Rapid Fire
Zyklon B
- 04 Sep 2024
- 1 min read
On 3rd September 1941, Nazis first used Zyklon B to kill Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
- Auschwitz was a Nazi Germany concentration camp in which almost one million Jews were systematically murdered.
- Jews were starved, worked to death and killed in the complex of gas chambers using toxic gasses like Zyklon B.
- About Zyklon B:
- Zyklon B is the commercial name of hydrogen cyanide (HCN).
- It was developed as a pesticide and rodenticide in the early 1920s in Germany.
- It was produced as blue-coloured pellets that changed to an extremely poisonous gas, when exposed to the air.
- Its inhalation led to internal asphyxiation of the victims by blocking the exchange of oxygen in the red corpuscles and impeding cellular respiration.
- Zyklon B became notorious during World War II. France in 1916 and Italy and the United States in 1918 also used it during World War I.
Read More: Holocaust and World War II
