Editing Gas van (section)

===Soviet Union===
According to historian [[Robert Gellately]], "the Soviets sometimes used a gas van (''dushegubka''), as in Moscow during the 1930s, but how extensive that was needs further investigation."<ref>Robert Gellately. ''Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe''. New York: Knopf, 2007, p. 460.</ref> while Nazi killers have "invented the first gas van, which began operations in the Warthegau on January 15, 1940, under Herbert Lange".<ref>Robert Gellately. ''Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe''. New York: Knopf, 2007, p. 367.</ref>

During the [[Great Purge]] in the [[Soviet Union]], NKVD officer Isaj D. Berg used a specially adapted airtight van for gassing prisoners to death on an experimental basis.<ref>[[Catherine Merridale]]. ''Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia.'' [[Penguin Books]], 2002 {{ISBN|0-14-200063-9}} p. 200</ref> The prisoners were gassed on the way to [[Butovo firing range|Butovo]], a phony firing range, where the [[NKVD]] executed its prisoners and buried them.<ref>Timothy J. Colton. ''Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis.'' [[Harvard University Press#Related publishers, imprints, and series|Belknap Press]], 1998, {{ISBN|0-674-58749-9}}, [https://books.google.com/books?id=lXM2H6tWHskC&dq=gas+chamber+butovo&pg=PA286 p. 286]</ref> According to testimony given by NKVD officer Nikolai Kharitonov in 1956, Isaj Berg had been instrumental in the production of gas vans.<ref name="Kizny236">Tomasz Kizny, Dominique Roynette. ''La grande terreur en URSS 1937–1938''. Lausanne: Éd. Noir sur Blanc, 2013, p. 236.</ref> Berg had become chief of the administrative economic department in Moscow's NKVD in the summer of 1937.<ref>Alexander Vatlin. ''Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police''. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016, {{ISBN|978-0-299-31080-6}}, p. 11.</ref> In October 1937 he was charged with the supervision of the Butovo firing range.<ref name="Kizny236" /> Berg had to prepare Butovo for the mass execution of people from greater Moscow and to ensure that these executions would take place smoothly.<ref>Alexander Vatlin. ''Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police''. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016, {{ISBN|978-0-299-31080-6}}, p. 15.</ref> 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. The interrogations revealed that the prisoners were stripped naked, tied up, gagged and thrown into the trucks. Their property was stolen.<ref name="Kizny236" /> Berg was arrested on 3 August 1938<ref>Alexander Vatlin. ''Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police''. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016, {{ISBN|978-0-299-31080-6}}, p. 67.</ref> and sentenced to death for participating in a "counter-revolutionary conspiracy within the NKVD" and executed on 3 March 1939.<ref name="Kizny236" />

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 4 August 1938). He points to archaeological excavations conducted in 1997. Then 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.<ref name="Kizny236" /> FSB officers Alexander Mikhailov and Mikhail Kirillin, and historian Lydia Golovkova, recounted the testimony of one witness at a mass execution site outside Moscow.<ref name=Lipkov>[https://magazines.gorky.media/continent/2005/123/ya-k-vam-travoyu-prorastu.html Александр ЛИПКОВ, "Я к вам травою прорасту..."], Alexander Lipkov, [[Kontinent]], N 123, 2005. "Mikhail Kirillin: The details of everything that happened here, we restored by talking with one person. There were no other survivors who would directly work in the zone. And now he is gone. This is the former commandant of the Moscow administration, who told all the details ... 
Lydia Golovkova: He told the following: cars loaded with people moved through the forest, up to 50 people were stuffed into a truck. Muscovites have long called these cars "dushegubka [soul killers]." In the case of Berg, who took part in the executions, of which there is his signature, he was accused as the inventor of these gas vans. 
Alexander Mikhailov: According to the driver of such a truck, the gas was used to prevent the possibility of riot in the truck. Naturally, the people who swallowed carbon monoxide have been suppressed, and many of them accepted death as deliverance from the torment. 
Lydia Golovkova: The exhaust pipe turned inside the van, and people came already half-conscious. Buses with half-dead people drove up from the side of the forest. There was a tower with a searchlight above the trees, the territory was surrounded by barbed wire, and there was a long wooden hut, where everyone was supposedly brought in for sanitation."</ref> 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.<ref name=Lipkov />

[[Babi Yar|Babi Yar massacre]] survivor and witness [[Dina Pronicheva]],  according to a published interview with her nephew named Mikhail Frenkel, narrowly escaped being turned over to a Soviet police "soul destroyer" (gas van) while visiting her mother-in-law in 1943.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Freeman |first=Colin |title=Babyn Yar Massacre 80 years on: 'I played dead as an SS man trod on my chest' |url=https://www.thejc.com/news/world/babyn-yar-massacre-80-years-on-i-played-dead-as-an-ss-man-trod-on-my-chest-1.521164 |access-date=2023-02-03 |website=www.thejc.com}}</ref> 

Marek Hałaburda has written that the gas vans were introduced to increase the rate of executions.<ref>Marek Hałaburda, “The Polish Operation”. The genocide of the Polish people in the USSR in the years 1937–1938, Orientalia Christiana Cracoviensia, 2013, v.5, p. 71.</ref> In the  book ''KGB: The State Within a State'' [[Yevgenia Albats]] and [[Catherine A. Fitzpatrick]] wrote that: "Owing to the shortage of executioners, Chekists 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"<ref name="Albats">[[Yevgenia Albats]] and [[Catherine A. Fitzpatrick]], ''KGB: The State Within a State. The secret police and its hold on Russia's past, present and future''. (International Affairs, Vol. 72). London: Tauris, 1995, p. 101.</ref> Gas vans were also reportedly used in the cities of [[Omsk]] and [[Ivanovo]] in the Soviet Union. <ref>According to high-ranking NKVD officer [[:ru:Шрейдер, Михаил Павлович|Mikhail Schreder]], they were used in the city of [[Ivanovo]] similar to that in Moscow: "When a closed truck arrived at the place of execution, all convicts were dragged out of cars in an unconscious state. On the way, they were almost killed by exhaust fumes redirected through a special tube into the closed cargo compartment of the truck." [https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2047681 Хроника событий 1937 года (Chronicle of the events of the year 1937)], by Evgeniy Zhirnov, [[Kommersant]], No.42, 22.10.2012, page 10.; Шрейдер М.П. (Shreider M.P) [http://www.urantia-s.com/library/shreider/nkvd НКВД изнутри: Записки чекиста. (NKVD from within. Notes by Chekist )], Moscow: Возвращение, 1995. – p.78, [https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=book&num=940 full text online]</ref><ref>Soviet dissident [[Petro Grigorenko]] described in his memoirs a story told by his close friend and former prisoner of Gulag Vasil Teslia who described killings of "[[kulak]]s" in a prison in [[Omsk]]. According to him, more than 27 people were loaded to a truck, which moved away from the prison, but soon returned. "When the doors were opened, black smoke poured out and corpses of people rained down." The corpses were then placed into the basement. Teslia watched such executions during whole week. Григоренко П.Г. В подполье можно встретить только крыс... ([[Petro Grigorenko]], "In the underground one can meet only rats") — Нью-Йорк, Издательство «Детинец», 1981, page 403, [https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=page&num=9485 Full text of the book (Russian)]</ref><ref>[https://www.sibreal.org/a/pervymi-dushegubki-ispolzovali-ne-fashisty-a-chekisty/31885986.html "Поставить смерть на поток". Первыми душегубки использовали не фашисты, а чекисты? ("Who was the first to use gas chambers?"], by Maria Aronova, [[RFE/RL]], 9 April, 2023</ref>