If you are not familiar with Zyklon B then let me give you a bit of a history lesson on the turn of the 20th century that you probably have forgotten from your days at public school. The world was a much scarier place to live in at the turn of the 20th century and well into half of that century. People regularly died because of ailments that might require an office visit today or even just a trip to the local pharmacy. For Europeans both East and West, the most ruthless killer of their time was Typhus.
Typhus literally killed millions of Europeans (for centuries actually) and their constant infighting only made this plague worse. Unlike the Black Plague which was transmitted through rodents, Typhus was transmitted through insects mainly lice but also fleas and ticks. Zyklon B was the first man made product that was capable in the fight against this plague followed up years later by the Americans DDT. Both of these products are toxic pesticides.
Death from Typhus is horrible. Skin rashes, dementia, emaciation. It is a rather long and painful to watch process. These days a few antibiotics and your on your way but not in 1945. It was such a feared disease that in some U.S. Amy camps in the European theater the speed limit of all vehicles was 5 miles an hour as to not kick up dust and those no see-ums. The point is that it would make sense for all German detainment facilities to have an ample supply of Zyklon B on hand. One might also assume that during the last few years of the war and with the allies successful bombing of railway lines, the product might have been a little difficult to come by.
All of the detainment facilities carried Zyklon B as I’m sure the military did and maybe the citizens could buy it at the market because, I mean who wants to get Typhus right? More importantly, every single camp that was open to public inspection was debunked as possibly having gas chambers by the U.S. Military and that is on record. The only ones which have not been are in Poland which to this day have not be made available for public inspection.
What we do know is that to date there has never been a single building discovered that would be suitable of such an enterprise. Because if the gas leaked out it would kill everyone on the ground. You see ZyKlon B’s active ingredient is cyanide so of course if that escaped everyone would die right? Maybe not so right.
Germans admitted that they used the Zyklon B to fumigate buildings and clothing to kill the insects that spread the plague. Anyone who has ever owned a house will wounder about the grounds too because people go outside. Today we put a big tent over a house to fumigate it. I’ve never seen any pictures from 1945 of houses covered in a tent. So where did the gas go? They would have also had to treat the ground or just never let anyone outside.
It does not appear that Zyklon B would be a capable agent to murder large numbers of people. DTT, the American version of Zyklon B would also not have been a capable product for such an application.
But even if Zyklon B was a capable agent of mass murder, the easiest and cheapest way to kill people is to just stop feeding them. They could have just locked their barracks and set a man outside with a machine gun in case some tried to escape. Using Zyklon B would have been idiotic. Well we killed all the Jews but now everyone has Typhus right? They could have killed the Jews with a match. And trust me when I tell you that Germans are almost as cheap as Jews.
You can’t say that the gas was so powerful that if it leaked out of the gas chamber that it would have killed everyone on the ground and then smoke out buildings and laundry with it. I doubt if even eating one of the pellets would kill a person quickly enough and maybe not even kill them. Yes cyanide is the active ingredient in Zyklon B so why not just use cyanide? Because cyanide is too strong to be handled by people this way. There is also sometimes traces of cyanide in some of the food you’ve eaten but it didn’t kill you.
But but but 6 million died? Ummm maybe Typhus and the emaciation associated with it? Typhus was a mass murderer after all.
You know, during the last year or so of the war, I bet the soldiers who were in charge of the detainment facilities hardly ever fired their weapons. But I bet they had lots of ammunition just in case. Germans are kinda anal like that. They probably had more bullets than they had food or cans of Zyklon B. If you wanted to murder a bunch of people out of all the things that were at the Germans disposal, what would you have used? Weren’t they making products for the German army in those camps?
If you do an image search for Zyklon be you’ll see several displays with open cans and the product spilled out over the surface for display. They all look exactly the same suggesting that what you see is in fact the product used. If someone spilled their coffee on that stuff would everyone in the room die and maybe a few rooms over? Or is it not quite as potent as we were lead to believe?