How Do Gas Vans Change After The Holocaust

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After the Nazis came to power in Germany they created detention camps to detain jews, gypsies, and any political threats. These camps were created all over Germany and could hold many people, especially the larger camps such as Dachau, Treblinka, and the well known, Auschwitz. Early on these camps were used for labor, how ever this changed as the war went on. They built more camps, as well as stone quarries and coal mines where they would work to death. Then they started to use the camps to exterminate the prisoners. There were many methods of killing they used like firing squads, burning, and gas vans, but they wanted to find a more efficient method. They later started to use zyklon B which effectively killed the prisoners quickly. As the war went on the Nazis found efficient ways of killing people which include gas vans, firing squads, and eventually gas chambers and crematoriums. …show more content…
They were a simple way of killing a group of people. All they were was a paneled truck with the exhaust being pumped into the box. The prisoners would be stripped of their valuables and clothes and were crammed into the van. When they locked the doors the driver turned on the engine and started driving until all of the screaming stopped. At this time the driver would make his way to the cremation site to unload the bodies. Rob Arndt states “On a large scale gas vans were used by the Einsatzgruppen in Byelorussia and the Ukraine. Here, between 250,000 and 300,000 persons (mainly Jews) were killed by the employment of these wagons” (http://strangevehicles.greyfalcon.us/). Smaller vans could hold about 50 people and larger vans could hold about 70 people. But this was not their most effective way of