THE RUDOLF REPORT

7. ZYKLON B FOR THE KILLING OF HUMAN BEINGS7.3.5. Why Precisely Zyklon B?One might naturally wonder why the SS are supposed to have decidedto use Zyklon B as an instrument of mass murder. The Soviets, atany rate, killed countless millions of human beings either simply byshooting them in the back of the neck or allowing them to die in campsunder miserable conditions. Surely it would have been simpler to leavethe people deported to Auschwitz to their fate; they would have perishedfrom hunger and epidemics within a very short time anyway.That is how the Americans murdered approximately 1 million Germancivilian internees after the end of the Second World War. 494 Instead,the SS at Auschwitz spent almost one billion dollars, in today’s values,to bring the epidemics raging there under control, incurring huge expenditureson medical facilities, to cure the internees from the typhusepidemics, which were very often fatal. 495 This alone speaks volumesabout the credibility of the conventional wisdom.The academic question, therefore, of whether or not some otherpoison gas would have been better suited for the mass murders insteadof hydrogen cyanide in the form of Zyklon B cannot, in the last analysis,be answered, since there are no scientifically documented experimentalvalues for mass murder by poison gas.Theoretically, one could, at that time, have chosen between nitrogen(N 2 ), carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), carbon monoxide (CO), phosgene(COCl 2 ), chlorine (Cl 2 ), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), nerve gases such asTabun and Sarin, Diesel engine exhaust, internal combustion engineexhaust, producer gas, coke or city gas, process gas, and, possibly, stillother, entirely different, instruments of mass murder, suitable even undercompletely different circumstances (shooting in the back of theneck, hunger, epidemics). But if one really wished to take the troubleto commit mass killings with poison gas, it is most probable that onewould have used carbon monoxide, which is definitely lethal to human494 James Bacques, Other Losses, Stoddart, Toronto 1989; Bacque, Crimes and Mercies, Little,Brown & Co., Toronto 1996.495 Hans Jürgen Nowak, op. cit. (note 97), pp. 323f.; Manfred Gerner, Michael Gärtner, HansJürgen Nowak, “Die Kosten von Auschwitz” VffG, 6(2) (2002), pp. 146-158; (online:www.vho.org/VffG/2002/2/GernerGaertnerNowak146-158.html); on the medical care, see theunpublished studies by the late C. Jordan on the G. Weise case; see also ibid., “The GermanJustice System: A Case Study”, in E. Gauss (ed.), op. cit. (note 22), pp. 147-181 (online:www.vho.org/GB/Books/dth/fndpoljust.html).241