The Last Gasp Read online

  72. RNO, February 1, 1936.

  73. RNO, February 13, 1936.

  74. Associated Press, “Executed in Lethal Chamber,” NYT, March 28, 1936.

  75. Associated Press, “Two Die in Gas Chamber,” NYT, August 22, 1936.

  76. Associated Press, “Slayer of Co-Ed Dies in Lethal Gas Room,” NYT, December 12, 1936.

  77. Guy B. Johnson, “The Negro and Crime,” The Annals 217 (September 1941): 93–104; H. Garfinkel, “Inter- and Intra-Racial Homicides,” Social Forces 27 (1949): 370–81.

  78. The Winston-Salem Journal of December 8–12, 2002, produced a prize-winning series, “Lifting the Curtain on a Shameful Era,” about North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization program.

  79. RNO, February 19, 1938.

  80. Quoted in the Salisbury Herald, July 4, 1938.

  81. Letter dated October 14, 1938, from Robert L. Thompson, Private Secretary to the Governor, Letters and Papers of Clyde Roarke Hoey, 1937–41, Messages to the General Assembly, p. 49, cited in Seitz, “The Transition of Methods,” pp. 193–94.

  82. Arridy v. People, 82 P.2d 757 (Colo. 1938); People ex rel. Best v. Eldred, 86 P.2d 248 (Colo. 1938).

  83. Associated Press, “Witness Dies after Execution,” NYT, August 15, 1937.

  84. Quoted in Robert Perske, Deadly Innocent? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), pp. 126–7.

  85. Associated Press, “Cardiogram Shows Death,” NYT, October 1, 1939.

  86. “Asphyxiation Preferable,” RR, January 24, 1935.

  87. “Gas Execution Fight Rages,” LAT, January 3, 1937.

  88. “Wyoming Prison Gets New ‘Tank’ for Executions,” Evening Independent, November 11, 1936.

  89. United Press, “First Gas Execution in Wyoming Prison,” JCPT, August 13, 1937; “Perry Carroll Executed at 12:16 A.M. Today,” RRB, August 13, 1937.

  90. Wyoming Eagle, April 19, 1940.

  91. Colorado had abolished the death penalty from 1897 to 1901, Oregon from 1914 to 1920, Arizona from 1916 to 1918, and Missouri from 1917 to 1919.

  92. “Senate Measure Stops Hangings, Substitutes Gas in State Prison,” JCPT, April 15, 1937.

  93. “Missouri Uses Gas Chamber,” (Monessen, PA) Daily Independent, September 17, 1937.

  94. “Wardens See Gas Death in Carson City, Disagree on California Adoption,” SFC, November 30, 1932.

  95. “Lethal Gas Chamber for Book Worms,” NYT, January 1, 1933.

  96. “Churchmen Launch Fight on Lynching,” NYT, December 4, 1933.

  97. “Nazi Units in United States List 1,000 Aliens; Admit Their Aim Is to Spread Propaganda,” NYT, March 23, 1933.

  98. “6,000 Watch As Mob Hang Slayers of Brooke Hart,” NYT, November 27, 1933; “Governor Rolph Backs San Jose Lynching as Kidnap Warning,” NYT, November 28, 1933.

  99. Alfred M. Beck, Hitler’s Ambivalent Attaché: Lt. Gen. Friedrich von Boetticher in America, 1933–1941 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005).

  100. “Lethal Gas Takes Place of Gibbet as Death Penalty,” SFC, May 8, 1937.

  101. United Press, Mansfield (OH) News Journal, April 14, 1938.

  102. Joan Smith, “The Return of the Big Green Death Machine,” San Francisco Examiner Image Magazine, January 8, 1989.

  103. Clinton T. Duffy Collection, Marin County Museum, San Rafael, California, quoted in Alan Bisbort, “When You Read This, They Will Have Killed Me”: The Life and Redemption of Caryl Chessman, Whose Execution Shook America (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006), p. 327.

  104. “Denver Firm Makes Lethal Gas Chambers,” DP, February 27, 1938.

  105. “Pro or Con: Execution by Lethal Gas?” Reader’s Digest, December 1937, pp. 56–58.

  106. “Killers Executed in Gas Chamber,” SFC, December 3, 1938; “Spectators Sickened as Two Die in Death Cell,” LAT, December 3, 1938.

  107. SFE, December 3, 1938, quoted in Bisbort, “When You Read This,” p. 328.

  108. Chrisanne Beckner, “Darkness on the Edge of Campus: University’s Philanthropic ‘Godfather’ Was Mad about Eugenics,” Sacramento News & Review, February 19, 2004.

  109. Tony Platt, “The Frightening Agenda of the American Eugenics Movement,” History News Network, July 7, 2003, http://hnn.us (accessed September 4, 2009).

  110. Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults & Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 118.

  111. United Press, “Gas Chamber Is Installed,” Valley Sunday Star-Monitor-Herald, August 22, 1937.

  112. See Gary Murrell, Iron Pants: Oregon’s Anti-New Deal Governor, Charles Henry Martin (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2000).

  113. “Two Slayers Die in Gas Chamber,” OSE, January 15, 1945.

  114. Associated Press, “Adam Richetti Executed, Last of Floyd Gang,” KCS, October 7, 1938; Missouri Department of Corrections Records; “Author Claims Lethal Gas Isn’t Humane as Hanging,” JCPT, November 14, 1938.

  6. PILLAR OF RESPECTABILITY

  1. See, e.g., Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Thomas Alan Schwartz, America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Alan Brinkley, “The Most Influential Private Citizen in America,” Harpers, February 1983, pp. 31–46; “‘We Know the Russians,’” Time, June 20, 1949. The John J. McCloy Papers are located at Amherst College.

  2. Quoted in Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 122.

  3. “‘We Know the Russians.’”

  4. Paul Warburg (1868–1932) was a Jewish-German-American banker who helped found the U.S. Federal Reserve system, the Council on Foreign Relations, and many other key institutions. He also served on the board of the American IG Farben Chemical Company. McCloy also worked closely with his son, the banker and diplomat James P. Warburg.

  5. The firm also had offices in Washington, D.C., and Paris. The Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory, 71st Annual edition, Vol. I (New York: Martindale-Hubbell, 1939), p. 1031.

  6. Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 122.

  7. Howard Watson Ambruster, Treason’s Peace: German Dyes and American Dupes (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1947), pp. 328–29, 345, 366, 370, 386, 411.

  8. On IG Farben, see Joseph Borkin, The Crime of IG Farben (New York: The Free Press, 1978); Joseph Borkin and Charles Welsh, Germany’s Master Plan (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1943); Ambruster, Treason’s Peace; Richard Sasuly, IG Farben (New York: Boni & Gaer, 1947); Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); John V. H. Dippel, Two Against Hitler (New York: Praeger, 1992); and Diarmuid Jeffreys, Hell’s Cartel: The Rise and Fall of IG Farben (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).

  9. See Ray Eldon Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd: The Story of Ivy Lee and the Development of Public Relations (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1966); U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities, 74th Cong., 1st sess., Report no. 153 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934).

  10. Quoted in Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 301.

  11. See Bird, The Chairman, book 1.

  12. Robert Paul Browder and Thomas G. Smith, Independent: A Biography of Lewis W. Douglas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 111.

  13. As president of Harvard, Conant had been criticized for his tolerance of anti-Semitism. In 1934 he allowed the alumnus Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a member of Hitler’s inner circle, to participate in numerous welcoming events at the university; he also maintained a tight quota on Jewish admissions and never publicly criticized the Nazis for their treatment of Jews. In 1933 Conant corresponded with the chemical director of DuPont (a Harvard alumnus) about w
hether to hire a renowned organic chemist who happened to be Jewish. Conant advised that the candidate was “certainly very definitely of the Jewish type—rather heavy,” probably dogmatic, with “none of the earmarks of genius,” and he recommended against the hiring. See Stephen H. Norwood, “Legitimating Nazism: Harvard University and the Hitler Regime, 1933–1937,” American Jewish History 92 (June 2004); E. K. Bolton to Dr. James B. Conant, September 8, 1933, and James B. Conant to Dr. E. K. Bolton, September 13, 1933, box 31, James B. Conant Presidential Papers, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge.

  14. Browder and Smith, Independent, pp. 119–20.

  15. Most of this information comes directly from DEGUSSA’s own website, www.degussa-history.com (accessed on May 25, 2006).

  16. Browder and Smith, Independent, chapter 10.

  17. Ibid., pp. 124–26.

  18. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1935).

  19. Zinsser’s mentor, Dr. Charles Nicolle of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, had been the first to prove that lice from rats were the carrier of typhus, for which Nicolle received the Nobel Prize in 1928. See Naomi Baumslag, Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), pp. 12–13.

  20. The American Polish Relief Expedition of the U.S. Army was one of the units that attacked the lice using mobile delousing field columns that moved from town to town.

  21. Alexander Cockburn, “Zyklon B on the Border,” The Nation, June 21, 2007. Peters also wrote a book about Zyklon-B; see Dr. Gerhard Peters, “Blausäure zur Schädlingsbekämpfung” (Hydrocyanic Acid for Pest Control) (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1933), which is available on the web at www.holocaust-history.org/works/peters-1933/. The patent referred to is number 2,344,105, patented by the U.S. Patent Office on March 14, 1944.

  22. “Der ewige Jude,” Unser Willie und Weg 10 (1940): 54–55.

  23. See Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  24. Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown (New York: Doubleday, 1935), p. 391. See also Alexis Carrel, Reflections on Life, trans. Antonia White (London: H. Hamilton, 1952). To date, biographers have given him strongly favorable treatment, largely overlooking his racism and his role as a fascist member of the Vichy government.

  25. Associated Press, “German Jurists Shocked,” NYT, August 9, 1927.

  26. Robert G. Waite, “Law Enforcement and Crime in America: The View from Germany, 1920–1940,” in Criminal Justice History, vol. 13, ed. Louis A. Knafla (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 191–215.

  27. “Against Reich Executions,” NYT, November 2, 1928; Guido Enderis, “Legal Right to Kill Proposed in Reich,” NYT, May 19, 1929.

  28. Frederick T. Birchall, “Nazis Riot in Court as 5 Are Condemned for Murder of Reds,” NYT, August 23, 1932.

  29. Otto D. Tolischus, “2 Americans Face Secret Reich Trial,” NYT, November 16, 1934.

  30. Associated Press, “Death for Pacifists,” NYT, April 20, 1935; see also Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  31. General Amos Fries to Cong. Samuel Dickstein, March 21, 1933, University of Oregon Library, Fries Papers, box 3; Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 245–46.

  32. See Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003); and Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  33. “Eugenicists Hail Their Progress as Indicating Era of Supermen,” NYHT, August 28, 1932.

  34. Black, War Against the Weak, pp. 314–15.

  35. Kühl, Nazi Connection, pp. 86–88.

  36. Foster Kennedy, “Euthanasia: To Be or Not to Be?” Colliers, May 20, 1939, pp. 15–16; “Mercy Death Law Ready for Albany,” NYT, February 14, 1939.

  37. Foster Kennedy, “The Problem of Social Control of the Congenital Defective: Education, Sterilization, Euthanasia,” American Journal of Psychiatry 99 (July 1942): 13–16.

  38. Black, War Against the Weak, p. 309; see also Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001).

  39. G. L. Steer, “Ethiopians Suffer in Biggest Air Raid,” NYT, March 26, 1936.

  40. German Olympic propaganda, quoted in Kühl, Nazi Connection, pp. 88, 135.

  41. Sam Knight, “The Tragic Story of Wallace Hume Carothers,” Financial Times, November 29, 2008.

  42. “W. Douglas Heads McGill University,” NYT, October 5, 1937.

  43. “11 Concerns Named as Nitrate Trust,” NYT, December 4, 1940.

  44. “Produces Chemical Here: DuPont Starts First U.S. Output of Potassium Cyanide,” NYT, December 5, 1940.

  45. “Vast Reich Funds Hunted in Inquiry into Drug Business,” NYT, April 11, 1941.

  46. “World Dye Trust Laid to 8 Big Firms,” NYT, May 15, 1943. American Cyanamid was fined $453,451, a large fine considering that its net profit the previous year was $5.6 million.

  47. Borkin and Welsh, Germany’s Master Plan, p. 90.

  48. “German Cartels Reported Boring In,” NYT, September 13, 1944.

  49. Quoted in Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 186.

  50. Browder and Smith, Independent, p. 158.

  51. See Peter Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

  7. THE RISING STORM

  1. Svend Ranulf, Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology (New York: Schocken Books, 1964 [1938]).

  2. Charles E. Silberman, Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 30.

  3. Walter White, quoted in Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), p. 563.

  4. Edwin H. Sutherland, Principles of Criminology, 3rd ed. (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1939), pp. 560–62.

  5. National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, Lawlessness in Law Enforcement (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931).

  6. See Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad, Scottsboro Boy (New York: Doubleday, 1950).

  7. Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U.S. 278 (1936).

  8. Sutherland, Principles of Criminology, pp. 120–21.

  9. John R. Larkins, The Negro Population of North Carolina: Social and Economic (Raleigh: North Carolina State Board of Charities and Public Welfare, 1944), p. 51.

  10. See esp. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, which cites many such studies.

  11. Paul M. Green, “A Rape, a Two-Day Trial, a Mistake,” RNO, June 6, 1999.

  12. State v. Peele, 220 N.C. 83, 16 S.E.2d 449 (1941); Record on appeal, No. 145, N.C. Supreme Court (1941); RNO, October 11, 1941; Paul M. Green, “Innocent in North Carolina,” Trial Briefs, April 2000, p. 10.

  13. Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927).

  14. Radelet, “Capital Punishment in Colorado, 1859–1972,” UCLR 74(3) (2003).

  15. “Woman Executed in Gas Chamber,” NYT, November 22, 1941; Kevin Roderick, “Last Steps and Words on Death Row,” LAT, March 28, 1990.

  16. Floyd Loveless, the prisoner executed in Nevada on September 29, 1944, had been only fifteen years old when he committed the murder for which he was sentenced to death. Floyd Loveless file, Nevada State Prison Inmate Case Files, Nevada State Library and Archives, Carson City, Nevada.

  17. Kevin Roderick, “Last Steps and Last Words on Death Row,” LAT, March 28, 1990.

  18. Prime Minister’s Personal Minute, dated June 7, 1944, in Guenther W. Gellermann, Der Krieg, der nicht stattfand (Koblenz: Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1986), pp. 249–51.

  19. Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, 103d Cong., 2nd sess., Is Military Research Hazardous to Veterans’ H
ealth? A Staff Report Prepared for the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (Washington, DC: United States Senate, December 8, 1994).

  8. ADAPTED FOR GENOCIDE

  1. Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 166, 289 n95, citing Gerhard Peters’s affidavit, United States National Archives, War Crimes, Record Group 238, Microform Series T-301/R 99/700, NI-12111.

  2. Hitler’s euthanasia order read as follows:Berlin, 1 September 1939 [but actually predated from October 1]Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt, M.D., are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons who, according to human judgment, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.

  [signed] A. Hitler

  3. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 62–70; Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 114–15, 177–79.

  4. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 94–96.

  5. Lifton, Nazi Doctors; Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide.

  6. National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C., Nuremberg Documents, RG 238: interrogation of Karl Brandt, October 1, 1945, P.M., p. 7.

  7. Testimony of Viktor Brack, U.S. Military Tribunal, Transcript of the Proceedings in Case 1, p. 7652, quoted in Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 88.

  8. Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken: The “Final Solution” in History (New York: Pantheon, 1988); Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide; Lifton, Nazi Doctors.

  9. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 115.

  10. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken.

  11. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), p. 337.