Why Producer Gas Wasn’t Used (Rebuttal of "Holocaust Encyclopedia")

Holocaust deniers often fixate on fringe technicalities or imagined inconsistencies to avoid confronting the overwhelming documentary, testimonial, and forensic evidence. One of their rhetorical questions goes something like this: "If gas chambers were real, why didn't the Nazis use producer gas?" 

Well, challenge accepted.

 

What is Producer Gas?

Producer gas, also known as wood gas, is generated through the gasification of solid biomass - typically wood or charcoal - in a low-oxygen environment. The result is a mix of gases including carbon monoxide (CO), hydrogen (H₂), carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and a large portion of nitrogen (N₂). 

According to Imbert company - Germany's leading producer gas generator manufacturer during the war - the typical gas composition was as follows: [1]

• 47% nitrogen
• 23% carbon monoxide
• 18% hydrogen
• 10% carbon dioxide
• 2% methane

With its high level of carbon monoxide, producer gas is highly toxic to humans. 

During World War II, wood gas generators were used in Germany as emergency substitutes for liquid fuels. Vehicles, particularly in the rear areas, were retrofitted with these bulky devices out of necessity, due to fuel shortages and rationing.

 

The "Revisionist" Argument 

When Germany and her allies were cut off from foreign oil supplies by the Allied naval blockade during World War Two, producer-gas generators became an important technology for the Axis powers in Europe. These devices could be fired with wood, coal or coke, and could be tweaked to contain as much as 35% of CO. 

[...] 

Therefore, when the so-called “Final Solution” was reaching its peak in 1942 and 1943, Germany had tens of thousands of engineers and mechanics familiar with this lethal-gas technology, hundreds of thousands of drivers capable of operating these devices, and an equal number of these poison-gas devices present literally everywhere, with no limitation on fuel.

Yet no one has ever claimed that this technology was used to kill even one single person.

 (Holocaust Encyclopedia. uncensored and unconstrained)

This line of argument has appeared in various iterations from Holocaust deniers like Friedrich Berg, Jürgen Graf, Santiago Alvarez, Thomas Dalton, and Nicholas Kollerstrom [2], and in discussions on the CODOH revisionist forum. This argument has become part of the canon of Holocaust denial.

The logic runs like this:

1. Producer gas was widely used in Germany and easily produced.
   
   
2. It was highly toxic with lethal levels of CO.
   
   
3. It required no strategic fuel.
   
   
4. Therefore, it would have been the most "logical" method for mass killing.
   
   
5. And since it wasn’t used, the narrative of homicidal gassings must be false.

Please note that this argument is often paired with the so-called "diesel issue" - the claim that diesel engines couldn’t produce enough carbon monoxide to kill efficiently. But this line of reasoning collapses immediately, because it’s based on a false premise: the Nazis didn’t use diesel engines for homicidal gassings - they used gasoline engines (see on this blog Why the "diesel issue" is irrelevant and  Rebuttal of Alvarez on Gas Vans: Why the Diesel Issue is Still Irrelevant ).

 

Engine Exhaust Was Used. Here’s Why.

The Nazis went for carbon monoxide as "silent killer" as early as 1939, during the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. In that context, they used pure carbon monoxide delivered in steel cylinders. But scaling that method to the mass murder operations in the East wasn’t logistically viable - gas delivery was too limited, too centralized, and too slow for mobile killing operations.

The alternative was carbon monoxide from gasoline engines:

• Gasoline engines are known to produce lethal levels of carbon monoxide (in fact, a well known method of suicide).

• They were readily available, state-of-the-art technology, and could be literally operated by anyone with a driver’s license

There is no evidence that the Security Police operated any producer gas fuelled vehicles around late 1941 and early 1942. The Security Police did not need producer gas, when gas vans were deployed to the Einsatzgruppen and Chełmno extermination camp and stationary gas chambers began operating in places like Belzec. At that point in the war, the Third Reich had access to roughly 8 million tons of liquid fuel, and that level held steady through 1943. The fuel crisis only truly hit in 1944 after the Allied bombing of synthetic fuel plants and the loss of Romanian oil.

Moreover, the Security Police and its mobile Einsatzgruppen were fuel-privileged institutions. These weren’t rural officials driving along on wood gas - they were well-equipped, fully motorized units with dedicated fuel allocations or direct access to Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS supply networks.

The Gestapo offices alone had monthly allocations of 250,000 liters of gasoline (BArch R 58/856/91). Sonderkommando Kulmhof burned 15,000 liters just to run a few trucks deporting Jews between January and May 1942. The Einsatzgruppen had their own mobile fuel tankers.

There was no shortage that forced a switch to alternative fuels, no political directive pushing for it within the Security Police until as late as 1944, and no technical motivation. Thus, there was no incentive to use producer gas, when gasoline-powered engines worked just fine.

Producer Gas - And Why It Wasn’t Used

While workable in rear logistics or agricultural vehicles, producer gas was largely unsuitable for frontline or police operations. Converting vehicles to run on producer gas came with serious drawbacks, it meant "reduced performance, poorer efficiency, cumbersome handling, [and] higher maintenance". [3]

• Startup time: Gasifiers had to be heated before they could produce usable gas. 

• Power loss: Vehicles retrofitted for wood gas suffered from reduced engine performance

• Bulky: The gasifier units were heavy and took up valuable space, reducing capacity
  
  
• Maintenance: Producer gas generators required frequent cleaning, careful operation, and constant monitoring

• Explosion risk: The flames of the gasifier unit and combustible gas mix (high in CO and hydrogen) posed a danger - especially in enclosed spaces like gas chambers. Producer gas generators were forbidden near explosive mixtures.
  

These limitations made producer gas a more challenging choice for mass killing operations - for the gas vans and - though to a bit lesser extent - also for stationary use in extermination camps such as Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor during Operation Reinhard.

In fact, it is all but certain that had the Nazis actually used producer gas, Holocaust deniers would likely be arguing the exact opposite - that gasoline engines would have been more practical, more safe, and more believable all along. That game is all too familiar.

 

Best Method? Flex method

The Nazis employed a wide range of killing methods - starvation, beatings, shootings, lethal injections, carbon monoxide from gas cylinders, engine exhaust, and Zyklon B. These methods often coexisted. This diversity was not random; it reflected the fact that what was considered "best" varied across different killing sites and operational contexts. 

What is perceived as the "best" method depends on many factors. There is no universal formula in state-sponsored mass murder, where decisions are made in real time under constrained conditions, with the tools and knowledge at hand.

The decision to use gasoline engine exhaust as a killing method was not the result of a prestigious expert panel or a broad expert consensus. It was a practical solution developed within a small inner circle of the Nazi police apparatus, specifically for use by the Security Police and the Einsatzgruppen. That’s why Auschwitz - administered separately by the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) - was not part of this initiative and developed its own Zyklon B route, just in case you were wondering.

Footnotes:

[1] Eckermann, Fahren mit Holz, p. 17.

[2] Friedrich Berg in: Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, 2019, p. 465 - 467: "The vast numbers of producer gas vehicles as well as the fervor with which the Germans developed new vehicles and uses for this gas technology, which is so evident throughout their wartime automotive literature, undermine the Holocaust story in general. If the Germans had ever intended to commit mass murder with carbon monoxide, they certainly would have had enough brains to employ this superb poison-gas technology long before using anything as idiotic as Diesel exhaust. [...] Another irony is the fact that the same producer-gas technology was actually used to gas rats and other vermin. According to the public-health literature from the Third Reich, producer-gas equipment from the firm of Nocht-Giemsa for killing rats was “very common.”And yet, no one thought of using this obvious, practical, effective, simple and cheap technology on humans – even Jews who had sometimes been compared to rats as in the film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). [...] What argues most strongly against all such gas-van stories is that the use of any kind of liquid fuel in medium and heavy trucks had already been prohibited a year earlier by Speer on September 22, 1942; smaller vehicles were still exempt until a year later (see Chapter 9). Assuming that anyone would have broken the law for a few percent of CO from gasoline engine exhaust – or even only a fraction of a percent from Diesel engine exhaust – when the legally required fuel was far more lethal, is too ridiculous. It never happened! "

Nicholas Kollerstrom, 2014, Breaking the Spell, p. 63: "If you believe that Germany had a wish to exterminate a particular ethnic group – for no discernible reason – and if you wish to believe they did so by herding crowds into a large room that would not have looked at all like a washroom (i.e. it could not have had any windows, or they would be smashed, and would have needed large, metallic outward-opening doors that clanged shut, and could not have had drains in the floor) then, clearly, mass murder would have been simple and efficient using the readily-available producer gas, because it has one-third carbon monoxide by volume;" 

Santiago Alvarez, The Gas Vans: "But not even gasoline engines would have been the choice of a potential mass murder, since Germany had an even cheaper, less complicated, and more efficient method readily at hand: wood gas or producer gas generators." (p. 101) "Hence, if the Germans had used the Saurer trucks mentioned in the Gaubschat exchange as gas vans – or any other truck – they would have been equipped with wood gas generators, and this very gas – before(!) entering the engine – would have been used to kill the inmates locked up on the cargo box." (p. 272)

Thomas Dalton, Debating the Holocaust, 2015, p. 116: "A second option, though, was much better: producer- or wood-gas generators. These devices burned wood or colce/coal in a small stove in order to create COgas, which was then used as fuel in the engine. Producer-gas generators were very efficient at producing high-concentration carbon monoxide—typically in the range of 18-35%. At these levels, anyone exposed to this gas would die very quickly.  [... ] Though hazardous, such devices were well-known to the Germans, who mass-produced them; some 500,000 were in use throughout the Reich. And obviously a producer-gas homicidal chamberwould have been a potential fire hazard—given that high levels of CO are flammable—but the Germans would have had no problem engineering such a system, if they desired."

Jürgen Graf in: Carlo Mattogno & Jürgen Graf, Treblinka. Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, 2016, p.123: "But that would have by no means been the ‘best’ source of CO available during World War II: due to a lack of gasoline, the German government passed laws that made it compulsory to equip all diesel-driven vehicles with producer gas generators, which generate a gas with up to 35% of CO from wood or coke. Hundreds of thousands of these truly poisonous generators operated in wartime Germany and in the occupied territories, and this technology was well-known to all major German politicians at that time, as Berg shows."

[3] Eckermann, Fahren mit Holz, p. 126.