Gas chamber

More people kept coming, always more, whom we hadn’t the facilities to kill. . . . The gas chambers couldn’t handle the load.
~ Franz Suchomel

A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used. Gas chambers were used as a method of execution for condemned prisoners in the United States beginning in the 1920s and continues to be a legal execution method in three states. During the Holocaust, large-scale gas chambers designed for mass killing were used by Nazi Germany as part of their genocide program, and also by the Independent State of Croatia at the Jasenovac concentration camp. The use of gas chambers in North Korea has also been reported.

Quotes

• The hallmarks of a regime which flouts the rule of law are, alas, all too familiar: the midnight knock on the door, the sudden disappearance, the show trial, the subjection of prisoners to genetic experiment, the confession extracted by torture, the gulag and the concentration camp, the gas chamber, the practice of genocide or ethnic clansing, the waging of aggressive war. The list is endless, Better to put up with some choleric judges and greedy lawyers.
  • Thomas Bingham, Baron Bingham of Cornhill, The Rule of Law (2010), Ch. 1. The Importance of the Rule of Law.

• Moira MacTaggert: Registration today, gas chambers tomorrow.
  • Chris Claremont and John Bryne Uncanny X-Men #141

• Though it was the most efficient, Auschwitz was not necessarily the cruellest of the Nazi death camps. The first people to be gassed by the Third Reich were, as we have seen, German mental patients; they had been asphyxiated with pure carbon monoxide gas. This method was then exported to Eastern Europe, but using exhaust fumes, first in specially converted vans, then in static gas chambers equipped with large diesel engines. This was how people were killed at Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec, the camps set up to implement the 'Action Reinhard' in the autumn of 1941. Compared with inhaling Zyklon B, which killed most victims within five to ten minutes, this was a slow way to die. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, regarded his own methods as 'humane' compared with those of his counterpart at the last of these camps, the notoriously sadistic Christian Wirth.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 507

• They developed out of the situation. The courts brought in a lot of people who had to be shot. I always objected to having to use the same men for firing squadrons over and over again. During that period one day my camp leader, Karl Fritzsch, came to me and asked me whether I could try to execute people with Zyklon B gas. Until that time, Zyklon B was used only to disinfect barracks which were full of insects, fleas, et cetera. I tried it out on some people sentenced to death in the cell prison and that is how it developed. I didn't want any more shootings, so we used gas chambers instead.
  • Rudolf Höss, To Leon Goldensohn, after being asked about the invention of gas chambers, April 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

• I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.
  • Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (1973), p. 196

• Nor did extermination policies arise from concentration policies. The Soviet concentration camp system was an integral part of a political economy that was meant to endure. The Gulag existed before, during, and after the famines of the early 1930s, and before, during, and after the shooting operations of the late 1930s. It reached its largest size in the early 1950s, after the Soviets had ceased to kill their own citizens in large numbers—in part for that very reason. The Germans began the mass killing of Jews in summer 1941 in the occupied Soviet Union, by gunfire over pits, far from a concentration camp system that had already been in operation for eight years. In a matter of a given few days in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews in the east than they had inmates in all of their concentration camps. The gas chambers were not developed for concentration camps, but for the medical killing facilities of the “euthanasia” program. Then came the mobile gas vans used to kill Jews in the Soviet east, then the parked gas van at Chełmno used to kill Polish Jews in lands annexed to Germany, then the permanent gassing facilities at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka in the General Government. The gas chambers allowed the policy pursued in the occupied Soviet Union, the mass killing of Jews, to be continued west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp. The image of the German concentration camps as the worst element of National Socialism is an illusion, a dark mirage over an unknown desert..
  • Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

The Holocaust—Yes, It Really Happened! - Awake! magazine, 1989, 4/8.

• The prisoners [transferred to labor camps] would have been spared a great deal of misery if they had been taken straight into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
  • Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz.

• Believe me, it wasn’t always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the perpetual burning.
  • Rudolf Höss

• More people kept coming, always more, whom we hadn’t the facilities to kill. . . . The gas chambers couldn’t handle the load.
  • Franz Suchomel, SS officer.