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Typhus became virtually extinct in Germany before World War II, but during the war it rocketed to levels at least as high as during the World War I. It is hard to know whether the initially low rates of typhus in German-occupied Poland were due to energetic implementation of delousing and vaccination or because the disease was an inherently trivial problem before the German attack on the Soviet Union. Yet once disease rates began to spiral, typhus became caught up in the idea of genocide. The fear of infection was a pretext for isolating Jews. While genuine delousing involved much physical and psychological torture, the question arises as to how it came about that the abuse of Zyklon gas chambers for genocide became a crucial phase of the Holocaust. The horrors of euthanasia, and the history of the extermination camps in Poland have been extensively reconstructed by historians. The criminological arguments against cremation as destroying evidence of murder rendered cremation attractive for the instigators of the Holocaust.

In 1929, Nevada prison officials tore down the original death house and built a more elaborate structure using convict labor. In response to the safety concerns posed by the first lethal gassing, the designers had devised a sealed compartment to fit inside the building. Given all of the problems with employing liquid cyanide and the crude gas-delivery system used in the first execution, Nevada authorities tried to be more careful in selecting the type of lethal gas they would employ in future executions. The newest and most potent form of cyanide gas in the United States came from Germany. The product was called Zyklon. Nevada's shiny new gas chamber was inaugurated on June 2, 1930, on Bob White, who had been condemned for killing a fellow gambler at Elko. In the face of new refinements in gas-chamber design and fumigation, other states also began to consider switching to gas. One of them was Arizona, which amended its constitution to provide for the death penalty to be inflicted by administering lethal gas.

This book traces the dreadful history of the gas chamber, providing both a step-by-step account of its operations and an analysis of the factors that contributed to its rise and fall. It recounts some of the scientific, political, and legal background leading up to the adoption of lethal gas, describes the executions, and outlines the struggle to abolish the use of gas-chamber executions. Although the Holocaust figures prominently in this history, most of this book focuses on its reign in the United States. The lethal chamber, later called the execution gas chamber or homicidal gas chamber, was originally envisioned before Adolf Hitler was born. The earliest gas chamber for execution purposes was constructed in the Nevada State Penitentiary at Carson City and first employed on February 8, 1924. The specter of the gas chamber evoked revulsion throughout the world and eventually contributed to the ongoing decline in America's resort to the death penalty. Nazi Germany appropriated the evolving American method of gas-chamber executions and embellished upon it with unfettered ferocity.

By the late 1970s, public opinion in the United States was swinging ever more strongly in favor of the death penalty. Although the public's appetite for gas chambers had diminished, eleven states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico (until 1978), North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Wyoming—still clung to that method of capital punishment. But the legal battle over the constitutionality of lethal gas executions, and the rise of the new method of lethal injection, were just beginning to take hold. Henry Schwarzschild, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project, served as one of the key national players in the anti-death penalty movement in the late 1970s. After John Spenkelink's execution, attention shifted to Jesse Walter Bishop and Jimmy Lee Gray. One by one, states had backed away from the continued use of the gas chamber, usually substituting lethal injection instead.

This chapter presents an interview with Shlomo Dragon and his brother, Abraham, who were among the Sonderkommando prisoners forced by the Nazis to aid with the disposal of Jews killed in gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. Born in Poland, they are living testimonies of the horrible fate suffered by Jews at the hands of the Nazis. As members of the Sonderkommando, the brothers were assigned “barrack room duty,” responsible for cleanliness in the Sonderkommando's residential barracks (block), distributing food, and attending to all their co-workers' needs. In this interview, Abraham and Shlomo Dragon talk about the time they spent as prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, from the time they were transported to the camp to their selection for the Sonderkommando. They also discuss how they were able to cope with the reality in which they were forced to live, their involvement in the Sonderkommando uprising, and how they survived the harrowing experience.

The last gasp of the American gas chamber came in 1999 in Florence, Arizona. Ironically, and fittingly some might think, the case involved the United States and Germany. Two brothers, Walter and Karl LaGrand, were German nationals who were both sentenced for stabbing to death a bank manager during a botched robbery. After the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied review, the LaGrands filed petitions for writs of habeas corpus. Arizona law gave the condemned the right to choose between lethal injection or lethal gas as their method of execution. Both brothers chose gas in the hope that the courts would find the method unconstitutional. When this tactic failed, Karl accepted a last-minute offer of a lethal injection, and he was executed on February 24, 1999. Walter, however, said he would prefer lethal gas as a means of protesting the death penalty. Walter LaGrand turned out to be the last person to be executed by lethal gas in the twentieth century. The lethal chamber had taken its final victim.

As Adolf Hitler prepared his plans for world conquest, Germany initiated a major program to develop all kinds of lethal gases. As Hitler invaded Poland, he used the press of war to secretly authorize a euthanasia program. With his approval, a gas chamber was built at each of six mental institutions in different parts of Germany to carry out “mercy killings.” Grim reports of Nazi gassing galvanized Jews around the world to intensify their campaign to stop the genocide. One of the enduring controversies of the Holocaust has been whether the Allies could and should have done something to try to disrupt the gassings. 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 the United States would view its own gas chambers.

The traumas of World War II had sensitized many nations to the need for international standards of human rights and the treatment of prisoners. Millions of prisoners of war and civilians had died or been murdered in captivity, both during the war and after. Britain's Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, appointed in May 1949, undertook what was to that point the most exhaustive study of capital punishment. Although its 500-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. In the United States, serious consideration of abolition was slower in coming, for political reasons. Litanies involving gas chamber executions were not so readily invoked in cold war America.

This chapter presents an interview with Josef Sackar, one of the surviving members of the Sonderkommando, who were forced by the Nazis to aid with the disposal of Jews killed in gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. Now living in Israel with his wife and two children, he describes the horrific work he undertook in the camp as one of the Sonderkommando prisoners. Born in Arta, Greece, in 1924, Sackar also tells about the Jews in Arta and their relations with the Greeks, his family background, how he was chosen as a member of the Sonderkommando, and how he endured and survived the experience.

The Great War that began in August 1914 ushered in deadly new weapons, including modern artillery, tanks, airplanes, and machine guns. The terror of modern chemical warfare was unleashed on the world when German troops clandestinely buried thousands of canisters containing the poisonous chlorine gas along the lines at Ypres. As a result of Germany's actions at Ypres, previous agreements had gone out the window, and the resulting arms race to devise more and deadlier gases would transform the nature of war itself and have many profound implications for the development of the gas chamber. Germany's first use of poison gas in World War I reflected its global dominance in the field of chemistry. Not to be outdone by the Germans, Britain set up a massive chemical warfare center at Porton Down. The Allies also established gas schools in France to train every soldier in chemical warfare tactics. In the United States, plants were built to manufacture poison gases for its troops or its allies.

Five months after the enactment of Nevada's Humane Execution Law, prosecutors identified a crime with all the makings of a ready-made test case. It occurred on the evening of August 21, 1921 in Mina, a tiny copper mining boomtown gone bust, when Tom Quong Kee, a seventy-four-year-old laundryman and nominal member of the Bing Kung Tong, was shot dead. The suspects were two Chinese men, Hughie Sing and Gee Jon, who were convicted by a jury convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die by lethal gas. In the end, Hughie Sing was spared, but not Gee Jon, who went on to become the first person in the world to be legally executed by lethal gas. Hydrocyanic acid was introduced into the lethal chamber, killing Gee Jon. Word that Americans had become the first to use the gas chamber to execute a human being flashed across the world, including Germany where the right-wing Bavarian radical Adolf Hitler was awaiting trial at the People's Court in Munich for his role in the failed November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

This book tells the tragedy of the Sonderkommando, work units of prisoners, composed almost entirely of Jews, who were forced by the Nazis to aid with the disposal of masses of Jews killed in gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. Sonderkommando members did not participate directly in the killing; their primary responsibility was to carry out various tasks related to all phases of the mass extermination enterprise. Those who were unable or unwilling to do their work had only one way of avoiding it: by committing suicide. An event known as the “Sonderkommando uprising” took place on October 7, 1944, at Crematoria I [II] and III [IV] in Birkenau, resulting in the death of 451 Sonderkommando prisoners. The thoughts, emotions, concerns, and sufferings endured by the Sonderkommando prisoners during their work at the extermination facilities are contained in the contemporary materials known as the “secret writings of the Sonderkommando,” which consist of diaries and other historical and literary texts, and written mainly in Yiddish.

The history of the gas chamber is a story of the twentieth century. But an earlier event that would subsequently figure into its evolution occurred one day in 1846, when a French physiologist, Claude Bernard, was in his laboratory studying the properties of carbon monoxide, a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas suspected of somehow being responsible for many accidental deaths. Bernard and the Swedish chemist and pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele had focused their attention on the effect of gases on the blood—work that later would become central to understanding the lethal power of the gas chamber. As Bernard was conducting his initial experiments with carbon monoxide, others were discovering the properties of carbon dioxide. One significant development in the discussion that would turn into the eugenics movement was set in motion in July 1874, when Richard Louis Dugdale conducted a study of the Jukes clan. Eugenics dovetailed readily with other already established American notions such as manifest destiny, racial segregation, and a reliance on capital punishment.

This chapter presents an interview with Eliezer Eisenschmidt, one of the Sonderkommando prisoners forced by the Nazis to aid with the disposal of Jews killed in gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. Born in Russia, he escaped from the death march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen, and owes his life to a Polish family that lived near Birkenau and who took him in. In this interview, Eliezer talks about his family, his journey to the camp, how he was selected for the Sonderkommando, his job as a Sonderkommando prisoner, and the Sonderkommando uprising.

This chapter presents an interview with Shaul Chazan, one of the Sonderkommando prisoners forced by the Nazis to aid with the disposal of Jews killed in gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. Shaul came from the Jewish community of Salonika, Greece and now lives in Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel. In this interview, he talks about his life and his family before he was transported to the camp, how he was selected for the Sonderkommando, his work as a Sonderkommando prisoner, and how he was able to survive the ordeal.

By the early 1960s, American capital punishment was being attacked on several fronts. Some churches and other religious organizations voiced their opposition, while numerous Western nations continued to pressure the United States to end its executions. On April 12, 1967, California carried out its first gassing in four years: the gas chamber execution of Aaron Mitchell, a thirty-seven-year-old black man convicted of slaying a Sacramento policeman during a robbery in 1963. Mitchell's execution set off waves of revulsion and exultation among death penalty opponents and supporters. Colorado's execution of Luis Monge in June of 1967 would turn out to be the last execution in the United States for a decade, and the last gas-chamber execution for twelve years. This gassing, and the others preceding it, as well as the thousands of capital punishments carried out by hanging and electrocution, were about to become a legal relic, at least for a while. Now increased attention was being focused on what the U.S. Supreme Court would rule about the constitutionality of the death penalty.

This chapter presents an interview with Leon Cohen, one of the Sonderkommando prisoners forced by the Nazis to aid with the disposal of Jews killed in gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. As a member of the Sonderkommando, he was given the responsibility of ripping gold teeth from the mouths of Jewish corpses. In this interview, Leon talks about his life and his family before he was transported to the camp, his first encounter with the Germans, how he was selected for the Sonderkommando, and his work as a Sonderkommando prisoner.

This chapter focuses on two death camps, Treblinka and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and on documentaries filmed on these locations. Differences between the two places, with the disappearance of Treblinka and the persistence of Auschwitz, are discussed in relation to documentaries bringing survivors and members of the postgeneration back to these places. The chapter also addresses rebellion and uprisings in these death camps.

This chapter presents an interview with Ya'akov Gabai, one of the Sonderkommando prisoners forced by the Nazis to aid with the disposal of Jews killed in gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. Born in Athens, he and his brother worked in the Sonderkommando, an ordeal that their ability to support each other helped them to survive. Ya'akov was a strong man and an eternal optimist, who, even while in Auschwitz, believed that he would leave the camp alive. In this interview, he talks about his family and how he got to the camp, his job as a Sonderkommando prisoner, and his harrowing experience.