Arizona Plans to Restart Executions With Poisonous Gas Used by Nazis

The state of Arizona recently refurbished its gas chamber to be able to conduct executions by gas inhalation, according to a recent report. The reported move comes amid shortages of the drugs used to perform lethal injection and news as far back as 2014 about a series of botched executions across the southwest.

Holocaust remembrance organizations were quick to point out that the chemicals in the cyanide gas were similar to those used to create “Zyklon B,” a lethal gas that the Nazis used to kill Jews, Poles, Roma, and LGBTQ prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps. Zyklon B was also used to “decontaminate” migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in the early 20th century. Now, it’s 2021. The abhorrent history of this drug being used to dehumanize, humiliate, and kill religious and ethnic minorities around the world is deplorable, and we should all be flabbergasted that Arizona is trying to bring it back.

One of the earliest uses of gas baths occurred in El Paso in 1917, when Mayor Tom Lea introduced mandatory gas bath “treatments” to disinfect Mexican day laborers like farmworkers and domestic workers. In a letter to the Surgeon General, Lea wrote, “Hundreds [of] dirty, lousy destitute Mexicans arriving at El Paso daily will undoubtedly…bring and spread Typhus unless a quarantine is placed at once.” Lea’s decision inspired what became known as the El Paso bath house riots, a chaotic protest that began when 17-year-old domestic worker Carmelita Torres refused to undergo the procedure and urged her compatriots to join her. An estimated 500 women ended up participating in the strike, which shut down the border between El Paso and Juarez.

Unfortunately, the protest didn’t stop the use of gas baths. According to research by author David Dorado Romo, by the 1920s U.S. officials were using Zyklon B for the humiliating fumigations to which Mexican migrants were subjected. They were carried out in a facility that U.S. officials referred to the “gas chambers.” Dorado Romo came across a German scientific journal article published shortly before World War II broke out praising the United States’ use of the chemical gas on migrant workers, and the Nazis would go on to use it in their gas chambers.

I spent two snow-sopped winter semesters in graduate school retracing Adolf Hitler’s path from taking control of the central government to carrying out the Final Solution: a mass extermination of the Jewish people in death camps scattered across Europe.

The blood-scented iron gates at Sachsenhausen, haunted by early experiments in efficient execution; the ruins at Treblinka, where Nazis tried to cover their tracks by burning bodies; the social club across from the crematoria at Auschwitz I, close to where S.S. soldiers held happy hour.

Early forms of extermination of the Jews included hangings, firing squads, and mobile gas units, but the highly bureaucratic Nazi regime quickly evolved their techniques to be maximally efficient.

Learning about these historical horrors made my return from Poland particularly jarring. I got back to the U.S. as former President Trump’s administration announced its “zero-tolerance” policy for “criminal illegal entry” into the U.S., forcibly separating migrant children from their families. Trump restarted federal executions after a 17-year hiatus, using his lame-duck period in office to oversee a killing spree.

Advocates are now urging Joe Biden to formally reinstate the moratorium on the federal death penalty and to commute the sentences of those on federal death row, as Newsweek reported. But meanwhile, at the state level, executions continue. Texas executed Quintin Jones last month without any media presence, which put advocates and journalists on alert regarding potential constitutional violations.

And while it seems fair to call the very act of state-sanctioned murder “cruel and unusual,” the methods some states resort to are truly ghastly.

In 2009, the U.S. started facing shortages of the drugs used to concoct the cocktail to perform lethal injections, slowing the number of executions states could carry out as companies also banned their drugs from being used in lethal injection mixes. In states like Oklahoma, the use of unintended lethal injection drugs have caused prisoners to suffer painful, drawn-out deaths due to human error, which compounds existing challenges—so some places searched for alternative methods. Death Row prisoners in South Carolina, for example, now have the option to die by electrocution or firing squad. In Arizona, prisoners on death row will now have the option to choose between lethal injection or lethal gas.

“The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry [ADCRR] policy on capital punishment is set in the Arizona Constitution,” Judy Keane, director of communications at the ADCRR, told Teen Vogue in an email.

Article 22, section 22 of the Arizona Constitution states:

The judgment of death shall be inflicted by administering an intravenous injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause death except that defendants sentenced to death for offenses committed prior to the effective date of the amendment to this section shall have the choice of either lethal injection or lethal gas. The lethal injection or lethal gas shall be administered under such procedures and supervision as prescribed by law. The execution shall take place within the limits of the state prison.

In addition, Arizona Revised Statute § 13-757.B states:

A defendant who is sentenced to death for an offense committed before November 23, 1992, shall choose either lethal injection or lethal gas at least twenty days before the execution date. If the defendant fails to choose either lethal injection or lethal gas, the penalty of death shall be by lethal injection.

Arizonans on death row are being given the option to choose a method of death similar to what was used during the Holocaust. And a disproportionate number of those people killed by the state in Arizona are likely to be people of color. According to the ACLU, “Black people account for just 5.2% of the state’s population, but 16% of the state’s 116-person death row.”

Throughout history, government-mandated executions have been euphemized as a product of law and order.

As Keane writes in her email, “ADCRR, along with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, are prepared to fulfill its constitutional obligations, carry out court orders, and deliver justice to the victims’ families.”

There has to be something wrong with the criminal justice system when efficacy is measured in executions.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: The Death Penalty in the U.S.: How It Works and Which Presidents Have Used It

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue