In response to the safety concerns posed by the first lethal gassing, the designers had devised a sealed compartment to fit inside the building, as Dr. Huffaker had recommended. It measured seven by eight by nine feet and had a double-paned window looking into the chamber on the east that measured ninety inches; a window on the south extended for forty-nine inches. Movement to and from the chamber was through a great wooden door that resembled a refrigerator door and was made to be airtight, like all of the chamber’s apertures. Inside the chamber, two large wooden chairs resembling electric chairs without the wires were bolted to the floor, with space for a third chair if necessary, indicating that Nevada was prepared to carry out multiple executions.1
The double-paned windows of the sealed gas chamber represented a radical departure from an open-air public gallows or hanging tree. It also meant the witnesses would occupy a closer vantage point than they did in their pewlike benches at Sing Sing and other electrocution sites. The glass would serve several important functions. First, it would encapsulate the condemned prisoner and seal in the poison gas so that it could better work its lethal magic. Second, it would keep the deadly gas safely away from the staff and witnesses. Third, it would permit the witnesses and staff to observe the condemned as he or she succumbed to death. Fourth, it would eliminate or reduce the witnesses’ experience of any unpleasant smells or sounds associated with the killing—no sizzling, excremental stench, gasps, gurgles, or sighs. The glass established distance between the doomed and the audience while at the same time providing the illusion of transparency that would satisfy the demands of democracy and the standards of modern civilization, decency, and humane killing. It served to contain the pain of dying and block the pain of execution. All that was left was the visual impression.
Given all of the problems with employing liquid cyanide and the crude gas-delivery system used in the first execution, Nevada authorities tried to be more careful in selecting the type of lethal gas they would employ in future executions. In this respect the federal government proved helpful. Under Surgeon General Cumming, the United States Public Health Service—a branch of the U.S. uniformed services, organized on a military model and closely tied to the armed forces—conducted extensive field tests to investigate different types of cyanide gas. There were several options.
The newest and most potent form of cyanide gas in the United States came from Germany. In 1922 the German firm Deutsche Gold und Silber Scheideanstalt (DEGUSSA) had perfected a process for packing volatile hydrogen cyanide into tins filled with absorbent pellets, for use as a fumigant. An ingredient such as sulfuric acid or oxalic acid could be added to the hydrocyanic acid in order to prevent the latter from decomposing. This agent stabilized the chemical until the airtight tins were opened, at which point the contents vaporized upon exposure to the atmosphere and in a short time blocked the transfer of oxygen to any organism in the vicinity. The empty tin could later be thrown away without further precautions. The product was called Zyklon. It amounted to a major breakthrough in insecticides and enjoyed immediate success as a fumigant, though DEGUSSA earned more through licensing the technology than through direct sales revenue, given the limited demand for it within Germany at the time.2 Walter Heerdt of Frankfurt am Main, who before the war had worked for Roessler & Hasslacher in the California fumigation tents, had applied for a patent with the U.S. Patent Office on June 9, 1923, and the patent was received on July 22, 1924, shortly after Gee’s execution.3
A version of this product known as Zyklon-B, consisting of a carrier of kieselguhr impregnated with liquid hydrocyanic acid and a volatile irritant, was sold through Deutsche Gesselschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung, or the German Pest Control Company (DEGESCH), the firm that had emerged in 1919 out of an earlier unit in the War Ministry and which Haber had used to conduct insecticide research. DEGESCH, which was part of DEGUSSA and a subsidiary of IG Farben, licensed two German companies for the manufacture and distribution of Zyklon. Prior to 1931, Zyklon was sold in the United States by Roessler & Hasslacher, but the company may have been reluctant to make it available for U.S. executions.4
In 1931 American Cyanamid would reach an agreement with DEGESCH to divide the world market for Zyklon-B.5 Americans would use a lot of it—so much so that during the 1920s and ’30s the Germans derived most of their profits from Zyklon-B’s licensing fees in the United States.6 The Americans found all sorts of uses for Zyklon. Under Surgeon General Cumming’s leadership, the federal Public Health Service (PHS) had spearheaded the use of potent pesticides to “delouse” ships and prisons. (A few years later the PHS would commence its infamous forty-year-long Tuskegee syphilis experiment on black sharecroppers under Cumming’s successor, Surgeon General Taliaferro Clark.) Starting in the late 1920s, American public health officials initiated one of their most shocking uses of Zyklon insecticide. A PHS officer in El Paso, Texas, J. R. Hurley, ordered Zyklon to be administered to cleanse tens of thousands of Mexicans who were arriving in the United States from Juárez.7 Officials and the news media seemed oblivious to the attendant public health consequences of spraying the clothes of incoming Mexicans with the deadly gas at the Santa Fe Bridge. At the time, the El Paso Herald noted approvingly, “Hydrocyanic acid gas, the most poisonous known, more deadly even than that used on the battlefields of Europe, is employed in the fumigation process.”8
Chemical company executives in Germany followed these developments very closely, since it had obvious commercial ramifications. Dr. Gerhard Peters of DEGESCH of Dessau, considered the world authority on Zyklon and its biggest promoter, authored numerous articles in scientific and trade journals about the virtues of Zyklon for preventing disease, especially typhus. Peters happily cited the Americans’ use of the poison on immigrants and circulated photographs showing what the Americans were doing with his pet product.9 (After World War II, Peters would be convicted in war crimes trials; in 1949 he was sentenced to five years for complicity in the extermination of the Jews.)
From August 1929 to February 1930, officers of the Public Health Service carried out experiments at the San Francisco Quarantine Station, Angel Island, California, a facility that processed many Asian immigrants. These experiments were conducted in a tightly sealed and unheated room measuring approximately five hundred cubic feet. The room adjoined a laboratory, and apertures were arranged so that live subjects or chemicals could be placed in the room without opening the door. Through a window in the door the researchers could observe the effect of the gas upon the subjects, which in these experiments were roaches. The roaches were kept in tiny wooden cages with screened sides, measuring six by four by four inches, with anywhere from two to two hundred roaches in each cage.
Different chemicals used for fumigation were administered to the imprisoned creatures. One combination consisted of straight hydrocyanic acid gas, generated from sodium cyanide, sulfuric acid, and water; another was hydrocyanic acid and cyanogen chloride gas generated from a mixture of sodium cyanide, sodium chlorate, hydrochloric acid, and water; a third involved liquid hydrocyanic acid with 10 percent chloropicrin; another was liquid hydrocyanic acid with 20 percent cyanogen chloride, or liquid hydrocyanic acid with 5 percent chloropicrin as a warning agent; and the last was Zyklon-B, which consisted of “an earthy substance impregnated with liquid hydrocyanic acid and marketed at present with five per cent chloropicrin as a warning gas.” In thirteen tests Zyklon-B in the proportion of sixty grams per one thousand cubic feet for one hour of exposure was found to be the most effective in killing all of the subjects. The researchers also reported that Zyklon was effective at both warmer temperatures and temperatures close to freezing.10