Synthetic nitrogen pollution isn’t limited to the waters; it has also entered the air and come back to Earth as acid rain, further damaging lakes, streams, and forests as well as the animals that depend on them. These problems will only worsen.
—
CONTAMINATION OF THE environment with synthetic nitrogen wasn’t the only evil that flew out of Pandora’s box when Fritz Haber dared to open it. There were a couple more. One involved another process that required the ready availability of nitrogen—a process that explains why Germany stopped making synthetic fertilizer during WWI and moved its production facility from Oppau to Leuna, where it could be better guarded.
When Fritz Haber moved from Karlsruhe to Berlin in 1911, he was able to strike up a friendship with another German scientist: Albert Einstein. Einstein tutored Haber’s son in math while Haber helped Einstein through a difficult separation from his wife. “Without Haber,” recalled Einstein, “I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
Although they were friends, Haber and Einstein couldn’t have been more different. Einstein was a liberal, wisecracking, irreverent, bohemian—disgusted by the militarism of his country. Haber was a straitlaced, pro-Kaiser Prussian who believed that German scientists should serve the fatherland whenever asked. On August 4, 1914, when Germany invaded Belgium—a neutral country—in an attempt to outflank France, Haber signed a manifesto defending his country against the international condemnation that quickly followed. Ninety-three German scientists signed the manifesto, including three current and three future Nobel Prize winners. Einstein, on the other hand, was part of a pacifist counterstatement decrying his country’s actions. Einstein left the country. Haber enlisted in the army.
German military officials assumed that they would quickly march through France, putting an end to the war. A few months, at most. It didn’t work out that way. German soldiers were stopped cold at the Marne River near Paris. German military officials now realized that this was going to be a different kind of war. One slugged out in the trenches. And one that would require massive amounts of one of the world’s most powerful explosives: ammonium nitrate. (In 1995, Timothy McVeigh used ammonium nitrate purchased from a fertilizer company to blow up a federal building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including many children; injuring 680 others; and destroying or damaging more than 300 buildings within a one-mile radius. All caused by a single, ammonium nitrate-containing truck bomb.)
As the war came to a standstill, the German military became desperate for more explosives. Haber saw an opening. He convinced Carl Bosch that it was possible to convert ammonia into ammonium nitrate using a commercially feasible, one-step process and that the facility at Oppau was the perfect place to do it. Although Bosch initially disagreed, he eventually yielded. By May 1915, the Oppau plant was producing more than 150 tons of ammonium nitrate a day. BASF was no longer just a chemical company; it was an instrument of war. Whereas workers at Oppau had been working round the clock to feed people, now they were working round the clock to kill them. Brot aus luft, “bread from air,” had become blut aus luft, “blood from air.” Bosch called the transformation “this dirty little business.”
—
ON MAY 27, 1915, French planes bombed the Oppau factory. In response, another ammonium nitrate–producing facility was built deep within Germany’s interior, in a little town near Leipzig called Leuna. On April 27, 1917, the Leuna plant opened. Centered on 13 large smokestacks, the plant, which boasted more than 30,000 workers, was two miles long and a mile wide. It looked like a small city. When the first batches of ammonium nitrate were produced at Leuna, workers scrawled “death to the French” on the canisters. Soon Leuna was producing more than 240,000 tons of ammonium nitrates a year, all of which fed directly into Germany’s war machine. Leuna was the largest chemical complex on Earth.
Fritz Haber was in his glory. WWI had now become “the chemist’s war,” and Haber, as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, was the chief chemist. He was named Geheimrat (privy counselor), a top adviser to the high command and a clear recognition of the importance of science in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. He was also made a captain in the German Army, unprecedented for someone who wasn’t a soldier. Determined to look the part, Haber shaved his head, commissioned a tailor to make his uniform, and carried himself with a military bearing. Albert Einstein lamented his friend’s transformation. “Haber’s picture unfortunately is to be seen everywhere,” said Einstein, after a visit to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. “It pains me every time I think of it. Unfortunately, I have to accept that this otherwise so splendid man has succumbed to personal vanity.” “He wanted to be your best friend and God at the same time,” recalled Lise Meitner, a physicist who would later participate in Nobel Prize–winning work on nuclear fission.
—
ON NOVEMBER 9, 1918, Germany surrendered. Although defeated, Germany’s war minister, Heinrich Scheüch, appreciated Haber’s contributions. “During the long duration of the war you put your broad knowledge and your energy in the service of the fatherland—beyond all measure,” he wrote. “You were able to mobilize German chemistry. It was not given to Germany to emerge victorious from this war. That it did not succumb to the supremacy of its enemies after the first few months because of lack of powder, explosives, and other combinations of nitrogen, is in the first instance your achievement. Your splendid success will always live on in history and remain unforgotten.” (The Leuna plant, which during WWII was more heavily guarded than Berlin, later fueled Hitler’s armies. On May 12, 1944, the U.S. Eighth Air Force sent more than 200 airplanes to bomb Leuna. By the end of the war, 6,000 Allied planes had dropped more than 18,000 tons of explosives on the plant. When the war was over, Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s architect, said that if the Allies had focused solely on eliminating the plant at Leuna, WWII could have ended in eight weeks.)
In 1919 when Fritz Haber received the Nobel Prize in chemistry, he wasn’t the only German to win it. Both Max Planck, for his work in quantum physics, and Johannes Stark, for his work on the Doppler effect, had also won the Nobel Prize that year. Haber was as proud for his countrymen as he was for himself—proud that German scientists were honored despite the ill will created by WWI. “I think it was a deed of greatness on the part of the Swedish academy to elect three Germans—and only Germans—as prizewinners,” he said. “My heartfelt wish is that it may lead to renewed international understanding.” It didn’t. Two Frenchmen, who had won Nobel Prizes, rejected their prizes in protest; one said that Haber was “morally unfit for the honor.” One American, who had won the Nobel Prize five years earlier, also refused to attend—the first such boycott in the history of the event. During the awards ceremony, several other scientists refused to shake Haber’s hand. Their disdain wasn’t because Haber had figuratively waved the German flag in their faces during his acceptance speech, or because he had unleashed a flood of fixed nitrogen that would choke off estuaries and waterways, or because he had signed a manifesto supporting Germany’s aggressive entry into WWI, or because he had fueled the German Army with explosives made from ammonium nitrate. It was because of something else that Fritz Haber had done during the war—another evil that he had allowed to escape into the world.
—
WHEN IT HAD BECOME CLEAR that German hopes for a quick end to WWI was impossible, that this was going to be a war of attrition, Fritz Haber saw his moment. Not only would he supply the ammonium nitrate that would allow his beloved fatherland to have an almost limitless supply of munitions, but he would also use his knowledge of chemistry to win the war in a different way—one that had never been used before. Haber believed that Germany would win not because its soldiers were braver or its military leaders shrewder, but because its chemists were smarter.
Under Fritz Haber, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which was now surrounded by barbed wire and military guards, had become an integral part of Germany’s war machine. The institute’s budget, which included the salaries of 1,500 peop
le and 150 scientists, was 50 times larger than during peacetime. In 1916, Haber was named chief of the Chemical Warfare Service. He wanted to find a way to kill the enemy without guns or mortar. To find something that would creep along the ground, seep into the trenches, and kill Allies on the spot. For months he and his team had studied the effects of poison gases on experimental animals (mostly cats), defining the relationship between the concentration of gas and the time of exposure. Haber found that low concentrations of poison gases over longer time intervals could kill just as completely as large concentrations over shorter intervals. His formula for death was later called Haber’s constant. By 1918, more than 2,000 scientists in Germany were working on chemical warfare.
Haber wasn’t the first to use gas during war. Indeed, the French and Brits had already used tear gas in 1914. But the purpose of tear gas was to temporarily disable the enemy. Haber’s goal was to kill them. Haber’s gas of choice was chlorine, favored because it was heavier than air—so it could spread down into the trenches—and because it caused almost immediate death, like being suffocated with a poisonous pillow.
When Fritz Haber was performing his experiments, he knew that chemical warfare was a violation of international law. Several years earlier, in 1907, Germany, along with 24 other nations, had signed the Hague Conventions, which forbid countries from “employing poisons and poisonous weapons.” Although poison gas was a clear violation of the conventions, Haber didn’t care. The goal was to win. And if he violated the rules, so be it. For his actions, Haber would later be branded as a war criminal.
—
IT HAPPENED ON THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 1915, at a battleground near the ancient trading city of Ypres, France—the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. German soldiers were on one side; French, British, Algerian, and Canadian soldiers on the other. At 5:00 p.m., Fritz Haber opened the valves on 6,000 canisters containing 150 tons of deadly chlorine gas. Standing at his side were three young scientists: Otto Hahn, Gustav Hertz, and James Franck, all of whom would later win Nobel Prizes. Hans Geiger, who would later invent the Geiger counter, was also there. The wind was right. Shortly after the canisters were opened, a yellow-green cloud four miles long rose to the height of a blue whale, traveled southward, and swept toward an unsuspecting battalion of French and Algerian soldiers. Within minutes, birds fell from the sky, leaves shriveled, and thousands of soldiers were choking, gagging, seizing, and turning blue. Those who weren’t immediately affected dropped their guns, threw down their packs, and ran. One British soldier recalled the event: “Suddenly down the road from the Yser Canal came a galloping team of horses, the riders goading their mounts in a frenzied way; then another and another, till the road became a seething mass with a pall of dust all over it.” The chlorine gas released that day killed 5,000 soldiers and disabled 15,000 others.
Fritz Haber had found a way to escalate the horror of war—a fact not lost on Allied generals. “It is impossible for me to give a real idea of the terror and horror spread among us by this filthy loathsome pestilence,” said one Canadian officer. Calling the event “spectacular,” Haber knew that his weapon had created not only a technological but also a psychological advantage. “Every new weapon is capable of winning a war,” he recalled. “Every war is a war against the soul of the soldier, not the body. New weapons break the morale because they are something new, something that he has not experienced, and, therefore, something that he fears. The artillery did not do much harm to morale, but the smell of gas upset everybody.” Not everyone in Germany was applauding. “The higher civilization rises,” wrote one German commander, “the viler man becomes.” Using the doublespeak that would later become a cynical theme in Hitler’s Germany, the attack was called “Operation Disinfection.”
After the attack at Ypres, both President Woodrow Wilson and the International Red Cross protested the use of chemical weapons, but to no avail. George Grosz, a prominent German artist, who was 24 years old at the time, protested in his own way. Grosz drew a picture of Christ on the cross with a gas mask and army boots—his attempt to show the bestiality of war, our seemingly limitless capacity for depravity. He was later tried and convicted for blasphemy.
Fritz Haber was unrepentant, declaring that his science belonged to humanity during peacetime but to the fatherland during war. His only regret was that the Germans hadn’t taken full advantage of the hole blown into the center of the Allied front. Advancing too slowly, the Germans had allowed Canadian forces to fill in. Haber believed that had the officers been bolder—and more willing to ignore the fact that 200 German soldiers were also poisoned and 12 killed by the gas—the war could have been won that day.
—
A WEEK AFTER the chlorine gas attack at Ypres, Fritz and Clara Haber hosted a dinner party. When it was over, they got into a terrible fight. Chemical warfare wasn’t science, said Clara, it was “a perversion of science.” Shy and quiet by nature with a slight lisp, this wasn’t an easy conversation for Clara. She rarely questioned her husband’s decisions. But Fritz had crossed a line. And Clara couldn’t live with it anymore. After Fritz had fallen to sleep, she went into the bedroom, took her husband’s handgun, walked outside to the garden, and fired a shot into the air. Convinced that everything was in working order, she aimed the gun at her chest and fired a second time. Her son, Hermann, who was 14 years old, rushed to his mother’s side. Clara was bleeding badly but still alive. Hermann screamed for his father, but to no avail. Fritz had taken a sleeping pill and was unarousable. That night, May 2, 1915, Clara Haber died from the self-inflicted gunshot wound. The next day, Fritz Haber left his son and traveled to the Eastern Front, where he was expected. Two years after Clara’s suicide, Haber remarried. Thirty years after the suicide, when he was 44 years old and living on Long Island as a patent attorney, Hermann Haber also took his life.
—
FRITZ HABER NEVER UNDERSTOOD his wife’s objections to chemical warfare. And never understood why several of his fellow Nobel Prize winners boycotted his acceptance speech. To Haber, a dead soldier was a dead soldier. It didn’t matter how they died. It only mattered that they died. Poison gas worked to the advantage of technologically advanced societies, so why shouldn’t Germany use its assets? “The disapproval that the knight felt for the man with a gun,” said Haber, “is repeated by the soldier who shoots bullets [at] a man with chemical weapons.” Haber’s goal was to turn warfare into a competition among scientists; the winner would make the deadliest poison gases, distribute them most efficiently, and create the best protective gear, including gas masks. “Gas weapons and gas defense turn warfare into chess,” he said, dispassionately. Further, using a rationalization that followed the dropping of the atomic bomb in WWII, Haber argued that chemical weapons would save more lives than take. In truth, Fritz Haber was enormously proud of what he’d done. Proud that science had advanced beyond shooting and shelling to something far more devastating. Something that, according to Haber, had turned “soldiers from a sword in the hand of their leader into a heap of helpless people.”
—
YPRES WAS THE FIRST of five chlorine gas attacks. Between April 22 and August 6, 1915, the Germans released 1,200 tons of chlorine gas in five separate attacks on the Allies. BASF’s Oppau plant, once a site for manufacturing synthetic fertilizer, now made explosives and poison gas only. By the end of 1915, BASF was making 16,000 tons of chlorine gas a year.
Fritz Haber was the first to use chlorine gas in war. On October 15, 1915, he became the first to use phosgene gas, which, like chlorine, asphyxiated its victims, but required much less gas to do it. At the front in Champagne, between October 15 and 27, 1915, the Germans released 500 tons of phosgene gas, disabling 5,700 Allies and killing 500.
Haber wasn’t finished. In 1917, he became the first person to release the most dangerous chemical used in warfare: mustard gas. Unlike chlorine and phosgene gases, which eventually dissipate in the wind, mustard gas hangs around, sticking to soil, clothing, homes, and tools—alm
ost impossible to wash off. Mustard gas caused severe conjunctivitis, making it difficult for soldiers to see; intense inflammation of the skin, mouth, throat, and windpipe, making it difficult to swallow and breathe; widespread blistering similar to second-degree burns; and overwhelming bronchitis and pneumonia, the most common cause of death. Three of every hundred soldiers exposed to mustard gas died. Because mustard gas was the most poisonous of the gases; because it lingered, disabling soldiers long after canisters had been opened; because it had a high death rate; and because soldiers feared mustard gas more than any other chemical weapon, Fritz Haber labeled it “a fabulous success.”
Not surprising, mustard gas was the chemical weapon most likely to cause collateral damage. On July 20, 1917, the Germans bombed the western outskirts of Armentières with mustard gas. Thousands of local farmers and townspeople went to their shelters. When they returned and came in contact with brickwork and household objects still laden with the poison, 675 were injured and 86 died.
Between 1914 and 1919, Germany made 87,000 tons of chlorine gas, 24,000 tons of phosgene gas, and 7,700 tons of mustard gas. Although Britain and France would also use chemical weapons, the Germans were the first to enter the race, and by far the most successful. The Germans were also the first to load poison gases into shells and fire them at the enemy. In 1918 about one-third of all German shells contained poison gas. By the end of the war, with Fritz Haber as the ringmaster, more than a million people had been disabled and 26,000 killed by chemical weapons.
Pandora's Lab Page 7