Such visions were more than just idle thinking. Within a few years they had combined with other forces to make the lethal chamber a reality. Much of the materiel and technology behind the specific gases capable of killing human beings came from the military-scientific-and-industrial complex during the First World War. Moreover, during the next quarter-century, scientists, physicians, writers, industrialists, warriors, politicians, reformers, managers, and bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic would all make their contributions to the gas chamber’s conceptual development, many of them scarcely imagining that their utopian dreams would ultimately become implicated in the greatest crime of the twentieth century.
The thinking behind eugenics seemed to dovetail nicely with the American way, as evidenced in part by how the country had handled Native Americans and blacks. “What in England was the biology of class,” one historian has written, “in America became the biology of racial and ethnic groups. In America, class was, in large measure, racial and ethnic.”5 Despite its origins in progressive social thought, American eugenics by the 1920s had become virtually synonymous with biological racism and modern degenerationism. During that period American eugenicists achieved what one historian has identified as two great political victories: the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924), which set a quota holding that no more than 2 percent of all immigrants to the United States could come from southern and eastern Europe and closed the gates to practically all newcomers from Asia; and the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927), which upheld the involuntary sterilization of a “mentally defective” inmate in Virginia.6 Following this line of thinking, one could also count Gee’s gassing as a third such “triumph,” for it turned out to have incalculable precedent-setting ramifications.
Enthusiasm for eugenics was by no means limited to the United States and Great Britain. By the early 1930s its influence was also being felt in Italy, Germany, Spain, Soviet Russia, Japan, and various South American nations. At the time—when fascists were remaking Germany, Italy, and Spain, threatening to sweep the globe as the “wave of the future,” and America was deep in the throes of its Great Depression, with the continued survival of its democratic institutions greatly imperiled—radical theories of “race” and “racial superiority” were reaching their most extreme conclusion.
It was during this politically hazardous period, from 1933 to 1937, that seven additional states in the American West, South, and Midwest followed Nevada by legally adopting lethal gas as their official method of execution, and they too commenced building gas chambers. This first wave of construction took place in the United States shortly before Germany began erecting its gas chambers. After some initial experimentation a small and obscure American company, Eaton Metal Products Company of Denver and Salt Lake City, became the world’s leading designer and maker of specially constructed gas chambers for prison executions. The U.S. government patented two models of the company’s death-dealing apparatus and aided the states to put them into use.
From the start, the American gas chambers utilized deadly cyanide gas—specifically, some form of hydrogen cyanide (HCN), also known as hydrocyanic acid or Prussic acid. With each new addition to its product line Eaton made various modifications and improvements. Additional patents for the lethal gas and gas-delivery systems for killing insects or “warm-blooded obnoxious animals”7 were filed in Europe and the United States by a bevy of German and American firms, including Deutsche Gold & Silber Scheideanstalt (DEGUSSA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in Great Britain; and Roessler & Hasslacher Chemical Company, E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company, and American Cyanamid and Chemical Corporation in North America, all of which were members of an international cartel with IG Farben (Interessen Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft, or the Community of Interests of Dye-Making Companies) of Frankfurt am Main. Hundreds of other companies often worked with them in close cooperation across the globe. Hence the advancement of gas-chamber technology was a joint effort involving players from several different countries and spheres.
Detailed news reports, articles in scientific journals, and industry sources describing America’s early lethal-gas executions circulated across the globe. The first reports reached Hitler in Germany at the crucial moment when he was on trial or in prison writing Mein Kampf. Fifteen or so years later, he latched onto the gas-chamber idea as a more efficient and “humane” method of mass extermination. As the Nazi dictator put into action his long-threatened genocide against the Jews, his underlings devised many practical enlargements of its design and operations, building upon what the Americans had recently done and were still doing.
The Nazis appropriated the evolving American method of gas-chamber executions and embellished upon it with unfettered ferocity, adding new ways to “lure the victims to the chambers, to kill them on an assembly line, and to process their corpses”—grand-scale refinements that enabled them to gas and cremate more than a million human beings with astonishing speed and efficiency.8 Under the Nazis the gas chamber evolved into the most efficient technique ever invented for wholesale extermination—a high-volume methodology that was less messy than shooting individuals and shoveling them into pits, chopping off heads one by one, or slowly starving them, and much less time consuming than hanging, injecting, or electrocuting each terrified victim.
After first employing carbon monoxide as their lethal agent, the Nazis ultimately settled upon using a brand of hydrocyanic acid known as Zyklon-B, a compound that had been invented shortly after World War I and patented as an insecticide in Germany in 1922 as an offshoot from that nation’s continuing chemical warfare research. Its inventor had actually worked for an American company in California’s burgeoning fumigation industry. Hydrogen cyanide gas already had been used to execute prisoners in the United States, where the method had been upheld by American courts as not constituting cruel and unusual punishment and was accepted by most members of the American public. The U.S. Public Health Service, among other official bodies, also had been issuing public reports about Zyklon-B and other combinations involving hydrocyanic acid for several years prior to its introduction in German death camps. Embracing and perfecting the gas chamber enabled the Nazis to marshal the apparatuses and techniques of modernity on an unprecedented scale. Unlike the Americans, who required witnesses and public reports for their executions, the Germans went to extreme lengths to implement their gas executions with great secrecy. By the time they were through, they had slaughtered millions of hapless prisoners. As much as possible, they tried to cover up their crimes by dynamiting many of their crematoria and gas chambers, murdering the witnesses, incinerating the corpses, destroying the records, and professing ignorance about anything that might prove their culpability.
The Final Solution claimed more than six million Jewish men, women, and children from 1941 to 1945, more than three million of them by various lethal gases (carbon monoxide and later hydrogen cyanide), whereas the Americans would end up gassing about six hundred convicted adult criminals over a span of seventy-five years, making it unreasonable to compare the two experiences. This book in no way equates the Holocaust with what was done in the United States, nor does it blame the Americans for the Nazi atrocities. Yet it is interesting to note that it was Americans who designed and built the first prison gas chambers, American scientists who selected cyanide gas as the poison of choice for executions, and American firms with close ties to German chemical corporations that provided the deadly gas (and paid the Germans for patents and licensing), as well as Americans who devised many of the basic killing procedures and bureaucratic modi operandi for putting to death helpless human beings by that means. American prisons functioned as the first laboratory for carrying out gas executions. Initially, it was American chemists, legislators, governors, prosecutors and defense counsels, prison wardens, public health officials, physicians, guards, executioners, prisoners, clergymen, business executives and sales personnel, technicians, clerks, political opponents, representatives of the news media, local residents, and members of the general public who were confronted with the issue of the gas chamber. Two American firms—Roessler & Hasslacher (which DuPont purchased in 1930) and American Cyanamid—also manufactured Zyklon-B under license from the Germans, and they helped to advance its image as well as its application. It was Americans who initially provided a scientific, ethical, and legal rationale and justification for gas executions and who trumpeted their actions across the globe. The Nazis took it from there, ultimately making gas-chamber executions and hydrogen cyanide their preferred tools for mass extermination, using it to carry out what many advocates of the lethal chamber had long espoused—the eradication of the “unfit” who were “unworthy of life.”