The Last Gasp Read online

  In addition to the Nuremberg tribunal, numerous trials of Nazi war criminals were held in the British, French, American, and Soviet sectors of Germany, in Austria, at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, and in many other places where the crimes took place. Most of the later proceedings involved physicians, SS-Einsatzgruppen officers, or camp guards.58 The British Military Tribunal in Hamburg tried three executives of the firm that had the exclusive agency for the supply of Zyklon-B gas east of the River Elbe.59 The defendants included Tesch; Tesch’s prokurist, or second-in-command, Karl Weinbacher; and Dr. Joachim Drosihn, a zoologist who was employed as the firm’s first gassing technician. All three were accused of having supplied poison gas used for killing Allied nationals in concentration camps, knowing how it was to be used. Tesch and Stabenow had also supplied heating elements to vaporize Zyklon-B gas, as well as pipes for the gas-chamber circulation system, which they claimed had been standard issue for fumigation chambers. The defendants claimed they had no knowledge about the gas being used for anything other than fumigation purposes.60

  Prosecutors contended that from 1941 to 1945 the company accepted orders for vast quantities of Zyklon-B (two tons per month to Auschwitz-Birkenau alone), knowing that it was being used to exterminate human beings. They also presented testimony to support their charges. The judge advocate agreed that “among those unfortunate creatures [who were gassed to death in the camps,] undoubtedly there were many Allied nationals.” Tesch and Weinbacher were convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged, although Drosihn was acquitted. Known as the “Zyklon-B Case,” it included no references to America’s invention and use of the gas chamber, American Cyanamid’s and DuPont’s manufacture with IG Farben of Zyklon-B, or the collaboration of American and German officials and executives in gas-chamber technology.61

  Dr. Peters, the former general manager of DEGESCH, got off more lightly. The German insecticide expert and chief promoter of Zyklon-B had been the executive in charge of its manufacture. His defense included the claim that in producing Zyklon-B he acted in good faith, thinking that he was “bringing relief to people sentenced to death in any case.” The Frankfurt Court of Assizes sentenced him to five years imprisonment in 1949 for having “contributed to manslaughter.” His treatment prompted an outcry among German democrats, prompting the superior court to upgrade the crime from manslaughter to murder. But after much legal wrangling, his sentence was only increased to six years. His case would continue to spark controversy throughout the 1950s, as the Frankfurt district attorney brought him up on trial again based on newly discovered evidence. This time he was charged with being “an accessory to murder in 300,000 cases.” He ended up being acquitted, allowing him to return to his position as a management executive at a chemical plant near Cologne.62

  During the war crimes era it would have been problematic for the U.S. to delve too deeply into the Zyklon-B can of worms. For one thing, since 1924 several states in the United States had been using hydrogen cyanide in gas chambers to legally execute prisoners, and all of those states and the federal courts accepted that such lethal gas executions resulted in a quick and painless death that did not violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and usual punishment.

  Farben and DuPont had a close relationship going back to 1919. Farben had owned $838,412 in DuPont stock, and DuPont owned more than $2 million worth of Farben shares. American Cyanamid had also been part of the same cartel. Their communications and linkages continued well into the war. As a result of their close business relationship, some German chemical executives and Nazi officials must have known a great deal about America’s development and use of gaschamber executions, just as some American chemical executives and government officials must have been informed through corporate channels about what the Nazis were doing with their gas chambers against the Jews.

  Throughout the war and during its aftermath, for instance, American intelligence agents were alerted to the longstanding commercial relationship and information exchange between DuPont and IG Farben by means of a secure route through Basel, Switzerland, involving IG Chemie. According to a secret agent (code-named “Ralph”) for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, top-secret correspondence between the German and American chemical interests were kept “locked in a special safe, to which no one in the company had access other than three or four special directors.” Sources reported that this exchange had continued even through the war.63

  “Ralph” was Erwin Respondek.64 Respondek (1894–1971) was a German economist, politician, and secret resistance fighter against the Nazis who spied for the United States. He originally came from Upper Silesia, the region in which Auschwitz and other death camps were located. Respondek had a son-in-law—Friedrich W. “Fritz” Hoffmann—who was a Frankfurt chemist working in the Germans’ chemical warfare laboratories near Berlin.65 Hoffmann and others passed information about the Germans’ poison gases to Respondek, who passed it on to Sam E. Woods, who served from 1937 to 1941 as the junior U.S. commercial attaché in Berlin and from 1942 served as consul general in Zurich and Vaduz.

  According to Respondek, a prominent German industrialist spoke with him in December 1945 to urge him to intervene with former U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull to try to squelch the war crimes prosecution of IG Farben’s directors for having knowingly supplied the SS with poison gas to murder Jewish prisoners. At the time the industrialist reminded Respondek of Farben’s connections to DuPont and other powerful American interests.66

  Respondek said he would relay the information to Ambassador Robert D. Murphy, who was a key American intelligence agent and diplomatic go-between, then stationed in Berlin. Shortly after Christmas 1945, Murphy sent a report to the U.S. State Department. Respondek later learned that when the U.S. State Department confronted DuPont executives about the allegations, they confirmed the industrialist’s statements. Afterward the criminal charges against IG Farben executives for shipping the poison gas to Auschwitz could not be conclusively proven.67

  One reason American prosecutors were pressured to avoid digging too deeply into the cartel was that since late 1942 E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company had been the leading private contractor in the all-powerful Manhattan Project, building and operating all of the project’s installations, including the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and elsewhere. Many U.S. military insiders thought that DuPont was the War Department, and vice versa. There were also many personal and political ties. For example, FDR’s son, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., had married Ethel du Pont, a daughter of Eugene du Pont Jr.68

  McCloy must have been particularly relieved that further disclosures were avoided. In March 1945, President Roosevelt greeted him one day with a mock Hitler salute, saying, “Heil, McCloy, Hochkommisar für Deutschland!” (Hail McCloy, High Commissioner for Germany!).69 But FDR’s close advisor, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., privately objected that McCloy’s “clients are people like General Electric, Westinghouse, General Motors,” noting just some of the corporations his nemesis had done battle with over the years.70 McCloy himself recommended that FDR select a military man, General Lucius D. Clay, to become the first high commissioner. Clay was duly appointed.

  In late 1945, after working on the Germany peace plan, participating in the decision to drop the atomic bomb, and drafting the articles of surrender for Japan, McCloy left government service to return to private practice. Nelson Rockefeller had invited him to join the family firm, which then became known as Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. His main task involved lobbying for the gas and oil industry. In 1947 he became the first president of the World Bank.71

  In 1949 President Truman appointed McCloy as the second high commissioner of West Germany (over another candidate, his brotherin-law Lewis Douglas). At the same time, an obscure figure in Germany, Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne, was selected to be West Germany’s first postwar chancellor. Adenauer, seventy-three, had been married to Gussy Zinsser, a cousin of
McCloy’s wife (and Douglas’s wife), who had died in 1945 after her release from a German concentration camp.72 “There is some destiny about all this business,” McCloy said. “Germany seems to dog my footsteps.”73

  In his supremely powerful post as high commissioner, a post he held until 1952, with offices housed in IG Farben’s former corporate headquarters, McCloy shaped the course of postwar Germany. He also unilaterally granted clemency to dozens of convicted Nazi war criminals (including Alfred Krupp, Klaus Barbie, Friedrich Flick, and the organizer of the Berlin Olympics) and suspended the hunt for others still on the loose. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to McCloy to ask, “Why are we freeing so many Nazis?”74

  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.

  At the time, most makers of American public opinion a
lso backed the country’s continued use of the gas chamber. In one ruling of 1953, the California Supreme Court claimed, after examining fifteen years of San Quentin’s death house medical records, that the gas chamber met “contemporary scientific standards,” adding, “For many years, animals have been put to death painlessly by the administration of poison gas.”8 In addition, many prominent writers in American law and criminology still endorsed lethal gas as the most humane execution option. In a typical statement from that period, the liberal professors Harry Elmer Barnes and Negley K. Teeters proclaimed in their popular textbook New Horizons in Criminology (1954):

  Lethal gas is certainly painless. It is a physically pleasant form of meeting death, and humanitarian sentiment would recommend it as a universal method of execution (until capital punishment is abolished). But even this method is revolting to many who are by profession somewhat inured to seeing men die at the hands of the state. The argument is not that gas is painful to the condemned men but that the spectacle of gradual expiration is “torture to the spectators.”9