Gas chambers/crematoria facilitating the murder of over 1 million people during WWII were designed not by the Nazi SS, but a small family firm of engineers.
Since the summer of 1941, the Nazis had been mulling over how to implement Hitler’s ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ and in August of that year, they discovered a horrible possibility. When testing a delousing agent, Zyklon B gas, on Soviet prisoners of war at a prison camp in Silesia known as Auschwitz, they discovered that the noxious substance had the ability to kill all those who breathed in its fumes. In the winter of 1941, the chief of the German police and SS, Heinrich Himmler, summoned Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss to Berlin to answer what the Nazis considered to be the vital question of how best to achieve annihilation. On 20 January 1942, while newspapers focused on collecting woolen fabrics for the war effort and celebrating the successes of German engineering and the Autobahn, Himmler hosted the infamous Wannsee Conference. ‘Whatever Jews we can reach are to be eliminated,’ Himmler tells Höss, ‘without exception.’
The resolution the Nazis reach will require a cold-blooded alchemy of technical ingenuity and moral bankruptcy, and will be brought into being not in the cold swampy flatlands of Poland, but, in part, in a comfortable office in one of Germany’s most pleasant cities. An office with drawing boards and a view of the Ettersberg mountain—where middle-aged men wearing stiff white collars dream up horrors, each more demented than the last.
Source: The History Reader – A History Blog from St. Martins Press
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