Pankov, Vassily

Vassily Pankov was a Ukrainian auxiliary presumably deployed as a guard at the Sobibór Camp. After the war, he was arrested for this. In his interrogation of 18 October 1950 by Soviet authorities, he was made to describe even the Buchenwald Camp as an extermination camp. According to Pankov, the gassing facility at Sobibór consisted of six chambers, and the engine supplying the asphyxiating exhaust gas was a diesel motor, with the execution lasting “an hour or more.” However, diesel-engine exhaust gas is not suitable for mass murder, as it is barely toxic. The reference to a diesel engine is clearly an echo from the 1943 Soviet show trials at Krasnodar and Kharkov, where gas vans, allegedly killing with diesel-exhaust gases, played a major role.

(See the entry on Sobibór for more details, as well as Graf/Kues/Mattogno 2020, pp. 111f., 158; Mattogno 2021e, p. 223.)