Already rebutted here.Friedrich Paul Berg wrote:Lying "Hans" is back even after I showed that he craftily lied about my relation to Eric Eckermann's writings. Hans LIED but is NOT man enough to admit it or even apologize. I never claimed anything Eckermann wrote was "totally false and absurd", But now, lying "Hans" tells more lies.
Fritz,After taking some of my words "out of context," Hans now claims: But the German paramilitary did not have "no gasoline at all". You [Berg] have totally failed to demonstrate this. As I have shown in a previous posting, the German paramilitary forces did have access to large supplies of gasoline and precisely for the reasons outlined by Eckermann, they were excluded from the regulations to switch to non-liquid fuels. The German police forces (Einsatzgruppen) did have "severely limited" access to large supplies of gasoline. Big difference! If the alotted gasoline was consumed, there might not be any gasoline left at all for unfinished tasks. What to do then? Sit alongside the road and wait for a new alottment--or an attack by partisans? That is all I meant and any honest reading of my text must recognize that.
you had advanced the premise that "if one has no gasoline at all", but you did not demonstrate that this was anywhere true, planned or anticipated in 1941/42. And since the relevance of your premise, which would mean that having "no gasoline at all" was any consideration among the Einsatzgruppen in 1941/42, is in doubt, your entire argument stumbles and collapses. That was my point and indeed any honest reading of my text would have recognized that! You also did you not provide any shred of evidence that the Einsatzgruppen "did have 'severely limited' access to large supplies of gasoline" in the relevant period. Likewise unfounded is your previous claim that "there was a critical shortage of gasoline for the entire German military" at this time. And of course, it then follows that your argument "The major reason producer gas vehicles should have been employed is that the Germans were desperately short of gasoline" is unfounded, too.
It is obviously absurd to presume that the Nazis started their war against the Soviet Union with a "critical shortage of gasoline" and the gasoline reserves had been build up again in Spring 1942 as the German army was barely moving anymore. The leading experts on the field of supply of resources of the Third Reich agree that there had been no critical shortage of gasoline among the German forces at the time the gas vans were developed and dispatched to the Einsatzgruppen, i.e. from late 1941 to early 1942. According to Dieter Petzina, there was "no shortage [of oil] effecting the war strategy until 1942" and "only since 1943 - with the military defeats on the Eastern front, the disturbed transport and strongly increasing needs of the Wehrmacht - the demands considerably exceeded the available amounts" (Petzina, Autarkpolitik im Dritten Reich, p.192). According to Wolfgang Birkenfeld, "the supply crisis failed to appear" in 1942, which "was mainly due to the Rumanian deliveries...the heavily reduced contigents of gasoline and Diesel assigned to the economy also played a role that there was no crisis". Although "in 1943 there was the increasing constraint to adjust the operative plans to the available fuel", there was "no serious total crises among the German fuel supply until Spring 1944" (Birkenfeld, Der synthetische Treibstoff 1933-1945, p. 155f.). According to Dietrich Eichholz, "even in 1943 - the year of the highest consumption, but also the highest production - there was no dangerous shortage of fuel" and the Third Reich was "sufficiently supplied with fuel for the warfare until Spring 1944" (Eichholtz, Geschichte der deutschen Kriegswirtschaft 1939 - 1945, volume 2, part 2, p. 353 & 355).
It is further absurd to presume that the RSHA would have set up highly mobile, fully motorized units operating in a wide area in the rear of the fighting army performing - in the eyes of the Nazis - vital intelligence and executive operations without allocating large fuel contigents for their tasks. The fact these fully motorized units operated in numerous towns, villages and the countryside in the Russian East according to their reports already shows that they had good access to large supplies of gasoline. The fact that they even had their own tank trucks - instead of getting handed over only some canisters - also confirms this point by the way.
It is moreover nonsense to suppose that Nazi elite forces engaged in intelligence, police and executive measures in 1941/42 would have planned operations anticipating that they will run out of gasoline and have to chop wood in the next forest. It is self-evident that the military and paramilitary forces would only plan such operations they expected to have sufficient gasoline for. Any operation of the Einsatzgruppen would have been designed so that the vehicles were carrying enough fuel or could refuel with their own tank wagon or at a Wehrmacht tank station. Even if their own reserve was exploited, they would confiscate gasoline from other vehicles rather than starting to collect wood, or blow off or reduce the operation, which were then an excellent reason to demand a higher contigent for the future. Note that the number of vehicles used by the Einsatzgruppen was insignificant compared to that of the Wehrmacht in the East and even suppposing an average higher mobility, the gasoline consumption of the Einsatzgruppen was miniscule compared to the Wehrmacht supply and reserves, which were tapped by the Einsatzgruppen.
Fritz' fantasy that producer gas generators made sense to the Germans as back-up for paramilitary forces is not only lacking any evidence and commons sense, but is also refuted by the actual Einsatzgruppen motorization (see again here). Producer gas vehicles are completely absent in hundreds of testimonies of Einsatzgruppen members as well as on any photograph showing the vehicles of the German paramilitary forces:
EG D near Rostov
Waffen-SS attached to EG B
EG D
EG C
Pol.Bat. 314 in Ukraine
Bialystok
Minsk
Auxiliary Russian police
EG D
Shitomir, Ukraine
The photo album of Lothar H. of Einsatzgruppe D also shows several vehicles of Einsatzkommando 10 a near Taganrog, Rostov and Krasnodar, none with producer gas setup (reproductions in BArch B 162/5618).
Now, if producer gas generators had been such a good idea for the Einsatzgruppen vehicles, it were even more so for the fighting army, where gasoline supply was more likely short for logistic reasons and where immobility was far more likely deadly. If Berg's hypothesis were true, the police, fire fighters etc., the paramilitary forces and the front army would have been the first to get equipped with producer gas vehicles if they provided any advantage. In reality, it is exactly the other way round, the producer gas generators were first provided to the civilian and economy sector, while the police, fire fighters, paramilitary forces and the front army were spared from this inferior "technology" with only supply and training troops later driving on wood. According to Eckermann, "naturally the fighting troop did not enjoy this technique" (p. 286).
Perhaps it is a most clever idea to provide police and army with a producer gas generator as back-up. Perhaps Fritz is far more intelligent than all people in charge of the German military and paramilitary forces were altogether. Perhaps Fritz is that genuis. But perhaps it is just a retarded idea he came up in order to justify his dogma that the Nazis were the good guys and did not gas other people. Take your pick, but the point here is that in either case Fritz's esteem for producer gas was clearly not shared by contemporaries and it is therefore historically irrelevant.
This is a crucial point now. Fritz has apparently no clue how people in charge of the military and police were thinking on producer gas. His entire argument against the German homicidal gas vans so far is limited to the would-coulda fallacy that the Germans supposedly would have done it differently, but since he has shown that he is incompetent to guess what the people actually thought at the time, his opinion bears no value. The paramilitary forces did not employ producer gas vehicles, which offered no advantage for their activities and since the gasoline engine was doing the job for homicidal gassings, it is clear that the Einsatzgruppen and Sonderkommando Chelmno employed homicidal gas vans on gasoline.
Given that Fritz could so far also not cope with the massive evidence on the German homicidal gas vans - numerous contemporary German documents and numerous testimonies from perpetrators, which he failed to address (see again here and here), there is indeed no reason why to reject the reality of the German homicidal gas vans.
