By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — In 1919, the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to German scientist Fritz Haber “for the synthesis of ammonia from its constituent elements.” Ekstrand, president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said that Haber’s discoveries were extremely important for agriculture and the prosperity of mankind. Scientists of the Entente countries strongly protested against the decision of the Swedish Academy, stating that Haber was a war criminal, the creator of chemical weapons.
Fritz Haber was born in Breslau on December 9, 1868, to a Jewish family. As a child, he loved the poetry of Goethe and dreamed of becoming an actor. But he was more attracted to chemistry and its applications in industry and war. Apparently, the first time he thought about baptism was when he didn’t get an officer’s rank as a Jew during his military service. He feared that without baptism his scientific career in Prussia was in jeopardy. In 1892, soon after receiving his doctorate in chemistry, Haber converted to Lutheranism. In 1906 he became a professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. In 1910, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society Institute was founded in Berlin. In 1911, Haber became director of the Institute for Physical Chemistry of this society.
For his agreement to be director Haber wrested a professorship at the University of Berlin, a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and a whopping 15 thousand marks salary for those times. In the Weimar Republic Haber he was highly respected as a great patriot, a major scientist, organizer, and politician. His rank, Geheimrat (Privy Councillor), was one of the highest ranks in Germany, the same rank worn by his beloved Goethe. In 1914, Albert Einstein began working in Berlin. Shortly after Einstein moved to Berlin, Haber persuaded him to be baptized “so that you will belong to us completely and entirely.” Einstein replied that the “we” to which Haber thought he belonged was a fiction. Despite the friendship between them, Einstein was always bluntly frank when he heard of Haber’s Christian beliefs. He considered him “a wretched man, a baptized Jewish secret counselor.”
On the eve of World War I, one of the main dangers threatening mankind was considered to be the “nitrogen famine.” The rapid growth of the population in European countries demanded a constant increase in soil fertility, and thus more and more nitrogenous fertilizers. Their only natural source was deposits of Chilean nitrate, which were to be exhausted in the coming decades. In August 1914, war and the naval blockade of Germany began. Entente military experts believed that without nitrate the Germans would not be able to produce nitric acid. Then the production of explosives and gunpowder would stop, ammunition factories would close, the Germans would be left without cartridges and shells, because nitrates, nitrogen salts, are an essential component of explosives. However, the blockade did not paralyze the German war industry and did not lead Germany to the expected military defeat. The country was saved by the Jew Fritz Haber. Even before the war he invented a way to synthesize ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric air at high pressures, 200 times the atmospheric pressure and at not very high temperatures (below 300 degrees Celsius) in the presence of a metal catalyst, on the surface of which the reaction of the compound was sharply accelerated. Nitric acid, fertilizers and explosives were produced by oxidizing the ammonia produced from air.
In the spring of 1915, the Germans, under the leadership of Haber, began to use the poison gases he had prepared against French soldiers. On April 22, 1915, Haber used for the first time a poisonous substance — chlorine gas — against French soldiers near the small Belgian town of Ypres. According to German reports, 5,000 were strangled on the spot and 10,000 were incapacitated and disabled. April 22, 1915, was the day of the first-ever use of a weapon of mass destruction. Fritz’s wife, the talented chemist Dr. Clara Haber (Immervar, also Jewish, one of Germany’s first female chemistry doctors) had long demanded that her husband stop testing chemical weapons in experiments on animals. On May 1, 1915, a tired Haber came home to rest from his murderous labors. That same night Clara, horrified by what Fritz had done, killed herself with a shot to the chest from her husband’s service pistol. The day after his wife’s funeral, Haber went to the front to do his patriotic duty. In 1916, Haber was appointed head of the military chemical service of the German army. He commanded operations on the use of chemical warfare agents, their production and the development of new types of chemical weapons. Haber was a striking and perhaps the first ever example of a scientist who used scientific advances to destroy people.
After the war, the Allies demanded that Haber be extradited as a war criminal. He fled to Switzerland, where he was granted citizenship as a wealthy man. A few months later, however, the extradition demand was dropped, and Haber returned to Germany. In 1919, inspectors of the victorious Allies stopped work on chemical weapons at his institute. Haber became involved in the manufacture of preparations against insect pests in agriculture. He took over this field in the country and founded a new company. His firm invented a hydrocyanic acid-based preparation called Cyclone. Already after Haber’s death, in the early 1940s, Dr. Vathers, then director of the firm founded by Haber, received secret orders to send tanks of Cyclone B to Auschwitz. Cyclone B was a granular form of cyanide. The letter B probably stood for Blausäure — hydrocyanic acid or Prussian acid. Through the holes of “showers” in hermetically sealed rooms in the death camps, bluish crystals of Cyclone B were ejected. Cyanide hydrogen slowly evaporated from the crystals, rising to the ceiling. People didn’t suffocate right away. They died in agony. Their bodies turned into bright pink, green-stained, bent corpses. The chemical developed at the Haber Institute became a terrible weapon for the extermination of the Jews and, among them, members of Haber’s own family.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Haber’s position became precarious because of his Jewishness. After his resignation, dated May 2, 1933, he left for England. For four months Haber worked at Cambridge University, where English Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford did not give him a hand, and English technicians, participants in the war, boycotted him. In Germany and in England an atmosphere was created around Haber in which he could not live and work.
Despite Haber’s baptism, German society never forgot his Jewish origins. Like some Jews in Germany, he tried to be more German than the Germans. The mimicry developed in reaction to anti-Semitism deformed Haber’s consciousness and made him utterly loyal to the German Reich. For Haber, Germany’s military defeat was a personal catastrophe. Yet he was deaf to anti-Jewish outbursts. He did not pay attention to the murder of Rathenau. He did not recognize his inferiority. Unlike Einstein, who considered the war madness and despised German society for its antisemitism, Haber remained a German patriot.
Fritz Haber made a human sacrifice. He not only sacrificed thousands of people during World War I, and with them his wife Clara. He sacrificed himself, his talent, his work, his reputation, and his conscience to the Moloch of German nationalism, but Moloch rejected him. In April 1933, after leaving Germany, Haber told a friend: “I have been German to such an extent that I only now feel the power of this feeling.” He had already spoken of his German identity in the past tense.
In the summer of 1933 in Cambridge, Chaim Weizmann offered Haber a job at Rehovot, at the Daniel Ziv Institute, the future Weizmann Institute, as head of the physical chemistry department. Haber accepted the invitation and decided to move to the country of Israel. In a desperate situation, he rejected Germanism and resigned himself to the fact that he could only live among Jews. Haber was rejected by the German people to whom he belonged and with whom he bound his fate, and accepted by the people among whom he was born, whom he rejected and to whose fate he looked with indifference and aloofness. He was forced to emigrate from Germany and immigrate to the only place where he was accepted — British Palestine. But Haber was too late, his life was over: on his way from England to Palestine on holiday in Basel, he died of a broken heart on January 29, 1934.
Haber was a super-patriot. For him, Germany was above all else. He used chemical weapons because he longed for a German victory at any cost. He worshipped the idol of German nationalism without understanding or refusing to accept its dangerous essence. He was sick with German patriotism, the spirit of which Heine described: “The patriotism of the German is that his heart shrinks, that it shrinks like skin in the cold, that he begins to hate everything foreign and no longer wants to be either a citizen of the world or a European, but only a limited German.”
Haber’s transformation into a “limited German,” his “narrowing of heart,” his insensitivity to the essence of the monster of German nationalism are striking for a man of his knowledge and intellect. Haber’s German patriotism was the flip side of his powerful Jewish inferiority complex. His rich, comfortable life was the flip side of his poor and uncomfortable spiritual existence. An extraordinarily high-ranking, financially independent man, Haber was dependent on what Germans thought of him. He was a sincere German and a complex Jew, a fake German and an inauthentic Jew. Haber’s chemistry with the German people failed, for it was his most unfortunate invention. Haber’s passionate pursuit of normalization led him to a monstrous deviation from moral standards. A lover of Goethe’s poetry, Haber could well compare himself to Faust, who sold his soul to the devil.
The letter of condolence that Albert Einstein wrote to Haber’s family upon learning of his death contains these lines: “His tragedy is the tragedy of a German Jew, the tragedy of an undivided love for his homeland.” In another situation, Einstein recalled Haber’s futile efforts to baptize him: “I never had any respect or sympathy for Germany, which he loved so hopelessly.” Haber experienced the tragedy of a Jewish scientist suffering from the conflict between his Jewishness and his German patriotism. Despite the fact that the Germans branded the Jews for some collective fault, it never occurred to any of them to blame them for bringing out a man like Haber, just as it never occurred to them to thank the Jews for it.
Haber was undoubtedly a creator of history. His discovery in agriculture fed and is still feeding millions of people, perhaps contributing to a population explosion. His greatest invention, the synthesis of ammonia, did enormous harm to humanity. The Viennese-born, Jewish British biochemist Max Ferdinand Perutz, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, hypothesized in a collection of essays on scientists and science what might have happened if Haber had not synthesized ammonia: “Without this invention, Germany would have been without explosives. The long-planned ‘blitzkrieg’ against France would have ended in failure. The war would have ended much earlier and millions of young men would not have died. Under these circumstances Lenin would never have reached Russia, Hitler might not have come to power, the Holocaust might not have happened, and European civilization from Gibraltar to the Urals would have been saved.”
Without this invention, Germany would have been quickly defeated in World War I. Millions of people would not have died. Germany would not have had to fund and infiltrate Lenin in Russia to organize a revolution there and get that country out of the war. It is possible that if Lenin had not come to Russia, the February Revolution of 1917, which freed Russia from tsarism, would not have turned into the Bolshevik revolution, leading the country to tyranny, and the whole history of Russia might have gone in a different direction. Germany would not have been reduced to complete exhaustion, to ruin, and to terrible humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles after its shameful and total defeat in the war. Hitler, “sitting on Germany’s empty stomach” (Einstein’s expression) would not have come to power, and the catastrophe of the European Jews would not have occurred. History might have gone a different way if Jew Fritz Haber had not turned out to be such a great German patriot.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and the Technion in Haifa (Doctor of Science, 1984). He immigrated to Israel in 1979. He is a Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. He is the author of eight books and about 500 articles in print and online, and has been published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.