TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter IV: The Alleged Extermination Facilities in Treblinka 123
carbon monoxide content can be increased up to 12%. But that would have by
no means been the ‘best’ source of CO available during World War II: due to
a lack of gasoline, the German government passed laws that made it compulsory
to equip all diesel-driven vehicles with producer gas generators, which
generate a gas with up to 35% of CO from wood or coke. Hundreds of thousands
of these truly poisonous generators operated in wartime Germany and in
the occupied territories, and this technology was well-known to all major
German politicians at that time, as Berg shows. Berg’s conclusion is thus
more than justified: 315
“How absurd to believe anyone with even a minimum of technical understanding
would even try to use the exhaust from [diesel engines] for murder,
when the [producer gas] fuel itself was a thousand times more lethal!”
The next question is, whether the Germans in 1941 would have known that
a gasoline engine would have been far more efficient for the mass killing of
human beings in gas chambers. The answer is unequivocally yes. We present
a single example.
In 1930, the Reich Office of Health and the company I.G. Farbenindustrie
joined forces to perform a series of toxicological and hygienic experiments
with combustion products of engines. E. Keeser, Professor and Doctor of
Medicine; V. Froboese, Ph.D.; and R. Turnau, Ph.D., from the Reich Office of
Health, participated in the research project, as did representatives from the
I.G. Farbenindustrie of Oppau and Ludwigshafen; E. Gross, Professor and
M.D.; E. Kuss, Ph.D.; G. Ritter, Ph.D.; and Professor W. Wilke, with a doctorate
in engineering. The result of the study was published as a monograph
under the title Toxikologie und Hygiene des Kraftfahrwesens. 316
The experiments were performed exclusively with gasoline engines because
their exhaust gases were regarded as far more harmful than those of diesel
engines. First, the scientists conducted preliminary experiments with three
different engine types: Hanomag 2/10 HP, Adler 6/25 HP, and Benz 10/30
HP. The average composition of the exhaust gases was as follows: 317
Carbon
Dioxide
Carbon
Monoxide
Oxygen Hydrogen
Conditions Engine [% CO2] [% CO] [% O2] [% H2]
Idle Hanomag 7.7 5.2 1.6 - -
[1,000 RPM] Adler 8.5 8.5 1.1 3.7 1.0
Benz 9.2 6.3 1.0 3.4 0.1
Full Load Hanomag 3.2 0.2 1.4 - -
[1,500 RPM] Adler 13.3 0.2 2.3 0.1 0.1
Benz 13.5 1.7 1.1 0.5 0.1
315 Ibid., p. 464.
316 Toxikologie und Hygiene des Kraftfahrwesens, Julius Springer Verlag, Berlin 1930.
317 Ibid., p. 4.
Methane
[% CH4]