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.
RecognitionLindsey 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.
"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
doorsHe 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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