Gas van Gas van A gas van or gas wagon ( ("dushegubka"); ) was a vehicle reequipped as a mobile gas chamber. The vehicle had an air-tight compartment for the murdered victims, into which exhaust fumes were transmitted while the engine was running. The murdered victims were gassed with carbon monoxide, resulting in death by carbon monoxide poisoning and suffocation. The gas van was used by the Soviet secret police in 1930s. During World War II Nazi Germany used gas vans on a large scale as an extermination method to murder inmates of asylums, Romani people, Jews, and prisoners in occupied Poland,
Gas chamber extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka used exhaust fumes from stationary diesel engines. In search of more efficient killing methods, the Nazis experimented with using the hydrogen cyanide-based fumigant Zyklon B at the Auschwitz concentration camp. This method was adopted for mass killings at the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps. Up to 6000 victims were gassed with Zyklon-B each day at Auschwitz. Most extermination camp gas chambers were dismantled or destroyed in the last months of the World War II as Soviet troops approached, except for those at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Majdanek. One destroyed gas chamber at Auschwitz was reconstructed