The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  But Hitler didn’t end the T4 program; instead, his killers simply slowed the pace of the killing and shifted the action to concentration camps, using traveling physicians to determine who among the inmates was unfit to work. Under this arrangement, between mid-1941 and mid-1943 nearly 4,500 inmates were taken from Mauthausen, Gusen, and Dachau camps to Hartheim killing center near Linz for gassing. Another 830 inmates from Buchenwald concentration camp were gassed at the Sonnenstein killing center in Saxony. Many more victims were later selected from other camps to suffer the same “mercy death.”10 As German forces swept over Europe, they rounded up prisoners of war, Jews, Gypsies, typhus victims, insane persons, and other targets. The Nazis constructed a steel web of prison labor facilities and death camps throughout Poland. The Polish killing centers included Chelmno (Kulmhof), Belżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, with Auschwitz being the largest and, as one writer has called it, “their eugenic apocalypse.”11

  Like the other killing centers, Auschwitz at first used carbon monoxide. But on or about September 3, 1941, its killers began to try out another gas. An SS officer took cans of Zyklon-B from the camp’s supply room and ordered staff to use it against 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 or so other prisoners—mostly Poles—who had been selected from the camp’s infirmary. The victims were crammed into basement cells of Building 11 (“The Bunker”), which served as the camp’s punishment block. Soldiers dumped Zyklon into the cells and closed the windows and sealed them with sand to prevent leakage. Then they waited to see what would happen. After the gas had cleared, they discovered that some had survived, so they repeated the procedure. This time they found everyone dead.

  The SS had begun to divert large quantities of the insecticide, planning to murder millions of prisoners. Medical imperatives and the involvement of physicians in the “euthanasia” process had been replaced by sheer brutality, trickery, and the treatment of human beings as vermin in an attempt to exterminate masses of people.

  The Zyklon-B used in the gas chambers consisted of hydrogen cyanide and a warning agent impregnated into a solid support.12 Instructions for its use, published by one of its German manufacturers, DEGESCH, mentioned three possible solid supports, claiming, “Wood fibre discs (discoids), a reddish brown granular mass (diagriess—Dia gravel) or small blue cubes (Erko) are used as carriers.”13 The most common solid carrier of Zyklon-B used at Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted of the small, chalky, grayish-blue cubes or pellets (Erko).14

  In selecting Prussic acid, the Nazis chose one of their own German creations. Hydrocyanic acid had a long history of being used for delousing and fumigation in Germany and around the world, and the German military was already using it to fumigate barracks in the concentration camps, just as American Cyanamid was using it to fumigate American military barracks. The United States Public Health Service had utilized large quantities of Zyklon for pest removal. For fifteen years hydrocyanic acid had also been used throughout America in legal executions, which had been written up in countless journals and apparently widely accepted as causing a quick and painless death.15 But never before had it been used for mass murder.

  Figure 11 Zyklon-B container, KL Auschwitz, Birkenau. Photo by Michael Hanke.

  For years Holocaust researchers wondered about the particular form of Zyklon-B that was used in the death camps, and particularly about what kind of solid support was used. In July 2000 a sample of Zyklon-B pellets from Auschwitz was obtained from Director Jerzy Wróblewski of the Panstwowe Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oświęcim, Poland. Harry W. Mazal of the Holocaust History Project conducted physical and chemical analysis in an effort to identify the substrate employed for Zyklon-B that was designated for murdering prisoners there. The sample Wróblewski provided and samples of two other materials—diatomaceous earth and Drierite (anhydrous calcium sulfate)—were examined using a scanning electron microscope, and they produced dramatic results. The sample containing a Zyklon-B pellet showed a microcrystalline structure with orthorhombic crystals that were approximately 1.5 micrometers wide and 7 to 15 micrometers long. The pore size was several micrometers in diameter.

  Further analysis was conducted using an energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX) accessory mounted on the scanning electron microscope. This method would permit accurate qualitative and semi-quantitative elemental analysis of inorganic materials in the sample. The Zyklon-B sample showed clear peaks for calcium, oxygen, and sulfur, as well as some very minor traces of barium and aluminum. It was calcium sulfate, but not soluble anhydride.

  A comparison between the EDX analysis of the Zyklon-B pellet and a sample of calcium sulfate clearly showed they were identical in composition. The analyst concluded that the Zyklon-B sample was “either the natural form of anhydrous calcium sulfate, also known as the mineral anhydrite, or, equally likely, the insoluble anhydrite resulting from heating gypsum at temperatures above 650 degrees centigrade.”16 Anhydrite is a colorless, white, gray, blue, or lilac mineral of anhydrous calcium sulfate, CaSO4, occurring as layers in gypsum deposits.

  It is unclear who manufactured the anhydrite and whether they knew the use to which it was being put in the camps. DEGESCH had licensed two German companies—Tesch und Stabenow (Testa) of Hamburg and Heerdt-Lingler (Heli)—along with American Cyanamid of the United States to manufacture and distribute Zyklon-B. The Zyklon-B crystals that killed prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau were allegedly furnished by Tesch und Stabenow and DEGESCH. Tesch und Stabenow supplied two tons of the cyanide crystals a month and DEGESCH provided three quarters of a ton, according to the bills of lading that were presented into evidence at the war crimes trials.

  Hydrogen cyanide had been absorbed into the substrate and placed in sealed steel cans. At the time of packaging the substrate and the gas had been combined with a stabilizing chemical that made it considerably more manageable and less volatile than other forms of hydrocyanic acid. Unlike the potassium cyanide used in American gassings, the Zyklon-B did not require immersion in sulfuric acid and water to vaporize. When the Zyklon tins were unsealed and their contents dumped into an enclosed and heated chamber crowded with naked human beings, the pellets simply released deadly hydrocyanic acid gas into the atmosphere, thereby killing those in the gas chamber.

  The Nazis’ first use of Zyklon-B at Auschwitz appeared to have worked so well that it became the gas of choice for mass extermination. Systematic gassing of Jews began shortly thereafter.

  A former Auschwitz gas chamber officer coldly described how the poison was used. “The disinfectors were at work,” he said. “One of them was SS-Unterscharführer Teuer, decorated with the Cross of War Merit. With a chisel and a hammer they opened a few innocuous-looking tins which bore the inscription ‘Cyclon, to be used against vermin. Attention, poison! to be opened by trained personnel only!’. The tins were filled to the brim with blue granules the size of peas. Immediately after opening the tins, their contents was thrown into the holes which were then quickly covered.”17 Rudolf Höss, SS-Kommandant of Auschwitz, later testified, “The gassing was carried out in the detention cells of Block II. Protected by a gas mask, I watched the killing myself. In the crowded cells, death came instantaneously the moment Zyklon-B was thrown in. A short, almost smothered cry, and it was all over.”18

  At another gassing, in autumn 1941, an officer ordered the institution’s registrar of new arrivals (Hans Stark) to pour Zyklon-B into the roof opening because only one medical orderly had shown up. “During a gassing Zyklon-B had to be poured through both openings of the gas-chamber room at the same time.” Stark later recalled:

  This gassing was also a transport of 200–250 Jews, once again men, women and children. As the Zyklon-B… was in granular form, it trickled down over the people as it was being poured in. They then started to cry out terribly for they now knew what was happening to them. I did not look through the opening because it had to be closed as soon as the Zyklon-B had been poured in. After a few minutes there was silence. After some time had passed—
it may have been ten to fifteen minutes—the gas chamber was opened. The dead lay higgledy-piggledy all over the place. It was a dreadful sight.19

  By war’s end, Auschwitz-Birkenau’s gas chambers would claim an estimated 1,100,000 men, women, and children.20

  Belżec was another forced labor camp that in 1941–42 was expanded into an extermination center as part of Aktion Reinhard, the program for the liquidation of the Jews living in Poland that was named after the assassinated Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. Wirth served as the camp’s first commandant, supervising the construction of six gas chambers with a huge capacity of 1,200 people. As the commencement of Belżec’s large-scale extermination program approached, a flood of prisoners arrived via rail. Then, on August 1, 1942, Wirth and his colleagues conducted a demonstration in one of Belżec’s new gas chambers using Zyklon-B.21

  Most historians assert that Hitler’s order for the Final Solution, or the destruction of European Jewry, which he had publicly vowed for years would happen and which his henchmen had been carrying out piecemeal for years, was formally put into action sometime in the latter part of 1941, after failures in the Russian campaign and the entry of the United States into the war. Although pains were taken to keep written proof of Nazi actions to a minimum, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on December 12, 1941, “With respect to the Jewish question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would live to see their annihilation in it. That wasn’t just a catchword. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”22

  One of the enduring controversies of the Holocaust has been whether the Allies could and should have done something to try to disrupt the gassings. Within a few months after the first gassings, detailed reports about the Nazis’ use of gas-chamber executions had begun to leak out to Allied countries. In The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Peter Novick claims “few Americans” during the war “were aware of the scale of the European Jewish catastrophe.” Even many of the most informed, such as longtime foreign correspondent William L. Shirer, who later would write The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, didn’t grasp “for sure” what the Nazis had done until 1945.23 But that doesn’t mean that the Americans weren’t told. They were informed, just as millions of Germans knew of the mass slaughters, despite the regime’s halfhearted attempts to keep the genocide out of sight.24 (How could the Germans living near the camps not have known given the “unmistakable odor of death hanging in the air for miles”?)25

  American government officials had innumerable sources of reliable intelligence that kept them apprised of the Nazis’ plans and actions almost as soon as they happened. News organizations also reported on many atrocities shortly after they occurred. From the early months of America’s involvement in the war, dispatches from Europe warned about the Nazis’ escalating atrocities, including their gassing of helpless civilians, although many readers may have dismissed them as exaggerated war propaganda. On December 7, 1941, the New York Times reported that Thomas Mann, the famous German author, had broadcast a radio appeal to his countrymen, urging them to “make the break while there is still time before the ‘ever-growing gigantic hatred engulfs you.’” Mann was quoted as saying, “In German hospitals the severely wounded, the old and feeble are killed with poison gas—in one single institution two or three thousand, a German doctor said.”26

  In June 1942 the British Broadcasting Corporation announced that Germans had slain seven hundred thousand Jews in Poland. “To accomplish this,” a Polish communiqué stated, “probably the greatest mass slaughter in history, every death-dealing method was employed—machine-gun bullets, hand grenades, gas chambers, concentration camps, whipping, torture instruments and starvation.”27 According to some early reports, the Germans’ killing methods included a “mobile gas chamber for wholesale executions.”28

  In response, members of the Polish government in exile and the Polish resistance made frenzied efforts to convince Allied forces to threaten retribution against the “Nazi terrorists” for the “systematic campaign of extermination being carried out in German-occupied Poland.” But the Allies demurred, believing they did not yet possess the strength to coerce the German war machine, and many Americans discounted the reports of atrocities. “A Jew,” one old world saying went, “did not ‘make rishis’” (did not stir up a fuss) for fear of waking a sleeping giant.29

  Around Thanksgiving in 1942, in an effort to refute German propaganda claiming that the Polish people were “grateful” to have their country cleansed of Jews, Polish exiles stepped up their outcries. Refugees confirmed the existence of “human slaughter houses” where Germans used “technical means” to liquidate masses of hapless civilians, including women and children. Smuggled reports increasingly described the Germans’ use of gas chambers in “death camps.”30 By July of 1943, official estimates by the Polish resistance placed the number of Poles executed at an astonishing 3.2 million, including 1.8 million Jews. Władysław Banaczyk, the Polish minister of home affairs, asserted to a reporter in London that one death camp alone, established at Majdanek in the Lublin district of his homeland, was executing more than three thousand persons a day in gas chambers.31 (Final estimates set the number of Polish Jews gassed from March 1942 to November 1943 at around two million.)32

  In the wake of such dire intelligence, Allied officials were divided over how to respond. Britain’s Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, played down the reports. “It is true that there have been references to the use of gas chambers in other reports,” he acknowledged in the summer of 1943, “but these references have usually, if not always, been equally vague, and since they have concerned the extermination of Jews, have usually emanated from Jewish sources.” He added, “Personally, I have never really understood the advantage of the gas chamber over the simple machine gun, or the equally simple starvation method. These stories may or may not be true, but in any event I submit we are putting out a statement on evidence which is far from conclusive, and which we have no means of assessing.”33 Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, who was Jewish, publicly criticized the United States government for its continued silence regarding the Nazis’ treatment of European Jews. Similarly, the American Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Fries’s former nemesis and the first critic of the American gas chamber) reiterated that Germans already had murdered millions of Jews in Poland, and it bitterly concluded that Americans must share the guilt—because, the activists said, Americans were “complacent cowards” covered “with a thick layer of prejudice.”34

  The political climate became so agitated in some quarters that even politicians who were not considered friendly to Jewish interests began to voice their concern. At a ceremony held at the Hotel Roosevelt on March 28, 1944, New York governor Thomas Dewey condemned the Nazi campaign to wipe out Polish Jewry—this only a few days after he had refused to stop the high-profile electrocution of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the Jewish gangster. “We as a people are spending the blood of our soldiers, our toil and our substance in the fight against the beasts in human form who seek to exterminate a race,” Dewey said. “But what is going on daily in the gas chambers of Poland and what impends because of the Nazi occupation of Hungary and Rumania requires even more.” Americans, he urged, needed to rouse themselves against anti-Semitism and extend to the victims every kind of assistance.35

  Fears intensified in May 1944, when reports from Budapest noted the construction of “special baths” for Jews that were in reality disguised gas chambers arranged for mass murder. Hungary’s Jews were said to be living in fear of imminent annihilation.36 In June 1944 the Czechoslovak state council disclosed it had received reports from Nazioccupied Europe of at least seven thousand Czechoslovak Jews being dragged to gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camp of Auschwitz.37

  Grim reports of Nazi gassing galvanized more r
epresentatives of world Jewry to intensify their campaign to stop the genocide. On June 21, 1944, John W. Pehle, executive secretary of the War Refugee Board, urgently pleaded with the U.S. War Department to “bomb the railroad line… used for deportation of Jews from Hungary to Poland,” and on November 8 he urged the bombing of Auschwitz itself.

  On behalf of the War Department, however, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy rejected both of Pehle’s requests, saying such an operation would divert “air support essential… to decisive operations elsewhere” and would “be of doubtful efficacy.” Besides, said McCloy, “such an effort, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.”38

  The American failure to bomb Auschwitz is a topic hotly debated among historians, but McCloy’s role in making that decision has come in for persistent criticism from a variety of perspectives.39 Some of McCloy’s arguments to Pehle in retrospect seem to ring hollow. According to McCloy’s biographer, Kai Bird, writing in 1992, at least as early as 1943 McCloy was one of the few Washington officials who had both detailed intelligence information about Hitler’s proposed Final Solution and the power to do something about it. It is possible he could have saved as many as 100,000 Jews from the gas chamber, yet he refused to intervene. The question of whether to bomb Auschwitz was never brought to President Roosevelt. As a result, says Bird, McCloy “bears substantial responsibility for this misjudgment.”40

  Jan Karski, a Polish resistance fighter who escaped from Nazi imprisonment to warn Western leaders about the extermination camps, without success, later got to view several American aerial reconnaissance photos showing Auschwitz. “It was the saddest thing,” he later bitterly recalled. “With a magnifying glass we could actually read the names and numbers of the Hungarian Jews standing on line waiting to be gassed. Yet McCloy claimed the target was too far away.”41