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Prussion-blue

posted 8 years ago by BravisJ
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I was thinking about Prussian-blue, the color in which fumigation chambers at Auschwitz had become from delousing with Zyklon gas. And the fact that some researchers could find ample traces of cyanide and Prussian-blue in the fumigation chambers and not in the gas chambers.

The fumigation chambers were meant to kill lice, very small bugs. These chambers possibly turned blue from over saturation from fumigation because of the size of the inhabitants and the very lack of their absorption rate. Those inhabitants took in far less gas than those whom were being exterminated in the gas chambers. Humans are able to take in much more of the gas, and their bodies are far better at absorbing the gas than that of a louse.

So, I'm thinking that the reason that the samples taken from both chambers revel different amounts of cyanide, being a heck of a lot to none at all are a result of the size of the occupancy and the differences in how they absorb. It takes much longer to kill lice than humans. So, in that regard, the testing of the color and the lack of cyanide to the scrapings from the areas in which were tested could have had the result they had due to my recent ideas regarding the situational differences between both chambers and the usage of them.

That said, the thought might make one leap from denial to acceptation. I don't know yet. Still researching. Still thinking...

[–] ZortMcFleen 8 years ago

Keep in mind that there's another difference between the "showers" and the delousing fumigation rooms, which is that the "showers" were apparently washed by the Sonderkommando between gassings, something that was necessary given the tendency of those in the process of being murdered to defecate and urinate in their panic. The "shower" had to look like a shower, not a latrine.

It's also worth noting along these lines that Degesch, the company that made Zyklon-B, was asked to produce a special version for (to use the Nazi euphemism for gassing) "special handling" at Auschwitz. In the same way that natural gas in the US must be marked with an indicator odor (usually mercaptan) as a safety feature, so that humans could detect the scent, HCN used as a fumigation gas was required to be packaged with an indicator odor. That odor had exactly the same purpose: to alert people that they were in the presence of a potentially harmful gas they couldn't otherwise smell.

And that odor was exactly what the Nazis asked Degesch to leave out of their special Auschwitz-bound batches of Zyklon-B.

Again, the odor had only one purpose: to let people -- that is, humans who had been raised to associate the indicator odor with poison gas the same way we associate mercaptan with natural gas -- know they were in the presence of poison gas. For some reason, the Nazis didn't want that. Did they not want supernaturally intelligent lice to know they were about to be gassed?

For more detail on why Prussian blue doesn't mean what the Holocaust deniers day it means: http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/chemistry/not-the-science/