In my article about Zyklon-B and German delousing chambers, I
included a brief discussion of the large, well-designed gas chambers which
were used by Germany and her allies to fumigate entire railroad trains, one
or more railroad cars at a time, with cyanide gas. Those chambers would have
also been ideal for the mass-extermination of people if the Germans had ever
intended to commit mass-extermination of Jews or anyone else.
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
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