Scott Christianson - The Last Gasp

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. 9Napoleon’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 continue 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.