Gas Van - Soviet Union

Soviet Union

Some journalistic publications have printed rumors that gas vans were already used experimentally during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. Moscow NKVD section chief Isay Berg would suffocate batches of prisoners with engine fumes in a camouflaged bread van while on the drive out to the mass graves at Butovo, where the prisoners were subsequently buried.

In his controversial historical work Two Hundred Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claimed that Isay Berg, the head of the administrative and economic department of the NKVD of Moscow Oblast, invented the gas van in the Soviet Union in 1937. Solzhenitsyn wrote:

I. D. Berg was ordered to carry out the decisions of the NKVD troika of Moscow Oblast, and Berg was decently carrying out this assignment: he was driving people to the executions by shooting. But, when in Moscow Oblast there came to be three troikas having their sessions simultaneously, the executioners could not cope with the load. Then the solution was thought about: to undress the victims naked, to tie them up, plug their mouths and throw them into a closed truck, disguised from the outside as a bread van. During transportation the fuel gases came into the truck, and when delivered to the farthest ditch the arrestees were already dead.

There is no official or documentary evidence of this actually having happened. At a formal investigation in 1939, and in 1956 while trying to rehabilitate Berg, no data was found.

According to the Russian researcher A. A. Milchakov, Berg's connection to the invention of the gas van (already used in 1936) has never been conclusively proven, and Berg himself was summarily executed during the Great Purge in 1939.