Zyklon B

Zyklon B:

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.
• 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.