A gas van or gas wagon (German: Gaswagen) was a vehicle reequipped as a mobile gas chamber. The gas vans were first used by the Soviet secret police in 1936.^[2] During World War II Nazi Germany used gas vans on a large scale as a extermination method to murder inmates of asylums, Romani people, Jews, and prisoners in occupied Poland, Belarus, and Yugoslavia.^[3][4]

The first usage of gas vans was described in the Soviet Union in 1930s^[2] A team of secret police officers was suffocating batches of prisoners with engine fumes in camouflaged cars while driving from Taganka or Butyrka prisons in Moscow^[5] to the mass graves at Butovo firing range, where the prisoners were subsequently buried.^[6] The use of gas vans was supervised by Isay Berg, the head of the administrative and economic department of the NKVD of Moscow Oblast who acted on the orders from the higher NKVD administration.^[7][8][9] An eyewitness, a former Commandant of NKVD said the executioners used multiple large trucks, each loaded with up to 50 naked people, some of which still remained alive upon arrival to the firing range.^[10] "According to a testimony by a driver of such truck, this [gassing] was necessary to exclude the possibility of a riot in the car. Naturally, the people who swallowed the carbon monoxide have been suppressed, and many of them already accepted the death as a deliverance from the torture", commented Alexander Mikhailov, major-general of the FSB Reserve^[10][11]. According to Yevgenia Albats, "Owning to the shortage of executioners, Chekists used trucks camouflaged as bread vans for mobile death chambers. Yes, the very same machinery made notorious by the Nazis - yes, these trucks were originally a Soviet invention, in use years before the ovens of the Auschwitz were built"^[12]

The use of gas vans by the Nazis to murder Jews, mentally ill people, Romani people and prisoners in occupied territories during World War II originated with the Nazi Euthanasia Program since 1939. Ordered to find a sutitable method of killing the Technical Institute for the Detection of Crime ("Kriminaltechnisches Institut der Sicherheitspolizei", abbreviated KTI) of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) determined to gas victims with Carbon monoxide.^[13] In October 1939 the Nazis started gassing prisoners in Fort VII near Posen. The first victims were Polish and Jewish inmates of asylums for the mentally ill.^[14] Witnesses report that since December 1939 mobile gas chambers were used to kill the inmates of asylums in Pommerania, Eastern Prussia and Poland.^[15] The vans were built for the Sonderkommando Lange and intended to speed up the killings. Instead of transporting the victims to the gas chambers, the gas chambers were transported to the victims. Most likely devised by specialists from the Referat II D of the RSHA these mobile gas chambers worked under the same principles as the stationary gas chambers: Through a rubber hose the driver released pure CO out of steel cylinders into the air tight special box construction placed on the carrier. The vans resembled moving vans or delivery lorries and were labelled “Kaiser’s Kaffee Geschäft” for camouflage. They were not called "gas vans" at the time, but “Sonder-Wagen”, “Spezialwagen” (special vans) and “Entlausungswagen” (delousing vans).^[16][15] The Lange commando killed patients in numerous hospitals in the Wartheland during 1940. They drove to the hospitals, collected patients, loaded them into the vans and gassed them while driving away.^[17] From 21 May to 8 June 1940 the Sonderkommando Lange killed 1558 sick people from Soldau concentration camp alone.^[18]

In August 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler attended a demonstration of a mass-shooting of Jews in Minsk arranged by Arthur Nebe, after which he vomited. Regaining his composure, Himmler decided that alternative methods of killing should be found.^[19] He turned to Nebe to explore more "convenient" ways of killing that were less stressful for the killers. Nebe decided to try experimenting by murdering Soviet mental patients, first with explosives near Minsk, and then with automobile exhaust at Mogilev.^[20] Nebe's experiments led to the utilization of the gas van.^[21] This vehicle had already been used in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in the Soldau concentration camp.^[22]

Gas vans were used, particularly at Chełmno extermination camp, until gas chambers were developed as a more efficient method for killing large numbers of people. There were two types of gas vans in operation, used by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. The Opel-Blitz, weighing 3.5 tons, and the larger Saurerwagen, weighing 7 tons.^[23] In Belgrade, the gas van was known as "Dušegupka" and in the occupied parts of the USSR similarly as "душегубка" (dushegubka, literally (feminine) soul killer/exterminator). The SS used the euphemisms Sonderwagen, Spezialwagen or S-wagen ("special vehicle") for the vans.^[24] The gas vans were specifically designed to direct deadly exhaust fumes via metal pipes into the airtight cargo compartments, where the intended victims had been forcibly stuffed to capacity. In most cases the victims were suffocated and poisoned from carbon monoxide and other toxins in the exhaust as the vans were transporting them to fresh pits or ravines for mass burial.

The use of gas vans had two disadvantages:

1. It was slow — some victims took twenty minutes to die.
2. It was not quiet — the drivers could hear the victims' screams, which they found distracting and disturbing.

By June 1942 the main producer of gas vans, Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke GmbH, had delivered 20 gas vans in two models (for 30–50 and 70–100 individuals) to Einsatzgruppen, out of 30 ordered from that company. Not one gas van was extant at the end of the war. The existence of gas vans first came to light in 1943 during the trial of Nazi collaborators involved in the gassing of 6,700 civilians in Krasnodar.^{[citation needed]} The total number of gas van gassings is unknown.^[25]

The gas vans are extensively discussed in some of the interviews in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah.

• Execution van
• Walter Rauff
• August Becker
• The Holocaust
• Operation Reinhard
• Charcoal-burning suicide

• Alberti, Michael (2006). Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Wartheland 1939-1945 (in German). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. ISBN 978-3-447-05167-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Beer, Mathias (1987). "Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden" (PDF). Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (in German). 35 (3): 403–417.
• Colton, Timothy J. (1995). Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-58749-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Friedlander, Henry (1997). The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-4675-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Merridale, Catherine (2002). Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-200063-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Vatlin, Alexander (2016). Seth Bernstein (ed.). Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Pres. ISBN 978-0-299-31080-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• The Development of the Gas-Van from the Jewish Virtual Library
• Film: Short explanation about the Gas vans at the Nuremberg trials (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum )
• NAZI GAS VANS By Rob Arndt