8 - Prophets of Poison: Industrialized Murder in the Gas Chambers of the Holocaust

Summary

The eighth chapter returns to poison gas, relating the ways in which the Nazis’ efforts in national chemical protection were intimately tied to their search for new offensive chemical weapons. The chapter then provides a reading of the Nazi relationship to poison gas and their attempt to realize a specifically “Nazi chemical modernity” in which poison gas would serve as a litmus test that would determine the masters and victims in a chemically hazardous world. Without drawing direct lines of causation between the 1915 German deployment of militarized gas and its reapplication in the Final Solution, this chapter explores the rhetorical and conceptual threads that developed across the interwar technological proposals of the gas specialists, the rhetorical racism of Nazi geopolitics, and the attempted chemical genocide in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.