Poison Gas & The War On Innocents

Having done a couple of articles on poison gas, I can't finish with the subject without covering the Nazi use of poison gas against innocent, defenseless people, namely Jews and Gypsies (also known to some as the "Romani" or "Roma").* The Nazis murdered many other people, and this article is not meant to diminish their loss, but Jews and Gypsies were specifically targeted for eradication by the insane Nazi racial nonsense, just because of their heritage. Many Gypsies and many Jews lived in communities together in various countries, although they learned the language and customs of their respective country.** Most of these people came to view themselves as being true citizens of the country in which they lived, in spite of periods of persecution, including some outbreaks of intense violence. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, persecution of minorities, especially German Jews, intensified, coming into full view for the world to see in November 1938 with the "Kristallnacht," "the night of broken glass," when Nazi thugs broke into Jewish businesses and religious facilities throughout Germany (which then included Austria, and Vienna had a substantial Jewish population). Many Jewish properties were burned or otherwise severely damaged, many Jews were hauled off to concentration camps, and others were killed.

The Nazis were murderers long before they started using poison gas, but the conquest of much of Europe, and especially of eastern European, where millions of Europe's Jews lived, brought them the desire to come up with a more "efficient" way to kill other human beings. They had tried mobile vans, pumping in carbon monoxide to kill their victims, but for the Nazi nutcases, led by nutcase-in-chief Adolf Hitler and his henchman, assistant nutcase, Heinrich Himmler, the process was much too slow. By 1941-42, the Nazis had discovered that using a cyanide-based pesticide gas, they could kill people faster than ever, an important point to these murderous bastards. The gas was called "Zyklon B," and it was kept in canisters. Usually pellets of the gas were dropped into fake shower rooms filled with victims. The most notorious of the sites where Zyklon B was used was "Auschwitz," a combination labor-extermination camp complex in a part of southeastern Poland annexed to Germany after Poland's defeat in 1939. The Nazis "sorted" people into those who could work, putting them into the labor camp areas, and into those they wanted to eliminate immediately. Once "workers" became too exhausted, sick or weak from malnutrition to work anymore, they too became expendable. The whole thing so boggles the mind, it is no wonder that many survivors and liberators feared the world would not believe such things had taken place. The Nazis used the poison gas in other camps too, but it was in Auschwitz where it has been figured that somewhere between about one and a half million to two and a half million people were gassed, with Jews being the overwhelming percentage of those killed. Records on how many Gypsies were gassed is not known, but it is estimated that about a quarter million Gypsies perished at the hands of the Nazi butchers, with quite a few of these victims having been gassed at Auschwitz.

* Gypsies or the Romani are a people who trace their roots back to India, and indeed, their language is from the Indo-Aryan part of the Indo European language family. English is part of the Germanic sub-branch of the Indo European languages, so Romani and English are related, although much further down the family tree. The Romani people migrated from India and many reached Europe at some point between 1000 and 1100.

** Jews were often forced by European "Christians" (I only use the term because that's what they called themselves) to live in particular areas of cities and towns, usually less appealing areas. Eventually these Jewish areas came to be called "ghettos." I plan to do an article, or a series of articles, on the history of ghettos very soon.

WORD HISTORY:
Lose-This word goes back to Indo European "leu" or "lu," which had the notion of "undo, loosen, separate." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "lausam," with the same basic meanings. This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "los," a noun which meant "loss," in the sense "total loss, destruction." From this came the verb "losian," which meant "to lose, to perish." Gradually "losian" overtook the then common word for "lose;" that is, its close relative, "leosan." "Losian" later became "losen" before the modern version. German has "lösen," which means "to solve or resolve (a problem)," from the original notion of 'undo,' and some Low German has "leese," also meaning "solve," Dutch has "oplossen" (also solve, resolve), West Frisian has "ferlieze" (lose), Norwegian and Danish have "løse" (solve), Icelandic has "leysa" (solve, also "untie") and Swedish has "lösa" (solve). Old English also had "liesan," from the same Germanic source. It meant, "to loosen, to free from something," but also had the the secondary meaning, "to redeem," perhaps from the notion of "loosening, or freeing something by giving up something." The related German word, "lösen," also has a secondary meaning of "buy a ticket" (usually for travel), and this is just purely speculation on my part, but tickets are often torn off or dispensed by machines, which ties in with the meanings of the Old English form "liesan."  Interestingly I could not find the Old English word for "solve" (English borrowed "solve"), but I've got to believe it was similar to its other Germanic relatives and thus would be related to "lose." I will keep checking. I will also do the history for "solve" very soon, and it may surprise you to learn that "solve" is distantly related to "lose."