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?
Degesch The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH (translation: German Corporation for Pest control), in short Degesch, is a German chemical corporation. Degesch produces pesticides used against weeds and insects. Degesch had the patent of the infamous Zyklon B, a pesticide that was used to execute people in gas chambers of German extermination camps during the Holocaust. Through the firms Tesch & Stabenow GmbH (Testa) and Heerdt-Linger (Heli) Degesch sold the poisonous gas Zyklon B to the German Army and the Schutzstaffel, abbreviation SS.
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.