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Volume IV · Page 450
three S-vans on hand (2 Diamond, 1 Saurer), since the ones on hand are leady already." (501-PS.) |
| Ever efficient in discharging their homicidal
duties, it appears that the Einsatz authorities now even set up a school in
this new development of the fine art of genocide. The defendant Biberstein,
describing one of these ultra-modern executions, spoke of the driver
Sackenreuter of Nuernberg "who had been most carefully instructed about the
handling of the gas truck, having been through special training courses."
(NO-4314.) Biberstein was satisfied that this method of killing was very
efficient because the faces of the dead people were "in no way distorted";
death having come "without any outward signs of spasms". He added that no
physician was present to certify that the people were dead because "this type
of gas execution guaranteed certain death." Who it was that guaranteed this was
not vouchsafed to history. The murder-vans were constructed in Berlin and then, under their own power, driven to the field of action. The reports tell of two vans which traveled from Berlin to the Crimea. It would be interesting to know the thoughts of the drivers of these murder-cars as they rolled over half of Europe, through city and country, climbing mountains and penetrating plains, traveling 2,000 kilometers with their gaseous guillotines to kill helpless women and children. One of the drivers was none other than the chauffeur of the arch-murderer Reinhard Heydrich. One reads and reads these accounts of which here we can give only a few excerpts and yet there remains the instinct to disbelieve, to question, to doubt. There is less of a mental barrier in accepting the weirdest stories of supernatural phenomena, as, for instance, water running up hill and trees with roots reaching toward the sky, than in taking at face value these narratives which go beyond the frontiers of human cruelty and savagery. Only the fact that the reports from which we have quoted came from the pens of men within the accused organizations can the human mind be assured that all this actually happened. The reports and the statements of the defendants themselves verify what otherwise would be dismissed as the product of a disordered imagination. The record reveals that investigators and evidence analysts have checked and rechecked. Being human they sometimes doubted the correctness of the startling figures appearing in the reports. Thus, when one of them came across the statement of Stahlecker that Einsatzgruppe A, of which he was chief, had killed 135,000 human beings in four months, the investigator questioned Otto Ohlendorf if this were possible. Ohlendorf read the statement in question and announced — |
