Also during the Depression, the U.S. Supreme Court took on a case in which white deputy sheriffs in Mississippi used leather straps to repeatedly beat black defendants suspected of murder until they confessed. Asked how much he had whipped one defendant, a deputy replied, “Not too much for a Negro.”7 In that instance the court reversed the convictions, but the ruling didn’t end such brutal practices in the South or elsewhere.
Racial problems weren’t confined to Alabama or Mississippi; they existed in one form or another in every region of the country. Throughout the United States race often helped determine who was labeled a dangerous criminal and how severely they were punished. National studies found that racial minorities—namely, blacks, Native Americans, and Asians—were several times more likely than whites to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned or executed.8 A report of the era from North Carolina noted that although blacks comprised only 27.5 percent of the state’s population, they accounted for more than 56 percent of the state prisoners. The most common offense was burglary, but blacks were also convicted of homicide at a rate more than three times that of whites.9 Although some whites cited such statistics to bolster their argument that the “black race was more criminal than the white race,” the fact was that blacks in North Carolina (and in other parts of the nation, especially the South) were subjected to Jim Crow discrimination, excluded from juries, denied the right to vote, and sharply restricted in their educational and economic opportunities, so it was by no means clear that blacks were inherently any more criminal than whites would have been if subjected to the same treatment. This, however, didn’t stop whites from labeling them as such. By the 1940s scholars were increasingly producing studies suggesting that blacks were more likely to be condemned to death, wrongfully and otherwise, than whites, due to the power of racial discrimination.10 Yet the problem of the color line remained one of America’s most deep-seated and vexing problems.
William Wellman’s ordeal was illustrative of what was going on in North Carolina at the time. In 1941 Wellman, a black ex-convict, was accused of raping an elderly white woman in Statesville, North Carolina. Police showed Wellman’s mug shot to the victim and a witness and officers put the suspect in a police lineup, but the pair failed to identify him. When the police made him stand in a second lineup, the victim declared, “He looks like the man, but if he is the man, he has changed somewhat from the time I saw him.” Although Wellman claimed to have been at his job in Virginia on the day in question, and there was no other evidence against him, he was charged with capital rape, and his alibi was ignored.
Even at that late date, someone in Wellman’s situation might have been lynched in some parts of the South. In North Carolina, however, authorities had been discouraging that kind of action for more than a generation. In 1906, after a mob in the backcountry strung up and mutilated five African-Americans, the governor had called out the National Guard, and the ringleader was prosecuted and sent to state prison. There was also a state antilynching law in effect. So, although Wellman was accused of raping a white woman, he wasn’t lynched. An all-white jury quickly convicted him soon enough, however, based on very little evidence.
The day after the verdict, the local newspaper reported on its front page that Nazi forces had invaded Russia and an African-American in town had been sentenced to die in the gas chamber. After Wellman’s court appeal was quickly denied, his appellate lawyer enlisted several prominent scholars (including Guy B. Johnson, the sociologist, and Paul Green, a Chapel Hill playwright and activist) to help him seek clemency. They finally succeeded in finding a dated pay receipt and other documentary evidence proving that Wellman was telling the truth. Although the North Carolina prosecutor, E. M. Land, continued to press for his execution, on April 15, 1943, Governor J. Melville Boughton ultimately issued a full and unconditional pardon. What made Wellman’s case so unusual was simply that he was one of the lucky few blacks to cheat his executioner after proving his innocence.11
While Wellman was struggling to save his own life, another black North Carolina man, George Peele, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death despite his stubborn pleas of innocence and the shaky evidence against him. Peele insisted that the police had extracted a false confession from him when he was drunk, but his attorney failed to file a brief on his behalf. At the time, some capital appeals were dismissed because the court had failed to prepare a trial transcript, and this sealed his fate. And so, on October 10, Peele “appeared thoroughly unnerved as he was led into the gas chamber.” He died still insisting he hadn’t committed the crime.12
Ideas based on eugenics continued to exert a significant influence on the administration of American justice, as reflected in the race, ethnicity, and mental status of the accused, as well as the eugenic approaches of segregation, exclusion, and execution by lethal gas. Besides skin color, “feeblemindedness” was another factor that sometimes contributed to suspects being executed. Although North Carolina and other states had laws on their books prohibiting the punishment of the “insane,” the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t held that executing a mentally incompetent person violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Mental incompetence was not considered a mitigating factor. In fact, in 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, had upheld forcible sterilization of the feebleminded, with Justice Oliver W. Holmes declaring in his famous opinion, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”13 Being labeled “feebleminded” had implications beyond just involuntary sterilization. Neither legislators nor the courts exempted persons of low intelligence from the death penalty. On the contrary, instead of disqualifying such persons from receiving a capital sentence, many Americans still believed that “feebleminded” criminals should be put to death. John Sullivan, another severely mentally retarded prisoner whom Colorado put to death, was just one example.14 Police found it much easier to extract a confession from mentally handicapped persons, and prosecutors noticed that they also were far less likely to defend themselves.
By the early 1940s gender was also becoming less of a disqualifying factor for execution in the United States. Until that point, women had rarely been put to death, and no female had ever been gassed. But in November of 1941 a new milestone was established in California when an American gas chamber received its first woman—Mrs. Ethel Leta Juanita Spinelli, a fifty-two-year-old grandmother known as “The Duchess,” said to be the leader of a robbery gang, who had been convicted of murder. Police depicted her as a professional criminal, saying she could throw a knife to pin a poker chip at fifteen paces, and prosecutors demanded her execution. Yet convicts at San Quentin were repulsed by the notion of a woman being put to death; many of them signed a petition protesting her execution, and they even offered to draw straws among themselves to select a replacement. But after the state and federal courts swiftly denied Spinelli’s attorneys’ applications for a writ of habeas corpus, and the governor refused to grant her clemency, the state went ahead with her execution the day after Thanksgiving. A news photographer snapped a picture of the smiling Italian-American woman holding a crucifix, and it went out on the international wire. When her time came, the authorities strapped the woman into the death chair with her back to the crowd of more than one hundred witnesses. Under her green prison smock she carried faded snapshots of her daughter, “Gypsy,” her two young sons, and her infant grandson. A week later, two of Spinelli’s alleged associates were also put to death. The chief witness against them remained in an insane asylum.15
By the end of 1941, San Quentin’s chamber had claimed twenty-four lives, twenty-two of them whites, which at the time put it second in the nation behind North Carolina in total gassings. Before the year was over, North Carolina followed California by executing its first woman, Rosanna Phillips, who was black. During the early 1940s the age range of those sent to t
he gas chamber was also stretched. In June 1941 Colorado executed someone who was seventy-six years old, and in 1942 and 1944 Oregon and Nevada tied the record for youngest person executed by dispatching a seventeen-year-old.16 In 1942, Arizona matched an earlier North Carolina milestone from 1938 when it executed three persons (all of them black) on the same day. In 1944, the first lethal gas execution of a federal prisoner took place when Wyoming put to death Henry Ruhl at Rawlins Penitentiary for the crime of murder on a federal reservation. (The federal government lacked its own lethal gas execution apparatus.)
The demise of Hungarian immigrant Leslie Gireth at San Quentin on January 22, 1943, in some ways exemplified the ideal in American gas chamber executions of that era. Convicted of murdering his former jewelry store employee during an adulterous affair, Gireth later expressed remorse, pleaded guilty, refused to appeal his sentence, and left Warden Clinton T. Duffy (Holohan’s former assistant) a warm letter saying, “Thank you so much for everything,” as he settled comfortably into the death chair.17 There was no resistance and no outcry.
In summary, the technology of gas chamber executions had been fairly well established in the United States by 1940, and the following decade saw some new milestones to America’s gas chamber history. By and large, however, the nation’s lethal gas executions went on as before, documented in news accounts but not viewed as a pressing social issue. But that was about to change because of what was happening in Europe.
For one thing, America’s entry into the war renewed many citizens’ fears about chemical warfare. Accounts circulated that Japanese and Italian military commanders had used poison gases on the battlefield and against civilians, and there was no doubt that the Germans would resort to doing so again if it suited their interests; everyone was sure the enemy had worked in their secret laboratories to devise even more diabolical gases and had probably stockpiled massive quantities of deadly chemicals for use when the time was right. The Americans’ greatest consolation was that geography would likely protect them from possible gas assault at home.
“Why have the Germans not used it?” Winston Churchill growled in a secret memorandum. “Not certainly out of moral scruples or affection for us…. [T]he only reason they have not used it against us is that they fear the retaliation. What is to their detriment is to our advantage.”18
Like the British, the U.S. Army secretly revived its chemical warfare program during the war, making gas masks, training soldiers and civilians, and preparing response plans. The government also conducted extensive research that included large-scale experimentation on human subjects, mostly U.S. military personnel and convicts. Some of the tests exposed about sixty thousand members of the U.S. armed forces to lewisite and mustard gas. Decades later a congressional inquiry would report: “Most of these subjects were not informed of the nature of the experiments and never received medical follow-up after their participation in the research… [and] some of these human subjects were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they discussed these experiments with anyone, including their wives, parents, and family doctors.”
One seventeen-year-old sailor, Nathan Schnurman, participated in the testing of gas masks and clothing while he was locked in a gas chamber and exposed to mustard gas and lewisite. Schnurman was not allowed to leave the chamber even after he became violently ill and passed out. “What happened after that, I don’t know,” he later recalled. “I may only assume, when I was removed from the chamber, it was presumed I was already dead.” At least four thousand of the army’s guinea pigs were Seventh-day Adventists, conscientious objectors who were especially prized as research subjects because they didn’t drink, smoke, or engage in other harmful behaviors.19 The army also continued to utilize gas-chamber drills as part of its required basic training for new recruits.
Soon, however, the notion of the gas chamber would change radically forever.
CHAPTER 8
ADAPTED FOR GENOCIDE
As Hitler prepared his plans for world conquest, his henchmen explored options for chemical warfare. A major program was initiated to develop all kinds of lethal gases. Some advisors expressed interest in Prussic acid, which IG Farben manufactured in large quantities as a pesticide.1 Hitler did not favor using gas on the battlefield. But as he invaded Poland, he used the press of war to secretly authorize a euthanasia program that at first was ostensibly limited to eliminating an incurably sick patient who could be killed “by medical measures of which he remains unaware.”2 In fact, it was just a first step. To make it happen, on October 1, 1939, the Führer placed the program under the supervision of Philipp Bouhler, chief of his chancellery (personal office), and Dr. Karl Brandt, his personal physician.
In keeping with the medical nature of this approach, Hitler’s SS Criminal Police used psychiatrists to provide legal authorization and help them explore different methods to secretly carry out the “mercy killings.”3 Nazi physicians experimented with lethal injection but found using a needle on one patient after another too cumbersome and intimate. As a result, they also began to test various gases. A psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Heyde, suggested they try carbon monoxide.
The “mercy killing” program was code-named Aktion T4 because its main office was at 4 Tiergartenstrasse, the address of the chancellery. In 1939 SS-Obersturmführer Christian Wirth, a former Stuttgart police officer then with the SS Criminal Police and assigned to the T4 staff, supervised the construction of the first Nazi gas chamber at Brandenburg State Hospital and Nursing Home, which had become a killing center. (Police officers would prove to be among the most zealous agents of genocide.) The unit was housed in a former brick barn. The initial arrangement included a fake shower room with benches, designed to accommodate about eighteen to twenty persons. A physician examined each patient and assigned him or her a number. Each one was then photographed and ordered to assemble with the others to prepare for their group shower. The inmates were told to take off their clothes. Some who expressed anxiety were given a sedative; others who resisted were simply beaten or shot.4
Two SS chemists with doctoral degrees, Dr. Albert Widmann and Dr. August Becker, operated the gas chamber from behind the scenes, watching through a tiny peephole. Becker observed how quickly “people toppled over, or lay on benches”—all without making any “scenes or commotions.” But he also noticed that one of the physicians (Dr. Irmfried Eberl) had opened the gas container too quickly, causing the escaping gas to make a hissing sound. Worried that this noise “would make the victims uneasy,” Becker demonstrated how to open the valve slowly and quietly, and “thereafter the killing of the mental patients progressed without further incidents.” Once the gas had done its work, the gas chamber was quickly ventilated, and SS men used special stretchers to push the naked corpses into the specially constructed crematory ovens.
A delegation of Nazi officials and physicians also witnessed the demonstration, and those in charge pronounced the gassings a success.5 One of the witnesses, Dr. Brandt, who served as Hitler’s physician and plenipotentiary for the euthanasia program, later met with the Führer and discussed various killing methods, whereupon Hitler is said to have asked him, “Which is the more humane way?” Brandt told him it was gas.6 And so, gas it was.
History does not record whether the subject of American gas chamber executions ever came up, nor has anyone found documents indicating that the Nazis closely studied the American experience. Yet it is not hard to believe that at least some Nazis, particularly chemists, psychiatrists, and perhaps some police officials, were aware that gassings had been carried out in the United States.
With Hitler’s approval, a gas chamber was built at each of six mental institutions in different parts of Germany to carry out the “mercy killings.” The initial models resembled the first makeshift chamber built in Nevada fifteen years earlier, but they had a few new twists. One of the euthanasia administrators, Viktor Brack, described the setup: “No special gas chambers were built. A room suitable in the planning of the hospital was use
d, a room attached to the reception ward…. That was made into a gas chamber. It was sealed, it was given special doors and windows, and then a few meters of gas pipe was laid, some kind of pipe with holes in it. Outside of this room there was a bottle, a compressed bottle, with the necessary apparatus, necessary instruments, a pressure gauge, etc.”7
Within a period of just nine months, Brandenburg alone “disinfected” (killed) at least 9,772 individuals, more than four hundred of them Jews. After the corpses were cremated, the patients’ next of kin or guardians received notices through the mail that their loved ones had passed away due to some sort of natural cause.8 Between January 1940 and August 1941 the euthanasia killing centers gassed to death seventy thousand patients and killed an estimated twenty thousand more with drugs.
One of the centers, Grafeneck, was located in a sixteenth-century castle near Stuttgart that had been converted to a hospice for invalids. Its old coach house had been converted to accommodate the gas chamber in a room disguised as a shower room. It could “shower” up to seventy-five persons at a time. It too had a crematorium and was surrounded by a heavily patrolled barbed-wire fence. Some of those gassed included disabled veterans of the German army who had fought in World War I. But in November 1940, after their relatives received sanitized death notices and rumors flared about comings and goings at the institution, local residents complained to a Nazi judge and a controversy arose.
Word of the incidents soon reached local priests and circulated up the church hierarchy. On August 4, Catholic archbishop Count Clemens August von Galen delivered a stern public sermon at Münster warning that German mental hospitals were gassing to death thousands of severely wounded German soldiers; he urged an end to the killings as well as less Nazi interference with the Church.9 The scandal spread from there. After British intelligence dropped propaganda leaflets reporting the archbishop’s charges, on August 24, 1941, Hitler suspended the euthanasia program and the Nazis scurried to cover their tracks.
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