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Comment by chuckadams | Hacker News Reader

The Nazis modeled their laws on Jim Crow, that’s well-known. What’s this about nerve gas tho?

> But I also unexpectedly uncovered other information at the National Archives that took my great-aunt's personal recollections beyond family lore or microhistory. These records point to the connection between the U.S. Customs disinfection facilities in El Paso-Juárez in the 20s and the Desinfektionskammern (disinfection chambers) in Nazi Germany. The documents show that beginning in the 1920s, U.S. officials at the Santa Fe Bridge deloused and sprayed the clothes of Mexicans crossing into the U.S. with Zyklon B. The fumigation was carried out in an area of the building that American officials called, ominously enough, "the gas chambers." I discovered an article written in a German scientific journal written in 1938, which specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B. At the start of WWII, the Nazis adopted Zyklon B as a fumigation agent at German border crossings and concentration camps. Later, when the Final Solution was put into effect, the Germans found more sinister uses for this extremely lethal pesticide. They used Zyklon B pellets in their own gas chambers not just to kill lice but to exterminate millions of human beings. But that's another story.

Excerpts: 'Ringside Seat to a Revolution'

From Ringside Seat to a Revolution, An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez: 1893-1923 by David Dorado Romo. Published 2005 by Cinco Puntos Press.

https://www.npr.org/5176017

Ok, “treated clothes with a deadly pesticide” is really quite different than “gassed migrants”. I mean, we were still burning leaded gas then.

It’s a matter of degree, not kind. I don’t think you could argue it’s a horse of a different color. That migrants literally rioted speaks to the depravity of the conditions.

That we inadvertently and indirectly influenced and inspired certain Germans to build their own kind of literal gas chambers modeled on those of the United States is not a matter of debate, is my point. That they took it “too far” is not our fault today, but it is all our shared legacy and responsibility to not dare repeat or enable.

I’ll go with “depraved indifference” rather than “genocidal intent” but when you spread it across a whole society, they ain’t all that different, are they?

I don’t disagree, and I’m not trying to paint all Americans or all Germans with the same brush. The migrants were here legally, and they deserved due process and protections of the Constitution, even as noncitizens, especially their rights to “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” which could be interpreted as freedom from undue interference in their way of life and livelihood as legal migrant workers. That’s not to say that they weren’t subject to immigration/border controls, but the system as such was only just becoming formalized when these events occurred. Historically, the southern US/Mexico border was open and not really regulated much at all just years before these events transpired.

The events of World War 2 undertaken by Germany and other countries, individuals, and groups directly influenced the creation of the United Nations, leading to the drafting, approval, and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and the later International Bill of Human Rights in 1976. It’s thanks to the United Nations also we have a formal definition of what constitutes genocide.

We’ve come a long way, and have farther still to go, but “we shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, paraphrasing Theodore Parker. Yet we must also remember the words of John Stuart Mill, often paraphrased and misattributed to Edmund Burke:

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

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