One of the poisons used to gas those in the concentration camps was called Zyklon-B. It is a powerful insecticide, which serves as a carrier of the gas known as Hydro cyanic acid or HCN. It usually comes in the form of small disks or pellets. HCN is the cause of death following the application of the Zyklon-B. It interacts with iron and concrete and creates Hydro cyanic compounds. HCN is *extremely* poisonous to humans, and is much more affective on warm-blooded animals, including humans, rather then on insects what it was first used for (a fumigator).

The exposure period (to HCN) is much greater in delousing operations than in homicidal gassings. This means that a much lower concentration is necessary to kill people than to get rid of lice, etc. In delousing, concentrations of up to 16,000 ppm (parts per million) are sometimes used, and exposure time can be up to 72 hours; while 300 ppm will kill people in fifteen minutes or so. Although it took very little time after the gassing started to kill everyone, the gas chambers where not that large, and the Zyklon-B was dropped from four different openings and since the concentration used was higher then the lethal one, death was very swift.

"In short, this industry used very powerful gases to exterminate rodents and insects in enclosed spaces; that it should now have become involved in an operation to kill off Jews by the hundreds of thousands is not mere accident." There were two types of gas chambers in Auschwitz: those used for delousing clothes ("delousing gas chambers") and those used for killing people on a massive scale ("extermination gas chambers"). The delousing gas chambers were a standard feature, and were left intact by the SS (the extermination gas chambers were dynamited in an effort to conceal criminal traces).

Of the 405, 000 registered prisoners, only 65,000 of them survived, and of the 16,000 Soviet POW’s, only 96 of them survived. It is estimated that over 1.6 million were murdered. And though it is admittedly difficult to get the exact figures, (since the Nazi’s did not maintain registration records for those to be exterminated immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz) it seems about accurate that the number of Jews killed was somewhere around 1.6 million. Realizing that Jews where not the only victims of the Auschwitz killing machine, it estimates that 200, 000 to 500,000 gypsies where destroyed as well as an unknown number of homosexuals that where sent to Auschwitz and then executed.