Fritz Haber: The Damned Scientist**

 Fritz Haber: The Damned Scientist**

Magda Dunikowska* and Ludwik Turko*

Dedicated to the Fritz Haber Institute,

Berlin, on the occasion of its 100th

anniversary

ammonia · poison gas · Haber, Fritz · history of science

A Portrait and a Monograph

The even row of portrait photographs of Lower Silesian

Nobel Prize winners displayed on the wall of the club Salon

S´la˛ ski, or Silesian Salon, one of the city-

s magic places, right

across the street from the Baroque main building of the

Wrocław University, is rather unorthodox as far as the

standards of picture exhibitions go. Two of the laureates

observe the coy interior of the club having assumed postures

that are somewhat unusual for respectable learned men:

hanging upside down. One of the two is Philipp Lenard, the

cathode ray discoverer who subsequently developed the

conception of creative “Aryan physics” as opposed to

secondary and mendacious “Jewish physics”. The other one

is Fritz Haber, who invented a method for synthesizing

ammonia and later pioneered the use of poison gases on

World War I battlefields. In the gallery of famous people

tracing their origins to Wrocław (formally named Breslau),

few are as controversial, as complex, or as tragic as Fritz

Haber. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1919

for developing a method for the direct synthesis of ammonia

from its elements: hydrogen and nitrogen. The reaction made

possible industrial-scale production of artificial fertilizers to

provide grain crops with necessary nitrogen. For hundreds of

millions around the world, the discovery averted the specter

of famine and linked Haber-

s name with the concept of

“bread from air”. It would be difficult to find a better

illustration of Alfred Nobel-

s last will, which instructed his

heirs to bestow prizes on those who confer the greatest

benefit on mankind.

Less than a decade after enabling the production of bread

from air, Fritz Haber pioneered the use of deadly poison gases

on the battlefields of World War I. He personally oversaw the

first successful chlorine gas attack on the French and English

lines at Ypres in April 1915. His passion and commitment led

to the association of Haber-

s name with the notion of “poison

from air”.

The authors of Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European

City, Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, dot the i-

s and

cross the t-

s: “Fritz Haber (1868–1934) … earned the name of

Figure 1. Wrocław Salon Slaski interior with Nobel Prize winners.

Figure 2. Haber’s portrait, upside down in Salon Slaski.

[*] L. Turko

Institute of Theoretical Physics, University Wrocław

pl. M. Borna 9, 50-205 Wrocław (Poland)

E-mail: turko@ift.uni.wroc.pl

M. Dunikowska

Wrocław (Poland)

E-mail: magda_dunikowska@hotmail.com

[**] We are grateful for comments and suggestions kindly provided to us

by Gerhard M. Oremek (Frankfurt), Bretislav Friedrich (Berlin),

Adam Jezierski (Wroclaw).

Essays

Germany-

s ”Doctor Death“. After studying in Berlin, he

returned to Breslau to take over his father-

s business, but tired

of merchant life and opted for an academic career. Though

largely self-taught, he lectured at the Technical Highschool in

Karlsruhe before being appointed Professor of Physical

Chemistry … At the outbreak of war in 1914, he placed the

institute at the disposal of the government and became involved

in the development of chemical weapons. Less than a year later,

on 22 April 1915, Haber personally directed the German

chlorine gas attack at Ypres. His wife and fellow chemist, Clara

Immerwahr, committed suicide in protest at his work, but he

pressed on undeterred. He was later to be involved in the

development of ”Zyklon B“.

[1]

In the light of the above, it would seem quite fair and

proper to hang the Germany-

s “Doctor Death”, in effigy, not

only upside down but also facing the wall. Before doing that,

however, and before embarking on an anti-Haberian crusade,

replete with easy moralistic indignation,[2] it is worthwhile

taking a closer look at this character, in whose story crystal-

lized the key challenges and phobias of his time. To begin

with, it is reasonable to put aside Microcosm, at least as a

source of knowledge about Fritz Haber. Describing a

graduate of the University of Heidelberg with a Ph.D. in

chemistry from Berlin as “self-taught” is rather precarious, at

least as much as is calling the Technische Hochschule

Karlsruhe a high school. It would be as appropriate and

informative to call Poland-

s Szkoła Głwna Handlowa a trade

high school or the cole Normale Suprieure in Paris an

ordinary high ö

In actual fact, this scientist who has become a black

legend, his decisions, and his fate deserve a fair and objective

analysis for at least two reasons. Firstly, because of the

character, talent, and achievements of this extremely complex

personality who was a true hero of his time. Secondly, because

such analysis provides an opportunity to gain an insight into

the beginnings of the era that turned scientists and industri-

alists into new political players, that is, our present time. The

figure of Fritz Haber, like a lens, brought into focuses all of

the tough dilemmas of abandoning the romantic vision of

history, still alive during his lifetime. Let us treat him then as a

window into the Wrocław/Breslau and the Europe of that

time with their conflicts, hopes, and achievements, and into

the point where a paradigm shift took place marking one of

the major civilizational turning points: the world would never

be the same after Haber-

s inventions; much like the world

would never be the same after the breakthroughs of his friend

Einstein. Today-

s landscape with millions of shops selling

fresh packaged foodstuffs, restaurants and fast-food outlets

mushrooming on all continents and even the most remote

islands, the landscape that is, as it were, our natural environ-

ment, has come into being as a consequence of none other

than Haber-

s work.

Fritz Haber, a true Breslauer by birth, grew up in a city

that was a European microcosm. Microcosm, the title chosen

by the authors for the above-cited monograph of the city,

aptly captures the essence of the place, including especially

the fervor of late 19th century Breslauers. The city, a mixture

of ethnicities, cultures, and religions, was torn between the

poles of elegant urban culture and faith in the power of

science. Its outwardly manifest growth proceeded in a climate

of immediate industrial-scale application of chemical patents,

which was made possible by the collaboration of university

laboratories, but in a way evoked echoes of alchemy. The

murky yearning for power promised affluence, unmindful of

the risk of unleashing forces that could spiral out of control

and push the world into the turmoil of destruction. The city,

rapidly growing ever prettier, seemed to be inhabited by a

genius loci, a kind of guardian spirit of the place, protecting its

residents. The genius loci may have been present at the bed of

Figure 3. Breslau: Ohlauer Stadtgraben mit Liebichshçhe.

Figure 4. Breslau: Tauentzienplatz.

Figure 5. Breslau: Kaiser Wilhelm Bridge.

a certain Breslau woman in labor who was giving birth to Fritz

Haber, the father of weapons of mass destruction but also of a

technology used to avert mass famine. Born into a Jewish

family tracing its roots to Galicia, an area spanning today-

s

south-eastern Poland and western Ukraine, Fritz Haber was

an intellectual with a posture and personality of a Prussian

Junker (the landed nobility). His ammonia synthesis not only

made it possible to mass-produce artificial fertilizers but also

enabled industrial production of compounds needed to mass-

produce explosives. Haber was a fierce German patriot at a

time when state nationalism was a virtue and a commendable

attitude. After the outbreak of World War I, he was convinced

that the shock caused by chemical weapons would force the

Entente to quickly capitulate, thus saving lives. That is where

he was wrong: for over three years, millions of soldiers would

continue to die in the muddy trenches of the Great War.

Chemical weapons, used by all the belligerent countries, did

not bring about any breakthrough, and “traditional” weapons

were much more efficient in killing people than the chemicals.

The latter would not prove their superior efficiency until their

application in German death camps during World War II.

After Hitler-

s rise to power, state nationalism was

supplanted by ethnic nationalism and the German Haber

became the Jew Haber. A year later, having left Germany, he

died in Basel. At a semi-conspiratorial memorial service held

at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, whose Institute for Physical

Chemistry and Electrochemistry Haber had directed since

1911, another German Nobel Prize winner, Max Planck,

stressed that without Haber-

s work on ammonia synthesis

Germany would have lost World War I after just a few months

both for economic reasons, lack of food, and for military

reasons, lack of ammunition. It so happens that the reaction

providing bread from air also makes it possible to produce

explosives. Planck-

s speech was delivered to a tightly packed

audience, mostly composed of women, professors-

 wives.

They were representing their husbands, who preferred to stay

at home choosing “the lesser evil” and “preservation of

values”.

Understanding Haber

There are multiple roads to understanding the extraordi-

nary personality of Fritz Haber. Travelling those roads are

numerous contemporary historians, biographers, film makers,

and artists.[3] Haber-

s name appears in theatre plays, novels

and biographies.[4] Just how it continues to intrigue and inspire

to this day is evidenced by the Fritz Haber series started a few

years ago. To its creator, David Vandermeulen, a talented

Belgian graphic artist, this complex character brings into

focus the complexities of the early industrial era: the

dynamics of brilliant technological advances fuelled by the

ambitions of newly formed social classes. He even developed

a special literary genre for his protagonist: an interesting

combination of comic book, drama, and historical documen-

tary. The resulting opus is a book/album/portal in sepia,

resembling a silent motion picture, where dialogues alternate

with situational descriptions.[5] The author has taken partic-

ular care to ensure that his work has historical value and put it

in a different perspective. In addition to classic quotes from

acclaimed authors, chapters open with longer quotations from

period documents: speeches by presidents, prime ministers,

generals, statements by leading journalists and writers, that is,

various opinion leaders, published in European newspapers

and magazines of that time. It is the beginning of a literary/

artistic/research project planned for more than ten years: this

is how much time the author expects is needed to sort out the

tragic destiny of this Faust of the turn of the twentieth century.

In the face of so many manifestations of ongoing interest,

one cannot do justice to the Fritz Haber figure other than by

recognizing three layers of its structure: internal, or the

psychology of his personality; external, or his social status;

and temporal, or his development and evolution driven by

family history and social pressures.

A review of the literature on Fritz Haber offers an insight

into the impressively complex landscape of his time. On the

one hand, the scholarly approach makes possible a solid

reconstruction of the industrial era on the eve of World War I,

when it had already become clear that it would be very

difficult for an inventor to stop at being a benefactor of

Figure 6. Breslau: Fechterbrunnen Uniwersit-

t.

Figure 7. Breslau: Kçnigsplatz.

mankind. No society can restrict, or could have restricted, a

new, promising technology to serve peaceful development

only. On the other hand, the humanities will not allow the

ethical questions to be left out, bringing up the issue of

scientists-

 responsibility. Likewise, it is impossible to pass over

the role of pressures from various interests which, like a

powerful tributary, bolster social dynamics and their further

turbulent development. Thus, it is difficult to ascribe all

further uses of an invention to the will of the inventor.

Consequently, the story of Fritz Haber does not permit an

account composed of simple basic assumptions, forcing the

analyst to suspend judgments and concentrate on the question

marks.

The Virtues of Patriotism

If we take a really close look at the time of Haber-

s youth

in order to investigate German cities-

 intellectual climate in

statu nascendi, to trace the ambitions of the elites of

Bismarck-

s state, whom will we meet? The world in which

Fritz Haber grew up and was educated was already very

complex. Prussia laid emphasis on solid and rigorous educa-

tion, with discipline, patriotism, and respect for the army

instilled at home and at school. As the education was

comprehensive and of high quality in every field with the

purpose of ensuring cohesion of the state, the nationalism

emerging in those conditions did not appear in the least

pathological, especially as regional and religious differences

were still visible and the bloody civil wars were still present in

living memory. It was that memory that Wilhelm II and his

chancellor tried to console by uniting the German peoples

under the new motto of “Deo–Litteris–Patriae” (God, Sci-

ence, and Fatherland). Scholars and scientists could hope for a

high rank in the social hierarchy. This is how the Kaiser

congratulated Wilhelm Rçntgen in 1896 on the discovery of

X-rays: “I praise God for granting our German fatherland this

new triumph of science”. Thus, Haber-

s immediate environ-

ment was marked by fresh dynamics of a sensibly developing

state. The emblematic trio of God, Science, and Fatherland

seemed in a natural way to assure the right course of

civilizational evolution. An atmosphere of confidence in the

virtues practiced set in, especially as the appearance of cities

clearly manifested not only wealth but also beauty and

harmony. Commerce and industry coupled with love of the

army did not eliminate love of art, which was revealed in

architecture, town planning, sculpture, painting, and handi-

crafts. If one makes the effort to reconstruct the streets that

Haber walked, the laboratories, lecture halls, and salons he

spent time in, and the furnishings and thousands of objects he

used, it is not difficult to realize that all of that outside world

was in fact part of his world. It certainly gave him a lot of

satisfaction: he felt at home, at the right place, ready to work

incessantly in order to maintain that state of affairs.

By the end of the nineteenth century, industrial develop-

ment had attained unprecedented intensity, due to constant

rivalry between the states of Europe. It soon turned out that

the mutual stimulation came at a price: nationalism was

rising, and with it, in view of conflicting interests and

ambitions of the European powers, grew the threat of war.

Under such conditions, for many, patriotism imperceptibly

mingled with nationalism, so much so that the boundary

between the two was no longer discernible. From today-

s

perspective, following the painful experience of the parox-

ysms of the twentieth century, it is no longer possible to easily

picture a time when extreme nationalism was a virtue and a

commendable attitude. The latter half of the nineteenth

century was a time a fierce rivalry in Europe between the

French, the Germans, and the English. The united German

empire, emerging from nonexistence lasting since the Thirty

Years-

 War, the “Kaiserreich” (Empire), which considered

itself the successor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German

Nation, vigorously pushed and shoved to gain elbowroom in a

space already divided up by Europe-

s traditional colonial

powers. The conflicting currents of state nationalisms clashed

in all areas of life, without omitting the traditional academic

virtues. It was at that juncture that Pierre Duhem, an eminent

French physicist and philosopher, in his essay “La science

allemande”, contrasted the esprit de finesse of French science

with Germany-

s dull scientific thought that he considered a

degenerate form of French science. He also used the

opportunity to expose the shortcomings of English scientific

thought as, while not deprived of sharpness, suffering from a

shortage of logical coherence, or bon sens.

Between Prosperity and the Specter of Famine

The modern reader rarely has a chance to take a close

look at the decades preceding the outbreak of World War I

through the prism of documents originating from industrial

companies, university laboratories, and research institutes.

The rapid development enjoyed by Europe in the

industrial age was not free of concerns. Threats to the

development of the European industrial civilization were

discussed since Malthus. Even as a century earlier, he had

warned that advances in European civilization, which ex-

tended life expectancy and thus resulted in a steady popula-

tion growth, would come up against the problem of feeding

the population. Existing production, dependent on the whims

of climate and the land drained by centuries of cultivation,

would be unable to meet the growing demand. Mankind

would thus be left with the only choice to restore a balance:

famine or war. In the late nineteenth century, the problem

persisted to be the main challenge to be tackled by science:

Sir William Crookes, president of the British Association for

the Advancement of Science, who discovered thallium and

invented the radiometer, presented this issue as a potentially

imminent catastrophe. Imports of American and Russian

grain, which had been helping to maintain a balance, would

no longer be able to fulfill the task, since those main

producers would limit supplies in the coming decades in

order to feed their own populations. Restoring internal self-

sufficiency was not an option either: Chilean sodium nitrate

deposits and reserves of South American guano were nearly

exhausted. The only solution was to develop a method for the

production of fertilizers from ammonia taking nitrogen

directly from its inexhaustible source, that is, air.

Crookes-

 speech resounded throughout the scientific

communities in Europe, and 1898 marked the beginning of

a race among laboratories. German scientists had a privileged

position at the time as their country had introduced an

innovative solution to the burning problem of research

funding: government guarantees encouraged both bankers

and industrialists to invest in science. Factories willingly

purchased patents and employed talented specialists, while

banks provided financing. The effectiveness of the resulting

academic-industrial-financial complex proved disturbing for

other countries.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the high status that

Bismarck-

s reunified state afforded to the symbiosis of

science and industry had seriously undermined the traditional

dominance of the colonial powers. The patent race was ever

more clearly tipping in favor of Germany when its scientists

discovered the structure of alizarin, the main ingredient of

dyer-

s madder. As early as 1872, synthetic alizarin was

produced by three different German chemical concerns:

BASF, MLB, and Bayer. This powerful competition soon

ruined the traditional cultivation of madder, the cost of the

synthetic dye being a tenth of that of the natural substance.

Less than fifteen years was enough to see a complete collapse

of the market. The south of France, which in 1881 still

provided more than a half of the global production, sold none

at all just five years later. A similar fate befell the English

market for indigo, the king of dyes, even though developing a

synthesis method took BASF and MLB chemists twenty-two

years of incessant effort and consumed millions of marks of

capital expenditure before a success was achieved. By 1904,

Germany was exporting 9000 tonnes of synthetic indigo,

rising to three times as much in 1913. That spelt ruin, now for

entire regions of British India living off the cultivation of

Indigofera plants, and consequently brought about the

collapse of the English indigo market and the port of

Marseille, which served that market.[6] As can be seen,

globalization is by no means a new development of the last

quarter-century.

Fritz Haber-

s career as an eminent scientist, which started

with the development of an industrial method for ammonia

synthesis (the so-called Bosch–Haber process), and the

establishment of a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Haber in

Dahlem were possible precisely because of the comprehen-

sive development of German state institutions. The first

attempts at ammonia synthesis were undertaken by Wilhelm

Ostwald, an eminent chemist and future Nobel Prize winner,

his method however was unsuccessful. Several years later,

Haber and a young English scientist, Robert Le Rossignol,

achieved the first promising synthesis by using precise

physicochemical analysis combined with bold engineering.

This was initially carried out at the laboratory of the

Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe and then, on an industrial

scale, in collaboration with BASF. In July 1909, the first

milliliters of ammonia containing exclusively atmospheric

nitrogen, unavailable before, flowed from their tabletop

laboratory apparatus.

Figure 8. Karlsruhe.

Figure 9. Commemorative plaque of the “Hochdruck-Reaktor”.

Figure 10. Group picture: Fritz Haber and his co-workers in front of

his chemistry lab, Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe in 1909.

Essays

German Jews, Jewish Germans

Fritz Haber never had any doubts about his national

identity. He considered himself German and was German.

German culture was his culture; the German state, Kaiser-

reich, was his state. More than a century of Prussian

enlightened absolutism, going back to Frederick the Great,

had led to the emergence of a modern state, one of the key

players on the European scene. Germanhood was the young

Haber-

s natural environment, something “not to judge, but to

adjust to, like day and night, like spring and summer, like

everything great and eternal”.[7] One of the aspects of Haber-

s

self-fulfillment in Germanhood was his decision, at the age of

twenty-four, to be baptized in a Protestant church.

For the talented and ambitious man, brought up in a

country with efficiently functioning institutions, a scientific

career was a powerful attractive force, stronger than his

family-

s religious tradition. It is worth pointing out that, since

the Stein–Hardenberg reforms in the late eighteenth century,

the inhabitants of Prussia had been treating their state as a

tool of emancipation, universal education, and formation of a

sense of citizenship. Nevertheless, the emancipation of Jews

was not a completed process at that time, despite successive

legislative advances, and persisting anti-Semitism in nine-

teenth-century Europe was far from a marginal phenomenon.

Thus, when Haber-

s religion became a serious handicap, he

decided to convert to Christianity. The decision was com-

mented upon variously, but there is no doubt that in this case,

like in many similar cases, religious motives played a much

less significant role than a desire to open up and assure one-

s

career prospects. This conclusion is evidenced by events in

Haber-

s later life, which confirmed that the main reason for

his conversion was a desire to blend into Germanhood, a need

to feel “one of us”, a community bound by ties of a common

land, a common past, and a common present.

While changes taking place in Prussian society had gained

a momentum unseen before, the growing emancipation of

various social strata proceeded for the time being without the

former elite being stripped of its privileges. The electoral

system based on three property-owning classes, rooted in a

long European tradition of membership of various occupa-

tional corporations, gave the members an important place in

the social hierarchy. The Jews, invariably involved in com-

merce and international finance since the ancient times, had

always enjoyed direct access to the monarch, which was

considered a particular privilege. When Bismarck succeeded

in unifying Germany towards the end of the nineteenth

century, the development of the German state in the new

structures, based on industrial investments and maintenance

of extensive, increasingly international markets, proceeded in

parallel with the rise of a new elite: Jewish bankers and

industrialists. Due to its strength, that social stratum, by its

very nature cosmopolitan and cultivating somewhat different

codes of social communication, was perceived by Prussian

aristocratic families to be a dangerous competitor that might

in time become a threat to the construction of their state,

based, since the time of Frederick the Great, on military

might and a high level of education. Thus, despite formal acts

of enfranchisement, the political reality revealed new divi-

sions, fractures, and tensions. The German officer corps with

traditions rooted in old Junker families remained an impreg-

nable fortress, out of reach even to assimilated Jews converted

to Protestantism; the university elite was similarly hermetic,

carefully scrutinizing all candidates.

Fritz was entering adulthood just as another wave of

discussions about the role of Jews in the new Reich was

sweeping through Germany. It was not a purely German

problem. The question about the place of Jews in the states of

Europe in the Age of Enlightenment was a question about the

practical implementation of the concept of a state that, at

least in principle, afforded equal rights to all. In England, the

Jewish question was the subject of a debate in the mid-

eighteenth century; in post-revolutionary France the question

sur les juifs was debated by the National Assembly in 1790.

The German Reich guaranteed constitutional equality of its

Jewish citizens upon its establishment in 1871. In that way, the

state that was bringing unification after centuries of fragmen-

tation became a synonym of a “new order” in citizenship

terms for the Jewish community. However, the adoption of

the constitution did not, and in fact could not, remove the

“Judenfrage” (the Jewish question), the dispute about the

place of Jews in Germany, from the public space.

What probably also had significant effect on the young

Haber was the fierce public debate sparked off by a famous

essay by Heinrich von Treitschke, a Berlin-based historian,

philosopher, and politician, deputy to the Reichstag, entitled

“Unsere Aussichten” (Our prospects) and published in

1879.[8] It was there that the notorious sentence “Die Juden

sind unser Unglck!”,[

*] which was to become the motto of

the Nazi propaganda paper Der Strmer barely fifty years

later, first appeared in print. Treitschke-

s essay, distributed as

a self-contained brochure entitled Ein Wort ber unser

Judenthum,

[

**] ignited a heated debate, referred to as

Treitschkiade at the time and now usually described as the

Berlin Anti-Semitism Dispute in the literature.[9] In contrast

to the widely circulating and diverse anti-Semitic literature

existing before, this came from a university scholar, a

recognized authority in his field. The matter thus gained an

additional dimension, and its weight increased. An answer

from a polemicist equal to Treitschke in stature did not come

until a year later: December 1880 saw the publication of a

sixteen-page brochure by Theodor Mommsen, a professor of

the University of Berlin, whose title, Auch ein Wort ber unser

Judenthum[

*]

,

[10] alluded to Treitschke-

s essay.

Theodor Mommsen, an expert on the history of ancient

Rome and Greece who would win the Nobel Prize for

literature in 1902 and who had been a professor of Breslau

University in 1854–1856, was a recognized authority and a

kind of guru of the German liberal circles of his time. An

enthusiast of building a strong Germany, he saw the state as a

community of various groups, social as well as ethnic, who

self-limit their separate interests in the name of the state as a

supreme good and contribute their best qualities to the

“German alloy”. That was a different conception of Germany

from Treitsche-

s idea of a state based on blood ties and a

mythical German spirit. One of the elements of the self-

limitation and sacrifice that Mommsen proposed was, in the

case of the Jewish community, baptism and conversion to

Christianity. He argued that “remaining outside the bounda-

ries of Christendom and at the same time belonging to the

[German] nation is possible, but difficult and risky”.[10]

It is unreasonable to assume that Fritz, twelve years of age

at the time, was a keen reader of Treitsche-

s or Mommsen-

s

writings. Still, both essays carried enough weight to be

repeatedly reissued and become permanent reference points

in never-ending discussions, throughout the 1880s and be-

yond. When the 58-year-old Fritz Haber confided in his friend

Rudolf Stern in 1926 about what had prompted him to make

the decision to convert, he admitted it was the Theodor

Mommsen text. “I considered myself a hundred per cent

German and under the impact of philosophy and science, of

the whole rational temper of the word, no longer felt any ties to

the Jewish religion”, he recalled.[11]

One can easily picture Fritz Haber reading Mommsen-

s

conclusion: “Entry into a great nation comes at a price. The

Hanoverians, the Hessians, and we, from Schleswig-Holstein

[Mommsen-

s native land], are prepared to pay it. We can feel

that we are sacrificing a part of ourselves. But we are offering it

to our common fatherland. The Jews too will not be led by a

Moses again to the promised land”.[

**]

Many years later, the now fully mature Fritz Haber with

full conviction and a sort of pride addressed a group of

American physicians visiting Berlin as follows: “You live in a

land where personal freedom is the highest good. Your

tradition honours the pioneer whose happy work changed a

dangerous wilderness into an industrial state which serves its

citizens … In our past times, not personal freedom but citizen

organization was the highest political good. Our tradition does

not honour the power to do but loyalty to duty. Our state does

not serve its citizens, but the citizens the state. Therefore our

Republic is different than is yours”.[12] It was already the year

1926.

Thirteen years later, in October 1939, another Breslau

Jew, Willy Cohn, a historian deprived of work, living in a city

of vandalized synagogues, reduced to second-class citizenship

with a passport stamped by the police, wrote in his system-

atically kept diary:[13] “I have read the Fhrer-

s speech. It was

fairly moderate and reasonable; it could even be a bridge to

peace if others were reasonable. But it is unlikely that England

will acquiesce. The speech was not particularly anti-Semitic,

either. One should acknowledge the greatness of the man who

has given the world a new face”. That ethos of Germanhood,

even if second-class, of identification with one-

s state no

matter what, was probably what motivated Cohn in Septem-

ber 1933, when he wrote: “I love Germany so much that the

love is not diminished even by all the harassment we

experience. Germany is the country whose language we use

and where we have also had good days ! One has to be loyal

enough to accept even a government originating from a

completely different camp”. In November 1941, German

citizen Dr Willy (in honour of Kaiser Wilhelm) Cohn, holder

of the Iron Cross from World War I, having surrendered his

property to the State, was deported with his family, wife and

two little daughters, and an entire transport of others to

Kaunas in Lithuania. Once there, they formed even lines

outside the walls of Fort IX, along pits resembling infantry

trenches. And there they remained.

Under the Volcano

The Germany of the early twentieth century resembled a

volcano shortly before an eruption. The accumulated intel-

lectual potential, industrial achievements, organizational

efficiency, and growing wealth spawned a feeling of strength

inevitably poised to be transformed into a real, tangible

success. What stood in the way was the traditional balance of

influences inherited from the nineteenth century and founded

on the dominance of the major colonial powers. A sense of

unsatisfied longing and a craving for change at all costs

quickly gripped not only the masses but also a large part of the

intellectual elite. Level-headed and widely respected at the

age of 58, Max Planck, a future Nobel Prize winner, wrote in a

November 1914 letter to Wilhelm Wien: “Besides much that is

horrible, there is also much that is unexpectedly great and

beautiful: the smooth solution of the most difficult domestic

political questions by the unification of all parties …, the

extolling of everything good and noble”.[14] Earlier, in the first

weeks of the war, in September 1914, Planck enthusiastically

wrote to his sister: “What a glorious time we are living in. It is a

great feeling to be able to call oneself a German”.[14] Awareness

of the necessity for the nation to undergo a short but intensive

purification process, similar to the tempering of a steel cast,

was shared almost universally.[15] Skeptical about the idea of a

[*] Another word on our Jewry

[**] “Der Eintritt in eine große Nation kostet seinen Preis; die

Hannoveraner und die Hessen und wir Schleswig-Holsteiner sind

daran ihn zu bezahlen, und wir fhlen es wohl, daß wir damit von

unserem Eigensten ein Stck hingeben. Aber wir geben es dem

gemeinsamen Vaterland. Auch die Juden fhrt kein Moses wieder in

das gelobte Land.”[10]

Es

“holy fire”, from which a new German nation was to emerge,

were not only the social democratic circles but also by some

financiers and industrialists, who could not see the point of

rashly entering risky and uncertain war projects. However, the

eruption of the volcano could not be stopped.

The reviving tempering bath, Stahlbad, quickly turned

into a Blutbad (blood bath). It turned out to consist of

hopeless burrowing in the ground churned up by artillery fire,

bristled with barbed wire, and enveloped in the sickening

odor of decaying bodies. What had been heralded as a

Blitzkrieg, a lightning war, turned out to be a trench war of

attrition. Germany found itself on the brink of disaster. The

resources and the production capacity of ammunition facto-

ries, sufficient for a short lightning war planned for by the

General Staff, proved completely inadequate for the purposes

of the ongoing conflict. The British blockade successfully

stopped transports of Chilean saltpeter used for the produc-

tion of explosives. As early as September 1914, a team of

experts was appointed to find a way out of the technological

trap that Germany, fighting on two fronts, had found itself in.

The team included Fritz Haber, who was already a Geheimrat,

or privy councilor, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, an

establishment whose primary goal was to catch up with, and

get ahead of, American research institutes. He rubbed

shoulders with members of the Berlin government circles

and was a brilliant scientist and a splendid organizer with a

natural ability to put together efficient implementation teams.

Fritz Haber considered it his civic duty to contribute to the

war effort of his fatherland, the more so that because of his

specialization and position he was part of the core industrial/

scientific circle. The technological process he had developed,

originally for the synthesis of ammonia, made it possible to

close the ammunition gap after the requisite modifications

and upgrades to the BASF chemical works at Leuna and

Oppau. That, however, would not be enough to gain a distinct

advantage and win the war. It was impossible to win quickly

by only increasing the firepower of rifles and cannons and

sending additional divisions to the front. Haber concluded

that a quick victory was only feasible if the war was given a

new technological dimension, introducing an element of

shock and terror, moving outside the traditional patterns of

general staff thinking. Such a shock was to be caused by the

use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. What he had in

mind was not any of the various irritant gases that force

enemy troops to get out of the trenches straight under

machine gun fire. Haber expected a shock reaction to be

brought about by true chemical weapons, not just incapaci-

tating but lethal gases, all-pervading, unstoppable, and leaving

a free way for advancing German troops. As a chemist, he

realized with full clarity that chemical weapons would never

remain the exclusive domain of one side. For that reason, he

attached so much weight to the element of surprise, shock,

and a spectacular military success, on a scale that would force

the enemy to capitulate. He argued that a quick victory

achieved in that way would on the whole reduce losses and

save human victims on all sides. The Hague conventions in

effect at that time prohibited the use of projectiles filled with

asphyxiating gases, but Haber quickly convinced himself and

others that if something was technologically possible it would

definitely be used if only it could make more likely to win the

war. The threat of possible secret French and English research

on chemical weapons turned out to be an effective and

decisive argument against those opposing the violation of

existing conventions.

As a matter of fact, that line of reasoning did not differ

much from the American Manhattan project during World

War II. The use of nuclear weapons in Japan certainly caused

a shock, helped to bring forward the end the war, already won

anyway, and saved many lives, at least American ones. In

contrast to Haber-

s old-fashioned ideas, the new weapon was

used not on the battlefield but against civilian population, in

agreement with the generally accepted military doctrine of

World War II. The amazing effectiveness of the weapon

intensified the shock experienced by Japan-

s staff officers,

prompting capitulation, which was completely contrary to the

Japanese war tradition.

Fritz Haber turned the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute he

headed into an efficient machine supporting the ongoing

war effort. The task of the institute for the time of war was not

only to develop new, more effective kinds of chemical

weapons but also to devise adequate protections, in reason-

able anticipation of imminent use of similar weapons by the

opponents. The institute grew immensely: 1500 people, in-

cluding 150 scientists, worked, or rather served, there. They

included future Nobel Prize winners, such as Otto Hahn,

James Franck, and Gustav Hertz. The scale of engagement

and the organizational conception developed by Haber

foreshadowed a new era of direct involvement of science in

war, portending the Manhattan project, a war and a gener-

ation later. Similar establishments were also brought into

existence on the Entente side, especially in England and

France.

Even though it is estimated that nearly half of the shells

used in the last year of the war were filled with war gases,

 weapons were in no way decisive with regard to the

final outcome of World War I. Used by all sides, they were the

cause of individual tragedies of soldiers but had no effect on

the plans of army staffs. A representative of the United States,

refusing to sign a Hague declaration banning chemical

weapons, effectively stated that there was little difference

between the allowable use of a stream of molten metal tearing

apart human bodies and the illegitimate use of poisonous gas

filling the lungs.[16] Haber-

s chlorine released directly from

thousands of cylinders towards the trenches at Ypres was only

a prelude. It was the subsequent generations of chemical

weapons, developed after the war, and the improved means of

delivery that led to the creation of a certain balance of fear,

effectively blocking the use of chemical warfare during World

War II.

Death on the Frontline, Death in the Extermination

Camps

Judging past events by the present standards can be tricky.

The traumatic experiences of World War II shaped the

historical awareness of post-war European generations for

decades; they carved mental furrows that continue to channel

diverse streams of thoughts, sometimes without their true

origins being realized. The figure of Fritz Haber, viewed

through the conceptual filters of the Holocaust, mass

extermination, fallen totalitarian systems, and additionally

framed in contemporary political correctness, becomes a

bizarre construct that has little to do with the realities of his

day. Such chains of associations as Haber-Zyklon B-Ausch-

witz-Holocaust or Haber-Poison Gases-Mass Extermination-

Dr Death, used in cheap journalism, inevitably lead into the

wilderness of populism. They distort Haber into a forerunner

of Dr Mengele from the Auschwitz camp, or, at best, a

grotesque mass-murder maniac  la Dr Strangelove from

Stanley Kubrick-

s cult film.[17] Following this path, Haber

could also be held responsible for acid rain, deforestation, and

desertification of Africa, based on the chain of associations:

Haber-Ammonia-Artificial Fertilizers-Environmental Pollu-

tion. Zyklon B, existing in the public mind as a tool of mass

extermination, was developed as a strong and effective

insecticide. As a matter of fact, it is still used as such but, to

avoid grim associations, marketed under a different name. It

is produced as Uragan D2 at a plant in Kolin, Czech

Republic.[18] In fact, it is the same plant that, then known as

Kaliwerken, supplied Zyklon B for Auschwitz in 1943–1945.

Taboo

Even without the modern, ahistorical associations linking

the battlefields of the Great War with the gas chambers of

Auschwitz, the use of war gases and similar chemicals has

been taboo for a long time. Lethal chemicals were inescapably

associated with poisons, regarded as treacherous, despicable,

and cruel in Western culture. It is no coincidence that the first

treaty on chemical warfare was the Strasbourg Agreement of

1675 signed between France and the Holy Roman Empire of

the German Nation.[19] Both parties agreed to refrain from

using poisoned bullets against each other. The agreement was

entered into between the flagging German Empire of

Leopold I and Louis XIV-

s France at the height of its power.

Two hundred and forty years later a hardened German Reich

of Wilhelm II released a chlorine cloud against the French at

Ypres.

The European taboo against chemical warfare was

reflected in several international treaties signed during the

industrial era in Europe. The Hague Convention with respect

to the Laws and Customs of War on Land signed in 1899

prohibited the signatory states from using poisoned arms in

hostilities between them, and the accompanying Hague

Declaration of 29th July, 1899 banned the use of projectiles

the object of which was the diffusion of asphyxiating or

deleterious gases. The World War I belligerents tried to evade

the prohibition of the declaration from the very start of the

armed conflict.[20] Gases were to serve primarily as a means to

help overcome the stalemate of trench warfare. France used

grenades filled with tear gas as early as August 1914, to which

Germany responded with a heavy mortar shell combining

shrapnel bullets with a gas irritant. Both of these attempts,

and some similar ones, passed almost completely unnoticed

by those attacked as the effectiveness of the chemical agents

in those ad hoc projectiles was close to zero.

Fritz Haber and his team approached the issue using full

scientific methodology, carrying out detailed analyses, plot-

ting mortality curves for various laboratory animals, chiefly

cats, mice, and dogs, and analyzing different atmospheric

conditions. The first chlorine gas attack at Ypres was a

complete success from a technological point of view, whereas

militarily it was a local episode, and ethically it was a violation

of the taboo against poison death in the name of a short-term

tactical benefit. The Allies, having appropriately expressed

their indignation, embarked on the organization of their own

chemical forces, now with full scientific support. Like the

Germans, they established identically specialized laboratories

and even chemical warfare testing grounds. In declassified

documents published after the war, it was noted that one of

Figure 13. Group picture, taken in 1921 at the Farewell of James Franck

from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin—now called Fritz Haber

Institute—leaving for his professorship at the University of Gçttingen.

From left to right: Hertha Sponer, Albert Einstein, Hugo Grotrian,

Ingrid Franck (wife of James Franck), Wilhelm Westphal, James Franck,

Otto von Bayer, Lise Meitner, Peter Pringsheim, Fritz Haber, Gustav

the parameters measured at the German laboratories, the

Tçdlichkeitsprodukt, or lethal index, was markedly lower

(indicating a more “efficient” substance) than the corre-

sponding index measured for the same substances at Amer-

ican laboratories.[21] With true scientific perspicacity, it was

explained as a result of wartime malnutrition of German lab

cats compared with their American counterparts.

As early as Autumn 1915, a new invention made its way to

the battlefields: phosgene, the true “superstar” of the

chemical warfare of that time. Known previously from the

dye industry, it was used successfully for the first time as a

chemical weapon by France thanks to the inventiveness of

Victor Grignard, the French winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize in

chemistry. Ten times more effective then chlorine, it account-

ed for about 80 per cent of the deaths caused by chemical

weapons during World War I.

Clara

Haber-

s black legend would not be so black were it not for

Clara Immerwahr and her suicide. As with Zyklon B, today-

s

criteria informed by knowledge from a later time try to make

her primarily a victim of Haber-

s almost military despotism

that not only stifled her career but betrayed the mission of

science itself. The marriage had its epilogue on 1st May 1915

at Dahlem, on the night of a party that Fritz Haber, director of

the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, gave to celebrate his last great

success: promotion to the rank of captain. It was one more

dream come true, all the more precious as the promotion was

granted outside the usual procedure in recognition of his

outstanding merit. It was also a triumph which proved to be

the last drop that caused Clara-

s cup of bitterness and

disappointment to overflow.

While today-

s perspective of decades of peace and equal

rights for women seems obvious, a picture of Clara composed

only of elements presenting her as an innocent victim of her

husband appears to be a product of moral reductionism,

neglecting the context and the richness of nuances in history.

In contrast to the conditions in which Marie Skłodowska-

Curie was able to study and work, women in the German

Empire did not publicly manifest dissatisfaction with their

position. Neither the women-

s suffrage movement nor the

opening of universities to women in Paris inspired similar

initiatives in Germany. A climate or a model for the wife and

mother pursuing a scientific career had yet to emerge. The

Habers were probably the first university married couple,

both holding doctorates cum laude. They had met as students

at university, members of the peculiar research community

that had only just begun to establish its social and professional

codes and was completely unaccustomed to the presence of

women. Clara agreed to marry Fritz after no fewer than ten

years, when he already had an established scientific position

at Karlsruhe, and she had begun her career at Professor

Richard Abegg-

s university laboratory in Breslau. Following

an initial period of collaboration, in particular after the birth

of their son, Fritz succumbed to the traditional model of

family and stopped caring for Clara-

s scientific needs. Fritz-

s

and Clara-

s characters and ambitions did not turn out to be

complementary, which led to frequent clashes, as Clara

confessed in a letter to Abegg:[22]

What Fritz has gained during these eight years, I have lost

… Even if external circumstances and my own peculiar

temperament are to blame too, the largest share of responsi-

bility for this loss rests with Fritz and his permanent self-

confidence and certainty about his place in the marriage and in

running the household. He simply destroys every personality

that is unable to stand up to him, like me. I keep asking myself

if superior intelligence is sufficient to be a more valuable

human being than others and if the part of me that has gone to

the devil only because I did not meet the right man was not

more important than even the most significant part of the

theory of electrons.

A few years later, when the war broke out, the differences

between them grew even deeper as a result of conflicting

views on the question of using chemical weapons; the discord

reached its climax and ended in a tragic gunshot. It was not

the only suicide in the family, however. Aside from Clara-

s

cousins, one cannot omit to mention the suicide of the

Habers-

 son Hermann and then one of his daughters. Fritz

Haber himself, accused of callousness because he left the

same morning for the front, made the following confession in

a letter to Karl Engler, his former rector at Karlsruhe, six

weeks after Clara-

s death:

“I did not know if I would survive this month. But the war,

full of its horrible sights and constantly requiring all my

strength, has been able to soothe me. I was lucky to spend eight

days working at the ministry, so I had a chance to see my son.

Now I-

m back at the frontline. Working amid the wartime

complications, amongst unfamiliar people, I have absolutely

no time to rest, reflect, or delve into my own feelings. The only

thing left is concern about my stamina: will I be able carry the

burden that has been put on my shoulders? … Every next day

of bullets whizzing past is good for me. Here, only the present

moment counts … But when I get back to the staff office,

Figure 14. Wroclaw: Clara’s family house today. clinging to the telephone receiver I can still hear in my heart the