After various attempts at extermination, the Nazis concluded in 1942 that asphyxiating the victims in gas chambers was the most effective means of achieving the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
In late 1939, German doctors began experimenting with a toxic gas on the mentally ill.
After Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile extermination units)—which had been established as early as 1939 in Poland—carried out mass shootings of Jews (in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states).
To speed up the extermination process, the Nazis experimented with the use of hermetically sealed mobile gas trucks. Their exhaust was directed into the interior compartment. Hundreds of thousands of people—Jews, Roma, the mentally ill, and political opponents—were murdered.
In late 1941, the Nazis accelerated the process of extermination: the Chelmno camp became the experimental center for gassing by truck.
In 1942, systematic extermination in stationary gas chambers (using carbon monoxide generated by diesel engines) began in the camps at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek, located in Poland. Upon arrival, the victims were thrown out of the cattle cars and told they were being “disinfected” in “showers.” The greater the accumulation of naked bodies in the gas chambers, the faster the victims suffocated.
The Nazis were constantly seeking more “efficient” methods of extermination. At the Auschwitz camp, also located in Poland, they experimented with Zyklon B (a powerful pesticide) by gassing, in September 1941, some 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners. Zyklon B pellets turn into toxic gas upon contact with air. This gas proved to be the fastest means of gassing and was chosen for the mass extermination of Jews at Auschwitz. Up to 12,000 victims were gassed there each day.
Although they were not specifically designed to serve as killing sites, the concentration camps at Natzweiler-Struthof, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück also had gas chambers. Relatively small, they were intended for prisoners deemed unfit for work. Most of these camps also used Zyklon B.
The mass shootings in the Soviet territories occupied by the Nazis constituted the first phase of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The second phase is the best known: of the 6 million Jews who were victims of the genocide, approximately 2.7 million died in the gas chambers.
References:
— Michael Berenbaum, 1993, *The World Must Know*, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
— Bruttmann Tal, Christophe Tarricone, 2020, *The Hundred Words of the Shoah*, *Que sais-je?*, PUF.
