How important do you think it is to be aware of atrocities that are committed in history?

Zyklon-B is a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the 1920s. It's said to smell like almonds and marzipan. Before World War II, it was used in Germany to disinfect ships, barracks, clothing, warehouses, factories and more. It was developed by a vermin control corporation called DEGESCH and was made in varying strengths, with Zyklon C, D and E representing gradations in potency and price. Zyklon-B was known to be toxic to humans. It could be used as a lethal gas that attacked the brain and heart. Death occurred in a matter of seconds. First there was crippling chest pain and violent seizures. Then there was cardiac arrest. In small amounts, it was deemed safe for killing lice, mice and rats. Before this survey, had you heard of Zyklon-B?

In 1917 the US Congress passed the Immigration Act, and it was signed by President Wilson. The Public Health Service simultaneously published its Manual for the Physical Inspection of Aliens. In its pages was a list of people who shouldn't be allowed into the US: "imbeciles, idiots, feeble-minded persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority [homosexuals], vagrants, physical defectives…anarchists, persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases…all aliens over 16 who cannot read." Zyklon-B arrived in El Paso, Texas in the 1920s as a fumigating agent when a Public Health Service officer, J.R. Hurley, purchased a small amount for $25 in pellet form to fumigate the El Paso delousing station. This is where undocumented Mexicans who crossed into the US from Juárez were taken. Once they arrived at the delousing station, immigrants were forced to strip and be fumigated with small amounts of several toxic substances, including gasoline, kerosene, sulfuric acid, DDT and, after 1929, Zyklon-B. It is estimated that Public Health Service agents "bathed and deloused" 127,123 Mexicans at the bridge between Juárez and El Paso that same year. And though there are no US records of what became of the immigrants, the writer, David Dorado Romo, has chronicled stories of survivors who developed several types of cancers, children born with birth defects and other health issues. Were you aware of this chapter in US history?

In 1924, Adolf Hitler wrote, "The American union itself... has established scientific criteria for immigration... making an immigrant's ability to set foot on American soil dependent on specific racial requirements on the one hand as well as a certain level of physical health of the individual himself." In 1938, three years before the first Nazi death camps, Nazi chemist Dr Gerhard Peters, wrote an article for a German pest science journal, advocating for its use in the German Desinfektionskammern. The article featured photos of El Paso's delousing chambers. Peters went on to become the managing director of DEGESCH, which supplied Zyklon B to the Nazi death camps and was later used at Auschwitz. By June of 1944, the first documented gassing occurred at the women's camp at Ravensbrück. Were you aware that the Nazis took their inspiration for the gas chambers from the U.S. government?

In June 2021, Arizona announced plans to use Zyklon-B to kill inmates on Death Row. Corrections officials have refurbished a gas chamber and acquired the ingredients to make the lethal gas. Critics say that in addition to hydrogen cyanide's infamous use in the mass killings of Jewish people by the Nazis, it has produced some of the most botched, disturbing executions in the United States. Do you think it is acceptable or unacceptable for the state of Arizona to use Zyklon-B to execute prisoners?