Explosives, as a Murder Weapon

Albert Widmann, a German scientist employed at Germany’s top crime lab, claimed that experiments to kill innocent civilians with explosives were made during World War Two. He came up with this nonsense when conjuring up a fairy tale in the 1960s in an attempt to “explain” how gas vans were invented.

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, a high-ranking SS official, made similar claims in an absurd postwar deposition, probably extracted by torture. He claimed that Himmler had watched the execution of 100 partisans in the summer of 1941, after which he ordered a new, more humane method to be devised. This new method, Bach-Zelewski claimed, was blowing up people with explosives.

No rational person would ever have implemented such an idea. It is obvious that blowing up people with explosives leads to

• objects in the vicinity getting damaged and destroyed;
• the victim’s body parts strewn around the area,
• and deep craters in the ground, which need to be filled in afterwards.

Other witnesses have claimed that explosives were used when trying to destroy the corpses of mass-murder victims. See the next entry on this.