I’ll be the first to admit that today’s fact is way too long. However, I found the story of Fritz Haber to be compelling in its ironic and morbid twists and turns, so I thought I’d share it in full for…
Today’s Self-Canceling Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Thanks to one man, a bald, mustached chemist who wore a pince-nez, German gas research units outpaced the rest of the world’s during World War I. Fritz Haber had one of the great minds in history for chemistry, and he became one of the most famous scientists in the world around 1900 when he figured out how to convert the commonest of chemicals – the nitrogen in air – into an industrial product. Haber heated nitrogen to hundreds of degrees, injected some hydrogen gas, turned up the pressure to hundreds of times greater than normal air pressure, added some crucial osmium as a catalyst, and voila: common air transmuted into ammonia, the precursor of all fertilizers. With cheap industrial fertilizers now available, farmers no longer were limited to compost piles or dung to nourish their soil. Even by the time World War I broke out, Haber had likely saved millions from Malthusian starvation, and we can still thank him for feeding most of the world’s 6.7 billion people today.
What’s lost in that summary is that Haber cared little about fertilizers. He actually pursued cheap ammonia to help Germany build nitrogen explosives – the sort of fertilizer-distilled bombs that Timothy McVeigh used to blow a hole in an Oklahoma City courthouse in 1995. It’s a sad truth that men like Haber pop up frequently throughout history – petty Fausts who twist scientific innovations into efficient killing machines. Haber’s story is darker because he was so skilled. After World War I broke out, German military leaders, hoping to break the trench stalemate ruining their economy, recruited Haber for their gas warfare division. Though set to make a fortune from government contracts based on his ammonia patents, Haber couldn’t throw away his other projects fast enough. The division was soon referred to as “the Haber office,” and the military even promoted Haber, a 46-year-old Jewish convert to Lutheranism (it helped his career), to captain, which made him childishly proud.
After some failed attempts at chemical warfare with the caustic tearjerker xylyl bromine (which froze solid in the Russian winter air), Haber ditched bromine and redirected his efforts to its chemical cousin, chlorine. Chlorine sits above bromine on the periodic table and is even nastier to breathe. Chlorine turns victims’ skin yellow, green, and black, and glasses over their eyes with cataracts. They actually die of drowning, from the fluid buildup in their lungs. If bromine gas is a phalanx of foot soldiers clashing with the mucuous membranes, chlorine is a blitzkrieg tank rushing by the body’s defenses to tear apart the sinuses and lungs.
Because of Haber, the buffoonery of bromine warfare gave way to the ruthless chlorine phase history books memorialize today. Enemy soldiers soon had to fear the chlorine-based grunkreuz, or “green cross”; the blaukreuz, or “blue cross”; and the nighmarish blister agent gelbkreuz, or “yellow cross,” otherwise known as mustard gas. Not content with scientific contributions, Haber directed with enthusiasm the first successful gas attack in history, which left 5,000 bewildered Frenchmen burned and scarred in a muddy trench near Ypres.
Horrified by the gas projects, Fritz’s wife Clara confronted Fritz early on and demanded he cease. As usual, Fritz listened to her not at all. In fact, although he wept quite unironically when colleageues died during an accident in the research branch of the Haber office, after he returned from Ypres he threw a dinner party to celebrate his new weapons. Worse, Clara found out he’d come home just for the night, a stopover on his way to direct more attacks on the eastern front. Husband and wife quarreled violently, and later that night Clara walked into the family garden with Fritz’s army pistol and shot herself in the chest. Though no doubt upset, Fritz did not let this inconvenience him. Without staying to make funeral arrangements, he left as planned the next morning.
Despite having the incomparable advantage of Haber, Germany ultimately lost the War To End All Wars and was universally denounced as a scoundrel nation. The international reaction to Haber himself was more complicated. In 1919, before the dust (or gas) of World War I had settled, Haber won the vacant Nobel Prize in chemistry for his process to produce ammonia from nitrogen. A year later, he was charged with being an international war criminal for prosecuting a campaign of chemical warfare that had maimed hudnreds of thousands of people and terrorized millions more – a contradictory, almost self-canceling legacy.
Things got worse. Humiliated at the huge reparations Germany had to pay to the Allies, Haber spent six futile years trying to extract dissolved gold from the oceans, so that he could pay the reparations himself. Other projects sputtered along just as uselessly, and the only thing Haber gained attention for during those years was an insecticide. Haber had invented Zyklon A before the war, and a German chemical company tinkered with his formula after the war to produce an efficient second generation of the gas. Eventually, a new regime with a short memory took over Germany, and the Nazis soon exiled Haber for his Jewish roots. He died in 1934 while traveling to England to seek refuge. Meanwhile, work on the insecticide continued. And within years the Nazis were gassing millions of Jews, including relatives of Haber, with that second-generation gas: Zyklon B.
Why couldn’t history class have been as interesting as your blog?!