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The Montréal Gazette

Montréal, February 12, 1985, page A-6


Mass Nazi gassings impossible, expert witness tells Zündel trial

 

TORONTO (CP) - Mass gassings using hydrogen cyanide would have been physically impossible in the large, unsealed rooms that were called Nazi gas chambers, a United States chemist testified yesterday at the trial of Ernst Zundel.

William Lindsey said he can't believe historical accounts that between one million and 2.5 million were gassed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps in Poland.

Recognition

Lindsey was recognized by the court as an expert witness on hydrogen cyanide, the posion said to have been used to kill millions of Jews at Nazi death camps.

"After looking over the evidence...I've been forced to conclude it is impossible for it to have happened the way it's been described," said Lindsey, a research associate at an Iowa chemical company for 33 years.

Cans of Zyklon pellets"There are too many inconsistencies...No one was willfully and purposefully killed with Zyklon B (gas) in this manner," added the defence witness, who said he shares "revisionist" information with Zundel.

Zundel, 46, a West German citizen living in Toronto, has pleaded not guilty to knowingly publishing false information likely to cause social or racial intolerance.

Two of his publications dismiss Second World War genocide of Jews as a hoax and a Zionist conspiracy to extract reparations from Germany.

Zyklon B, which contains one third liquid hydrogen cyanide, was named at the post-war Nuremberg trials as the killing agent in underground gas chambers.

Hydrogen cyanide is so deadly that 300 parts per million vaporized in the air will kill humans in three minutes, Lindsey told the District Court jury.

But the underground chambers were cool, he said, and it takes a higher temperature to readily vaporize the solid Zyklon B.

Lindsey later said under cross-examination that the chemical's boiling point is 26 degrees and admitted body temperature would raise the temperature in crowded chambers.

Lindsey, who visited all of the eastern European Nazi camps to pursue his interest in "allegations" of Holocaust gassings, said the chambers leaked and people outside them would have been killed.

Flimsy doors

He described the Auschwitz chamber as having two flimsy wooden doors, one with a glass pane, and a hole in the roof.

Lindsey disputed earlier testimony by a Crown witness who said he pulled wet, recently gassed corpses from the chambers.

"You can absorb hydrogen cyanide easily (through the skin)," he said. "Unless you washed quickly, you would join the alleged pile of victims you were carrying out."

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