Pursuing this haunted path has brought great sadness; my battered heart grieves in memory of those lost.
INTRODUCTION
The huge literature about the Holocaust has assumed that, in the words of one leading historian, “The creation of the gas chamber was a unique invention of Nazi Germany.”1 In fact, however, the lethal chamber, later called the execution gas chamber or homicidal gas chamber, was originally envisioned before Adolf Hitler was born, and the first such apparatus claimed its initial human victim nine years before the Nazis rose to power and more than sixteen years before they executed anyone by lethal gas.
The earliest gas chamber for execution purposes was constructed in the Nevada State Penitentiary at Carson City and first employed on February 8, 1924, with the legislatively sanctioned and court-ordered punishment of Gee Jon, a Chinese immigrant who had been convicted of murdering another Chinese immigrant, amid a wave of anti-immigrant and racist hysteria that gripped the country at that time.
America’s and the world’s first execution by gas arose as a byproduct of chemical warfare research conducted by the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service and the chemical industry during the First World War. Embraced by both Democrats and Republicans, including many progressives, and touted by both the scientific and legal establishments as a “humane” improvement over hanging and electrocution, the gas chamber was also considered a matter of practical social reform. Its adherents claimed that the gas chamber would kill quickly and painlessly, without the horrors of the noose or the electric chair, and in a much more orderly and peaceful fashion. But they were quickly proven wrong. Technocrats nevertheless kept tinkering with its workings for seventy-five years in a vain attempt to overcome the imperfections of lethal gas.
Eventually adopted by eleven states as the official method of execution, lethal gas claimed 594 lives in the United States from 1924 to 1999, until it was gradually replaced by another, supposedly more humane, method of capital punishment, lethal injection (see table 1). Along the way, the specter of the gas chamber evoked revulsion throughout the world and eventually contributed to the ongoing decline in America’s resort to the death penalty.
Beginning in the late 1930s, and with unparalleled ferocity immediately after the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi regime began using every conceivable means to murder prisoners: beatings, starvation, the guillotine, lethal injection, and firing squads, to name a few. The gas chamber turned out to be their most efficient form of mass slaughter. The Third Reich took the practice of gas-chamber executions from the Americans and expanded upon it, developing a huge industrial system to systematically slaughter millions of innocent men, women, and children in an effort to carry out genocide against the Jewish people and Gypsies and eliminate mentally handicapped persons, homosexuals, and political radicals. Unlike other execution methods, the gas chamber—sealed off and removed from witnesses’ sight and hearing—finally proved to be the preferred way for the Nazis to efficiently exterminate large groups of persons and with the least threat of exposure; it enabled the killers to better conceal their atrocious crimes against humanity, thereby reducing the dangers of resistance, reprisals, and self-incrimination. At the same time it offered the pretense of quick and painless euthanasia.
This book is the first in-depth attempt to trace the dreadful history of the gas chamber, providing both a step-by-step account of its operations and an analysis of the factors that contributed to its rise and fall.2 I recount some of the scientific, political, and legal background leading up to the adoption of lethal gas, describe the executions, and outline the struggle to abolish the use of gas-chamber executions, all within the social, political, and legal context of the day. Although the Holocaust figures prominently in this history, forever shattering the gas chamber’s image as a “humane” method of execution, most of this book focuses on its reign in the United States. There too its operation can hardly be described as painless or kind.
As hard as it may be to believe today, given what we know about Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps, the gas chamber originated as a grand but practical utopian idea. Like gas itself, the sinuous rise of what was first called the lethal chamber led (though not always intentionally) to other variants, although its sometime chaotic movements later proved difficult to track.
The lethal chamber was a construct of modernity. Charles Darwin’s formulation in Origin of Species (1859) of natural selection as the survival process of living things in a world of limited resources and changing environments transformed humankind’s relationship to nature and supplied a coherent discourse for Western capitalism. At first Darwin was writing about the natural world without reference to man, but many of his contemporaries and followers saw his model as having profound religious, social, and political implications for humankind as well as meaning for the lower animal and vegetable kingdoms, and Darwin himself later extended some of his musings into those realms as well. However, it wasn’t so much what Darwin intended or initially wrote as what others made from it that later caused so much trouble, particularly as his readers combined his theory with another notion gaining currency at that time.
The English philosopher Herbert Spencer popularized the term “the survival of the fittest,” envisioning a form of class warfare between the impoverished “unfit,” who were doomed to failure, and the privileged elite, whom he and many of his peers saw as worthy persons destined to succeed. “The whole effort of nature,” according to Spencer, was to “get rid of” the pauper classes “and to make room for the better…. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.”3 For some, then, after Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared, the notion of a battle for the “survival of the fittest” among lower forms of life gave rise to notions of human racial supremacy and imperialism that came to be called (rather unfairly) “social Darwinism” and “scientific racism.”
As Victorians raced to come to terms with some of these ramifications, a constellation of Britain’s intellectual elite—scientists, medical titans, visionaries, and social reformers—gathered around the newfound ethos known as eugenics. Its originator, Sir Francis Galton (who was Darwin’s first cousin), had coined the term in 1883 to signify the scientific betterment of the human race and the supremacy of one race and species over the others. He defined the word as referring to “the science which deals with all the influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.”4
Believing that degeneracy or degeneration posed a serious problem for humankind, many of these eugenicists scrambled to devise solutions they thought would advance the human race, in large measure by eliminating the defective or degenerate aspects of humankind. Such notions proved so powerful that within just a few years, by the turn of the twentieth century, eugenics took on the righteousness of a religion and became a growing social movement whose members longed to change the world. In short order the eugenicists’ discriminating beliefs about hereditarily superior and inferior classes would contribute to calls for immigration control, intelligence testing, birth control, involuntary sterilization, racial segregation, large-scale institutionalization, and euthanasia. Intoxicated by such ideas, some eugenicists soon began to envision what came to be known as the “lethal chamber,” a modern mechanism to cull the gene pool of its defective germ plasm and free civilized society from unwanted burdens. It would be a quality-control appliance that would remove society’s unwanted pests and detritus as humanely and painlessly as possible.