The seventh chapter examines the writings of gas specialists in their various gas protection journals. Through the publication of articles and books, this group of personally and professionally connected scientists and engineers continued to heighten the German public’s concern for gas preparedness, calling for both increased gas drills and civilian familiarization with gas protection technology. This then created a greater public desire for visible steps toward national protection, including civilian gas mask distribution. With the creation of the Reichsluftschutzbund, the Nazis intended to centralize national gas protection services and to dramatize the possibility of aero-chemical attack. As part of this theatrical staging, they attempted to provide gas masks for every German civilian. Practically speaking, this endeavor proved impossible, but the distribution of gas masks was also meant as a way to visually and psychologically armor the German populace. Civilians who received gas masks were required to always keep them nearby, ready to pull them onto their faces at a moment’s notice. Thus, by forcing the individual to respond to a seemingly imminent chemical attack, the mask could ostensibly reveal the collective power of a Third Reich comprised of militarized “Nazi chemical subjects.”

Responding to imagined threats about chemical weapons delivered aerially, the British government intensified its efforts to create gas masks for everyone, testing fit and designs for those who might be unable to wear standard equipment. It did so in an atmosphere where popular culture continued to offer dire imaginings about poison gas’s potential for widespread destruction and where questions about anti-gas protection in the empire continued to emerge. By the start of 1938, the government’s air raid precautions department had developed extensive plans for how to distribute gas masks in case of an emergency across the United Kingdom. However, as it began to unveil such plans further, it encountered resistance from pacifists and antimilitarists as well as some grudging acceptance. The first significant test of these schemes came amid the Czechoslovakian or Munich Crisis in September 1938. On what became known as “Gas Mask Sunday,” the government asked its civilian inhabitants to line up across the nation to be fitted for gas masks. Although the outbreak of war was avoided, the limitations of anti-gas protection and the lack of suitable gas masks for all would propel this aspect of civil defense to the forefront as Britain’s entry into war seemed more likely than ever.