[Justa]

Peculiar accounting of Aushwitz gassing since the gas was actually from a can of Zyklone B powder dispensed through grates in the roof. There was no ‘turning’ it on so to speak. Journalistic embellishment I’m sure.

[jjotto]

Or a slight translation error. Despite the name in the link, the story is from The Romanian Times.

[RayChuang88]

Given that time of the war, Auschwitz may have run out of Zyklon B pellets, since the factories that produced this chemical may have already been bombed by Allied bombers. People sometimes forget from late 1944 on, most concentration camp prisoners died from a major outbreak of typhus--and that included the famous Anne Frank.

[dfwgator]

Peculiar accounting of Aushwitz gassing since the gas was actually from a can of Zyklone B powder dispensed through grates in the roof. There was no ‘turning’ it on so to speak. Journalistic embellishment I’m sure.

The earlier camps, like Treblinka, used carbon monoxide from tank engines, in those cases the gas was "turned on."

[bajabaja]

The “turning on” may refer to the opening of the venting system. People entered when the vents were closed, and once the doors were shut behind them, the vents were “turned on” so the gas could enter the chambers.

[Kirkwood]

Heaters and blowers are turned on to quickly vaporize the Zyklone B poison and disperse it in the room. I don’t know what process was used to heat the pellets, but it may have been with some type of bottled gas, and they ran out of it. In any case, the process requires an operator to turn the process on and off.