Pictured: Mass grave of Soviet POWs whom the Axis killed in its concentration camp in Deblin, Poland.

Quoting Prof. Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps:

One day in early September 1941—probably on September 5—a train from the Neuhammer POW camp in Lower Silesia arrived at Auschwitz. Hundreds of prisoners spilled out of the railcars. All of them were Soviet POWs identified by the Gestapo as “commissars.”¹⁵⁹ By the time they marched through the Auschwitz compound, it was dark. The silence was punctured by barking guard dogs and the screams of the prisoners, beaten and whipped by cursing SS men.

The noise stirred some inmates who had been asleep inside their barracks. Breaking strict SS instructions, they peered through the windows and saw the columns of POWs, illuminated by searchlights, disappear into block 11. Of all the places in Auschwitz, this was the most feared: it was the bunker, the SS center for torture and murder. Prisoners called it the “death block,” and Camp SS men associated it with death, too, which is why they had turned it into a makeshift gas chamber for Soviet POWs.¹⁶⁰

The Auschwitz SS was about to carry out the first mass gassing inside a concentration camp.¹⁶¹

Inspired by the earlier murder of prisoners in the T‐4 gas chambers (during Action 14f13), Auschwitz SS officials had decided to experiment with poison gas as well.¹⁶² They chose prussic acid—more commonly known by its trade name, Zyklon B—which had been used in the KL for some time to fumigate vermin‐infested buildings. SS orderlies were trained in handling this delousing agent and knew how dangerous it was. It was also easier to deploy than the carbon monoxide used in T‐4 killing centers, as there was no need to install pipes or gas cylinders—the murderers just had to drop Zyklon B pellets into a sealed chamber.¹⁶³

I would like to interrupt this to provide some additional history on this acid. From David Swanson’s Leaving World War II Behind:

“In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon‐B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon‐B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon‐B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, ‘Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.’ Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.”⁹⁸

Now, continuing with KL:

A first lethal test had taken place around late August 1941, when the Auschwitz SS executed a small group of Soviet prisoners. The action was supervised by camp compound leader Karl Fritzsch, a Camp SS veteran who later bragged to colleagues that he was the inventor of the Auschwitz gas chambers.¹⁶⁴ Commandant Rudolf Höß quickly agreed to a larger trial. In preparation, the SS cleared the bunker; doors were sealed and the cellar windows filled with cement.

It was into this cellar—a series of small cells and corridors—that the Auschwitz SS led the Soviet “commissars” that fateful night in early September 1941. As they were forced down the stairs, the POWs saw some 250 other prisoners sprawled across the floor, invalids from the infirmary who had been selected to die with them. Once the last Soviet prisoner had been crammed into the cellar, the SS threw Zyklon B crystals inside and locked the doors.

On contact with the warm air and the captives’ bodies, highly toxic prussic acid was released and desperate screaming started, carrying all the way to the adjacent barracks. The gas quickly destroyed the victims’ mucous membranes and entered their bloodstream, asphyxiating them from within. Some dying men stuffed bits of clothing in their mouths to block the gas. But none survived.¹⁶⁵

Commandant Rudolf Höß, who had watched outside with other SS men, took off his gas mask and congratulated himself; hundreds of prisoners had been killed without an SS man firing a single shot.¹⁶⁶ Still, the practical‐minded Höß saw room for improvements. For a start, block 11 was too far away from the Auschwitz crematorium: the corpses had to be dragged through the whole camp for disposal. Moreover, there was no built‐in ventilation in block 11. The building had to be aired for a long time before the SS could force other inmates inside to recover the bodies.

By then, the corpses—swollen, entangled, and stiff—had started to decay and proved hard to dislodge. One witness, the Polish prisoner Adam Zacharski, saw everything: “The scene was truly eerie, because one could see that these people had scratched and bitten each other in a fit of madness before they died, many had torn uniforms … Although I had already got used to some macabre scenes in the camp, I became sick when I saw these murdered people and I had to vomit violently.”¹⁶⁷

To make mass murder more efficient, the Auschwitz SS soon relocated gassings to the morgue of the crematorium. It lay outside the camp compound, which meant that there would be fewer unwelcome witnesses among the regular prisoners. The morgue could hold hundreds of victims and already had an effective ventilation mechanism, making its conversion into a gas chamber easy; the doors were insulated and holes were hammered into the ceiling, so that Zyklon B could be dropped in from the flat roof above.

Afterward, the corpses would be burned in the adjacent crematorium ovens. The Auschwitz SS had stumbled across the prototype of the death factory.¹⁶⁸

Its first lethal test came in mid‐September 1941, when the SS gassed some nine hundred Soviet POWs in the Auschwitz crematorium.¹⁶⁹ As the prisoners arrived, SS men told them to undress and then forced them into the morgue, supposedly for delousing. SS men now slammed the doors shut and threw in the gas pellets. Commandant Rudolf Höß watched once more: “After the insertion, some screamed ‘gas,’ followed by mighty howling and pushing toward the two doors. But they withstood the pressure.” It took several days, he added, to burn all the bodies.¹⁷⁰

Höß was convinced that the Auschwitz SS had made an important discovery. True, his men continued to use other methods to kill.¹⁷¹ But when it came to large‐scale murder, Höß much preferred gassing over shooting, because it was less stressful for the SS. “Now I was relieved indeed,” he noted later, “that all of us would be spared these bloodbaths.” Höß also claimed that gassings were kinder on the victims, blanking out the terrible death struggle of all those crammed into the gas chamber.¹⁷²

After the Auschwitz SS pioneered the use of poison gas in concentration camps, other KL followed, just as they had imitated the Sachsenhausen neck‐shooting apparatus. Camp SS officers, already familiar with the principle of gassings (from the T‐4 centers), were keen to test the latest innovations in mass murder. Once again, Franz Ziereis in Mauthausen was especially eager. From late autumn 1941, he oversaw the construction of a gas chamber, converting a cellar near the crematorium.

The first large‐scale gassing here took place in May 1942, killing 231 Soviet POWs with Zyklon B.¹⁷³ Meanwhile, the Mauthausen Camp SS doctor requested a mobile gas van, built by the Criminal Technical Institute (KTI) of the Reich Criminal Police Office. The local SS used such a van, probably from spring 1942, to murder hundreds of Mauthausen prisoners, among them sick inmates and Soviet POWs.¹⁷⁴

One last quote from Leaving World War II Behind:

DuPont signed agreements with IG Farben that, according to Nadan Feldman, “gave IG Farben critical knowledge for war production, enabling Nazi Germany to start the war. […] Amazingly,” he added, “Dupont continued [ties] […] even after Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941.” DuPont also had stakes in two companies (also part of IG Farben) responsible for making the gas Zyklon B, which was used to murder over a million people.¹⁹³ DuPont also profited from investments and patents in [Fascist]‐occupied France.¹⁹⁴

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Events that happened today (September 3):

1939: France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia declared war on the Third Reich after its invasion of Poland, forming the Allied nations. (The Viceroy of India also declared war, but without consulting the provincial legislatures.) Consequently, the United Kingdom and France began a naval blockade of the Third Reich that lasted until the war’s end. This also marks the beginning of the Battle of the Atlantic.
1942: In response to news of its coming liquidation, Dov Lopatyn lead an uprising in the Axis ghetto of Łachwa (present‐day Belarus).
1943: British and Canadian troops landed on the Italian mainland. On the same day, Walter Bedell Smith and Giuseppe Castellano signed the Armistice of Cassibile, although it went unannounced for another five days.
1944: Axis personnel placed diarist Anne Frank and her family on the last transport train from the Westerbork transit camp to the Auschwitz concentration camp, arriving three days later.