The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  Enthusiasm for eugenics was by no means limited to the United States and Great Britain. By the early 1930s its influence was also being felt in Italy, Germany, Spain, Soviet Russia, Japan, and various South American nations. At the time—when fascists were remaking Germany, Italy, and Spain, threatening to sweep the globe as the “wave of the future,” and America was deep in the throes of its Great Depression, with the continued survival of its democratic institutions greatly imperiled—radical theories of “race” and “racial superiority” were reaching their most extreme conclusion.

  It was during this politically hazardous period, from 1933 to 1937, that seven additional states in the American West, South, and Midwest followed Nevada by legally adopting lethal gas as their official method of execution, and they too commenced building gas chambers. This first wave of construction took place in the United States shortly before Germany began erecting its gas chambers. After some initial experimentation a small and obscure American company, Eaton Metal Products Company of Denver and Salt Lake City, became the world’s leading designer and maker of specially constructed gas chambers for prison executions. The U.S. government patented two models of the company’s death-dealing apparatus and aided the states to put them into use.

  From the start, the American gas chambers utilized deadly cyanide gas—specifically, some form of hydrogen cyanide (HCN), also known as hydrocyanic acid or Prussic acid. With each new addition to its product line Eaton made various modifications and improvements. Additional patents for the lethal gas and gas-delivery systems for killing insects or “warm-blooded obnoxious animals”7 were filed in Europe and the United States by a bevy of German and American firms, including Deutsche Gold & Silber Scheideanstalt (DEGUSSA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in Great Britain; and Roessler & Hasslacher Chemical Company, E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company, and American Cyanamid and Chemical Corporation in North America, all of which were members of an international cartel with IG Farben (Interessen Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft, or the Community of Interests of Dye-Making Companies) of Frankfurt am Main. Hundreds of other companies often worked with them in close cooperation across the globe. Hence the advancement of gas-chamber technology was a joint effort involving players from several different countries and spheres.

  Detailed news reports, articles in scientific journals, and industry sources describing America’s early lethal-gas executions circulated across the globe. The first reports reached Hitler in Germany at the crucial moment when he was on trial or in prison writing Mein Kampf. Fifteen or so years later, he latched onto the gas-chamber idea as a more efficient and “humane” method of mass extermination. As the Nazi dictator put into action his long-threatened genocide against the Jews, his underlings devised many practical enlargements of its design and operations, building upon what the Americans had recently done and were still doing.

  The Nazis appropriated the evolving American method of gas-chamber executions and embellished upon it with unfettered ferocity, adding new ways to “lure the victims to the chambers, to kill them on an assembly line, and to process their corpses”—grand-scale refinements that enabled them to gas and cremate more than a million human beings with astonishing speed and efficiency.8 Under the Nazis the gas chamber evolved into the most efficient technique ever invented for wholesale extermination—a high-volume methodology that was less messy than shooting individuals and shoveling them into pits, chopping off heads one by one, or slowly starving them, and much less time consuming than hanging, injecting, or electrocuting each terrified victim.

  After first employing carbon monoxide as their lethal agent, the Nazis ultimately settled upon using a brand of hydrocyanic acid known as Zyklon-B, a compound that had been invented shortly after World War I and patented as an insecticide in Germany in 1922 as an offshoot from that nation’s continuing chemical warfare research. Its inventor had actually worked for an American company in California’s burgeoning fumigation industry. Hydrogen cyanide gas already had been used to execute prisoners in the United States, where the method had been upheld by American courts as not constituting cruel and unusual punishment and was accepted by most members of the American public. The U.S. Public Health Service, among other official bodies, also had been issuing public reports about Zyklon-B and other combinations involving hydrocyanic acid for several years prior to its introduction in German death camps. Embracing and perfecting the gas chamber enabled the Nazis to marshal the apparatuses and techniques of modernity on an unprecedented scale. Unlike the Americans, who required witnesses and public reports for their executions, the Germans went to extreme lengths to implement their gas executions with great secrecy. By the time they were through, they had slaughtered millions of hapless prisoners. As much as possible, they tried to cover up their crimes by dynamiting many of their crematoria and gas chambers, murdering the witnesses, incinerating the corpses, destroying the records, and professing ignorance about anything that might prove their culpability.

  The Final Solution claimed more than six million Jewish men, women, and children from 1941 to 1945, more than three million of them by various lethal gases (carbon monoxide and later hydrogen cyanide), whereas the Americans would end up gassing about six hundred convicted adult criminals over a span of seventy-five years, making it unreasonable to compare the two experiences. This book in no way equates the Holocaust with what was done in the United States, nor does it blame the Americans for the Nazi atrocities. Yet it is interesting to note that it was Americans who designed and built the first prison gas chambers, American scientists who selected cyanide gas as the poison of choice for executions, and American firms with close ties to German chemical corporations that provided the deadly gas (and paid the Germans for patents and licensing), as well as Americans who devised many of the basic killing procedures and bureaucratic modi operandi for putting to death helpless human beings by that means. American prisons functioned as the first laboratory for carrying out gas executions. Initially, it was American chemists, legislators, governors, prosecutors and defense counsels, prison wardens, public health officials, physicians, guards, executioners, prisoners, clergymen, business executives and sales personnel, technicians, clerks, political opponents, representatives of the news media, local residents, and members of the general public who were confronted with the issue of the gas chamber. Two American firms—Roessler & Hasslacher (which DuPont purchased in 1930) and American Cyanamid—also manufactured Zyklon-B under license from the Germans, and they helped to advance its image as well as its application. It was Americans who initially provided a scientific, ethical, and legal rationale and justification for gas executions and who trumpeted their actions across the globe. The Nazis took it from there, ultimately making gas-chamber executions and hydrogen cyanide their preferred tools for mass extermination, using it to carry out what many advocates of the lethal chamber had long espoused—the eradication of the “unfit” who were “unworthy of life.”

  The Americans and Germans may not have been the first to use poison gas to execute prisoners. According to one historical footnote, in 1791, in an effort to put down the bloody Santo Domingo slave revolt, one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s ruthless colonial commanders had packed Haitian rebel prisoners into ships’ holds and pumped in sulfur dioxide gas produced from burning oil, thereby intentionally killing as many as 100,000 slaves by asphyxiation and hence creating what some historians have called “history’s first primitive gas chamber,” although the episode did not become widely known until 2005.9 Napoleon’s crude effort was merely a prelude, however. Gas chambers specifically designed for execution purposes were a product of twentieth-century thinking.

  The Nazis’ programs to exterminate prisoners using gas chambers were authorized, engineered, and carried out with utmost secrecy, yet British and American government officials almost immediately began to receive detailed intelligence reports about what was happening. They did nothing, however, to intervene other than to conti
nue waging war. As the fighting in Europe ground to a close and victorious Allied troops began to liberate the German death camps, however, graphic and irrefutable proof of the true horrors finally emerged, leaving no doubt that the Nazis had committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Although Hitler’s forces had committed genocide by every conceivable means, their ultimate weapon of choice was revealed to have been lethal gas, most notably hydrogen cyanide.

  Following Germany’s defeat were more public disclosures, and there were even some war crimes trials to judge not only some of the executioners, but also a few of the German executives and chemical firms that had supplied the gas and built the gas chambers and ovens. Some culpability was established and a handful of individuals were convicted and executed or imprisoned, although many later had their sentences reduced. But many of those involved in providing gas for the death camps were never pursued, in part, perhaps, because members of the German military and chemical company executives had destroyed the incriminating records, and also because the victors may not have relished what might come out from a thorough investigation. Most of the German companies and executives who had helped equip the death camps and war machine were let off lightly, and many corporations resumed their business.

  Although the Germans had dominated the cyanide business worldwide for many years, one murky link that was never explored was that American as well as German firms had manufactured and sold vast quantities of cyanide for various purposes, including the patented poison Zyklon-B, for “pest removal.” More than ten years before the Nazis began ordering huge quantities of the poison from German sources for use in their concentration camps, Roessler & Hasslacher (which was acquired by E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company in 1930) and the American Cyanamid Company in New York had also been licensed to manufacture Zyklon-B, and they had done so at a considerable profit for both themselves and Germany’s IG Farben. Indeed, prior to the war the bulk of the profits the Germans derived from Zyklon’s sale came from abroad, particularly from the United States. To this day, neither DuPont nor American Cyanamid has come clean about this depressing history. Until now, this American involvement and its disturbing implications have been largely overlooked. Historians have also neglected to explore what German cartel executives and Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s knew about the progress of American gas executions, how closely they monitored the evolution of the gas chamber in the United States, and whether German-controlled companies may have actually provided the lethal cyanogen and potassium cyanide used to execute American prisoners until late 1940, when the United States finally halted German cyanide imports. Might the earlier American development of lethal-gas executions have influenced the Nazis to take the approach further to much greater extremes?

  A number of postwar trials brought criminal charges against a few German chemical executives and crematorium makers as well as SS executioners for their actions involving the gas chamber. But the American experience of the gas chamber was scrupulously kept out of the trials and the ensuing discussion about Nazi war crimes. No witnesses testified about the prior development of lethal-gas executions in the United States, or about the role of the U.S. military in promoting American gas executions, or the collaboration of American chemical companies with their German counterparts in the worldwide cyanide cartel. All such collusion was kept out of the discussion. Nobody brought up the development of gas-chamber technology by the Eaton Metal Products Company or the adoption by several states of lethal gas statutes for executions in the 1930s. Nor did anyone point out the prevailing U.S. argument that killing by lethal gas amounted to a “quick and painless” and “humane” method of execution. Some executives who were convicted and imprisoned had their sentences commuted to very brief terms, after which they resumed their lives and in some cases their careers. In the years that followed the war, critics of the German public’s complicity in the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime failed to examine the complacent response by the American public—especially the press, criminologists, members of the bar, and medical professionals—to their own gas-chamber executions and the merchandizing of death-dealing technologies. American and British military commanders were informed about the Nazis’ ongoing extermination efforts, yet they did nothing to intervene or attempt to disrupt the genocide other than to try to win the war. Then, when the conflict was won, most of the German companies and executives who had helped equip the death camps and war machine were let off lightly, and many corporations resumed their business. With a few exceptions, the commentators and historians also played down the failure—indeed, the refusal—of Allied policymakers to try to disrupt or diminish the Nazi death camps.

  Although this book breaks some new ground regarding the American and German adoption of the gas chamber, the extent to which German officials and companies were monitoring or assisting America’s gas executions before the entry of the United States into the war still remains unclear. More investigation needs to be done to establish whether any American corporations or individuals contributed, wittingly or unwittingly, to Germany’s gas-chamber genocide. But this book raises some serious questions about American-German gas-chamber collaboration.

  The horrors of Auschwitz stripped the mask of humaneness from gas-chamber executions and ruined the image of gassing as a form of painless euthanasia. A growing realization about the horrors of the Holocaust contributed to the decline of the death penalty in Europe and probably hastened its fall from favor in the United States as well. But eleven American states continued to maintain gas chambers. Notwithstanding the issues raised by the war crimes trials, America’s struggle over lethal gas was remarkably subdued. Finally, however, agitation against the death penalty itself gradually intensified in the media and the courts.

  In the late 1950s and early ’60s, reports of suffering from lethal gas executions and highly publicized cases such as Caryl Chessman’s ordeal in California at last resulted in the suspension of executions in the United States, a moratorium that lasted for ten years. But even this milestone proved to mark only a temporary end for the gas chamber.

  In the 1970s conservatives escalated their campaign for the restoration of capital punishment. To convince undecided voters, some of those demanding the death penalty’s return suggested the adoption of a new form of execution that would avert the criticisms of such distasteful methods as electrocution and lethal gas. After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 appeared to open the door to “improved” death penalty statutes, lethal gas as a method of legal execution was for the first time seriously contested on constitutional grounds. In the 1990s a federal court received a substantial body of scientific evidence showing how human beings had actually suffered and died from cyanide executions. It convinced both a federal district court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to conclude for the first time that death by lethal gas amounted to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

  A few legal loopholes, however, remained until 1999, when at last the final American gas execution was carried out in Arizona. Ironically, the gas chamber’s final victim was a German national, and the World Court later condemned the execution as a violation of international law. Even after Auschwitz, it still took more than fifty years for gas-chamber executions to cease in the United States. At the close of the twentieth century, seventy-five years after the first lethal gas execution, the American gas chamber appeared to have reached the end of the line. One by one, the strange-looking steel-and-glass contraptions that had taken hundreds of lives were either consigned to museums or parking lots, or converted into lethal-injection chambers with hospital gurneys instead of chairs.

  Even today some observers wonder if the gas chamber might be brought back. As I was writing this book, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled in State v. Mata that execution by the electric chair is cruel and unusual punishment, finding that the “evidence here shows that electrocution inflicts intense pain and agonizing suffering.”10 Shortly thereafter the U.S. Supreme Court in Baze v. Rees considered whether Kentu
cky’s execution by a three-drug protocol of lethal injection violated the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The action was historic because the only time the court had ever ruled directly on a method of execution was in 1878, when it upheld the use of the firing squad. Until Baze, the court had scrupulously avoided dealing with the nuts and bolts of specific execution methods.11 A leading capital-punishment scholar who testified in the case, Professor Deborah W. Denno, commented that the courts’ lack of Eighth Amendment guidance had “unraveled” the death penalty in the United States, contributing to a recent moratorium on executions as several states awaited the Supreme Court’s ruling.12

  But when the Supreme Court finally did rule, in April of 2008, validating the three-drug “cocktail,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote for the 7–2 majority, “Simply because an execution method may result in pain, either by accident or as an inescapable consequence of death, does not establish the sort of ‘objectively intolerable risk of harm’ that qualifies as cruel and unusual.” Nevertheless, the ruling was so divided and convoluted that six individual justices wrote their own opinions, and legal observers concluded that the decision had generated more questions than answers, leaving open many possible future challenges to lethal injection and the death penalty in general.13