{"id":6417,"date":"2017-04-12T08:21:08","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T14:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=6417"},"modified":"2017-04-12T08:21:08","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T14:21:08","slug":"history-buffs-didnt-hitler-use-poison-gas-battlefield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/04\/history-buffs-didnt-hitler-use-poison-gas-battlefield.html","title":{"rendered":"History buffs: why didn’t Hitler use poison gas on the battlefield?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"DSC_0953<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a post title that I wrote after Sean Spicer said, \u201ceven Hitler didn\u2019t use poison gas,\u201d then had to retract his statement multiple times, because, of course, what he meant to say was \u201c. . . on the battlefield\u201d, and he didn\u2019t, seeming to discount the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

And the Washington Post<\/a> was quick to publish a piece, by Michael S. Rosenwald, addressing that very question \u2013 except it turns out that there\u2019s not really an answer. \u00a0The Nazis had sarin. \u00a0According to the article, German officers wanted to use it.<\/p>\n

Rosenwald\u00a0points to two possible elements at play.<\/p>\n

Hitler was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack in World War I. \u00a0Some have speculated that this experience lead him to object to chemical weapons on the battlefield. \u00a0But why would it have? \u00a0It could just as easily have produced a desire to take revenge \u2014 after all, he didn\u2019t react to the overall suffering of Germans in World War I by adopting pacifism.<\/p>\n

The author also proposes that he afraid that Churchill would have retaliated in kind. \u00a0But that would only explain Hitler\u2019s decision in battlefields where Hitler was fighting Western armies \u2014 North Africa, Italy, and eventually the Western Front.<\/p>\n

What about the East? \u00a0They would have been a much more natural target, since they were classified as Slavs, and inferior peoples. \u00a0Even disregarding their genocide against the Jews, the Nazis had no concerns about starving Soviet POWs, or retaliating for partisan attacks by destroying entire villages, had a master plan of starving the cities of Poland, and, after the Warsaw Uprising, destroyed the city of Warsaw block by block with flamethrowers, not out of any military objective but purely as retribution, to name only a few of their war crimes.<\/p>\n

So, that being said, here\u2019s what the Post\u2019s commentariat has to say:<\/p>\n

LightlySaltedTarako<\/strong>: \u00a0Hitler did not use chemical weapons because they are not very effective. Military leaders figured out pretty quickly after WWI that conventional weapons are much more effective. It had absolutely zero to do with anyone\u2019s scruples or feelings.
\nI learned this during my Air Force Biological and Chemical Weapons training. These weapons have very limited effective uses for true military operations.<\/p>\n

(He provides a link: \u00a0https:\/\/www.stratfor.com\/sample\/analysis\/world-war-i-and-legacy-chemical-weapons<\/a>)<\/p>\n

snowball1025: \u00a0<\/strong>It is not a mystery at all. It is well documented. They didn\u2019t use gas because 80% of the German Army used horses for transport. They used gas one time, killing thousands of Russians, in the eastern Balkins (sic). But mainly they didn\u2019t use gas on the battlefield for fear of killing their horses.<\/p>\n

Kahled al-Asaad<\/strong>: \u00a0The main reason was that gas weapons are notoriously unpredictable. All that\u2019s needed to poison your own troops is a sudden change of wind direction (something that happened frequently in WWI). While they have very high psychological value they have limited (at best) field value.<\/p>\n

accidental flyer<\/strong>: \u00a0Horses & Mules! It\u2019s a myth that the Wehrmacht was highly mechanized. In fact the allies were far more mechanized. The Germans relied on animals to for transportation heavily and till the end, and apparently they never figured out how to produce animal gas masks. Regarding aerial bombing: nobody figured out how to deliver chemical weapons effectively as bombs during WWII, and V1 & V2 payload too small to deliver chemical weapons. So technical limitation.<\/p>\n

Noah Lehr<\/strong>: \u00a0The Germans stumbled upon Tabun, not Sarin, and it was Tabun that the Nazis had in tens of thousands of bombs and shells at the time of D Day. The reason they did not use it was because they had noticed our press suddenly started censoring chemical news about the same time they found Tabun. They thought we had nerve gas too. We did not! We had a miracle chemical that would protect our vital food supply, and thus it was a secret \u2013 DDT! By an accident of faulty intelligence analysis \u2013 we successfully stormed the beaches, when the Germans could have actually wiped up right out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which is all very interesting, though all the more peculiar if the German generals truly did want to use it and Hitler overrode them. \u00a0(Maybe Rosenwald is wrong on this point?) \u00a0These reasons are certainly different than the \u201cHitler might have been a monster, but he followed International Law about chemical weapons\u201d rationale, which is hard to believe. \u00a0And it does point to a set of reasons that are not applicable in a place like 2017 Syria, where Assad could launch an attack by air, without harming his own soldiers.<\/p>\n

But it does raise the bigger question of whether chemical warfare is any more heinous than conventional warfare, and whether there are reasons for outside powers to step in, solely due to the use of chemical weapons in any fashion? \u00a0Or is the red line, chemical weapon attacks specifically on civilians<\/em> \u2013 and, in that case, are chemical weapons, again, worse than attacking civilians with bombs, and, if so, is that because of the chemicals\u00a0themselves or insofar as they are\u00a0indiscriminately deadlier?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image: \u00a0own image. \u00a0Protection from radiation, not poison gas, from the\u00a0Dokumentazionsstatte Regierungsbunker<\/a>\u00a0(see the link for more photos).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That\u2019s a post title that I wrote after Sean Spicer said, \u201ceven Hitler didn\u2019t use poison gas,\u201d then had to retract his statement multiple times, because, of course, what he meant to say was \u201c. . . on the battlefield\u201d, and he didn\u2019t, seeming to discount the Holocaust. And the Washington Post was quick to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":5023,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[610,608,609,448],"class_list":["post-6417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-assad","tag-chemical-warfare","tag-hitler","tag-syria"],"yoast_head":"\nHistory buffs: why didn't Hitler use poison gas on the battlefield?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"That's a post title that I wrote after Sean Spicer said, "even Hitler didn't use poison gas," then had to retract his statement multiple times, because,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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