Hello dear users!

As I am sure many of you have already heard, today has seen a certain commotion over comments made by a US government official regarding the Nazis, the use of chemical weapons in WWII and the Holocaust. Because recent experience surrounding the comments of Ken Livingstone has shown us at here at this sub that it is likely that we will be see an uptick of questions surrounding this issue, I have decided to preemptively put together some answers and information surrounding these issues.

• "You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons."

According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons "the term chemical weapon may be applied to any toxic chemical or its precursor that can cause death, injury, temporary incapacitation or sensory irritation through its chemical action." This internationally recognized definition of chemical weapons includes many things, from nerve agents like Tabun and Sarin to the more conventional pepper spray and CS gas. It also includes poison and other gas, both famously used by Nazi Germany to kill millions of people.

The utilization of gas as a means of mass killing has in fact become so strongly related to the Nazis and their policies that it as well as the used gas chambers have become by now almost synonymous with the Holocaust and other Nazi mass crimes, even despite the fact that a lot of other means of killing, foremost among them mass-shootings, were also employed by the Nazis.

Historians generally distinguish between four different kinds of mass killings via gas as employed by the Nazis depending on the technical method of killing:

• In the earliest iteration of Nazi mass murder via gassing (1940/41), in the six T4 killing centers (Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein Pirna, Bernburg and Hadamar) the Nazis employed Carbon Monoxide from gas canisters that was funneled into gas chambers. The same methods were also employed during the mass killing of concentration camp inmates unable to work dubbed "Aktion 14f13" and by the so-called Sonderkommando Lange, a special SS and Police unit that used two gas vans with the same method to kill both Polish intellectuals as well as inmates of Polish mental and handicapped institutions around the same time. This method was also later used in the first gas chamber in the Majdank death camp

• In the death camps of Aktion Reinhard (Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec) as well as in the Chelmno death camp and in the Soviet Union and Serbia, the Nazis used exhaust fumes from a variety of motors to mass-kill people. In the Reinhard Camps, a tank engine was hooked to a funnel that lead into a gas chamber while in Chelmno as well as in Serbia, the USSR and Chelmno especially constructed gas vans were used where with the flip of a switch the driver could funnel the motor exhausts in the back cabin of the van.

• In Auschwitz – most famously – but also in a second gas chamber in Majdanek, the Nazis used Zyklon B, cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It was a poisonous gas that interfered with cellular respiration, meaning it's victims would effectively suffocate while air was all around them. Zyklon B was also supplied to the considerable smaller gas chambers in Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, and Buchenwald among others.

• The gas chambers in Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler used a different compound that was also based on Hydrogen cyanide or prussic acid as it was called that was liquid.

In these actions combined, the Nazis killed more than 3 million people using gas. The original idea to do so was developed by Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the chief of Hitler's personal Chancellery and Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician whom Hitler charged in 1939 with designing and carrying out the T4 killing program against handicapped and mentally ill in German institutions. Bouhler and Brandt decided on the use of gas for two reasons: First, they deemed it economical and in line with the mandate that the program should be carried out in secret (it would have been hard to hide mass shootings in Germany) and secondly, they thought that if details of the program would became known to the public, they could at least claim that its victims "peacefully fell asleep".

In reality however, death by Carbon Monoxide poisoning is far from "peacefully falling asleep". Rather, as witnesses to the T4 gassing have described it, death took anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes all the while the victims were shaken by painful cramps and panicked.

The T4 program and its way of mass killing was what also later lead to a similar method employed in the Aktion Reinhard Camps and with the gas vans. It was in fact the about 500 employees of the T4 killing centers who when the program was stopped due to public outrage got with a delay transferred to the Reinhard Camps, camps designed to kill the Jews of Poland from spring 1942 onward. Because pure Carbon Monoxide in gas canisters was hard to obtain / deliver in occupied Poland, the instead opted to use the tank engines as their source for gas.

The gas vans were originally an idea of the Sonderkommando Lange and while the origin of the first two models is unclear, it is very likely that Lange build them himself. Taking this idea and with the input from the T4/Reinhard personnel, it was the Kriminaltechnische Institut (KTI or Criminal Technological Institute) in Germany that developed the more "refined" versions of the gas vans that were used for mass killing in Chelmno, Serbia and the Soviet Union.

To understand how the use of Zyklon B came around, it is important to understand that the Auschwitz personnel under commandant Rudolf Höss was actually competing with the Reinhard Aktion for who could build the more effective and useful concentration / death camp. Höss and his personnel were looking for more effective and economic ways to mass murder people and after several experiments, including the first gassing in Auschwitz of Soviet POWs, in 1942 they settled on Zyklon B.

Zyklon B as a Hydrogen cyanide has – according to Höss – several advantages over exhaust gasses. Unlike in the reinhard Camps were the tank engines had broken down several times due to over-use, this would not happen with Zyklon B. Also, Höss argued that it generally killed faster. While exhaust gasses could take anywhere from 8 to 18 minutes to kill a gas chamber full of people, Zyklon B was able to cut down this time by about half thus making the time between killing actions shorter and subsequently being able to kill more people per day.

While all this occurred, the use of liquid cyanide in Sachsenhausen was actually experimental in order to find an even more economical and faster way to kill thousands of people daily.

So, in conclusion, the Nazis made extensive use of gasses that fall well within the definition of chemical weapons and killed more than 3 million people using this method.

• "But what about the use of chemical weapons as part of conventional warfare along the lines of WWI?"

Hello everyone. I decided it was easier to just make my way through a massive multi-volume reference work than to sift through the askhistorians list and try get piecemeal views on particular subjects in order to build a solid general understanding of history.

My question is Cambridge Ancient History which goes from prehistory to late antiquity in 14 volumes (technically 19 if you count v1 part 1, v2 part 2, etc.) still up-to-date / worth the read? The thing is the first volume in this massive set was first published in 1970, but was reprinting for the 6th or 7th time in 2006; the last volume was first published in 2000 and reprinted in 2007...So I'm hoping that because these were reprinted within the last 10 years they are fairly up-to-date? I don't need perfection, just competency.

If this is out of date, do you have any suggestions for anything comparable in scope and up to date?