Typhus the Killer in the Camps

At the end of this introductory discussion I have included two articles from the German technical literature which discuss those remarkable gas chambers in some detail. Those articles are only two among many that can be found in the German literature of that period.

Delousing Tunnels

The history of large gas chambers (more than 200 cubic meters in volume) goes back to at least the early 1920's when tunnels were used by the British to fumigate railroad trains in Russia and Poland when the British had a military presence there during the chaotic post World War I period.

The standard procedure then was to fumigate an entire railroad train at one time within a sealed tunnel with hydrocyanic acid (also referred to simply as cyanide or cyanide gas). Zyklon-B had not yet been invented and so the cyanide had to be introduced into the tunnels either from gas-filled tanks or else generated within the tunnels by the dropping of cyanide salt into barrels filled with sulfuric acid (the so-called "barrel method").

The British experience with typhus in Poland and Russia during that period was described many years later in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine as follows:¹

Administrative Measures of Control of Widespread Epidemics

Though the measures taken are not likely to be applicable to Great Britain it may be of interest to outline the broader administrative steps we took when dealing with widespread epidemics of typhus fever.

The personnel of a number of units was established, including doctors, nurses, and subordinate medical auxiliaries. All were young and all were protected by the use of special clothing. Arrangements were made for the regular disinfestation of the garments and for bathing the personnel. The stores required included portable baths and showers, fuel for heating water, soap, hair clippers and scissors, nail brushes, towels, &c., in addition to as good rations as it was possible to obtain. Units were sent into the various regions and were administered centrally in Poland from Warsaw, in Russia from Moscow and Kuibyshev, and, two years ago, in China from Chungking and Sian.

The next step was to put a cordon round healthy areas, with the aid of the military and barbed wire, to prevent the ingress of infected refugees. This was in many cases done locally, though eventually a cordon had to be established right across Europe, from North Poland to Rumania. Refugees were only allowed to enter this "clean" zone at certain points established on the roads and railways. Patrols watched the open country and brought stragglers into the disinfesting points. At each such point were arrangements for bathing and disinfestation, and all persons passing the cordon were thoroughly 'de-loused' with their belongings. The size of the work may be gathered from the fact that at one centre alone--Baranowice, on the Polish-Russian frontier in 1921--we were for a long time disinfesting each day 10,000 refugees returning to Poland from Russia. The method of disinfestation varied according to the country and the apparatus available. In Poland, steam and cyanide were both used, the latter being employed on an extensive scale on the frontiers. At Baranowice, where the refugees arrived chiefly by train, a tunnel was built, into which hydrocyanic gas could be introduced. On the arrival of each train, all the passengers were given a blanket and told to strip, leaving their garments and all their belongings on the train. Each person was then bathed in hot water with soft soap and paraffin, while the train was backed into the tunnel, the engine uncoupled, and cyanide gas liberated in the tunnel. When the bathing of the refugees was completed, the train was pulled out of the tunnel by means of a rope attached to a locomotive and was allowed to air. In due course the passengers dressed, gave up their blankets, and continued on their journey. In Mesopotamia, we used a locomotive with waggons attached, into which steam, first saturated and superheated, could be passed. The train included accommodation for personnel and thus constituted a unit which could be moved to any point where typhus broke out.

In Russia, we utilized the Russian baths, with which every village is equipped. These are log huts in which fires are made under heaps of stones, which are thus heated to a high temperature. Buckets of water are thrown on the stones, the water immediately evaporating into clouds of steam. The population was first bathed and de-loused in the bath, and then the amount of heat and steam were increased so as to deal with the bedding and clothing. Subsequently, no further water was thrown on the stones, and the heat of the hut was allowed to dry out the material.

For furs, which are very readily infested with lice and which do not lend themselves to the ordinary methods of disinfestation, crude naphthalene was used. A large box or chest was constructed at the entrance to the house and half-filled with crude naphthalene. Into this all furs and outer garments were dropped on entry to the house and left there until the following morning. I should mention that in winter in a cold country it is, of course, sufficient to hang one's garments in the open for the night for every louse to be destroyed. Whether the nits survive or not depends on the degree of cold, but there is in any case no evidence that these can transmit the disease.

In China, where padded garments have to a great extent superseded furs, brick ovens were used. . . .

In spite of the difficulties, the delousing of entire railroad trains was absolutely essential to prevent the spread of typhus from infested areas to non-infested areas. Railroads could otherwise carry typhus-infected lice throughout all of Europe within a few days. Not only the railroad trains themselves but even the railroad stations were important sources of contagious disease, particularly typhus, because it was there that people would spend hours and even days in close contact, often huddled together--an ideal environment for the spreading of lice from "lousy" persons to clean persons. By contrast, busses, trucks and automobiles were still relatively unimportant for public transportation.

The invention of Zyklon-B in 1923 was a major step forward because delousing methods employing this product could handle furs and leather goods without damage as easily as they could handle all other types of clothing. By the late 1930's (see Appendix A), the delousing of railroads had been greatly improved with specially-constructed delousing tunnels or gas chambers. These facilities were subsequently improved even further with blowers and ductwork to circulate air and gas, and with space heaters to raise interior temperatures above the boiling point of hydrocyanic acid (78.6o F).2 Heating was especially necessary during winter--precisely the time of the year when typhus was generally most severe and when delousing was most needed--in order to be sure that all of the hydrocyanic acid from Zyklon-B would evaporate and fill the chamber interiors.

DEGESCH as an Information Source
for a Technology of Mass-Murder

The technology which was employed for fumigating entire railroad trains was hardly a secret. On the contrary, before the war and throughout most of the war, the DEGESCH company had placed large advertisements for its products and technical expertise in many technical journals which were distributed throughout the entire world. Many of these advertisements clearly showed large gas chambers for fumigating railroad trains and trucks with Zyklon-B.

The half-page advertisement which follows appeared in dozens of issues of Der praktische Desinfektor just as an example.³

Figure 1: Typical advertisement (half size) by the DEGESCH Company showing large gas chambers, including one for railroads in the lower left corner.⁴

Any German official seriously interested in using Zyklon-B for almost any purpose would have been well aware of this superb technology. The people responsible for the "Final Solution," about whom it is generally conceded that they were otherwise intelligent and in many cases well-educated, would have surely read the German technical literature also. Any German official responsible for the purchase of large quantities of Zyklon-B would have surely seen the DEGESCH advertisements, not just once but many times, showing large, well-designed gas chambers about which numerous technical discussions could be easily found.

The importance of circulation and heat are clearly emphasized in the relevant German literature and much of the English language literature as well. The absence of any means for circulating and heating the air-gas mixture in cellar rooms which were supposedly used for mass-murder in Auschwitz is strong and clear evidence that the extermination claims, at least with regard to Zyklon-B, are sheer nonsense.⁵

Disease in War and its Aftermath

A standard feature of the Holocaust story is the reliance upon photographs of thousands of dead bodies found in some of the German concentration camps at the end of World War 2. For people who are unfamiliar with the horrors of war, which includes most of us fortunately, those photographs are more than sufficient proof of a genocidal policy on the part of the German regime. Even for many veterans from the Western Allied armies who may have spent years reading the generally available literature, those photographs constitute convincing evidence of genocide. The claims of revisionists that the bodies were the result of catastrophic epidemics of typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, dysentery, etc., are readily scoffed at as the foolish ravings of Nazi apologists. After all, how could disease alone have possibly caused such misery as one sees in those photographs? The bitter reality is that the photographs tell only a small part of the horrors of modern warfare.

How many Americans have any idea that for every Union soldier who died during the American Civil War from combat, including those who died from wounds and injuries, there were approximately two Union soldiers who died from disease. Despite all that has been written and said in a hundred years about the Civil War and shown on film, it would be surprising if one American in a hundred has any idea as to the relative size of these numbers even though the Civil War was fought on American soil and is a major part of America's history.

Out of a total of 359,528 Union deaths from all causes, 110,070 were from combat but 224,586 were from disease.⁶ Of the deaths from disease, 44,000 were from "diarrhea and dysentery, acute and chronic" and 34,883 were from "typhoid, typho-malarial, and continued fevers."⁷ By contrast, the total number of deaths arising from combat at the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union army is only 3,155 and for the Confederate army is only 3,903.⁸

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6