The Last Gasp Read online

  But removing unwanted animals was one thing; addressing the human being was another matter. Popular anxiety about class, immigration, and race mixing came together in 1916 when the blue-blood American conservationist and eugenicist (and director of the Bronx Zoo) Madison Grant brought out his popular book The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History, a work that would exert considerable influence over the next twenty-five years, particularly in Germany. “Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws,” he wrote, “and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.” Instead, Grant insisted, the “laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit”—the extermination of defectives—because “human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”26

  In his popular book, the most explicit statement of racist ideology ever published in the United States, Grant’s hatred for democracy and the immigration of “inferior peoples” knew no bounds. He expressed special disdain for “the Polish Jew… with his dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest.” According to Grant, “a cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.” But Jews were not his only targets. His categories of inferiority extended to other races as well—indeed, to anyone who did not meet his definition of white Anglo-Saxon.27

  Grant’s views were widely shared among a hard core of leading eugenicists such as the biologist and American eugenics organizer Charles Davenport and Lothrop Stoddard, the Boston Brahmin political scientist and leading anti-Bolshevik who labeled the Jew as “the cause of world unrest.” Many such ideas also enjoyed support among many liberals, such as the government chemist and Pure Food and Drug Act pioneer Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and civil rights lawyer Clarence Darrow, who said it was just to “chloroform unfit children… [and] show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.”28 William J. Robinson, a New York urologist and leading authority on birth control, eugenics, and marriage, wrote that the best solution would be for society to “gently chloroform” the children of the unfit or “give them a dose of potassium cyanide.” Robinson also insisted that splitting hairs about any of their “individual rights” should never be allowed to trump the preservation of the race. “It is the acme of stupidity,” he wrote, “to talk in such cases of individual liberty, of the rights of the individual. Such individuals have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.”29

  Grant’s views helped provide more of a political foundation for the lethal chamber. Across the country his friend Paul Popenoe, the leader of California’s powerful eugenics movement, also endorsed the lethal chamber as a sensible response to society’s woes. “From an historical point of view,” he wrote in his popular text Applied Eugenics (1918), “the first method which presents itself is execution…. Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.”30

  In 1916, the same year that Grant’s book appeared, Allan McLane Hamilton released a memoir in which he recounted having witnessed a grisly double execution in Sing Sing prison’s famous electric chair several years earlier. The first inmate, he wrote, had been “a degenerate Italian” who was quickly reduced to “a limp thing,” although a convulsion had caused the prisoner’s right hand to “coincidentally” raise the crucifix he had been clutching. The second condemned convict was a burly German who had strangled his wife in a fit of jealousy. The execution did not go as smoothly, for it required the warden to order a second jolt, thereby causing the “distressingly perceptible and horrid” smell of burning flesh to permeate the execution chamber. “It was not long,” wrote Hamilton, “before my nervous system and stomach rebelled and I hurried to the cool outer air and left Sing Sing as soon as I could.” The famous physician said that for years afterward, he remained haunted by the brutality of the electrical execution he had witnessed, adding that it made him wish that the more humane alternative of gas had been used instead.31

  Hamilton’s words arrived just as humankind was experiencing another impetus for the realization of early visions of the lethal chamber. That new crucible was the battlefield of modern war.

  CHAPTER 2

  FASHIONING A FRIGHTFUL WEAPON OF WAR

  The Great War that began in August 1914 ushered in deadly new weapons, including modern artillery, tanks, airplanes, and machine guns. It was the moment when Franz Kafka in Prague wrote his prescient short story “In the Penal Colony,” in which he describes the unveiling of a terrifying new execution apparatus.

  Eight months into the fighting, the nature of warfare took yet another horrific turn. On April 22, 1915, Allied soldiers—French Algerians and territorial division troops—were dug into their trenches around the village of Langemarck, in Flanders, facing four German divisions that were hunkered down a few hundred yards away. At five o’clock in the afternoon, three red rockets streaked into the sky, signaling the start of a deafening artillery barrage, and some of the high-explosive shells began pounding the deserted town of Ypres and surrounding villages. From their distant vantage point, Allied officers observed two curious greenish-yellow clouds arise from the German line and get picked up by the approaching wind, gradually merging to form a single bank of blue-white mist, such as schoolboys might see over a swamp on a frosty night.1

  According to one British soldier’s eerie eyewitness account, the French divisions were “utterly unprepared for what was to come.” They gazed spellbound at the strange specter they saw creeping slowly toward them. Within a few seconds the sweet-smelling stuff tickled their nostrils, without any effect. “Then, with inconceivable rapidity, the gas worked, and blind panic spread.” Hundreds fought for air and fell dying, suffering “a death of hideous torture, with the frothing bubbles gurgling in their throats and the foul liquid welling up in their lungs.” One after another, they drowned. Others staggered and lurched, trying to move away from the gas. As they did so, many were shot down in a hail of fire and shrapnel, leaving their defensive line broken. Suddenly their flank was exposed, and the northeast corner of the salient around Ypres had been pierced.

  Six miles away, Anthony R. Hossack of the Queen Victoria Rifles observed a low cloud of yellow-gray vapor hanging over the area struck by the bombardment. Suddenly, from the Yser Canal down the road galloped a team of horses, lashed by riders making a frenzied retreat. “Plainly something terrible was happening,” Hossack thought, wondering what could have caused such a panicked reaction. Officers and staff stood staring at the scene, dumbfounded not only by the sight but also assailed by a pungent nauseating smell that tickled their throats and stung their eyes. As horses and men poured down the road, Hossack noticed two or three men clinging to one mount, while many soldiers cast off their equipment, tunics, and rifles in order to hasten their retreat. As Hossack later recalled about one man who came stumbling through their lines, “An officer of ours held him up with leveled revolver, ‘What’s the matter, you bloody lot of cowards?’ says he. The Zouave was frothing at the mouth, his eyes started from their sockets, and he fell writhing at the officer’s feet.”2 “It was the most fiendish, wicked thing I have ever seen,” another British veteran later exclaimed.3 After about fifteen minutes, the German troops rose from their trenches and cautiously but freely advanced across ground that until recently had been fiercely contested, stepping over enemy corpses as they moved ahead.4

  History had been made. The terror of modern chemical warfare had been unleashed on the world. Under the cover of darkness, German troops had clandestinely buried thousands of canisters along the lines at Ypres. When the wind was right, the Germans had moved with perfect precision to simultaneously open the valves on 5,700 high-pressure steel tanks containing four hundred tons of deadly chlorine gas, a highly poisonous substance that strips the
bronchial tubes and lungs, blocks the windpipe with fluid that fills the lungs, and causes its stricken victims to gasp for breath and fall dead.5

  The Germans estimated that by the time the attack was over they had inflicted fifteen thousand casualties, five thousand of them deaths—a significant toll. Two days later the Germans mounted a second devastating gas attack. The use of gas provided the Germans with the advantage of being able to render battlefields uninhabitable for six to twenty-four hours after an assault, thereby enabling them to stall likely Allied advances. But its greatest impact was psychological: the specter of poison gas constituted the most powerful weapon of mass destruction and terror yet devised. Although gas ultimately didn’t prove to be the breakthrough weapon that some had hoped, it still changed the nature of warfare.

  Since antiquity armies had occasionally tried to employ poisonous or noisome gases, vapors, and smoke to defeat or incapacitate their enemies. In the fifth century B.C. Thucydides wrote that the Spartans used arsenic smoke during the Peloponnesian War. In the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci sketched plans for smoke weapons formed of sulfur and arsenic dust. In the sixteenth century, an Austrian chemist, Veit Wulff von Senftenberg, wrote about stink bombs containing horrid mixtures of feces and blood, saying, “It is a terrible thing. Christians should not use it against Christians, but it may be used against the Turks and other unbelievers to harm them.”6 In modern times before World War I, however, the use of gas and poisons generally had been regarded as dishonorable under the laws of warfare. During the American Civil War, a Confederate officer, Brigadier General W.N. Pendleton, had considered manufacturing “stink shells” to utilize the “suffocating effect of certain offensive gases,” but he decided against it; even in that bloody conflict the combatants opted against introducing such weapons.7 International conventions of 1899 and 1907 had banned their use. The Hague signatories, including Germany and the Allied powers (except Great Britain and the United States), had pledged to “abstain from the use of projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” (Technically speaking, the Germans’ cylinders were not “projectiles.”)

  In the wake of the Ypres attack the Allies discussed what to do in response, but in the end they “realized there was no choice on their part and that they had to retaliate in like manner.”8 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. German chemical productive capacity, so vital to the manufacture of explosives and other military items, was unmatched, and Germany had a corps of top-flight chemists. They included Fritz Haber, the scientific genius who had personally directed the Ypres attack, which the Germans had code-named Operation Disinfection.9

  Haber was an extraordinarily ambitious German patriot of Jewish descent who had converted to Christianity. In 1905 he published his most important book, Thermodynamik technischer Gasreaktionen (The Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions), a pioneering work that exerted considerable influence in teaching and research. In 1911 Haber had been appointed to direct the world-leading Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für physikalische Chemie in Berlin-Dahlem, a government-sponsored and privately funded research organization that was modeled after the Carnegie Institution in the United States. Haber’s invention with Carl Bosch of a process to produce ammonia from the nitrogen in the air not only benefited the manufacture of fertilizer, but it also had enormous strategic value, because ammonia was essential in the production of nitric acid, which was necessary for making explosives.10 When the fighting started, Haber threw himself into the war effort. He was, one German who knew him wrote, “above all concerned with the effectiveness of the new weapon; science, he once said, belonged to humanity in peacetime and to the fatherland in war.”11 Haber didn’t invent the use of poison gas as a weapon of war, but he took the idea to new levels.12 “We could hear the tests that Professor Haber was carrying out at the back of the institute,” one of his colleagues said, “with the military authorities, who in their steel-gray cars came to Haber’s Institute every morning…. The work was pushed day and night, and many times I saw activity in the building at eleven o’clock in the evening. It was common knowledge that Haber was pushing these men as hard as he could.” (His laboratory assistant died in an explosion during one of these experiments.)13

  At a firing range near Berlin in mid-December 1914, Haber attended a test of artillery shells filled with tear gas, but finding the gas was too widely dispersed to have any effect, he suggested using chlorine instead, noting that it would immediately produce violent coughing; corrode the eyes, nose, mouth, throat, and lungs; and finally asphyxiate the person who inhaled it. If blown in the wind toward the enemy lines, he theorized, the gas, which was heavier than air, would sink into their trenches and either kill them there like dogs or drive the soldiers into the open, where they could easily be mowed down. The German high command embraced the gas idea as a possible super-weapon. Following a successful test demonstration outside Cologne that sealed the deal, a dinner party was planned to celebrate. But Haber’s wife, Clara Immerwahr (the first woman in her university to have earned a doctoral degree in chemistry), was deeply troubled by the immoral nature of this project, and she accused her husband of perverting science, to which he responded by branding her a traitor. That night Immerwahr took her husband’s army pistol and shot herself through the heart. The couple’s embittered youngest son, Ludwig, later wrote, “In Haber the [High Command] found a brilliant mind and an extremely energetic organizer, determined, and possibly unscrupulous.” Soon his work catapulted him to a position of great power within the German war machine, eventually earning him the title of “father of chemical warfare.”14 The budget of his institute grew fifty times larger.

  Following Fritz Haber’s example, Germany’s scientists worked in close cooperation with the military as part of a highly centralized system.15 Researchers often conducted experiments on animals and humans to explore how best to treat gas casualties, and much of their study of this sort was assigned to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s Department E (Pharmacology and Work Pathology), headed by toxicologist Ferdinand Flury.16 The full-scale exploration of lethal gases had begun.

  Confronted with such a hideous new weapon, the British, French, and Italians immediately responded by frantically starting their own chemical warfare programs. Less than five months after the Germans’ first gas attack, the British unleashed their own chlorine cloud at Loos, but a change in the wind turned the poison back on them, causing 2,639 self-inflicted casualties (although only seven actually died) and prompting what would become a deep-seated hatred of gas on the part of many British troops.17

  Not to be outdone by the Germans, the British set up a massive chemical warfare center at Porton Down. Their researchers plunged into designing new gas masks and decontamination procedures and began investigating every sort of poisonous substance known to man. The Allies also established gas schools in France to train every soldier in chemical warfare tactics. The instructors could hardly keep up with the frenzied developments in respirator equipment, warning procedures, and tutorials about all the latest gases being used by one side or the other.

  Each new gas appeared more deadly than the last: phosgene (or carbonyl chloride, a compound that had originally been identified by John Davy in 1812) was said to be eighteen times more powerful than chlorine and more difficult to detect, and mustard gas, a vesicant (skin irritant), was deemed five times more lethal than phosgene. Mustard gas was considered “the most powerful casualty producing agent yet devised,” in part because “even minute traces could insinuate clothing, including rubber boots and gloves, to incapacitate victims” with huge red welts and other ailments for several days, leading to its emergence as “an al
most perfect battle gas.”18 Each kind of poison offered its unique advantages and disadvantages: phosgene, for example, proved extremely deadly until soldiers learned to detect its telltale odor (like freshly cut hay) and color, and masks were devised to ward off its worst effects. Another lung and eye irritant, chloropicrin, was more difficult to defend against without gas masks containing charcoal. It took only 60 pounds of mustard gas to produce one casualty, compared to 230 pounds of lung irritant or 500 pounds of high explosives.19

  Figure 1 Poster of World War I battlefield gassing (U.S. Chemical Warfare Service). Unknown artist. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

  Figure 2 French soldiers entering a gas chamber, World War I. Unknown photographer. From The Great War: The Standard History of the All-Europe Conflict, vol. 4, ed. H. W. Wilson and J. A. Hammerton (London: Amalgamated Press, 1915).

  Inventors devised frightful new delivery systems such as the Livens Projector and the Stokes Mortar, and starry-eyed tacticians extolled the enormous potential of air power for dropping gas bombs on hapless German troops and cities —just as their enemy plotted its own glorious triumphs. The effects of all these poisons upon the environment were simply ignored.20

  One of the early innovations developed at the War Department Experimental Ground at Porton Down was a state-of-the-art “gas chamber” for testing various poison gases. Soldiers volunteered to serve as human guinea pigs (called “observers” in Porton’s terminology), subjecting themselves to any one of a range of poisonous substances that were being tested in the contraption. Typically they stood for protracted periods wearing gas masks as the vapor swirled around them, and some were required to expose areas of their skin to see how it might respond to the chemical agent.21