Pesticide used for slow, painful death in gas chamber

The trial of a former SS guard has heard how the Nazis used a lethal pesticide to slowly and painfully kill over one million victims of the Holocaust.

Oskar Groening, now 93, a former accountant at Auschwitz, is on trial in Luneburg, Germany, for his involvement in the deaths of 300,000 Hungarian Jews at a Nazi camp in Poland in 1944.

Yesterday an expert delved into the horrendous properties of Zyklon-B gas, the pesticide used in the concentration camp death chambers.

Dr Sven Anders, 44, a coroner from the University Clinic of Hamburg-Eppendorf, told how Zyklon-B which “attacks the brain”, causes extreme pain, violent seizures and kills anyone who inhales it from cardiac arrest “within seconds”.

Dr Anders told how the gas was originally produced as a pesticide to cleanse large buildings like warehouses and barracks.

Groening, who arrived 30 minutes late to the hearing due to a traffic hold up, looked intently at him and twitched slightly as he said: “Zyklon B is known as prussic acid. Only one in two people can smell the cyanide - but it has the smell of bitter almonds and marzipan.

“It is lighter than air and penetrates by inhalation into the smallest branches of the lungs. There it blocks cellular respiration.”

He went on: “The brain and the heart are first attacked. It begins with a stinging feeling in the chest, then it can cause spasmodic pain - similar to epileptic seizures. Death by cardiac circulatory arrest occurs usually within seconds. Cyanide is one of the fastest-acting poisons.”

The Nazis produced the gas in huge quantities during the Second World War and it was used on its victims at Auschwitz, who were led into huge gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

Gas-mask wearing SS guards would then shake the pesticide crystals and slip them into the chamber and waited for the people inside to die.

Dr Anders said it was unlikely that the poison worked at the same speed in all areas given the size of the gas chamber and the unfortunate people who were breathing lower concentrations would suffer much more.

He added: “A lower intoxication leads to a blockage of blood in the lungs and thereby causes shortness of breath.”

“Commonly one speaks of water in the lungs, breathing will then always deeper and stronger, because the body craves after oxygen. The agony could last more than half an hour.”

Groening, who is known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, has admitted to being “morally guilty” but denies legal responsibility because he claims he “never hurt anyone” directly.