The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH (translation: German Corporation for Pest control), in short Degesch, is a German chemical corporation, Degesch had the patent of the infamous Zyklon B, was the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in which country in the early 1920s?
Zyklon B Zyklon B ( ; ] ; translated Cyclone B) was the trade name of a cyanide-based pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It consisted of hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid), as well as a cautionary eye irritant and one of several adsorbents such as diatomaceous earth. The product is infamous for its use by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust to murder approximately one million people in gas chambers installed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, and other extermination camps.
Chemical weapons in World War I Although the use of toxic chemicals as weapons dates back thousands of years, the first large scale use of chemical weapons was during World War I. They were primarily used to demoralize, injure, and kill entrenched defenders, against whom the indiscriminate and generally very slow-moving or static nature of gas clouds would be most effective. The types of weapons employed ranged from disabling chemicals, such as tear gas, to lethal agents like phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas. This chemical warfare was a major component of the first global war and first total war of the 20th century. The killing capacity of gas was limited, with only about ninety thousand fatalities from a total of some 1.2 million casualties caused by gas attacks. Gas was unlike most other weapons of the period because it was possible to develop effective countermeasures, such as gas masks. In the later stages of the war, as the use of gas increased, its overall effectiveness diminished. The widespread use of these agents of chemical warfare, and wartime advances in the composition of high explosives, gave rise to an occasionally expressed view of World War I as "the chemist's war" and also the era where "weapons of mass destruction" were created.