Gas: the weapon "that even Hitler would not use"

Some fascinating, and timely, historical nuggets from the latest issue of The Economist:

Hitler during WWI

More surprisingly, Adolf Hitler too refrained from the use of chemical weapons in war, though not from the use of poison gases in concentration camps. This was in part because of a fear of reprisals in kind. It was probably also because Hitler, himself gassed in the first world war, had an active antipathy to the stuff. In their history of chemical weapons, “A Higher Form of Killing”, two British journalists, Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, note that Raubkammer, where Germany tested its chemical weapons, was the only big military proving ground that Hitler never visited.

Germany’s abnegation was triply welcome. A concerted chemical counterattack could, according to Omar Bradley, an American general, have made the difference between success and failure on the beaches of Normandy. Germany, though it did not know it, had a powerful edge over the allies in chemical weapons, having developed nerve gases far more lethal than any other chemical weapons then available. And becoming the only scourge “that even Hitler would not use” redoubled the stigma on chemical weapons.