The Self-Assisted Holocaust Hoax

On The Learning Channel on American television, some recent programs have described in graphic detail the horrible execution of one prisoner, David Lawson, who had refused to help his executioners.[1] Lawson was executed on June 15, 1994 in Raleigh, North Carolina. In one of the last executions by gas, Lawson repeatedly held his breath for as long as possible and took only short breaths in between.[2] By some accounts, the prisoner was also feebleminded. Perhaps for that reason he did something else which was unusual; he appealed to his executioners and to the witnesses during his execution. Again and again, as he was taking his short breaths, he cried out “I am human!” At first, his cry was clearly audible, but as the minutes went by, he became less and less understandable, and finally, more than ten minutes into the execution, there was just a mutter. He was dead only after eighteen minutes. The witnesses to the execution were horrified. The warden of the prison who had also supervised the execution was so shaken that he resigned. Because of this execution fiasco, executions with poison gas have been generally abandoned in the USA and replaced with lethal injections.

It is now clear to the experts, especially those still waiting on death rows, that a quick and painless execution by gas requires the cooperation of the intended victim. Prisoners about to be gassed were usually encouraged to inhale deeply as soon as the cyanide was released in order to make their deaths come easily. However, if an intended victim was uncooperative, the execution could easily become a fiasco. By simply refusing to take the deep breaths needed to quickly ingest a lethal dose of cyanide, the agony – even under the most ideal conditions – could last for more than eighteen minutes. Publications in the United States reveal that executions lasting from 10 to 14 minutes are the rule, rather than the exception.[3][4]^,,-[5] With regard to the quantity used, it is reported, for example, that 454 g of KCN is added to semi-concentrated sulfuric acid in the gas chamber in Raleigh (North Carolina), which leads to a sudden formation of gas that is even visible for a brief moment to the witnesses in the viewing room and reaches the victim in a matter of seconds.3 In purely mathematical terms, around 180 g of hydrogen cyanide is produced, which corresponds to 150 liters of gas, although a considerable proportion (around 50%) of this is likely to remain dissolved in the semi-concentrated sulfuric acid.[6] These 75 liters of hydrogen-cyanide gas are produced in North Carolina’s gas chamber directly under the victim, so that the victim is probably exposed to HCN concentrations a few seconds after the start of the execution which are probably even higher than 10% by volume for a short time, but then fall steadily due to the dissipation of hydrogen cyanide throughout the chamber.[7]

With a normal breathing volume of some 15 to 20 liters per minute and an assumed average concentration during the execution of only 0.75% by volume, about 1.35 to 1.8 grams of HCN were ingested in 10 minutes (150-200 liters of inhaled air), which corresponds to about ten to twenty times the lethal dose, which according to the literature is about 1 mg per kg of body weight.[8] To ensure the death of all victims within a quarter of an hour, it is therefore apparently necessary to administer a tenfold overdose of poison.

An execution procedure using the most modern execution chamber technology with a lethal gas concentration that should have killed in only a few seconds was thwarted by at least one intended victim simply holding his breath. An execution procedure which should have been painless and quick had proved to be so impractical that it is now generally abandoned.[9] An execution procedure which dispersed an extremely lethal concentration of cyanide within seconds, and which theoretically should have killed within a few additional seconds, nonetheless took eighteen minutes to kill a single, feebleminded victim.

It should now be obvious that the Jewish Holocaust claims of mass gassings are rubbish. The sketchy and error-riddled bits of evidence for those claims show that Nazi gassing methods were primitive at best.[10] Rather than dispersing a lethal concentration in seconds, those methods could have only dispersed marginally lethal concentrations after many minutes.

For the alleged gassings with cyanide at Auschwitz and possibly Maidanek, but nowhere else according to the Holocaust story, the cyanide supposedly arose from granules of Zyklon-B dumped either on the heads or among the feet of the intended victims or into perforated columns. For any of those scenarios, the cyanide would have arisen from the granules slowly; that was after all the whole purpose of Zyklon-B: to release a measured quantity of cyanide slowly. Under normal conditions a layer of Zyklon-B 1/2 to 1 centimeter thick would have required half-an-hour to release half of its cyanide.[11] The presence of a tightly packed crowd of intended victims or screening would have slowed the process even more. Although many might have died within the execution times that are claimed,[12] many others would have survived – and that would have been a fiasco. What would the executioners have done with the survivors – return them to barracks where they could describe what happened or send them back in for a second gassing? After separating the obvious survivors from the dead, how would the executioners identify and dispose of those who were merely groggy or unconscious or feigning death? The answer is that any realistic mass gassing arrangement would have had to kill everyone. Otherwise, one would have had the same emotional strain on the executioners that supposedly led to mass gassings in the first place as an alternative to mass shootings.

The American experience with simple gas executions under ideal conditions proves that mass gassings of Jews would only have been possible if the Jewish victims – not just some of the Jews, but all – had assisted in their own mass executions; that is too unbelievable. The self-assisted Holocaust story is a hoax indeed.

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Editor’s Remark

An earlier, shorter paper, written under the pen name Conrad Grieb and without any source references, was published in late October 1996 as an opinion piece on the CODOH website. It was subsequently translated into German, expanded, equipped with source references, and published in the first issue of the German revisionist journal Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (“Der selbstassistierte Holocaust-Schwindel,” Vol. 1, No. 1 (1997), pp. 6-8). Since the English version was not “quotable” due to it being not more than a blog post without any source references, and because the German version was not desirable as a source due to the increasingly cryptic nature of this language and the disappearance of the periodical it was published in, we have decided to publish this enhanced, footnoted and updated English-language version in our journal.

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Endnotes

[1]	For a detailed description of this execution see Bill Krueger, “Lawson’s Final Moments”, The News & Observer, Raleigh, North Carolina, 19.6.1994, S. A1.
[2]	Newsweek, Nov. 8, 1993, p. 75; The New York Times, Oct. 6, 1994, p. A20; ibid., June 16, 1994, p. A23.
[3]	The News & Observer, Raleigh (NC), June 11, 1994, p. 14A (according to the prison warden, normally 10-14 min.).
[4]	C.T. Duffy, 88 Men and 2 Women, Doubleday, New York 1962, p. 101 (13 to 15 min.); C.T. Duffy was warden of San Quentin Prison for almost 12 years, during which time he conducted the execution of 88 men and 2 women, many of them executed in the local gas chamber.
[5]	Stephen Trombley, The Execution Protocol, Crown Publishers, New York 1992, p. 13 (approximately 10 minutes or more); Amnesty International, Botched Executions, Fact Sheet December 1996, distributed by Amnesty International USA, 322 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10001-4808 (more than 7 min).
[6]	See the experiences of G. Rudolf as described in: The Chemistry of Auschwitz, Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2017, Chapter 8.3.3.4, p. 325; the most-recent edition is posted at https://holocausthandbooks.com/book/the-chemistry-of-auschwitz/.
[7]	Assuming a chamber volume of 10 m³, 75 liters of HCN correspond to 0.75% by volume.
[8]	W. Wirth, C. Gloxhuber, Toxikologie, Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart 1985, pp. 159f.; W. Forth, D. Henschler, W. Rummel, Allgemeine und spezielle Pharmakologie und Toxikologie, Wissenschaftsverlag, Mannheim 1987, pp. 751f.; S. Moeschlin, Klinik und Therapie der Vergiftung, Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart 1986, p. 300; H.-H. Wellhöner, Allgemeine und systematische Pharmakologie und Toxikologie, Springer Verlag, Berlin 1988, pp. 445f.; F. Flury, F. Zernik, Schädliche Gase, Dämpfe, Nebel, Rauch- und Staubarten, Berlin 1931, p. 405; see also Daunderer, Klinische Toxikologie, 30th Supplement, Oct. 1987, ecomed, Landsberg 1987, pp. 4ff.
[9]	Newsweek, Nov. 8, 1993, p. 75; The New York Times, Oct. 6., 1994, p. A20.
[10]	The literature scrutinizing witness claims on homicidal gassings by German authorities during WWII has increased considerably recently. To get the best scoop, see the studies listed in “Section Four: Witness Critique,” of the series Holocaust Handbooks; https://holocausthandbooks.com/handbooks/.
[11]	R. Irmscher, “Nochmals: “Die Einsatzfähigkeit der Blausäure bei tiefen Temperaturen,” Zeitschrift für hygienische Zoologie und Schädlings­bekämpfung, 1942, p. 36.
[12]	Regarding the claimed killing times, see the detailed treatment of this issue by G. Rudolf, now in The Chemistry of Auschwitz, op. cit. (note 6), Chapter “7.3.1.3.2.,” pp. 250-267, with long lists of sources to claimed execution times ranging from instantly to 20 minutes, with the presumably most-competent witnesses – the allegedly supervising physicians – claiming times of not more than five minutes.