In response to Arizona refurbishing its gas chamber for executions, the American Jewish Committee said the “decision to employ Zyklon B gas as a means of execution defies belief. Whether or not one supports the death penalty as a general matter, there is general agreement in American society that a gas devised as a pesticide, and used to eliminate Jews, has no place in the administration of criminal justice.”
Janice Friebaum, vice president of the Phoenix Holocaust Association, which educates people about the Holocaust, told NBC News, “Uniformly, Holocaust survivors and their descendants are nothing short of horrified of this form of execution being utilized.” Friebaum said that the gas chamber was a “Nazi innovation, and it was positively inhumane. To think our ‘civilized society’ today in the state of Arizona would utilize this Nazi innovation, I believe, is tantamount to giving posthumous approval to the evils conducted by the Nazis. We’re basically saying what the Nazis did was OK.”
With all due respect to the memory of the Holocaust and those who perished and survived, including my late grandparents, this outrage is misguided for two reasons.
First, Friebaum is incorrect in asserting that the Nazis invented the gas chamber. In 1803, amid the Haitian Revolution, the French general Vicomte de Rochambeau executed prisoners of war by filling the cargo holds of ships with sulfur dioxide. The United States has used gas chambers for death row inmates since the 1920s. Second, and more important, Arizona’s gas chamber has been used for those convicted of murder who the law has deemed deserving of death. In contrast, the gas chambers used during the Holocaust were used for exterminating innocent Jews and others simply for the fact of their ethnic identity.
“Capital punishment is the law in Arizona and the appropriate response to those who commit the most shocking and vile murders,” said Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. “This is about the administration of justice and ensuring the last word still belongs to the innocent victims who can no longer speak for themselves.”
Well said.
But while we are on the subject of capital punishment and the Holocaust, we should note that there are states, most recently South Carolina, that use firing squads as an option for executing death row inmates. Where is the outrage from Jewish groups? After all, the Nazis also used firing squads in the Holocaust. They were called the Einsatzgruppen. It is one thing to be against the death penalty. It is another to appropriate the Holocaust for political purposes.
Context matters. Execution under due process of law is not the same as genocide under the process of ideology.
Jackson Richman is a journalist in Washington, D.C. Follow him @jacksonrichman.
