"Riddle of Why Hitler Didn’t Use Sarin Gas Remains Unsolved" Topic

"Sean Spicer on Tuesday badly fumbled one of the major riddles of World War II: Why didn't Hitler use the thousands of tons of lethal nerve agents that German chemists had invented and military leaders had readied for battlefield use, including sarin, the deadly gas that recently killed scores of Syrian civilians, children among them?

"It's a real mystery," said Raymond A. Zilinskas, director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. "There're a lot more questions than answers."

During the war, the deadly agents could have dealt a major blow to the Allies, who had no knowledge of the lethal arms. According to the Army's textbook on the medical effects of chemical weapons, German attacks with sarin and tabun, another nerve agent, "would have been devastating and might have altered the outcome of that conflict."…"
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Amicalement
Armand

The usual story is that Hitler had been gassed in WW1 and was not prepared to sanction its use. There may be some truth in that.
All nations had chemical weapons and often kept them near the front. The Luftwaffe bombing of Bari, in Italy, hit a US ship carrying US mustard gas which led to the unfortunate release of mustard gas over the Allies and Italian civilians:
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Perhaps this fear of prompt Allied retaliation, especially after Germany began to lose the air war, preyed on German minds.

From the German point-of-view the Soviet Union was not a good target for chemical weapons as it was a vast space where such weapons would have been less effective. To use gas/chemicals against the Soviets would have been less effective.

Meanwhile on the Western Front, the RAF had been bombing Germany since 1939 and had proved its ability to reach targets at night. Any use of gas/chemicals by the Nazis would have invited a retaliation against civilian and industrial targets in central Germany.

Remember also that the Imperial German use of gas on the Western Front in WW1 had proved counter-productive to the Germans in the end. The winds blew from behind the French/British lines two days out of three which meant that 66% of the time the Germans were vulnerable to gas, etc. Also the British got rather good at it and invented the Livens Projector. We Brits did not just fire gas shells any more, we threw the whole gas cylinder at the Germans:
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Nasty!

Given their other horrors it does seem that unrestricted use of gas/chemicals was one thing that the Nazis were not willing to do, even in the dying days of the war. One might have expected some deployment by Nazi die-hards at the very gates of Berlin but perhaps even they saw the wisdom of not 'defecating on their own doorstep' so to speak.

Barry

To use gas/chemicals against the Soviets would have been less effective.

Yes, chemical warfare can be weather and even terrain dependent.

Oh, I understood German intelligence was monitoring Allied chemical journals, and realized that suddenly all references in US publications to how sarin and other nerve agents worked had disappeared. Clearly, we were pressing ahead with agents very similar to the ones the Germans had developed. Using their chemical agents would result in retaliation, and as noted, the winds usually aided the Western Allies.

Turned out, we weren't developing a human nerve agent, we were developing DDT, which admittedly helped us win the war, particularly in the Pacific.

Grelber

I tend to agree with Barry in that the use of Sarin and other chemical weapons would have resulted in massive retaliation in kind by the Allies. Once air superiority was lost, German military options were limited.

@Extrabio1947:

Thank you!

B

Using any WMDs could expect a retaliation in kind … or worse …

One can almost see the parallel between German perspectives on using Sarin against the Allies, and Allied perspectives on using proximity-fuzed rounds against the Germans.

The question is: would you initiate the use a weapon that you are more vulnerable to than your opponent?

The Allies declined to issue proximity-fuzed ammunition for units (AA or field artillery) that were anywhere near the front, because any dud rounds could give the Germans key technology, and if the Germans developed and used such rounds, the impact on the Allies would be out of all proportion to the impact they could expect to have on the Germans through use of the ammunition.

Similarly, if the Germans had used Sarin, or ANY chemical weapon against the Allies, they could expect the Allies to respond in kind, and the impact on Germany, which was categorically unable to prevent area bombing across any part of their nation, would be all out of proportion to whatever impact they could have on the Allies through use of chemical weapons.

It hardly mattered if the Germans had Sarin (a superior chemical weapon) and the allies only had Mustard gas or Phosgene (inferior chemical weapons), as the Allies could deliver mass quantities of chemicals anywhere they chose, while Germany could not.

Add to that the German expectation (incorrect in the end) that the Allies had nerve agents, and Hitler's own personal loathing of chemical weapons, and it is hardly a mystery that, both intellectually and emotionally, they were not on the agenda.

I would suggest that the burden of proof would lie the other way -- that the presumption should be that the Germans were not ever going to use them, and the area for investigation should be whether the Germans ever got anywhere near to a decision to use them.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Thanks!.

Amicalement
Armand

@Mark 1:
I should point out that VT or proximity fused rounds WERE used against the Germans.
The VT fuse is credited with breaking up German infantry attacks during the Battle of the Bulge as it allowed very accurate air bursts of fragmentation rounds which effectively stripped the German tanks of their infantry support.
The fuse was also used by the USN in Sicily in 1943:
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I have also seen footage of U.S. artillery air bursting over the roofs of a small German town at the same (VT controlled) height. The tiles and slates from the roofs just took off.

I would also point out that even if the Germans had captured a VT fuse they would not have had the capability of manufacturing it. Britain invented the fuse and handed it to America as part of reverse Lend-Lease as even Britain did not have the capability to produce it in quantity. The Germans stood no chance by late 1944/early 45.

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The Americans did the same thing in WWI holding back the BAR.

Wolfhag

Hitler was a WWI vet. His experiences with chemical warfare probably shaped is outlook.

The Americans did the same thing in WWI holding back the BAR.

Which was a bad idea IMO.

This is a regular topic on local forums. Germans had several units ready to conduct chenmical warfare on the Eastern front, they have used gas and gas-filled mortar shells against partisans on several occasions – most known and documented is Kerch, where they've used gas to smoke out partisans from underground caves.
Both sides were prepared for chemical warfare – you see gas masks holders on both German and Russian soldiers photoes.
main reasons typically listed are:
- large areas, a lot of mobile warfare as opposed to WWI trenches
- weather and risk of having the gas blown in your face
- risk of retaliation as both sides knew that other side had the means to use chemicals
- gas was relitively expensive to make. I can't comment on this one, but may be Germans needed the poison for their death camps more than for the front
- Hitler's WWi trawma also mentioned quite often

Oh, I understood German intelligence was monitoring Allied chemical journals, and realized that suddenly all references in US publications to how sarin and other nerve agents worked had disappeared.

Which is similar to how the Soviet bomb project started.
Lt Flyorov was a Russian nuclear researcher and a reserve Soviet Air Force pilot. The story goes that he was shot down in July 1941. While recovering, he was studying the latest journals and noticed a conspicuous lack of articles by British and American physicists on fission.
He pointed his out in a letter to Stalin.
Stalin allegedly asked "Why is this man flying airplanes at the Front?"
Flyorov ended up second behind Kurchstov running the Soviet bomb project.
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