Soon, however, the notion of the gas chamber would change radically forever.
CHAPTER 8
ADAPTED FOR GENOCIDE
As Hitler prepared his plans for world conquest, his henchmen explored options for chemical warfare. A major program was initiated to develop all kinds of lethal gases. Some advisors expressed interest in Prussic acid, which IG Farben manufactured in large quantities as a pesticide.1 Hitler did not favor using gas on the battlefield. But as he invaded Poland, he used the press of war to secretly authorize a euthanasia program that at first was ostensibly limited to eliminating an incurably sick patient who could be killed “by medical measures of which he remains unaware.”2 In fact, it was just a first step. To make it happen, on October 1, 1939, the Führer placed the program under the supervision of Philipp Bouhler, chief of his chancellery (personal office), and Dr. Karl Brandt, his personal physician.
In keeping with the medical nature of this approach, Hitler’s SS Criminal Police used psychiatrists to provide legal authorization and help them explore different methods to secretly carry out the “mercy killings.”3 Nazi physicians experimented with lethal injection but found using a needle on one patient after another too cumbersome and intimate. As a result, they also began to test various gases. A psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Heyde, suggested they try carbon monoxide.
The “mercy killing” program was code-named Aktion T4 because its main office was at 4 Tiergartenstrasse, the address of the chancellery. In 1939 SS-Obersturmführer Christian Wirth, a former Stuttgart police officer then with the SS Criminal Police and assigned to the T4 staff, supervised the construction of the first Nazi gas chamber at Brandenburg State Hospital and Nursing Home, which had become a killing center. (Police officers would prove to be among the most zealous agents of genocide.) The unit was housed in a former brick barn. The initial arrangement included a fake shower room with benches, designed to accommodate about eighteen to twenty persons. A physician examined each patient and assigned him or her a number. Each one was then photographed and ordered to assemble with the others to prepare for their group shower. The inmates were told to take off their clothes. Some who expressed anxiety were given a sedative; others who resisted were simply beaten or shot.4
Two SS chemists with doctoral degrees, Dr. Albert Widmann and Dr. August Becker, operated the gas chamber from behind the scenes, watching through a tiny peephole. Becker observed how quickly “people toppled over, or lay on benches”—all without making any “scenes or commotions.” But he also noticed that one of the physicians (Dr. Irmfried Eberl) had opened the gas container too quickly, causing the escaping gas to make a hissing sound. Worried that this noise “would make the victims uneasy,” Becker demonstrated how to open the valve slowly and quietly, and “thereafter the killing of the mental patients progressed without further incidents.” Once the gas had done its work, the gas chamber was quickly ventilated, and SS men used special stretchers to push the naked corpses into the specially constructed crematory ovens.
A delegation of Nazi officials and physicians also witnessed the demonstration, and those in charge pronounced the gassings a success.5 One of the witnesses, Dr. Brandt, who served as Hitler’s physician and plenipotentiary for the euthanasia program, later met with the Führer and discussed various killing methods, whereupon Hitler is said to have asked him, “Which is the more humane way?” Brandt told him it was gas.6 And so, gas it was.
History does not record whether the subject of American gas chamber executions ever came up, nor has anyone found documents indicating that the Nazis closely studied the American experience. Yet it is not hard to believe that at least some Nazis, particularly chemists, psychiatrists, and perhaps some police officials, were aware that gassings had been carried out in the United States.
With Hitler’s approval, a gas chamber was built at each of six mental institutions in different parts of Germany to carry out the “mercy killings.” The initial models resembled the first makeshift chamber built in Nevada fifteen years earlier, but they had a few new twists. One of the euthanasia administrators, Viktor Brack, described the setup: “No special gas chambers were built. A room suitable in the planning of the hospital was used, a room attached to the reception ward…. That was made into a gas chamber. It was sealed, it was given special doors and windows, and then a few meters of gas pipe was laid, some kind of pipe with holes in it. Outside of this room there was a bottle, a compressed bottle, with the necessary apparatus, necessary instruments, a pressure gauge, etc.”7
Within a period of just nine months, Brandenburg alone “disinfected” (killed) at least 9,772 individuals, more than four hundred of them Jews. After the corpses were cremated, the patients’ next of kin or guardians received notices through the mail that their loved ones had passed away due to some sort of natural cause.8 Between January 1940 and August 1941 the euthanasia killing centers gassed to death seventy thousand patients and killed an estimated twenty thousand more with drugs.
One of the centers, Grafeneck, was located in a sixteenth-century castle near Stuttgart that had been converted to a hospice for invalids. Its old coach house had been converted to accommodate the gas chamber in a room disguised as a shower room. It could “shower” up to seventy-five persons at a time. It too had a crematorium and was surrounded by a heavily patrolled barbed-wire fence. Some of those gassed included disabled veterans of the German army who had fought in World War I. But in November 1940, after their relatives received sanitized death notices and rumors flared about comings and goings at the institution, local residents complained to a Nazi judge and a controversy arose.
Word of the incidents soon reached local priests and circulated up the church hierarchy. On August 4, Catholic archbishop Count Clemens August von Galen delivered a stern public sermon at Münster warning that German mental hospitals were gassing to death thousands of severely wounded German soldiers; he urged an end to the killings as well as less Nazi interference with the Church.9 The scandal spread from there. After British intelligence dropped propaganda leaflets reporting the archbishop’s charges, on August 24, 1941, Hitler suspended the euthanasia program and the Nazis scurried to cover their tracks.
But Hitler didn’t end the T4 program; instead, his killers simply slowed the pace of the killing and shifted the action to concentration camps, using traveling physicians to determine who among the inmates was unfit to work. Under this arrangement, between mid-1941 and mid-1943 nearly 4,500 inmates were taken from Mauthausen, Gusen, and Dachau camps to Hartheim killing center near Linz for gassing. Another 830 inmates from Buchenwald concentration camp were gassed at the Sonnenstein killing center in Saxony. Many more victims were later selected from other camps to suffer the same “mercy death.”10 As German forces swept over Europe, they rounded up prisoners of war, Jews, Gypsies, typhus victims, insane persons, and other targets. The Nazis constructed a steel web of prison labor facilities and death camps throughout Poland. The Polish killing centers included Chelmno (Kulmhof), Belżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, with Auschwitz being the largest and, as one writer has called it, “their eugenic apocalypse.”11