

German Wikipedia

Mahmnal Koblenz

 

Holocaust-Evil paying the price, albeit a small one.

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The Holocaust was without a shadow of a doubt the worst atrocity ever committed in the history of the world. But what makes it possibly even worse is the fact that so many key players responsible for the Holocaust got away with it and even got high positions in government jobs of the allied governments.

There were some though who were caught and paid the price. However if you consider the suffering of the victims, the death in the gas chambers wasn’t always instant, often it would take several minutes in agony before they died.

The sentences handed out, even the death penalties, to the arrested Nazis was a very small price to pay compared to the suffering of their victims.

The picture at the start of the blog is of Joseph Kramer, commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Belsen, photographed on April 28, 1945. After standing trial, Kramer, “The Beast of Belsen”, was convicted and executed in December of 1945.

When American troops liberated prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp, Germany, in 1945, many German SS guards were killed by the prisoners who then threw their bodies into the moat surrounding the camp.

Holocaust_pictures (16)

Amon Goeth  was the Commandant of the Plaszow labor camp. While he was the Commandant of Plaszow, Goeth was assigned to supervise the liquidation of the Podgorze ghetto on March 13, 1943, and later the labor camp at Szebnie.

amon_goeth_12

Goth was sentenced to death and was hanged on 13 September 1946 at the Montelupich Prison in Kraków, not far from the site of the Plaszów camp. Goeth’s last words were “Heil Hitler”

amon_goeth

The executioner  miscalculated the length of rope necessary to hang Goeth twice, and it was only on the third attempt that the execution was successful.Even with that he did not suffer more then

His remains were cremated and the ashes scattered in the Vistula River.

Gustav Laabs was ordered to the Chełmno concentration camp where he served between April 1942 and January 1945, and started driving the gas vans within a few days of his arrival. He had earlier worked at the vehicle pool at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, the Reich Main Security Office) and had been transferred to a Sonderkommando in Posen (Poznań in Polish); he had to agree to remain silent about his work there.

Destroyed_Magirus-Deutz_furniture_transport_van_Kolno_Poland_1945

At the end of November 1963, Laabs and ten other people from the Chełmno concentration camp were tried at the Landgericht Bonn ,Germany,regional court. Laabs was indicted for the murder of 100,000 people in the gas van and for personally shooting the few survivors.On 30 March 1964, Laabs was sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment and lost 10 years of citizenship rights for his part in the Holocaust. His sentence was later reduced to 13 years.

It is not clear if he had been in jail between 1645 and 1963.

Chelmno-Gustav-Laabs

Donation

I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.

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Chelmno Extermination camp

1389.4 Holocaust C

To say that Chelmno is a forgotten extermination camp would be an overstatement,however there are many people who have never heard of this camp.

Many think there were only a few concentration camps but in fact there were hundreds.

cff0e456da90dfd12cc0f46c6930277b

Chelmno was the first Nazi camp where gassing was used to murder Jews on a large scale. The site was chosen due to the village’s position in the Warthegau region (previously an area of Western Poland, but now part of Nazi Germany). It was 47 kilometres to the west of the Lodz ghetto where many of the victims came from.

A total of 320,000 people were murdered at Chelmno. These included Jews from the Lodz ghetto and throughout the area, in addition to 5,000 Roma who had been previously sent to the ghetto.

Chelmno consisted of two sites, just two and a half miles apart. The first was located in a large manor house, known as ‘The Palace’.

As there was no railway running through the village of Chelmno, the victims were taken by train to a nearby station. They then walked or were loaded onto trucks to the Chelmno camp reception area.

 

1389.4 Holocaust C

The first group of victims arrived at Chelmno on 7 December 1941. The following day the first exterminations took place. The killings continued throughout 1942. By March 1943 the camp was dismantled because all the Jews in the area had been murdered, except those in Lodz.

On arrival at the Palace camp, the victims were addressed by the camp commandant or one of his deputies, who was disguised as the squire of the estate, wearing a feather hat, jackboots and smoking a pipe.

chelmno SS Kommandatur

The Jews were told that they would be fairly treated and receive good food in return for working on the estate, in Austria or in the East.

To put insult to injury they   were held in a  synagogue at Kolo near Chelmno before being murdered by the Nazis

They were then told that they needed to shower to become clean and that their clothes had to be disinfected. This was a huge lie. They were led to the undressing room, where they gave up their valuables and clothes. But, having been led up steps to the ‘washrooms’, they in fact found themselves in a gas van. The doors were closed and locked.

Destroyed_Magirus-Deutz_furniture_transport_van_Kolno_Poland_1945

The driver then drove into the forest. After 10 minutes the gas fumes had suffocated all those inside the van. The victims were buried in mass graves.

The possessions of those brought to Chelmno were given or sold to Germans living in the region.

PsbTLZ_web

In April 1944 the Nazis planned to liquidate the Lodz ghetto, so they reopened Chelmno. Those who had previously worked at the camp were brought back to resume their work and carry out the killings. Between 23 June and mid-July 1944, more than 7,000 Jews were murdered and disposed of in the newly-erected crematorium. The camp was then closed as the killings were moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Nazis destroyed Chelmno in September 1944. They tried to erase all evidence of mass murder. They ordered the digging up and cremation of all of the bodies from the mass graves.

On 17 January 1945, the Nazis murdered 45 of the last 48 Jewish prisoners as the Soviet army edged closer to the camp. These last few Jews at the camp had fought against the fleeing Nazis, but only three of them succeeded in escaping.

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