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Master Mind: The rise and fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate
who launched the age of chemical warfare
by Daniel Charles
Review from The Observer, Sunday October 16, 2005
All life and death is here
Daniel Charles
shows how Fritz Haber embodied the good and evil of modern science
in Between Genius and Genocide, says Robin McKie
Between Genius
and Genocide: The Tragedy of Fritz Haber, Father of Chemical Warfare
by Daniel Charles
Jonathan Cape £20, pp313
It would be hard to
pinpoint a man who better embodies our fears and fascination for
modern science than Fritz Haber, a genius who battled heroically
for his native land, but whose reputation was destroyed by his
unquestioning scientific enthusiasms.
Bald and absurdly
Teutonic in demeanour, the chemist created the industrial processes
we still use to transform atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia fertiliser
- 'bread from air' - and so unleashed the intensive cultivation
of our planet.
'A third of all the
people on Earth, about two billion souls, could not survive in
the absence of the Haber process today,' Daniel Charles tells
us. 'Left to its own devices, Earth simply could not grow enough
food.' In fact, half the nitrogen atoms in our bodies come from
a Haber factory, via its fertilisers and the food nourished by
them.
How fitting, then,
that he was given a Nobel Chemistry Prize in 1918, you might think.
Not so. The award was profoundly controversial, for by this time,
Haber, a Jew and a passionate German nationalist, had used his
talents to try to save his country during the First World War,
with conflicting results.
Germany, blockaded
by the Allies, had no source of natural ammonia for explosives,
so Haber switched his factories to munitions production. Trains,
bursting with ammonia-based explosives and scrawled with 'Death
to the French', were soon chugging to the front, lengthening the
war and his country's suffering, 'piling horror on top of horror',
as Charles puts it.
Haber could scarcely
have realised such an outcome. However, no such excuse could be
made for his other work. Within weeks of war starting, he began
developing gas weapons, efforts that reached fruition on 22 April
1915, at Ypres, when 400 tons of chlorine gas were sent sweeping
in clouds over Allied troops, the world's first major chemical
weapons attack. 'Those who tried to stay in place were overcome,
retching and gasping for breath as they died,' says Charles.
This advent, 'obscene
as cancer, bitter as the cud,' in Wilfred Owen's words, accounted
for hundreds of thousands of Allied and German lives, though Haber
claimed asphyxiation was no worse than blowing a soldier's leg
off and letting him bleed to death.
Others disagreed,
including his wife, Clara, who, a week after Ypres, took his revolver
and blew her brains out. Thus began a descent into misery that
consumed Haber's last years. After the war, he struggled to keep
his business afloat. He married, again disastrously, while his
health, afflicted by heart spasms, deteriorated. 'You asked how
I'm doing,' he told a friend. 'I'm suffering.'
Haber ended his life
'broken, muddled, moving about in a mental and moral vacuum,'
said his friend, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. The Nazis expelled
'the Jew Haber' from all his posts. His ceaseless labour in his
fierce, blinkered defence of his native land meant nothing.
He spent the last
five months of his life wandering Europe, from hotel to hotel,
his health weakening, until he died on 29 January 1934, in Basle.
Colleagues were shocked; Haber was popular and had helped the
careers of young researchers. James Franck, a future Nobel laureate,
summed up his old boss as a man who 'knew what [he] was capable
of, and his fingers were itching to do it'. So, if it could be
done, it had to be done, the epitaph of the military scientist
throughout the 20th century, from the creators of the Manhattan
Project to those working on germ warfare.
Haber's story is an
enduring scientific tragedy, one that Charles tells with commendable
clarity, style and brevity. And as he points out, the bitter ironies
that afflicted Haber in life were to continue in death. One of
the most effective insecticides made by his institute was Zyklon
B, used by the Nazis in concentration camps to murder millions
of people, including many members of Haber's family.
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