Ostrowski Company

The Ostrowski Company operated a factory at the Polish city of Koło, some 7 km northwest of the Chełmno Camp. After the war, a damaged moving truck of the German truck manufacturer Magirus, once operated by the moving company “Otto Koehn Spedition,” was discovered on the Ostrowski factory grounds which several witnesses claimed to have been a “gas van.” However, an investigation by Polish judge Władysław Bednarz established that this vehicle was not a “gas van.” Still, photos taken by Bednarz in the context of his investigations were later shown by mainstream historians, such as Gerald Fleming and Christopher Browning, as proof for the existence of gas vans. (See Alvarez 2023, pp. 33-39, 151, 159, 165-171, 358.)