Gas Chambers

   Following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, inmates from psychiatric hospitals in Posen were sent and crammed into a sealed room in the local headquarters of the Gestapo. Here they were forced to inhale carbon monoxide gas released from canisters. This was the first time in history that a gas chamber had been used for mass killing. The decision to introduce the gas chambers and the crematorium as the most efficient means of murder marks the unprecedented characteristic of the Holocaust. The technology, the chemicals, and the willingness of the Nazis to use both in behalf of their ideological objectives were soon introduced in Germany where gas chambers, using carbon monoxide gas, were one method of killing in its Euthanasia Program. The technicians who supervised the gas chambers in the Euthanasia Program, such as Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl, were subsequently transferred to the Aktion Reinhard death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where they employed the use of carbon monoxide in the gas chambers, as opposed to Zyklon B, which was the gas used in the gas chambers in Auschwitz.