Gas Vans Were First Used by NKVD in 1937

Contrary to the almost universal misconception, the Nazis were not the first to use gas van (Gaswagen) – a truck-based mobile gas chamber. It was first used by the Nazis in Aktion T4 program (involuntary euthanasia) on January 15, 1940 to murder patients of mental hospitals in Warthegau (administrative district of the Third Reich formed from parts of Polish territory annexed in 1939).

These vans – used as a murder tool in Chelmno death factory – were a major step on the Road to Holocaust – and a heavy slab in the slab stack that six years later triggered the “Holocaust Avalanche” that killed four million Jews.

However, it was invented (by a Jew – of all people) and first used in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge more than two years earlier – in the summer of 1937 (how extensive its usage was needs further investigation).

During the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, NKVD lieutenant Isaj D. Berg (commandant of Butovo shooting range where mass murders took place) used a specially adapted airtight van for gassing prisoners to death.

The prisoners were gassed on the way to Butovo, the former firing range, where the NKVD executed its prisoners and buried them. According to testimony given by NKVD officer Nikolai Kharitonov in 1956 (when NKVD crimes were being investigated), Berg constructed several of gas vans.

Berg was appointed building manager of NKVD department in Moscow region in the summer of 1937. In October 1937 he was charged with the supervision of the Butovo firing range.

Berg had to prepare Butovo for the mass execution of people from greater Moscow and to ensure that these executions would take place smoothly. According to testimony given by Fjodor Tschesnokov, a member of Berg’s execution team, in 1956, trucks were used, which were equipped with valves through which the gas could be directed inside the vehicles. Prisoners were stripped naked, tied up, gagged and packed into the trucks. Their personal property was stolen by NKVD.

Berg (no surprise here) was arrested on August 1938 and sentenced to death for participating in a “counter-revolutionary conspiracy within the NKVD” and executed on March 3, 1939 (using gas van was one of the charges).

The scale at which these trucks were used is unknown. Author Tomas Kizny assumes that they were in use while Berg oversaw the executions (October 1937 to August 1938).

He points to archaeological excavations conducted in 1997. 59 corpses were exhumed who most likely had been murdered during Berg’s tenure. Only four of these victims had been shot in the head, which leads Kizny to conclude that at least some of them had been gassed.

FSB officers Alexander Mikhailov and Mikhail Kirillin, and historian Lydia Golovkova, recounted the testimony of one witness at a mass execution site outside Moscow.

As many as 50 prisoners were loaded into trucks whose exhaust pipes were turned into the trucks, which Muscovites called “soul killers” and which were said to have been invented by Berg. Prisoners were “half dead” when they arrived at the site, where most were subsequently executed.

In the book "KGB: The State Within a State" Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick wrote:

“Due to the shortage of executioners, NKVD used trucks that were camouflaged as bread vans as 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”.

Gas vans were also reportedly used in the cities of Omsk and Ivanovo in the Soviet Union – and in the Crimea. It is possible (albeit highly unlikely) that the Nazis somehow learned about Soviet gas vans (there were lots of Germans in Crimea at that time) and used this knowledge to construct their own gaswagens. However, it is far more likely that they invented this diabolical machinery on their own.