Whether it was because of a “soft spot” McCloy had for German fascists or realpolitik (the pressures of the cold war and the onset of the Korean War had “made more important than ever a pro-American West Germany, rearmed and thus a bulwark against the Russians”), his failure to hold the Nazis and American interests to full account for their crimes put a disturbing twist on both the judgment at Nuremberg and his own legacy as far as some historians are concerned. Telford Taylor, who took part in the prosecution of the Nazi war criminals, wrote, “Wittingly or not, Mr. McCloy has dealt a blow to the principles of international law and concepts of humanity for which we fought the war.”75 But McCloy’s posture toward Nazi Germany also needs to be reexamined with closer scrutiny of his deep ties to Nazi interests and American corporations that were linked to IG Farben.
Regardless of to what extent any of the Nazis were held accountable for their war crimes, by the early 1950s the gas chamber had acquired an extremely bad reputation as a result of what the Nazis had done. Nevertheless, it remained to be seen how Americans would view their own gas chambers. The nation’s leading anti–death penalty organization, the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment, had “barely survived the 1940s,” and up until that point gas executions had generally been regarded as “humane.”76 Lethal gas was still the law of the land in several American states, and the death penalty itself did not seem to be in much danger of ending.
PART TWO
THE FALL OF THE GAS CHAMBER
CHAPTER 9
CLOUDS OF ABOLITION
In the wake of two world wars that had occurred in the span of less than thirty years and cost more than ninety million lives (more than a million of those by the gassing of innocent civilians in prison camps), and with growing fears of annihilation from nuclear bombs or other mass destruction, not to mention rising concerns about the “enemy within,” Americans had much to reflect upon. Among other things, the traumas of World War II had sensitized many nations to the need for international standards of human rights and treatment of prisoners. Millions of POWs and civilians had died or been murdered in captivity, both during the war and after.1
Britain’s Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, appointed in May of 1949, undertook what was to that point the most exhaustive study of capital punishment. Although its five-hundred-page public report, issued in 1953, did not directly argue for abolition of the death penalty, it did question its underlying rationales, including the principle of deterrence, which was becoming so crucial in the nuclear arms race. Based on scientific review, the panel further concluded that executions by lethal gas, electrocution, or lethal injection were no more “humane” than killing by hanging. The commission’s conclusions prompted intense debate in England, Canada, and elsewhere about the appropriateness of capital punishment by any method. By 1954 many nations, including Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, most countries in Latin America, and New Zealand, had already abandoned the death penalty.2
In the United States, however, serious consideration of abolition was slower in coming, for political reasons. On the one hand, capital punishment had been used since the earliest days of exploration and colonization; it was still legal in all but a few states. On the other hand, America was entering the early stages of the black civil rights movement, with its calls for desegregation, racial equality, and an end to lynching. Moreover, the period 1951–53 witnessed one of the greatest waves of prison revolts in American history, including disturbances in some of the gas-chamber states, such as Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Oregon. Prisoners’ rights and the abolition of the death penalty were suddenly on many reformers’ agenda, and capital punishment was emerging as a key civil rights issue.
The memory of World War II cast a painful shadow over American society, but like the aftermath of so many catastrophes, the postwar period often prompted deep-seated desires to suppress, forget and overcome the traumatic past. “By the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s,” one historian later wrote, “talk of the Holocaust was something of an embarrassment in American life.” Deeper recognition of Germany’s crimes against humanity, including its use of the gas chamber, was hampered in part by cold war considerations that suddenly had transformed America’s former ally, the Soviet Union, into a new apotheosis of evil, and its former archenemy, Germany, into a “gallant” outpost against Communist domination.3 As a result, some of the revulsion previously expressed toward Nazism was now converted into disdain for “totalitarianism,” which included Communism as well as National Socialism. American cold warriors framed the Soviets’ ruthless persecution of political opponents, curtailment of civil liberties, and resort to extensive use of labor camps and executions as something like what the Nazis had done, conflating Stalin’s crimes with Hitler’s. At the same time, any effort to confront America’s shortcomings and complicity was swept aside as unpatriotic.
Because the Soviets hadn’t used lethal gas for execution purposes, and the Americans had, litanies involving gas chamber executions were not so readily invoked in cold war America; and such particulars as the manufacture of Zyklon-B and American complicity in the international cyanide cartel were scrupulously avoided.
Also, with many assessments of the Communist threat in the United States numbering Jews as the most numerous supporters of Communist organizations and ideas, anti-Communist zealots such as Fries and Senator Joseph McCarthy still tended to depict Jews as the most dangerous group. This paranoia about Jews reached its zenith in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple of New York Jewish Communists who in 1950 were charged with stealing “the secret of the atomic bomb” and passing it on to the Soviets.4 When the United States government found the pair guilty and sentenced them to death, a Rosenberg supporter from the Communist-dominated Civil Rights Congress told a rally, “Every Jew knows in his heart that the Rosenbergs have been convicted because of anti-Semitism.”5 The Rosenbergs and their supporters also cited Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and use of the gas chambers. Hours before they were to be executed, while thousands of supporters gathered at Seventeenth Street in New York to protest the executions, Julius Rosenberg wrote, “Ethel writes it is made known we are the first victims of American-Fascism.”6 President Eisenhower had the power to stop the Rosenbergs’ execution, but he did not. Originally scheduled to take place on the Jewish sabbath, the event was moved up a few hours to avoid giving offense. Many Jews, however, were still incensed. “We were only eight or so years past the discovery of the mounds of dead in Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, and other marks of Cain on the forehead of our century,” wrote the playwright Arthur Miller. “They could not merely be two spies being executed but two Jews.”7 The couple went to their deaths in Sing Sing’s electric chair on June 19, 1953, delivering a brutal warning to American dissidents, especially Jewish ones.
Even in the wake of the controversial Rosenberg execution, a Gallup poll of November 1953 found that 68 percent of the American public still supported capital punishment for murder, with only 25 percent opposing it. Public support in the East actually stood at 73 percent. As the method to carry it out, most (55 percent) favored electrocution, and 22 percent favored lethal gas, compared to only 4 percent for hanging and 3 percent for shooting.