Gas Chambers for Dogs… and People

This rolling gas chamber was put into operation by the "Animal Protective Association" of Washington, D.C., and was featured in the November 1937 issue of Popular Science magazine.  

On this day in 1933, the Nazi Party won 44 percent of the vote in German parliamentary elections, enabling it to join with the Nationalists to gain a slight majority in the Reichstag. Within three weeks, the Nazi-dominated Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers and ended the Weimar Republic in Germany.  

It was only two years earlier that veterinarian and American Eugenics leader Leon F. Whitney had written The Case for Sterlization, advocating the forced sterilization of 10 million "undesirable" Americans -- a book which Hitler praised. 

It was only 2 year later that Alexis Carrell, the French scientist who had won the 1912 Nobel Prize for medicine, published the best-selling book L'Homme, Cet Inconnu (Man, The Unknown) which took Whitney's ideas one step further, advocating a forced eugenics system to be controlled by the state and facilitated by gas chambers -- an idea he got from the world of dogs.