I read that the Germans invented chemical weapons during WW2 but decided not to use them; why is that? Was it really a sense of ethical concern?
Yeah, they were big on ethics.
Check out this chemical:
p.s. maybe google ‘mustard gas’ - that was used in WW1. WW1 was before WW2, btw.
Hitler got gassed in WW1.
He feared them.
The Germans invented chemical weapons in World War II?
Search for “mustard gas” and “World War I” on Google.
Edit: Double ninja’ed!
Seems to me gas in the showers is a chemical weapon.
They were also worried about the allies retaliating in kind if I understand correctly.
The popular myth is because Hitler was gassed in WWI (this did happen) he didn’t want the WWII battlefields to be filled with chemical weapons attacks. There are many reasons to doubt this:
- No evidence Hitler felt this way based on any of his statements or orders we have on record.
- Hitler was more than willing to throw the lives of his men away and considered them appropriate sacrifices for the greater goals he was seeking. When Germany was defeated Hitler had a plan to ruin Germany by intentionally destroying as much of the infrastructure of the country that was still standing. This was to “punish” the German people for being unworthy of greatness. A guy who felt that way about his own people, and I’m not even getting into all the stuff he did to non-Germans, doesn’t strike me as the type to have any problem with soldiers suffering mustard gas or chlorine gas side effects.
- Hitler drew no lines when it came to advancing the war effort, he enslaved millions of people to make them work in factories to further the war effort. If poisonous gas would have furthered the German war effort, I don’t see how using it would not be something Hitler would have done nor do I see any evidence he’d have had any moral qualms.
The truth of the matter I think is that chemical gas is very shitty to use to control a battlefield. Depending on the way the wind blows you may end up gassing your own troops. If you’re spearheading major offensives, a bunch of poisonous gas on the battlefield actually benefits the defenders. Not knowing which way the gas will blow, and because of the longer term effects you’re basically going to have to hunker down. This disrupts a speedy offensive, and gives the defenders time to strengthen their line with troops from other sectors. As a country that was on the offensive for much of the war, Germany didn’t want poisonous gas all over the battlefield at all.
The allies really didn’t want chemical gas on the battlefield either. That meant both sides recognized they could get something they wanted (no chemical weapons on the battlefield) by simply not using any of the stuff themselves. Both sides had significant gas stockpiles, and chose by and large not to use them because they didn’t want this stuff being used and they recognized if they used it in limited engagements where it might work to their advantage it would suddenly escalate into de facto use of it on every battlefield including ones where they really did not want it present.
I suspect a major reason Germany continued to refrain from significant use of chemical weapons even when it was put on the defensive is because the Allies had a much larger stockpile of the Gas and the Germans recognized if they had tried to use it defensively most likely the Allied response would be so bad that it probably would be a greater detriment to their defensive prospects.
I don’t think you’d consider it a “weapon” under those circumstances.
When Kerry claimed Hitler had used CWs, apparently he was referring to use in the camps.
Poison gas is more effective in the static war environment of WWI, much less so in WWII conditions.
In static (trench) war, you know where the enemy is and it is a certainty that he’s going to be there an hour from now and a week from now. You can take the time to assemble your artillery and make a 50,000 round barrage over a limited area in order to saturate it and kill every living thing in that zone.
Under the Blitzkrieg Strategy of WWII, you don’t have those numbers of troops massed in small areas for days and weeks at a time. Your men are planning to be 10-30 miles away tomorrow, and you’re certainly not betting on the enemy being anywhere near where he is today by the time tomorrow morning rolls around. Poison gas then becomes extremely ineffective and inefficient.
Even in static warfare, it is something of a two-edged sword. The wind changes and you miss your target, or worse, you gas your own men. I would also assume there is something of a safety and quality control issue in merely handling it. Assemble 50,000 nerve gas rounds for an assault and assuming that a mere 2% are defective, and congratulations, your own (trained artillery)men and logistical support personnel are handling 1,000 leaking defective poison bombs. Must be awesome to be working with that shit.
That and the whole “we use it, they’ll start using it” argument. No one wants the enemy to decide that the best way to fight you is a Thousand Bomber Raid loaded to the gills with nerve gas (incendiaries were bad enough!) dropping their loads all over your major cities.
Of course we (or rather my parents gen) fully expected to be gassed through bombing during the blitz, it’s why everyone in Britain carried a gas mask. So it can’t be explained away as differing field battle tactics from WWI. I suspect it’s more likely that both sides had seen the horrors of mustard gas in the trenches and didn’t want to attract like for like retaliation to a chemical weapons attack. Because we bombed them too, after all.
The British tested using anthrax for possible use on German food supply in Operation Vegetarian.
I think they were prepared to use poison gas if the Germans actually crossed the channel.
One of my teachers who fought in WWII said that when they captured German soldiers, they usually had food and cigarettes in their poison gas mask cases. “Nobody on either side wanted to use poison gas” he said.
As others have said, delivering gas to your targets without getting any on you is tricky.
What about using it on enemy cities via bombers? Hitler was fine with using other terror weapons.
As alluded to in my post, that’s not a tactic that is going to work in Hitler’s favor. They had a small(er) number of short-ranged bombers. The Allies could and did mount Thousand Bomber Raids with aircraft capable of carrying far more than any German plane.
The Soviets were able to come up with strategies for using chemical weapons in a fast moving campaign. Since they never got around to coming through the Fulda Gap we can’t know how effective it would have been.
Yes, but that would have been medium range missiles and artillery against fixed position defenses in a total and nuclear war with basically no rules. Winner is the last irradiated man standing.
This was my reaction, too. The Nazi’s used millions of gallons of pesticides to extinguish millions of Jews and others in the death camps.
Yes, the Nazis gassed people to death. That obviously is not a chemical weapon in the sense meant by the OP, which is a poisonous or noxious substance used in a military context. Holocaust victims were not soldiers in the battlefield. They were victims of murder.
The reason the Nazis didn’t use chemical weapons is because they didn’t want the Allies to, and they were, with fairly good justification, fearful that a chemical weapons fight was one in which the Allies would have a huge advantage.
Not exactly. Although it may have led to total war, the way we were taught was that the soviets thought of chem weapons as just another artillery shell. They practiced using them tactically pretty extensively.
"*Black Cross * a novel by Greg Iles, is a novel that deals with a British chemical threat to Germany