Germany was getting its arse kicked by the Russians.  Units existed on the map only and the Eastern Front was like a sieve.  Hitler felt that if the Germans couldn't win the war, they deserved to be destroyed.  So, what kept Hitler from using all that poison gas like Tauban or Sarin that his scientists developed and factories stockpiled?  Unlike us, he wasn't worried about collateral damage if he gassed his own.  

BTW, the Germans were light years ahead of our own US Army Chemical Corps.  We prepared for mustard gas and had a lot of it on hand but didn't realize that the Germans had the nastier nerve agents mentoned above.

Hitler had been gassed in the first go around and had a pathological resistance to using it.

This

Gas works both ways, and the prevailing winds were not in Germany's favor.

I agree with the earlier posters about Hitler's reluctance to use gas.

I have to disagree about some of the nerve agents being nastier than mustard gas.  Much depends upon how you define "nasty", of course.  Mustard gas works just fine to deny use of an area to an enemy.

Gas warfare wasn't all that effective in the long run.  It was popular during WWI because they couldn't produce enough explosives to fill all of the shells that they wanted to fire.

I doubt if the outcome would have been significantly different if he had used gas.

There is also, of course, the fear of retaliation.

The US stockpiled a lot of chemical weapons in the E/MTO for possible use.

See, for example, the Bari incident

Tabun and Sarin were invented during WW II by the Germans.  One drop of the former on the skin and it's over.  Inhale it also brought death.  Sarin was even worse.  Just learned about them in the book, Operation Paperclip.

BTW, thanks guys for sharing that insight about Hitler.  I didn't realize that.

Germans also thought the Western Allies had their own stocks of the nerve gasses, a major failing for German Intelligence.

Both British and American bombers were overhead almost every day from 1943 onward.

By the end of the war, Germany had only a limited ability to drop gas on enemy cities.

If Britain and America had retaliated in kind with nerve gas, the death toll in Germany could have been enormous.  

Also, Britain was prepared to retaliate with anthrax (biological warfare), which the Germans also didn't know about at the time.

As has been mentioned, Hitler was gassed in WW I and temporarily blinded.  He hated chemical weapons. Prior to the war,  British Intelligence had learned that the Germans had developed new chemical weapons. The British gov. warned Germany officially that it would retaliate in kind if there was any use of chemical weapons. Hitler took the threat seriously.

What isn`t generally known is that the British decided to test their stockpile to make sure their weapons were still effective. They condemed an island in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland that was inhabited by shepherds and sheep. The Shepherds and their families were removed. Then the british armed forces used their chemical weapons  and anthrax on the island. They killed all the sheep and most, if not all insect life on the island. The island remained lethally contaminated until  the 1980s when the Thatcher government tested decontamination methods over growing concerns  over the Chemical weapons  of the USSR. That was reported in the journal of Chemical defense, IIRC.  I read about in the late 1980s while completeing my BS and I was killing time in the chemistry dept library.

I'm going to guess that Hitler was craphouse crazy enough to overcome any aversion to chemical/biological weapons, and that effective delivery/production systems were the issue(s).

Regarding nerve gas, he didn't use it (they had it) because he thought the Allies had it too. We didn't yet.
If he had used, it he may have won the war. At least I read this several years ago.

There was no good reason to use it.  It's not generally effective in gaining advantage if your opponent is equipped with relatively basic gas protection equipment and training, and everyone was by ww2.  It's main effect is in slowing everything down on both sides, and when your war plan is predicated upon rapid movement it's simply the wrong tool.  Sure, a surprise release of heretofore unknown nerve gasses probably would've stopped D-Day cold, but three to six months later the very same stuff would've been raining down on German cities.

Then there's the idea that Hitler expected us to have the same nerve gasses he was producing... The particulars that led to the big "a-ha!" were published in international scientific journal articles.  The pesticide work that led to it was being jointly conducted here and there.  Dupont and IG Farben were the two biggest dogs on the block and they played very nicely together.  Hitler also knew of at least some of the goings on at Porton Down and Dietrich.  He "knew" (with some questionable assumptions regarding the seriousness and success) that both the US and England were preparing for chemical warfare, and that the production capacity of the US was quite capable of outpacing even a peacetime Germany.  He also had a far more important mission for the IG, synthetics to replace the oil, rubber and nitrate supply cut off by the blockade.

Then there's something else I read recently... It would've killed the horses.  The wermacht was overwhelmingly horse powered.  They had masks for the horses but they didn't pass enough air to let them work while wearing them, and masks alone only work for those gasses that require inhalation.  They surely had not worked out a suit that could've protected horses from agents that would affect the skin.

I think people lean way too hard on the "Hitler was gassed in ww1" bit, but I think that has a lot to do with overestimating chemical warfare in general.

Hitler was gassing those around him daily. He knew it was too cruel.

Gas was the nuke before the nuke.
It's the same as nuclear missiles in modern times.

You have it but do you really want to deal with the reprocussions of using it.

Goering was asked at Nuremburg why gas wasnt used. His answer was simple, "The horses". As someone mentioned above much of the Wehrmacht moved by horse-power (especially in the East).

He might have better effect for poisoning the food and water supplies.

Zyklon B is a gas.

It was considered a pesticide and was commonly used all over for that purpose.  That's why it's manufacture wasn't prosecuted as a war crime.  It's manufacture without it's telltale marker scent was.

From what I have been told from guys who were there is the following story.... Believe it or Not....


All of our artillery use nitrogen for charge in the recoil system. Germany's did not. After June 6th the recon photo planes returned with photos of THOUSANDS of nitrogen cylinders on the beach. Hitler and his Generals thought this were for use in the war as poison gas, And there was a lot more there than they had.

So they did not use it, as they feared we would use what we had stockpiled on the beach.