The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  Others have argued that the Allies did not have the ability to conduct precision bombing, and even if they had struck Auschwitz, the damage could have been quickly repaired or replaced. According to Peter Novick, “Though Allied intelligence knew about some of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, they had no knowledge of two cottages converted to killing facilities in the woods west of Birkenau, one no longer used and the other used on a standby basis.”42

  Eventually the world began to receive independent confirmation that the alarmists’ worst assessments were true. On August 30, 1944, the New York Times published a stunning firsthand account by one of its correspondents, W. H. Lawrence, from Lublin, Poland, where he had toured the just-liberated Nazi death camp at Majdanek, where as many as 1.5 million persons had been killed in the last three years according to Soviet and Polish authorities.43 Lawrence acknowledged he had been skeptical of the veracity of the stories of the atrocities, and particularly of the accounts of Hitler’s systematic extermination campaign against the Jews. After witnessing the scene with his own eyes, however, he admitted, “I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth, inspecting its hermetically sealed gas chambers, in which the victims were asphyxiated, and five furnaces in which the bodies were cremated, and I have talked with German officers attached to the camp, who admitted quite frankly that it was a highly systematized place for annihilation, although they, of course, denied any personal participation in the murders.” Calling it “a place that must be seen to be believed,” he added, “I have been present at numerous atrocity investigations in the Soviet Union, but never have I been confronted with such complete evidence, clearly establishing every allegation made by those investigating German crimes.”

  Lawrence noted that a twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fence that was charged with death-dealing electricity encircled the death camp, cutting off escape. “Inside you see group after group of trim green buildings, not unlike the barracks in an Army camp in the United States,” he wrote. “Outside the fence there were fourteen high machine-gun turrets and at one edge were kennels for more than 200 especially trained, savage man-tracking dogs used to pursue escaped prisoners.” Lawrence’s story described scenes of hastily buried bodies, tens of thousands of shoes piled high, huge crematoria, and other searing images. Some newly arrived prisoners, he noted, had been taken directly to a room that was “hermetically sealed with apertures in the roof, down which the Germans threw opened cans of ‘Zyklon-B,’ a poison gas consisting of prussic acid crystals, which were a light blue chalky substance. This produced death quickly.” Near the shower house were two other death chambers fitted to use Zyklon gas or carbon monoxide, one of them measuring seventeen meters square. Lawrence’s report didn’t mention where or how the Germans had gotten their ideas for the execution gas chamber. Nor did he point out where the chemicals had come from, except to say, “We saw opened and unopened cans of Zyklon gas that bore German labels. We were told the victims always received a bath in advance of execution because the hot water opened the pores and generally improved the speed with which the poison gas took effect,” added Lawrence, who also wrote, “There were glass-covered openings in these death chambers so the Germans could watch the effect on their victims and determine when the time had come to remove their bodies.” Based on his personal inspection, he concluded, “I am now prepared to believe any story of German atrocities, no matter how savage, cruel and depraved.” He also stated that German war criminals should be hunted down and severely punished.

  Lawrence’s account was not an isolated one. By November 1944 the Jewish underground had clandestinely printed a booklet from Nazioccupied Poland that described the gas-chamber killings in the German death camp at Treblinka.44 Increasingly, oral reports as well circulated about the network of gas chambers and crematoria the Nazis had constructed—so much so that the Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a German American, felt duty-bound to demonstrate to the world that such reports of Nazi brutality were not mere propaganda, and he ordered all available units to tour a captured concentration camp. “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,” Eisenhower said. “Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.”45 Eisenhower also encouraged his forces to document what they found when they liberated the camps. William Casey, the head of secret intelligence for the European theater for the Office of Strategic Services, later observed, “The most devastating experience of the war for most of us was the first visit to a concentration camp…. We knew in a general way that Jews were being persecuted, that they were being rounded up… and that brutality and murder took place at these camps. But few if any comprehended the appalling magnitude of it. It wasn’t sufficiently real to stand out from the general brutality and slaughter which is war.”46

  Future discoveries proved to be even more ghastly. On April 18, 1945, the New York Times published a front-page story by Gene Currivan, who reported that twelve hundred German civilians were brought from the city of Weimar (long celebrated as a fount of high German culture) to see for themselves the horrors their countrymen had perpetrated at the infamous Buchenwald death camp. (One of the emaciated inmates photographed there was Elie Wiesel.) Currivan and the others saw lampshades made from human skin, shelves lined with jars containing shrunken human heads, and “human skeletons who had lost their likeness to anything human.”47 The evidence pointed to unspeakable depravity—crimes against humanity.

  With Russian and American troops rapidly closing in, executives of the chemical giant IG Farben at their immense headquarters in Frankfurt frantically assembled and burned as many incriminating documents as they could, hoping to destroy the paper trail that might seal their fate. Farben officials would later say that they had destroyed tons of documents upon orders of the counterintelligence officers of the German army and the German police. But the industrialists were also motivated to remove evidence of their own crimes. Some of the important records and files that were destroyed on March 21, 1945, included the following:

  Reports about visits to the United States and South America… all correspondence dealing with payments and deliveries of war materials to occupied, neutral, or allied countries… secret files containing information about certain individuals and visits of foreign guests to Farben plants… records, invoices, and information concerning sodium cyanide… all secret correspondence with Wehrmacht departments and government offices… records and plans for new chlorine cartel agreements to be made after the war… and circular letters from Reich Office Chemistry concerning supply and prices of chemicals in occupied countries.48

  In short, some of the cartel’s most incriminating records were gone, although shards of other evidence kept turning up. In April 1945, a few days before Germany’s surrender, a Russian news film of the “Nazi death factory” at Majdanek was shown to horrified audiences at the packed Embassy Newsreel Theatre at Broadway and Forty-sixth Street in New York. Released through Artkino Pictures, the Soviet film distributors, the footage showed the gas chambers and furnaces in grim detail, leaving the moviegoers stunned and silent. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.49

  Two days later, members of the American press captured additional graphic images of yet another death camp. The concentration camp Dachau, outside Munich, had officially opened on March 22, 1933, as a model prison for Communists and other political enemies. When American troops liberated it on April 29, 1945, they were shocked to find emaciated survivors as well as withered corpses stacked helterskelter near the ovens. Mountains of shoes and other clothing attested to those who had perished in the institution’s four gas chambers. Some visitors couldn’t smell the faint odor of bitter almonds that pervaded the cavernous, empty chambers, but the telltale piles of discarded canisters emblazoned with yellow-and-red “ZYKLON B… Giftgas!… DEGESCH” and “FARBEN INDUSTRIE” stickers suggested how the Germans had murdered millions of defenseless prisoners, using deadly cyanide gas that was purportedly manufactured as pesticide. The gas chamber wa
s only one of the Nazis’ countless atrocities, but it furnished some of the most graphic proof of their commitment to carrying out mass murder and extermination.

  The word went out—by wire, telephone, radio, newsreel, and print—about the immense scope of the genocide. Yet nobody noted that it had been the United States Army and American scientists, industrialists, and politicians who had invented the gas chamber in the first place. No American commentators acknowledged how close their own country may have come to realizing the dream of using the lethal chamber to “rid society of the unfit.” Writers seemed to have forgotten that philosophers, authors, and do-gooders on both sides of the Atlantic had been yearning for the lethal chamber for decades. Nobody stated the lamentable fact that the radical eugenicists and racial supremacists seemed to have gotten what they had wished for.

  References to the American version of the gas chamber made people uneasy, as a piece of motion picture history illustrates. In 1944 the Hollywood director Billy Wilder, a German-born Jew, filmed one of the great noir movies of all time, Double Indemnity, starring Fred MacMurray. However, in adapting Raymond Chandler’s story for the screen, Wilder decided at the last moment to leave out a final dramatic scene he had shot showing his star being executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber—perhaps because it struck too closely to a nerve and could have reminded viewers of matters too sensitive to ponder.

  Immediately after the discovery of the German death camps, many American officers and GIs initially expressed outrage toward the Germans and sympathy for the survivors they had liberated. It didn’t take long, however, for some latent prejudices against Jews and Eastern Europeans to resurface. “About June of 1945, I began to feel and see a change in attitudes in the American military towards refugees and displaced persons, especially towards Jews,” one Jewish-American officer assigned to the occupation confided. Among the arriving Americans, many of whom came from the hinterlands of the South and Midwest, where white-supremacist views remained strong, Jews were sometimes viewed as “scum, dirty, filthy people, undisciplined, dangerous, troublesome scavengers,” whereas Germans were seen as “salt of the earth.” In the words of one United Nations truck driver, “Hitler should have killed all the Jews.” As historian Joseph W. Bendersky has pointed out, many U.S. military commanders of the period were also anti-Semitic.50

  In fact, the concentration camps had been “liberated,” but their prisoners had not. Jewish former inmates of Dachau were kept confined to their barracks and sprayed with DDT to rid them of vermin.51 “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except we do not exterminate them,” Earl G. Harrison, the U.S. representative on the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, complained in a report to President Harry S. Truman in August 1945. “They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people… are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”52 Truman received Harrison’s report shortly after authorizing the plan that Harry Stimson, McCloy, and others had put forward for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities.

  Exposure of the genocide in Europe raised concerns about race to a new level in the United States. Racism—particularly against Native Americans, blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and other people of color—was far from alien to the American ethos, but talk about racial problems was still relatively muted. And while American anti-Semitism had never been as virulent as the German strain, nor had America’s treatment of Jews been as vicious as its treatment of Indians and blacks, the reports from Europe nevertheless highlighted the fact that Jews were still discriminated against in certain spheres of American society. They were often excluded from membership in elite clubs and educational institutions, for example, and barred from living in certain neighborhoods.

  In 1947 Hollywood released two major motion pictures dealing with American anti-Jewish prejudice, Crossfire, directed by Edward Dmytryk, and Gentleman’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A few months later the journalist Carey McWilliams noted in A Mask for Privilege (1948), his classic study of American anti-Semitism, “The Jewish stereotype is to be sharply distinguished from the Negro stereotype in two respects. In the first place, the Jew is universally damned, not because he is lazy, but because he is too industrious; not because he is incapable of learning, but because he is too intelligent—that is, too knowing and cunning.”53

  Passions ran high in some quarters to hold the Nazi leaders to account for their barbarous behavior. In anticipation of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt had agreed at Yalta in February 1945 that Axis leaders should be prosecuted after the war, and shortly before he died, in April of that year, President Roosevelt appointed Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court to serve as chief U.S. counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Jackson and his counterparts met to discuss ground rules for the tribunals, and the victorious nations later signed a formal agreement establishing the basis for the proceedings. After the judges and lawyers were selected and indictments were issued against the major figures, the International Military Tribunal opened its trials at Nuremberg on November 20, 1945. “Not only are they in peril of the death sentence,” wrote Rebecca West in The New Yorker, “but there is constant talk about millions of dead and arguments whether they died because of these men or not, and there now emanates from them a sense of corruption hardly less tangible than the smell which, as one walks through the old town of Nuremberg, sometimes rises from the rubble where one of the thirty thousand missing Nurembergers has not fully reacted to time and the disinfectant spray.”54

  On October 1, 1946, people around the world were riveted as verdicts were handed down at Nuremberg, resulting in death sentences for eleven of the twenty-one major defendants. Announcements of “Tode durch den Strang!” (Death by the rope!) reverberated in the courtroom. And yet, although more trials continued through April 1949, resulting in additional sentences for Nazi doctors, military and government officials, and Nazi party leaders, the American public seemed far less concerned about the outcome of the trials than the Europeans were.

  One of the Nuremberg trials prosecuted the least energetically was the IG Farben case, conducted from August 27, 1947, to July 30, 1948.55 One of the charges outlined in the complicated case was that DEGESCH, in which Farben had a 42.5 percent interest, had supplied Zyklon-B for the extermination of enslaved persons in concentration camps throughout Europe.

  According to the prosecutors, the proprietary rights to Zyklon-B belonged to DEGUSSA, which had developed the process by which Zyklon-B was manufactured using absorbent pellets. DEGUSSA had for a long time sold Zyklon-B through DEGESCH, which it and Farben controlled. DEGESCH did not physically produce Zyklon-B itself, but because it owned the patent and the manufacturing license, it was therefore considered the producer of the substance.

  Dessauer Werke für Zucker und Chemische Werke (located about fifty kilometers north of Leipzig) manufactured the lethal product. Dessauer had acquired the stabilizer from IG Farben, the warning agent from Schering AG, and the Prussic acid from Dessauer Schlempe, and then assembled them into the final Zyklon-B. Starting in 1943 it was manufactured with the warning agent, so that it could better serve its purpose as an execution gas. Once it produced Zyklon-B, DEGESCH sold the product to DEGUSSA. To cut costs, DEGUSSA sold the marketing rights of the gas to two intermediaries: Heerdt-Lingler (Heli) and Tesch und Stabenow (Testa), who split their territory along the Elbe River, with Heli handling the clients to the west and Testa handling those in the east. According to the prosecutors, Testa supplied most of the Zyklon-B to Auschwitz, and Testa’s owner, Dr. Tesch, personally conducted experiments on the feasibility of using Zyklon-B not only as a pesticide but also as a means of mass murder.56

  The owner of DEGESCH, the German chemist Dr. Gerhard Peters, was fully aware of everything the Nazis had done with his product, although he denied r
esponsibility. With the support of IG Farben, Peters and Tesch had initiated research that had circumvented many of the problems associated with hydrogen cyanide’s use as a fumigating agent in order to adapt it for use in the gas chambers. Some of this had involved adding an irritant tear gas to the odorless hydrogen cyanide that would warn anyone of the lethal gas’s presence. They had also added a chemical stabilizer that was soaked into some porous, highly absorbent material in order to produce a mixture that was not a liquid, but solid, free-flowing granules that were different from the discoids.

  As the patent holder for Zyklon-B and the leading authority on its uses for fumigation, Peters had also closely followed its use in the United States and often publicized how U.S. immigration officials and others employed it to remove pests. In the 1930s and ’40s Peters produced articles, advertisements, and at least one film to extol the virtues of Zyklon-B.

  DEGUSSA’s business manager, Dr. Walter Heerdt, the individual credited as the inventor of Zyklon-B, was among those who testified at Nuremberg. Twenty-four Farben executives were charged with plunder and spoliation of private property in German-occupied territories and other war crimes, and thirteen were convicted and sentenced to prison. But given what they had done, they got off lightly.

  At Nuremberg the victors amassed voluminous reports and shocking testimony about the Germans’ atrocities: their “waging of aggressive war”; their war crimes (violations of the laws or customs of war), such as the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity; and “crimes against humanity”—namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, as well as persecution based on racial, religious, or political grounds. But although the Nazis’ use of the gas chamber against the Jews figured prominently in the war crimes trials, it was not the main focus. When the war criminal defendants attempted to argue that some of the acts they were accused of perpetrating were not so different from acts their accusers may have committed, the court’s president, Lord Justice Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, simply responded, “We are not interested in what the Allies may have done.”57