What led Nazis to use gas chambers in order to conduct one of the most brutal genocidal
campaigns in human history?
There’s no lighthearted way to approach this shockingly gruesome and tragic historical
event, so let’s get right to it.
Here’s how Nazi gas chambers actually worked.
In 1939, trouble was brewing in Europe.
Adolf Hitler had by now become a full-fledged dictator, and the Nazi Party ruled Germany
with an iron fist.
Being a raging anti-Semite backed by other raging anti-Semites, Hitler had succeeded
in convincing a fair amount of people that the Jewish population of Germany, and Europe
at large, was to blame for most of society’s ills.
Of course, there were other groups Hitler wished to be rid of as well.
Besides his political adversaries, he believed Roma, homosexual people, and the mentally
or physically disabled, just to name a few, had no right to exist in German society.
The Nazis wanted to capture and eventually exterminate these people.
This meant they were searching for the most efficient methods with which to do so.
Enter the “Euthanasia Program” in 1939, a program of mass murder targeting institutionalized
patients, that was as far from “euthanasia” as anything we could imagine.
According to Webster’s, euthanasia is “the painless killing of a patient suffering from
an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma”.
Though it is still a highly contentious practice illegal in many countries, euthanasia requires
either the consent of a mentally able patient approaching their end of life, or a medical
professional’s assessment that a patient’s comatose state is irreversible.
What the Nazi party did instead was a trial run for murder on a mass scale.
Calling the start of their genocide a “Euthanasia Program” was one of the many ways in which
they attempted to cover unthinkably evil actions with misleading euphemisms and language.
Nazis believed those who were severely physically, mentally, or neurologically disabled were
a financial burden on the German state, a genetic burden on German society, and should
be eliminated.
And because the Nazis were truly trying their hardest to ensure an express ticket to hell,
they started this “elimination” with the mass murder of children.
Hitler’s private chancellery director, Philipp Bouhler, and his attending physician, Karl
Brandt, hatched the initial plan for what would become the “Euthanasia Program”
in the spring of 1939.
On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior decreed that all medical professionals
were to report any infants under the age of three who showed signs of physical or mental
disabilities to the state.
A couple of months later, parents were encouraged to admit their disabled children to “special
pediatric clinics” in Germany and Austria.
The reality, as anyone who has read World War II history can imagine, was light years
away from what parents were told.
The “special pediatric clinics” were, in fact, killing centers.
Staff hired specifically for this purpose would murder the children in their custody
by either starvation or lethal overdoses.
As time went on, older and older children were admitted to these centers.
At least 10,000 disabled German children were murdered through the “Euthanasia Program”,
though the true numbers are likely higher and may never be known.
However, the methods of killing disabled children - we hate that this sentence exists in this
world - were time and energy consuming, according to the sociopaths spearheading the extermination.
And they were about to extend their cruelty to adult patients as well, under the guise
of a “T4” campaign, meaning a rapid increase in the amount of people targeted for murder.
This led to the first use of gassing for mass murder.
The Nazi Party quickly established six gassing centers throughout the country - Bernburg,
Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein - though they clearly weren’t
called gassing centers in the press.
Questionnaires were distributed to hospitals, with patients filling in information about
their health issues.
Special emphasis was placed on the effect any conditions had on a patient’s ability
to work; anyone considered unable to fully participate in the labor force was transported
to these camps and killed.
The first camps used pure carbon monoxide gas.
As in most killing camps, the gassing chambers were disguised as showers, so patients wouldn’t
know the fate that awaited them.
The bodies of the victims were then burned in adjacent crematoria, and ashes were placed
in urns at random in order to be delivered to their family members.
Physicians and administrators hired by the Nazis would list fictional, most often natural,
causes of death, on any death certificates sent to the surviving family.
Though the Nazi Party tried to hide the reality of what was happening in these gas chambers,
it quickly became an open secret to the German public.
Protests took place throughout Germany, and several members of the German clergy spoke
out against the practice.
Due to public pressure, Hitler temporarily - very temporarily - halted the Euthanasia
Program in August of 1941.
But it was too late.
Between January 1940 and August 1941, approximately 70,723 institutionalized patients had been
gassed.
For the Nazis, the program had been a success.
They had found a brutal and grotesquely efficient killing method they would perfect and use
throughout the course of the Holocaust and World War II: the gas chambers.
And unbeknownst to most of the world at large, they were already employing this method elsewhere.
In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
The Einsatzgruppen, the “mobile killing units” of the SS (Schutzstaffel), were tasked
with the mass shooting of civilians.
As the invasion continued members of the Einsatzgruppen complained that shooting so many women and
children was causing them mental anguish and fatigue.
In order to make the jobs of the Einsatzgruppe soldiers easier, the Nazi command gave them
gas vans, which had occasionally been previously used in the invasion of Poland, but not systematically.
These vans were vacuum-sealed trucks, where the engine exhaust - in the form of carbon
dioxide - could be diverted and pumped into the van’s interior.
This method quickly suffocated the people the Einsatzgruppen soldiers locked inside.
The use of gas vans, thanks to the fact that they were both an efficient and cost-saving
method of mass murder, quickly became widespread with civilian communities on the front lines.
However, at some point in 1941, the SS decided that in order to achieve the “Final Solution”,
the horrible euphemism given to the Nazi Party’s decision to exterminate all Jewish people
on the continent, larger and more efficient gassing methods would need to be implemented.
The SS had already started sending Jewish people and Roma to killing centers such as
Chelmno, where they were rounded up and killed in the aforementioned gas vans.
To accelerate the genocide of the Jewish population, stationary gas chambers were now built into
the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka in Poland.
By 1942, these gas chambers were fully operational.
Carbon monoxide gas was still the poison of choice, pumped into the chambers by diesel
engines.
Victims were often told to pack in tightly with raised arms, in order to fit more people
into the chamber and accelerate their suffocation by carbon monoxide.
The final and deadliest of many attempted methods would be used at the most infamous
and destructive extermination camp of all: Auschwitz.
To improve the efficiency of their killings, the SS had started experiments with other
toxins for suffocation, including Zyklon B.
This chemical came in the form of amethyst-blue pellets, and was originally used for fumigation
of pests.
The Nazis realized that when the pellets came into contact with air, they became an exceptionally
lethal gas, known as hydrocyanic or prussic acid.
After conducting an experiment in September of 1941 by gassing 600 Soviet prisoners of
war and 250 sick prisoners, they concluded that Zyklon B killed people more rapidly than
any toxins the SS had experimented with before.
Thus, Zyklon B was chosen for use in Auschwitz.
The killing machine that was the Auschwitz death camp worked frighteningly well.
Members of the SS would march people chosen for death to the gas chambers.
Anyone disabled or too weak to walk would be transported in trucks.
Initially only crematorium I was used, though by 1943, captured people were being escorted
to crematoria II, III, IV, and V.
Jewish people, Roma, and other victims would be ordered to disrobe, either in wooden barracks,
an antechamber, or outside, depending on how many people were being transported to Auschwitz
that day and how crowded the camp was.
The SS soldiers kept up the charade of the chambers being “showers” where the prisoners
had to bathe and disinfect themselves before entering the camp.
Afterwards, men, women, and children were locked in the chamber as the large door of
the entrance was sealed off.
A masked soldier would then open a vent on the roof to pour Zyklon B pellets into the
chamber.
He would then immediately close the vent to seal off the gas chamber completely.
The victims, who were packed in tightly to begin with, had no way out as the gas from
the Zyklon B pellets filled the air and inevitably, their lungs.
They would quickly - usually in a matter of a few minutes - suffocate and die.
After the soldiers outside believed everyone to be dead, the toxic air was pumped out of
the chamber for approximately 15 minutes.
During the biggest mass deportations to Auschwitz, in the years of 1943 and 1944, the Nazi-operated
gas chambers, with the use of Zyklon B, killed an average of 6,000 Jewish people and others
per day.
Some Jewish people who were deported to the camp were made members of the Sonderkommando.
Though they avoided being killed right away, the enslaved Jewish members of the Sonderkommando
underwent another kind of hell.
The Nazis had observed the mental toll close contact with dead bodies had taken on the
German soldiers unloading the gas vans after their victims had been murdered.
To avoid their soldiers being negatively affected by such sights as much as possible, the Nazis
forcibly tasked a group of Jewish prisoners with entering the gas chambers after each
gassing.
The Sonderkommando members were made to pry apart dead bodies using poles and hose down
the gas chambers.
They were also forced to burn the bodies of their fellow murdered Jewish People, collect
any gold fillings or jewelry they came across, as well as women’s hair, and throw the ashes
of the victims in a nearby river.
If any bones hadn’t burned down completely, the men of the Sonderkommando had to grind
them down and also throw them in the river or in a landfill.
One of the Sonderkommando members, a Greek Jew and former resident of Thessaloniki by
the name of Marcel Nadjari, wrote down very accurate descriptions of what took place in
Auschwitz, a gruesome reality the Nazi Party tried to hide from the eyes of the world.
Nadjari describes the gas chamber facilities as such:
“The crematorium is a big building with a wide chimney and 15 ovens.
Under a garden there are two enormous cellars.
One is where people undress and the other is the death chamber.
People enter it naked and once about 3,000 are inside it is locked and they are gassed.
After six or seven minutes of suffering they die.”
Due to his forcible conscription to the Sonderkommando, Nadjari had to escort victims to the chambers
and saw many groups enter and die.
He knew exactly what the gas chambers were.
However, the Nazis, in order to keep up the ruse that the chambers were “showers”
to potential victims, even went so far as to install pipes and fake showerheads in the
rooms.
In fact, the Nazi plan to hide the atrocities being committed at Auschwitz extended to almost
every aspect of the gas chambers, including the hidden delivery of the Zyklon B itself
in hermetically sealed canisters.
As Nadjari writes, “the gas canisters were always delivered in a German Red Cross vehicle
with two SS men.
They then dropped the gas through openings - and half an hour later our work began.
We dragged the bodies of those innocent women and children to the lift, which took them
to the ovens.”
Nadjari wrote 13 pages of letters detailing the horrors of Auschwitz, which he stuffed
into a sealed thermos flask and buried near one of the crematoriums.
Miraculously, Nadjari would survive Auschwitz, though many of his fellow Sonderkommando members
didn’t.
At one point, Nadjari describes a revolt the Sonderkommando, who attempted to blow up the
crematoria at Auschwitz using gunpowder stolen from the Nazi soldiers.
The revolt failed and all participating members were executed.
Gas chambers led to the death of millions of Jewish victims, Roma, homosexuals, disabled
people, and others in Auschwitz and many extermination camps.
Though accurate numbers may be nearly impossible to collect, historians estimate that approximately
6 million Jewish people and 5 million others were killed during the Holocaust, the vast
majority of those in gas chambers.
Though this was not one of our easier videos, we hope it was an informative one, because
it’s important to remember even the darkest parts of our history.
You can also use this video as incentive to be extra disgusted every time someone online
describes themselves as a neo-Nazi.
Now that you’ve made it to the end and have about 4,000 more reasons to hate Hitler, perhaps
check out one of our more lighthearted historical videos, or one of our cool scientific videos
instead!