Things I find questionable:
1. Gassing: the only point of contention I have. Should there have been pink or blue marks on the bodies? How long would they have to wait before opening it up and removing the bodies? Was there no smell? I find it hard to believe the “we thought we were going to take a shower” that persisted until the canisters dropped due to smell and marks on the wall from people trying to escape. I do think there had to be a quick way they killed off the elderly and children and I know they didn’t use bullets on each person. I’d like anyone’s feedback on this because this has always bothered me.
Guy from middle Europe here who has access to primary sources and plenty of survivor interviews in their native language (as well as having attended various lectures given by one of 'em when he was still alive in my area).
The use of gas chambers, while not uncommon, is sometimes exaggerated in American media, particularly concerning the Dachau camp. One of the major misconceptions pertains to which gas was used - Zyklon B is well known, but to my knowledge not the most commonly used overall (see below). A lot of gas chambers simply used carbon monoxide, exhaust fumes, meaning it was the closed off nature that was fatal in combination with the gas. The moment you opened the doors and waited a few minutes, you could go inside again no problem and carbon monoxide doesn't stay in a room for a long time (imagine running your car in the garage for an hour and then opening the garage door). In fact, before camps, they made gas-cars. Basically large trucks you could close somewhat airtight and then fill with exhaust fumes to kill prisoners on the go.
The Auschwitz concentration/extermination camp was an extreme case and did utilize Zyklon B. Now Zyklon B is based on Hydrogen Cyanide, which is a gas that dissipates quite quickly, so again, you could just open the doors. It is also used extensively (and was originally developed partially) to kill bugs, including lice, so it was in fact used for decontamination - even most of the stuff that was shipped to extermination camps served this purpose primarily. But because Auschwitz genuinely industrialized killing, it actually had large scale ventilators installed for the underground chambers to ventilate them even faster. Auschwitz had the capacity to gas nearly 9000 people at the same time. It had 7 buildings, some of them originally barns, solely dedicated to this.
Every extermination camp certainly had the rumors and for some perhaps, the knowledge, that the "showers" were actually gas chambers. Note also that most people that were in a concentration camp equipped with a gas chamber that was actually regularly in use, wouldn't be there long, for obvious reasons. Meaning there isn't all that much time to wisen up and for word to get around and honestly, no matter what you've suffered through - the idea that someone would actually build a gas chamber for the sake of industrialized killing is - at that time, still insane and far fetched. People were herded, forced inside and at first, most likely relieved - because the rooms were built to look like showers and people will cling to any sort of hope. You're not clawing much or leaving a ton of marks on concrete walls when you're in a room with dozens of people.
Usually there'd be a pipe either above or below to allow gas to enter and only after the first 1-2 minutes of nothing happening would some people panic. Even if someone can detect the smell, which is unlikely because the majority of people cannot detect Zyklon B, it's odorless to almost everyone - you are in a crowd of people that have no access to sanitation. It takes some time for the smell to become apparent enough to the few that can even detect it and at that point, the doors are closed and locked tight and you are probably already out cold, since it is lethal in small amounts (a single pound could kill about a hundred people)
I visited one of the concentration camp gas chambers and they are absolutely built like large scale prison showers. It is genuinely stomach churning when you actually see how banal it looks and then realize there was never any water hooked up.
