Difficulties in carrying out legal executions led Arizona to investigate implementing the use of Zyklon B, the poison gas used by the Nazis in the Holocaust to murder millions of Jews. The decision highlights the disturbing story behind the poison gas and its clinical efficiency at ending human life.

Arizona investigating Zyklon B

A report in the Guardian claimed that according to documents obtained by the British media, the Arizona state corrections department purchased a brick of potassium cyanide commercially known as Zyklon B, in December for $1,530. The department also purchased sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid which, when combined with the solid potassium cyanide, produces lethal gas. The state has also refurbished its gas chamber which was built in 1949 but has been unused since 1999.  A series of tests were conducted last August to establish the “operability” of the facility at  Arizona State Prison Complex – Florence. In December, the staff declared the facility to be “operationally ready”.

The method of execution currently employed in Arizona is lethal injection. However, if convicted for a crime committed prior to November 23, 1992, the inmate may choose gas inhalation instead. Since capital punishment was resumed in 1976, 37 individuals in Arizona were convicted of murder and have been executed.

The decision by Arizona to pursue gas as a method of execution comes after a moratorium on executions after the botched 2014 execution of Joseph Wood III. The execution by lethal injection of Midazolam and hydromorphone, a combination that had only been used once before for an execution in Ohio which also proved to be problematic. The execution by lethal injection should have taken ten minutes. Wood struggled to breathe for an hour and fifty-seven minutes while being injected a total of 15 times when one dose should have sufficed. It should be noted that from 1890 to 2010, the rate of botched lethal injections in the United States was 7.1%, higher than any other form of execution.

Somewhat ironically, the last execution by gas carried out by Arizona was in 1999 on Karl-Heinz LaGrand, a German national who was convicted of murdering a man and severely injuring a woman during a bungled bank robbery. The execution was carried out despite diplomatic pressure from Germany which included claims the execution violated the international Geneva Conventions.

In a strange Catch-22, despite executions by lethal injection being legally mandated, doctors are not permitted to prescribe drugs for executions as taking a life does not serve a therapeutic purpose. In 2011 the state was found to be lawfully buying execution drugs from Dream Pharma, a pharmaceutical company operating out of a driving school in west London, UK. Last month, the Guardian reported that Arizona has spent $1.5 million on a batch of pentobarbital, a sedative it now hopes to use as its main lethal injection method.

The chilling story of Zyklon B

Zyklon-B is a powerful insecticide that serves as a carrier for the gas Hydrocyanic acid, or HCN. The Germans had a lot of experience with HCN, as it was extensively used for delousing but HCN is much more effective on warm-blooded animals, including humans, than it is on insects. So it was natural for them to adapt it for use in their genocide against the Jews. Zyklon B was chosen after Nazi experiments in 1941 determined that carbon monoxide was inefficient. The Zyklon B method used by the Germans killed in less than fifteen minutes and usually much quicker than that. From that point on, Zyklon B was used in Birkenau (Auschwitz II) on Jews. Delivered to the camps in crystal pellet form, the pellets were exposed to air, turning them into poisonous gas. A Nazi equipped with a gas mask would empty the crystals into the packed gas chamber through a small opening. There was little concern for the effects of lingering gas as the death chambers were emptied of corpses by the Sonderkommando, prisoners pressed into service.  

By the end of the Holocaust, the Nazis had ordered 5.8 tons of Zyklon B from its producer, I. G. Farben which made use of slave labor provided by Auschwitz. The amount of Zyklon B was enough to kill an estimated 1.8 million people. An additional 2.4 tons was delivered to Mauthausen which, in addition to its program of death by forced labor, made use of a mobile gas chamber. 

The inventor of Zyklon B was Fritz Haber, a secularized Jew who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Chemistry in 1918. Haber is also considered the “father of chemical warfare” for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine.