Gas

Today's mind-numbingly degraded comment coming out of the Trump White House has to do with the Nazis' use of poison gas:

"White House press secretary Sean Spicer created a major headline at this afternoon’s press briefing when he denounced Russia for sticking by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the wake of recent chemical attack on citizens, saying someons “as despicable as Adolph Hitler…didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

"Spicer made it worse: “I think when you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing.”

And why might that be?  Why might Hitler have not used Sarin gas?  Maybe because he was such a nice guy?  Let's see if we can find out, something which will take approximately 45 seconds online:

"Sarin was discovered in 1938 in Wuppertal-Elberfeld in Germany by scientists at IG Farben...it is the most toxic of the four G-Series nerve agents made by Germany...

In mid-1939, the formula for the agent was passed to the chemical warfare section of the German Army Weapons Office, which ordered that it be brought into mass production for wartime use. Pilot plants were built, and a high-production facility was under construction (but was not finished) by the end of World War II."

So, in brief, Sarin was invented in Nazi Germany, by IG Farben, one of the worst industrial collaborators with the Nazis, and whose other contributions to a decent society included the production of Zyklon B, the gas used at the death camps; Germany was in the process of building a factory to mass produce Sarin for use in war until the end of World War II closed the facility.  Hitler was not using the gas because the factory wasn't operating yet. That certainly qualifies Hitler as a far nicer guy than Bashir Al Assad, I guess.  Like I say, 45 seconds to find the Wikipedia article, and  about two minutes to read it.

And I cannot resist a mention of the aforementioned death camps, referred to by Spicer in this speech as "holocaust centers," or as we know them here at Green Eagle, as "Jewish Disneylands."


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If, by any chance, you are interested in more about the development of the German chemical industry and its willing collaboration with the Hitler war machine, you might like to read an excellent book,  Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine, by Diarmuid Jeffries, available in a Kindle version as well as a hard copy.  Be sure to read to the end, where the belligerent intransigence of a right wing American judge prevented any but the most symbolic punishment of the monsters involved.

Comments

Infidel753 said…
Hitler, of course, did "sink to" using poison gas both on former German citizens ("his own people") and citizens of other countries -- about six million of them. He differed from Asad in that he locked those people in enclosed spaces before turning the chemical weapons on them, but that doesn't strike me as a major improvement.
Green Eagle said…
And as I mentioned, he was gearing up for large scale use of Sarin in military situations; he just didn't get the factory done in time.
Anonymous said…
Poison gas had been used several decades before Hitler, especially among military forces during World War I. There were chemical weapons used prior to 1938, and Green Eagle ought to mention them.

Hitler wasn't even the first to use poison gas on his country's own civilians. The Ottoman Empire's Committee of Union and Progress did that first:

"One terrible occasion saw 5,000 Armenian villagers rounded up and burned alive, something that shocked even Turkish witnesses many of whom reported it drove them mad and that the air smelt of burning flesh for days afterwards. In the city of Trabzon, thousands of Armenians were sent out into the Black Sea on wooden boats that were then deliberately capsized with their inhabitants drowning. Others were killed by morphine injections or poison gas."

But they were Armenians, so the anti-Armenian bigot Green Eagle doesn't care. I, D. Hagopian, have tried to get him to change, but he is unfortunately stuck in his ways. The use of chemical weapons needs to be remembered and condemned, something Spicer and the website's administrator have both failed to do.
Green Eagle said…
The use of poison, in gas form and other ways, goes back to ancient times, with rudimentary attempts to use poison gas documented at least as far back as 500 BC. We also have records of Mongol invaders catapulting bodies infected with plague into cities they had under siege, and at least one incident of a British officer giving native Americans blankets infected with smallpox. So it hardly dates back only to World War I, or the (at least two) Turkish genocides of Armenians.

I would like to add that at least most people are aware of the World War I Turkish genocide. Almost no one seems to remember that another genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire happened in the 1890's.

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