The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  12. See Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide.

  13. DEGESCH, “Directives for the Use of Prussic Acid (Zyklon) for the Destruction of Vermin (Disinfestation),” NI-9912, as cited in Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989), p. 18.

  14. Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, trans. Mary Scott and Caroline Lloyd-Morris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 139.

  15. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 287. See also American Cyanamid and Chemical Corporation, Military Fumigation Manual: Zyklon Discoids for Insect Control (New York: American Cyanamid, 1944).

  16. Harry W. Mazal, “Zyklon-B: A Brief Report on the Physical Structure and Composition,” www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/zyklonb/ (accessed May 4, 2009).

  17. Testimony of SS-Unterscharführer Pery Broad, describing gassing in Krema I in Auschwitz, quoted in Rudolf Höss, Pery Broad, and Johann Paul Kremer, KL Auschwitz as Seen by the SS, trans. Constantine FitzGibbon (New York: Howard Fertig, 1984), p. 176.

  18. Quoted in Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 9.

  19. Testimony of Hans Stark, registrar of new arrivals in the Auschwitz death camp, quoted in E. Klee, W. Dressen, V. Riess, The Good Old Days (New York: The Free Press, 1988), p. 255.

  20. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 287.

  21. Breitman, Architect of Genocide.

  22. Die Zeit, January 9, 1998.

  23. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 24.

  24. On what the German people knew, see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

  25. Ibid., p. 198.

  26. “Mann Bids Reich Break Nazi Yoke: Author Warns German People to Act Before Ever-Growing World Hatred Engulfs You,” NYT, December 7, 1941.

  27. United Press, untitled report, dateline Stockholm, Sweden, NYT, June 27, 1942.

  28. “Poles Ask U.S. to Seize Nazis,” NYT, July 10, 1942.

  29. Paul Jacobs, Is Curly Jewish? (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1965), p. 15.

  30. “Poland in Appeal on Nazi Outrages,” NYT, November 28, 1942.

  31. Milton Bracker, “Polish Executions Put at 3,200,000,” NYT, July 27, 1943.

  32. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 194.

  33. Victor Cavendish-Bentinck Minute, August 23, 1943, Public Record Office, FO 371/34551.

  34. “1943 Timeline,” www.holocaustchronicle.org/StaticPages/462.html (accessed August 13, 2007).

  35. “Dewey for Offset to Anti-Semitism,” NYT, March 29, 1944.

  36. Joseph M. Levy, “Jews in Hungary Fear Annihilation,” NYT, May 10, 1944.

  37. “Czechs Report Massacre,” NYT, June 20, 1944.

  38. Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 338–40.

  39. See especially David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

  40. Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Joseph Finder, “Ultimate Insider, Ultimate Outsider,” NYT, April 12, 1992; Robert N. Rosen, Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 2006), pp. 405–6.

  41. Interview with Jan Karski, quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Touchstone, 1995), p. 516.

  42. Peter Novick, Holocaust in American Life, pp. 55–56.

  43. W. H. Lawrence, “Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp,” NYT, August 30, 1944.

  44. “3,000,000 Jews Executed,” NYT, November 13, 1944.

  45. Bendersky, “Jewish Threat,” p. 350.

  46. William Casey, The Secret War Against Hitler (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1988), p. 218.

  47. Gene Currivan, “Forced Tour at Buchenwald,” NYT, April 18, 1945.

  48. Affidavit of Karl von Heider, Frankfurt a/M., Grillparzerstr. 83, Nuernberg Military Tribunal, Vol. VII, p. 455, The Mazal Library, www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/07/NMT07-T0455.htm (accessed May 25, 2007).

  49. “Nazi Death Factory Shown in Film Here,” NYT, April 28, 1945.

  50. Bendersky, “Jewish Threat,” pp. 352–58.

  51. Joel Sack, Dawn over Dachau (New York: Shengold Publishers, 1990). I appreciate having had the opportunity to interview Joel Sack, a Dachau survivor, in September 1990.

  52. Report of Earl G. Harrison, August 1945, pp. 2, 12, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO, Harry S. Truman Papers, Official Files, box 127.

  53. Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1948), p. 164.

  54. Rebecca West, “Rebecca West at Nuremberg,” from The New Yorker, 1946, reprinted in Louis L. Snyder and Richard B. Morris, eds., A Treasury of Great Reporting (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), p. 707.

  55. See Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (New York: Knopf, 1992); Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (New York: Viking Press, 1994).

  56. Pressac, Auschwitz; Peter Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Lifton, Nazi Doctors, p. 160.

  57. Franz von Papen, Memoirs, trans. Brian Connell (London: Andre Deutsch, 1952), p. 563; see also Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

  58. See, e.g., WO 235–12, Case 12, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz Concentration Camps Case (Lueneburg Tribunal), 11 vols., National Archives, London.

  59. WO 235–83, Case 71, Bruno Tesch, Karl Weinbacher, and Joachim Drosihn (Hamburg Tribunal), National Archives, London.

  60. Some defenders of Dr. Tesch, Holocaust deniers, later pointed out that hydrogen cyanide had also been used in large quantities for fumigation, including by the U.S. military. See, e.g., American Cyanamid and Chemical Corporation, Military Fumigation Manual, 1944, cited by William B. Lindsey, “Zyklon B, Auschwitz, and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch,” Journal of Historical Review 4(3) (1983): 261–303.

  61. See J. H. Barrington, ed., The Zyklon B Trial: Trial of Bruno Tesch and Two Others (London: n.p., 1948); and Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben (New York: The Free Press, 1978). Incidentally, the National Archives in San Francisco contains an investigative case file (RG 175) concerning a series of contracts made by the Chemical Warfare Service with the American Cyanamid and Chemical Corporation in the 1940s.

  62. American Jewish Year Book, 1956, available at http://69.20.59.207/AJC_DATA/files/1956_10_centralEurope.pdf (accessed December 1, 2008).

  63. John V. H. Dippel, Two Against Hitler: Stealing the Nazis’ Best-Kept Secrets (New York: Praeger, 1992), pp. 84–85. I am indebted to Dr. Dippel for sharing his research with me.

  64. Records of the Office of Strategic Services, Record Group 226, U.S. Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

  65. After the war, Hoffmann was dragooned into working in chemical warfare for the British at Porton Down and for the Americans at Edgewood Arsenal. See Jonathan B. Tucker, War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda (New York: Pantheon, 2006), pp. 116, 117, 160.

  66. Dippel’s book Two Against Hitler covers these relationships.

  67. Dippel, Two Against Hitler, p. 85; Robert D. Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors: The Unique World of a Foreign Service Expert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 245, 247–48, 273; Respondek, report on the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, p. 2, Max Planck Gesellschaft, Berlin Archives and Library.

  68. Dippel, Two Against Hitler, p. 84.

  69. McCloy interview, cited in Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1990), pp. 211, 730.

  70. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Internal Security Subcommittee, Morgenthau Diary (Germany) (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 573–74.

  71. See Bird, The Chairman.

  72. Rosemary Sponner, “Private Citizen Mrs. McCloy,” Information Bulletin, June 1950, p. 11.

  73. “‘We Know the Russians,’” Time, June 20, 1949.

  74. See Thomas Alan Schwartz, America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

  75. Finder, “Ultimate Insider, Ultimate Outsider.”

  76. Herbert H. Haines, Against Capital Punishment: The Anti–Death Penalty Movement in America, 1972–1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 10–11.

  9. CLOUDS OF ABOLITION

  1. For a shocking account of the postwar treatment of German prisoners of war and relocated civilians, of which an estimated two million perished, see Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

  2. Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 250; Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949–53, Report (London: HMSO, September 1953); Harry Elmer Barnes and Negley K. Teeters, New Horizons in Criminology (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954), p. 352.

  3. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 85–87.

  4. See Sam Roberts, The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair (New York: Random House, 2001).

  5. Elaine Ross, quoted in Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), p. 329.

  6. Letter from Julius Rosenberg to Emanuel Block, June 19, 1953, Sing Sing death house files, New York State Archives.

  7. Arthur Miller, “The Crucible and the Execution, A Memoir,” in The Rosenbergs: Collected Visions of Artists and Writers, ed. Rob A. Okun (New York: Universe Books, 1988), p. 87.

  8. People v. Daugherty, quoted in Ivan Solotaroff, The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 8.

  9. Barnes and Teeters, New Horizons in Criminology, p. 350.

  10. 1951 Okla. Sess., Laws 17 §1 (lethal gas); Bob Gregory, “They Died for Their Sins,” Oklahoma Monthly, November 1979, p. 73; Deborah Denno, “Getting to Death: Are Executions Constitutional?” Iowa Law Review 82 (1996–97): 457.

  11. David M. Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery”; Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: The Free Press, 1996), pp. 228–29.

  12. Inventor Thomas Clyde Williams filed his patent on September 2, 1955, and the U.S. Patent Office issued patent no. 2,802,462 on August 13, 1957.

  13. Frank Pittman, Associated Press, “8 States Use Gas Chamber in Execution of Condemned,” Bridgeport (CT) Sunday Post, January 2, 1955.

  14. Associated Press, “Killer Dies in Miss. Gas Chamber,” Lima (OH) News, March 4, 1955. (The Gallego execution did not prove to be a very good deterrent. Decades later Gallego’s son, Gerald Armond Gallego, was convicted as a serial murderer in Nevada, and he was executed by lethal injection on July 18, 2002.) Gerald Gallego’s execution is described in Solotaroff, Last Face You’ll Ever See, pp. 65–66.

  15. “Mobster Dies in Miss. Gas Chamber,” FB, January 17, 1958.

  16. “Maryland May Use Gas Execution Chamber,” Connellsville (PA) Daily Courier, January 15, 1949; “Killer to Die for Slaying,” HMH, October 9, 1957.

  17. Solotaroff, Last Face You’ll Ever See, p. 220.

  18. Larry Hall, Associated Press, “Kidnapers Pay with Lives,” The Lincoln (NE) Star, December 18, 1953.

  19. SB, April 20, 1998; Roderick, “Last Steps and Last Words on Death Row,” LAT, March 28, 1990. See also Byron E. Eshelman and Frank Riley, Death Row Chaplain (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962). The quote is from Warden Warren Wilson, in Ian Gray and Moira Stanley, A Punishment in Search of a Crime: Americans Speak Out Against the Death Penalty (New York: Avon Books, 1989), p. 122.

  20. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter attending the 1955 execution of Walter Thomas Byrd at San Quentin later recalled, “The methodical, even detached and deliberate performance of his tasks, designed to minimize or eliminate the human drama that is taking place, stood out in sharp contrast to the execution itself.” Declaration of Arthur Hoppe, April 15, 1992, exhibit 18, vol. 1, Fierro v. Gomez.

  21. Declaration of John M. Steiner, Ph.D., April 1992, exhibit 33, vol. 1, Fierro v. Gomez.

  22. “Abbott Executed!” SMT, March 15, 1957.

  23. Harold V. Streeter, Associated Press, “Barbara Graham Dies in San Quentin Gas Chamber,” FB, June 3, 1955. Another witness, a police officer, later declared that seeing Graham and two others put to death that day convinced him that “death by lethal gas is cruel and undignified.” Robert H. Coveney, April 15, 1992, exhibit 10, vol. 1, Fierro v. Gomez.

  24. Harry Kreisler, “Conversation with Robert Wise,” Institute of International Studies, U.C. Berkeley, February 28, 1998, at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Wise/wise-con6.html (accessed May 22, 2006). See also Bosley Crowther, “Screen: Vivid Performance by Susan Hayward,” NYT, November 19, 1958. In 1969 another popular movie picturing San Quentin’s gas chamber was released. Una sull’altra (also known as Perversion Story), directed by Lucio Fulci, was filmed in the actual death house.

  25. Harry Minott, United Press, “Death Penalty Foes to Step up Fight,” Cedar Rapids (IA) Gazette, September 12, 1955. Sara Ehrmann (1895–1993) was a major figure in the abolitionist movement who got involved through the Sacco and Vanzetti case. The author interviewed her by telephone in 1984. She joined the Massachusetts Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty in 1927 and assumed leadership of the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment in 1949. Founded in 1925, the latter had originally been based in New York. She was also active in many Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee. She is profiled in Gray and Stanley, Punishment in Search of a Crime, pp. 231–36. Many of her papers are located in the Northeastern University Archives in Boston.

  26. See Ralph Blumenthal’s celebrated biography, Miracle at Sing Sing: How One Man Transformed the Lives of America’s Most Dangerous Prisoners (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).

  27. See Clinton T. Duffy with Al Hirshberg, 88 Men and 2 Women (New York: Pocket Books, 1963); Clinton T. Duffy, as told to Dean Jennings, The San Quentin Story (New York: Doubleday, 1950); Gladys Duffy with Blaise Whitehead Lane, Warden’s Wife (New York: Popular Library, 1963).

  28. Duffy and Hirshberg, quoted in Adelaide H. Villmoare, “Through the Looking Glass of Teaching: The Death Penalty and the Political Culture of Detached Passions,” Richmond Journal of Law & Public Interest 6(1) (Spring 2001).

  29. Quoted in Alan Bisbort, “When You Read This, They Will Have Killed Me”: The Life and Redemption of Caryl Chessman, Whose Execution Shook America (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006), p. 118.

  30. Caryl Chessman, San Quentin Extreme Penalty File, #66565, California State Archives, Sacramento.

  31. Bisbort, “When You Read This,” pp. 84–85.

  32. See, e.g., William J. Kunstler, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt? The Original Trial of Caryl Chessman (New York: William Morrow, 1961); Milton Machlin and William R. Woodfield, Ninth Life (New York: Putnam, 1961), which concluded that Chessman was innocent; and Frank J. Parker, Caryl Chessman: The Red Light Bandit (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975), which found him guilty.

  33. Bisbort, “When You Read This,” chapter 4. See also Theodore Hamm, Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948–1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

  34. Bisbort, “When You Read This,” chapter 5.

  35. D
avid Lamson, We Who Are About to Die: Prison as Seen by a Condemned Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935); Bernard Butcher, “Was It Murder?” Stanford Magazine, January–February 2000. The film We Who Are about to Die, directed by Christy Cabanne and starring Preston Foster, is considered one of the classic early movies about prison, death row, and wrongful conviction.

  36. Caryl Chessman, Cell 2455, Death Row: A Condemned Man’s Own Story (New York: Permabooks, 1960). The movie of the same title was released by Columbia Pictures. For a discussion of Chessman’s book in the context of prison literature, see Hamm, Rebel and a Cause, pp. 69–75.

  37. John Barkham, Syndicated Review, Saturday Review, May 1954.

  38. Chessman’s books included Trial by Ordeal (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1955); The Face of Justice (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1957); and The Kid Was a Killer (Greenwich, CT: Gold Medal Books, 1960).

  39. Arnaldo Cortesi, “Spare Chessman, Vatican Implores,” NYT, February 19, 1960; “Chessman’s Stay Hailed in Europe,” NYT, February 20, 1960; United Press International, “Demonstrations Planned,” NYT, February 20, 1960.

  40. E. W. Kenworthy, “Chessman Uproar Persists in Capital,” NYT, February 21, 1960; C. P. Trussell, “U.S. Scored Anew in Chessman Case,” NYT, February 23, 1960; “Nixon Criticized on Death Penalty,” NYT, February 28, 1960.

  41. “Death Penalties Decline in World,” NYT, May 3, 1960.

  42. U.S. House, Subcommittee No. 2 of the Committee on the Judiciary, “Abolition of Capital Punishment,” 86th Congress, 2nd Sess. (May 5, 1960), p. 27.

  43. Lawrence E. Davies, “Chessman, in a Prison Interview, Sees 50–50 Chance of Clemency,” NYT, May 1, 1960.

  44. Lawrence E. Davies, “Caryl Chessman Executed; Denies His Guilt to the End,” NYT, May 3, 1960; quoted from Harold V. Streeter, Associated Press, “Reporter Lets You ‘See’ an Execution,” Wisconsin State Journal, May 3, 1960; Bisbort, “When You Read This,” pp. 359–64.

  45. Affidavit of John R. Babcock, April 12, 1992, exhibit 1, vol. 1, Fierro v. Gomez, Plaintiffs’ Trial Exhibits.