Astonishingly, this story was told in late 1942, before the introduction of gas to Auschwitz. It conflates two facts: the deportation of Jews in trains heading eastward and exterminations using exhaust fumes of motor vehicles, which had been taking place in Chelmno, in Riga, and around Poznan since the end of 1941.
The conflation of separate half-understood facts is a typical way in which rumors were started. Heimer’s laughter at the end of his anecdote indicates that he regards his story as something unbelievable, and in fact his interlocutor doubted its credibility:
KASSEL: Surely, you can’t do that!
HEIMER: It’s quite simple. Why shouldn’t one arrange something like that?
KASSEL: In the first place it’s not possible and secondly you just can’t do a thing like that for God’s sake!
HEIMER: All the same it was done.295
This is one of the rare instances in the protocols when a listener expressed disbelief and disgust at what he was hearing. But the listener in this case was a British stool pigeon who was trying to elicit further information from Heimer, a W/T [wireless telegraph] operator. That’s why he assumes the role of the disbeliever. Thus, even this exception confirms the rule that listeners usually didn’t consider even the most horrible of stories to be unlikely or improbable.
One recurring rumor was that the bodies of murdered Jews were dissolved by acid:
