⚠️ Historical Documentation Notice
This document is part of a historical archive and is presented for scholarly research and educational purposes.
The content reflects historical perspectives and should be understood within its historical context.
your David Hebden points to a little known document on a WW2 Nazi gas chamber at Minsk, Gas chamber at Minsk THE Franke-Grisksch report may not be the only example of gassings having been mentioned in contemporary German wartime documents. In the book Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (Yale UP, 1993) (a translation of the 1983 German book Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas (ed.
Kogon, Langbein, and Ruckerl) in the chapter Killings in the Gas Vans behind the Front, we learn: ‘On 15 May 1943 representatives of the Italian Fascist party visited Minsk. The general commissioner for Byelorussia, whose name was Kube, showed them a church that was being used as a warehouse.
A diplomat named von Thadden, who held the rank of legation counselor, first class, and was then stationed at the Foreign Office in Berlin, heard about this visit from another legation counselor, von Rademacher, and made the following note in his diary on 15 May 1943: “The Italians asked about the little packages and suitcases that were piled up in the church. Kube explained that that was all that was left of the Jews who had been deported from Minsk.
Then he showed them a gas chamber in which he said Jews had been gassed. The Fascists were severely shaken.”‘ The source given is: Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, ref. K-206919 (Archives of the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany). Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube is an interesting figure who features in most Holocaust histories ( e.g. link ), but this particular gas-van-chamber story is unfamiliar to us. Why is it not better known, we wonder? David Hebden