Post-Holocaust legacy
After the war, two directors of Testa –
Bruno Tesch and
Karl Weinbacher – were tried by a British military court and were executed for their part in supplying the chemical.
The use of the word
Zyklon (German for
cyclone) continues to prompt angry reactions from Jewish groups. In 2002, both
Bosch Siemens Hausgeräte and
Umbro were forced to withdraw from attempts to use or trademark the term for their products.
[10]
Holocaust deniers claim that Zyklon B gas was not used in the gas chambers, relying as evidence on the low levels of
Prussian blue residue in samples of the gas chambers found by
Fred A. Leuchter, which Leuchter dismissed as the results of general
delousing of buildings. However, Leuchter's
negative control, a sample of
gasket material taken from a different building in the camp, registered as having no such cyanide residue.
[11] The manager of the
analytical laboratory hired by Leuchter states in an interview in
Errol Morris' film
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., that Leuchter's thick samples of brick would have greatly diluted the cyanide residue, which forms only an extremely fine layer on the walls and cannot penetrate.
In 1994, the Institute for Forensic Research in
Kraków re-examined this claim on the grounds that formation of Prussian blue by exposure of bricks to cyanide is not a highly probable reaction (
Amoklauf gegen die Wirklichkeit. Praca zbiorowa; B. Gallanda, J. Bailer, F. Freund, T. Geisler, W. Lasek, N. Neugebauer, G. Spenn, W. Wegner; Bundesministerium fuer Unterricht und Kultur Wien, 1991). Using more sophisticated
microdiffusion techniques, they tested 22 samples from the gas chambers, delousing chambers (as
positive controls), and living quarters (as negative controls), finding cyanide residue in both the delousing chambers and the ruins of the gas chambers but none in the ruins of the living quarters, thus refuting the Holocaust deniers' claims.
[12]
