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The Pale Death: Poison Gas and German Racial Exceptionalism, 1915–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2021

Peter Thompson Open the ORCID record for Peter Thompson [Opens in a new window]
Peter Thompson*
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University of Illinois
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Abstract

In April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

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Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 273 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association

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53 This included postwar German attempts to justify their own imperial violence by comparing it to that of Britain and France. By revealing similarities in methods and means of imperial control (e.g., poison gas), the Germans intended to express commonalities with their fellow western European empires. Sean Andrew Wempe, Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 46.

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58 See Heinrich Schnee, German Colonization Past and Future: The Truth about the German Colonies (London: George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1926), 33.

59 Michael Geyer, “The Dynamic of Military Revisionism in the Interwar Years: Military Politics between Rearmament and Diplomacy,” in The German Military in the Age of Total War, ed. Wilhelm Deist (Warwickshire UK: Berg, 1985), 100–52, esp. 105.

60 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrarri (Washington DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1998) 182.

61 Stadtsarchiv Lübeck, Polizeiamt, 3335 22 GV, Heft 1, Lübecker General Anzeiger, Nr. 245, October 18, 1928.

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63 Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Gestalt, trans. Dirk Leach (Albany: SUNY Albany Press, 1990), 142. Reflecting on his own experience as a gas officer in the trenches, Jünger saw the soldiers of the First World War as the most apt to fully integrate themselves into a technological Gestalt. Variations of this idea were proposed by other former soldiers-turned-writers such as Franz Schauwecker and Werner Beumelburg. The former WWI artilleryman and proto-Nazi geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer also made it known that the men who survived the “shower of gas, fire, and steel” were best qualified to lead the nation into the future. Holger H. Herwig, The Demon of Geopolitics: How Karl Haushofer “Educated” Hitler and Hess (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 71.

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72 These peace movements enjoyed substantial support in the early and mid-1920s. One of their crowning political achievements was the passing of the Geneva Protocol in 1925.

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74 Getrud Woker, “Erwiderung,” Die Friedens-Warte 25, no. 9 (September 1925): 268. The belief that darker skin was more resistant to chemical weapons persisted through the early 1940s. For this reason, the United States military conducted several race-based toxicity studies with mustard gas during the early 1940s. See Susan L. Smith, Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 10.

75 In the mid- to late 1930s, some Germans were also clearly concerned by Japan's use of poison gas against China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. See Ricky W. Law, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 229.

76 (BA-MA) Russland V, 1932–1934. Sig 50, Ort 22, Mag H3EG.

77 The German view of the East as a place where Slavs encroached upon their Raum (or ethno-racially demarcated living space) increasingly took hold in the Weimar Republic. Maß, “The ‘Völkskorper’ in Fear,” 234. This ethno-national fear and resentment helped to foster a broad societal consensus for German rearmament in the early 1930s. Geyer, “The Dynamics of Military Revisionism in the Interwar Years,” 115.

78 Luftschutz-Rundschau, September/October 1932, Jahrgang 1, Heft 1/2. See also Die Sirene, Nummer 4, Februar Heft 1936; (BA-MA) Geyer-Denkschrift über den Gaskampf 1919. N/221/ Sig 23, Ort 22, Mag H1EG.

79 Vossische Zeitung 125, May 30, 1928; Hamburger Stimmen 119, May 13, 1928. Staatsarchiv Hamburg (SH) Giftgas Unglück auf der Veddel 1928. 135-1, I–IV, 4069.

80 Erich Mühsam, “Phosgen,” Fanal. Anarchistische Monatsschrift, Jahrgang 2, no. 9 (June 1928): 208–10; Rudibert Kunz and Rolf-Dieter Müller, Giftgas gegen Abd El Krim: Deutschland, Spanien und der Gaskrieg in Spanisch-Marokko, 1922–1927 (Freiburg: Verlag Rombach Freiburg, 1990), 72.

81 Gasschutz und Luftschutz, Jahrgang 5, Heft 3, 1935.

82 Gasschutz und Luftschutz, Jahrgang 7, Heft 1, 1937.

83 This was best demonstrated by the wide range of German apocalyptic literature that was published after 1928. Frequently featuring aerial wars among various European nations, these novels depicted German civilians as the ultimate victims of imagined future gas raids. See, for example, Axel Alexander, Die Schlacht über Berlin (Berlin: Verlag “Offene Worte,” 1933); Hanns Gobsch, Wahn-Europa 1934 (Hamburg: Fackelreiter-Verlag, 1931); Johann von Leers, Bomben auf Hamburg (Leipzig: R. Voigtländers Verlag, 1932); Karl August von Laffert, Giftküche (Berlin: August Scherl, 1928).

84 The Reichsluftschutzbund was one of the largest civic organizations in Nazi Germany, with a formal membership of 15 million by 1939.

85 At the same time, the Nazis pursued the offensive abilities of chemical weapons by expanding mustard gas production in chemical factories throughout Germany and funding the research and manufacture of nerve gas at military laboratories, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, and the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben. (BA-MA) Besprechung bei Herrn Generalmajor Thomas, September 5, 1939. RG/61/, Sig 726, Ort 22, Mag H3EG, Reihe 191, Regal 4, Gefach 1.

86 These arguments were also made in the field of chemical protection. Hugo Stoltzenberg routinely labeled the other gas mask companies as Jewish monopolies in order to garner government contracts. He wrote to the Nazi government: “The construction of [my] mask is based solely on German inventions, while the previous mask types were invented and developed primarily by Jews both during the war and today.” (BA-MA) Geratetechnisches, Konstruktion, Erfindungen, Versuche, Formveranderungen usw, 1933–36. RH/12/4, sig 84, Ort 22, Mag H3EG, Reihe 125, Regal 2, Gefach 4.

87 (BA-MA) Ausnutzung der deutschen chemischen Industrie fur eine entscheidungsuchende Kriegfuhrung, 1938. R/3113/, Sig 133, Standort 51, Mag M 2 05, Reihe 24.

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91 Dietmar Süss, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Survived the Bombing in World War II, trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38–39.

92 Julia S. Torrie, “For Their Own Good”: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 19–20; Hugo Grimme, Der Reichsluftschutzbund: Ziele, Leistungen und Organisation (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1936).

93 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 2 (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1927), 772.

94 Birgitte Hamann, Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 347.

95 Andreas Musolff, “What Role Do Metaphors Play in Prejudice? The Function of Anti-Semitic Imagery in Hitler's Mein Kampf,” Patterns of Prejudice 41, no. 1 (2007): 26–27.

96 Hake, “Making the Native Body,” 173.

97 Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 91.

98 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 255.

99 Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 57.

100 In a bitterly ironic twist of fate, Fritz Haber was forced to leave his research position in Germany due to the rise of the Nazis in 1933. He died in exile on January 29, 1934. In a darkly poetic sense, he was killed by the regime that had coopted his own justifications for chemical violence.

101 Shelly Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 329–330.

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106 The Greek word khloros, which is also the root for the word chlorine, can mean either pale or greenish-yellow. In the Old Testament, the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, or Death, rides a horse described in the original Greek as χλωρός, or khloros.