Nazi Botched Gassings?

A new book, Gruesome Spectacles by Austin Sarat, is gaining some attention, partly because of the recent botched execution by lethal injection in Oklahoma.

Were there ever any "botched" mass gassings of Jews in Nazi Germany? If not, why not? Given the complexity and record of botched gassings in the US where at most two people were gassed at one time and where great care is taken to do everything properly (even "painlessly"), there should have been many more botched gassings in Nazi Germany. But, there is at best only the sketchiest mention of anything like that. The Gerstein diesel gassing tale would be one such story—but the botching was not due to any problems with the gas not killing the intended victims within the expected execution period but only to the problem of getting the diesel engine to start. Was cyanide really any better?

From the following excerpt from the book it is clear that even in the US, botched gas executions (5.4%) were rather common.

“There should have been some kind of paper trail for Nazi ‘botchings’ if only to better avoid repeat botchings. The same botching rate as occurred in the US would have meant that of the 2 million victims or so of mass gassings in Nazi Germany, there should have been at least 100,000 victims of botched gassings—including many "survivors." Making sure that the cyanide was dispersed throughout the gas chamber would have been a major problem without ‘forced circulation’ or Kreislauf. What to do with groggy but very angry Jewish "survivors" of such botched gassings? Could Irene Zisblatt have really been as passive as she suggests after she was somehow taken out of a gas chamber? So many more questions for the holocaust zombies—but no real answers.”

The book goes a long way in dispelling the important hoax which preceded the holocaust hoax. That earlier but essential hoax was that poison gas could be used to commit mass murder quickly and even "painlessly." That was a widely held myth which even I believed until the revelations about botched gas executions in the US came to my attention in the late 1990s through the internet. The truth had effectively been suppressed by the government, especially the state governments, in the US presumably to allow states to keep gassing criminals to death. Under the best of circumstances, however, gas executions were only "quick" and relatively "painless" (whatever that means) if the prisoners c-o-o-p-e-r-a-t-e-d in their own execution by breathing deeply as an intense concentration of the gas first reached their nostrils. Any such cooperation from masses of Jews seems so unlikely.

Friedrich Paul Berg
Nazi Gassings Never Happened
http://www.nazigassings.com