Today Tiergarten4Association e.V. publishes its pioneering book: »Engineered for Mass Murder – The Nazi Gas Vans: 1939-1945«, including, for the first time, fifteen verifiable photographs of a gas van. This van was assigned to SS-Sonderkommando VIIa of Einsatzgruppe B in the occupied Soviet Union, in April 1942.
The author Cameron A. Munro, is able to authenticate and prove from surviving documents and witness testimonies that these fifteen photographs are of a gas van which utilized combustion engine exhaust gas to kill. This is a landmark moment in memorializing the victims and recording the history of the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes – until now, no verifiable contemporary photographs of any gassing apparatus used by the Nazis to kill, at the extermination camps of Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor and Treblinka or the killing centre of Auschwitz-Birkenau, had come to light.
Since the Nuremberg trials in 1945/1946, the Nazis’ use of gas vans has been shrouded in uncertainty, mystery and distortion, primarily due to a lack of verifiable photographs but also the absence of a book by a reputable historian; the gas vans became a cause célèbre for Holocaust deniers. No longer.
After twelve years of research the author for the first time records the history of the origins, design, construction and operation of the Nazi gas vans. The Nazis, using twenty gas vans of exactly the same design as the van assigned to SS-Sonderkommando VIIa, murdered more than 300,000 Jews, Sinti and Roma, mentally and physically disabled, partisans and others, in Nazi occupied Austria, Belarus, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine between December 1941 and the end of the war. The locations of mass killing operations using gas vans included Chełmno nad Nerem/Kulmhof in Nazi occupied Poland, the first Nazi extermination camp.
Uwe Neumärker, Director of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin: »Cameron Munro’s book is a milestone in the study of the Holocaust. His investigation – the result of tireless research – deals with an (almost) unknown chapter of this crime against humanity and closes a crucial knowledge gap.«
Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice-President of the International Auschwitz Committee: »Cameron Munro’s impressive research draws our attention to the technological fanaticism and cold determination with which the SS murderers planned and carried out the mass extermination of Europe’s Jewish families: a shocking document that once again demonstrates how people can go about their work unscrupulously and without moral inhibitions, developing and technically enabling scenarios of extermination against other people.«
More details are available in a filmed interview with the author at the site of the construction of the Nazi gas vans and the training of the gas van drivers, in the centre of Berlin. LINK to Youtube channel. Cameron A. Munro is available for interview and the book can be ordered from the Tiergarten4Association e.V. website at www.tiergartenstrasse4.org.
Contact: Tiergarten4Association e.V.
Wiesenstrasse 16
13357 Berlin/ Germany
Telephone: +49 (0)30 36427994; Email: info@tiergartenstrasse4.org
Website: www.tiergartenstrasse4.org
