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!
