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WORLD WAR I OFFICIALLY ENDED on June 28, 1919, with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The following summer, Fritz Haber heard that he was on a list of war criminals and that the Allies had demanded his extradition. In response, he grew a beard, bought a forged passport, fled to Switzerland, obtained citizenship, and settled in St. Moritz. In November 1919, he got word that he had won the Nobel Prize. When the Allies withdrew their extradition request, he returned to his beloved Germany.
Although the Hague Convention of 1907 had been clear about the prohibition of poison gas, the Treaty of Versailles made it even clearer. The Allies wanted to make sure that Germany never used chemical weapons again. Germany was prohibited from using “asphyxiating, poisonous, and other gases and all analogous liquids.” Further, “their manufacture and importation are strictly forbidden.” Fritz Haber didn’t see it that way. He believed that the treaty had no moral or legal legitimacy. And, as he had done with the Hague Conventions, he ignored it. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, with a framed picture of the chlorine gas attack on Ypres in his office, Haber continued to test chemical weapons on animals. When international weapons inspectors visited his institute, he insisted that he was working on insecticides. And although Haber never imported chemical weapons, as specified by the treaty, he exported them. He helped Spain with its construction of a mustard gas facility. And he helped Russian officials launch a poison gas program at Volga. In 1924, in collaboration with the German Ministry of Defense, he set up chlorine and mustard gas production plants in central Germany, misrepresenting them to foreign inspectors as “oil and refinery plants.”
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ON JANUARY 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler came into power. Three months later, Hitler introduced his Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Services; Jews were no longer allowed to work for the government.
Initially, Fritz Haber didn’t think this new law had anything to do with him. He was, after all, a Protestant, having been baptized at Saint Michael’s church in Jena when he was 24 years old. But both of Haber’s parents were Jewish. So, in the eyes of the Third Reich, Fritz Haber was a Jew. There was, however, an out. At the insistence of Hitler’s predecessor, Paul von Hindenburg, everyone who had served their country faithfully in WWI could still be employed by the government, even if they were Jewish.
At the time of Hitler’s ascension, about 500,000 Jews lived in Germany, less than one percent of the population. About 10,000 had converted, primarily to make it easier to advance in business and academia. Like most, Haber had converted to make himself “more fully German.” Although he’d converted, he did nothing to hide his Jewish ancestry. Both of his wives were Jewish, as were most of his friends. When Haber was asked by the Nazis to fill out a form declaring his ancestry, he wrote “non-Aryan.”
On April 21, 1933, Fritz Haber received a phone call from Bernard Rust, head of the Nazi Ministry of Art, Science, and Popular Culture. Rust was clear about what he wanted. Haber had to start firing Jews who worked in his institute. At first, Haber tried to comply. He fired two senior Jewish scientists, but only after he had found them jobs outside of Germany. He couldn’t bring himself to fire others, especially younger Jewish scientists, whom he felt needed his protection the most.
Unlike Haber, many German Jewish scientists never converted to Christianity. And all were sickened by Hitler’s insistence that they resign their positions. James Franck, who, like Haber, had served his country in WWI, and who, like Haber, later won a Nobel Prize, refused to live in a place where Jews were treated so heinously. So he resigned his post as professor at the University of Göttingen. But not before he wrote a letter to Fritz Haber. “I can’t get up in front of my students and act as though all this doesn’t matter to me,” he wrote. “And I also can’t gnaw on the bone that the government tosses to Jewish war veterans. I honor and understand those who want to hold out in their positions, but there also have to be people like me. So don’t scold your James Franck, who loves you.” (Franck later emigrated to the United States and worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb.)
Franck had assumed that because Haber was the most prominent scientist in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, he would stay in Germany. But he was wrong. Fritz Haber had had enough; he needed reassurance that he would continue to be seen as indispensable to the new regime, even though he was Jewish.
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THREE WEEKS AFTER Adolf Hitler introduced the law prohibiting Jews from working for the government, Fritz Haber resigned as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. No one could believe it, including Haber himself, who assumed that Bernard Rust would never accept his resignation—never allow someone as prominent and well respected as him to walk away from his country. “I herewith request that on 1 October 1933 I be allowed to retire,” wrote Haber. “According to the directives of the National Civil Service Law of 7 April 1933, I have the right to remain in office, although I am descended from Jewish grandparents and parents. But I do not wish to make use of this dispensation any longer.”
When Albert Einstein heard that Haber had resigned, he immediately sent him a letter. “I can imagine your inner conflicts,” he wrote. “It is somewhat like having to abandon a theory on which you have worked for your whole life. It’s not the same for me because I never believed in it in the least.” The theory, presumably, was that the German high command would honor faithfulness, blind devotion, and service; that they would be decent; that they would care about what Fritz Haber could do for them and not what religion he had been born into. But they didn’t. Haber was a Jew and that was all the Nazis could see. They didn’t care about scholarship or academia. On the contrary, German scientists, scholars, and intellectuals were more a threat than a matter of civic pride. When Rust accepted his resignation, Haber was stunned. “I am bitter as never before,” he wrote.
Several scientists tried to intervene on Haber’s behalf.
First, friends of Haber asked Rust to reconsider. But Rust was unwilling to relent. “I’m finished with the Jew, Haber,” he said.
Then, Max Planck, who had won the Nobel Prize in physics and, like Haber, was enormously respected in scientific circles, met with Adolf Hitler. Planck argued that Haber’s resignation was bad for German science; that although Jews made up only one percent of the population, one-third of Germany’s Nobel Prize–winning scientists were Jewish. It was “self-mutilation,” argued Planck. Hitler would have none of it. As the meeting progressed, Hitler talked faster and louder, pounding his fist on his knees, screaming, possessed. Planck, who was 75 years old, left the room without looking back. Shaken, it took him days to recover.
Finally, Carl Bosch, who was now Germany’s foremost chemical industrialist, also met with Hitler, arguing that persecuting Jewish scientists was bad for German business. But, as with Planck, Hitler seemed to be in a trance, a dream. Referring to what he believed would be his hundred-year Reich, Hitler screamed, “You don’t understand these matters! If Jews are so important to physics and chemistry, then we’ll just have to work one hundred years without physics and chemistry.” Bosch, who would become openly critical of Hitler’s policies, was later relieved of his executive duties. He died in 1940 from depression and alcoholism.
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ON AUGUST 3, 1933, Fritz Haber left Germany. Looking for work, he traveled from hotel to hotel in Spain, Holland, France, England, and Switzerland. Most of Haber’s colleagues, however, couldn’t forget his notorious past as an unabashed promoter of chemical warfare. Ernest Rutherford—a British scientist and the father of nuclear physics—refused to meet with him. After a few months, Haber was offered a meaningless position at the University of Cambridge. Still, he considered it—anything to rid himself of the stain of his native land. “My most important goal in life is that I not die as a German citizen,” he said.
While in Switzerland, Haber met Chaim Weizmann, a Russian-born, Jewish scientist and leading proponent for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Weizmann remembered his first meeting with
Haber. “He was a broken man,” said Weizmann, “moving about in a moral vacuum. I made a feeble attempt to comfort him, but the truth is that I could scarcely look into his eyes. I was ashamed for myself, ashamed for this cruel world, and ashamed for the error in which he had lived and worked throughout his life.” But Weizmann saw in Haber a man who had now finally embraced his Jewish heritage. So he offered him a job at the Daniel Sieff Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, just outside of Tel Aviv. “You will work in peace and honor,” said Weizmann. “It will be a return home for you.”
Haber was humbled and overwhelmed by Weizmann’s offer. “Dr. Weizmann, I was one of the mightiest men in Germany,” he said. “I was more than a great army commander, more than a captain of industry. I was the founder of industries; my work was essential for the economic and military expansion of Germany. All doors were open for me. But the position I occupied then, glamorous as it may have seemed, was nothing compared with yours. You are not creating out of plenty—you are creating out of nothing, in a land that lacks everything; you are trying to restore a derelict people to a sense of dignity. And you are, I think, succeeding. At the end of my life I find myself bankrupt. When I am gone and forgotten, your work will stand, a shining moment in the long history of our people.” Haber’s life had come full circle. After rejecting his Jewish heritage, he now fully embraced it. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, he had arrived where he had started and knew the place for the first time.
Perhaps no one was more surprised by Haber’s transformation than his friend of 20 years, Albert Einstein. Haber wrote to Einstein after his meeting with Weizmann: “In my whole life, I have never been as Jewish as I am now!” Einstein wrote back: “I was very happy to receive such a detailed and long letter from you, and was especially happy that your earlier love for the blonde beast has cooled a little. Who would have thought that my dear Haber would approach me as the advocate of the Jewish, even the Palestinian, matter! I hope you will not return to Germany. It is no true business to work for an intelligentsia consisting of men who prostrate themselves on their bellies before common criminals and even sympathize to a certain degree with these criminals.” Einstein ended his letter with a wish: “I hope to meet you soon under a milder sky.” But Albert Einstein and Fritz Haber would never meet again.
While traveling to Zermatt, Haber was taken off the train in the small Swiss town of Brig with chest pains. His sister, Elyse, immediately came to look after him. Suffering from severe heart disease, Haber was treated with the medications of his time: nitroglycerin and bloodletting. On January 29, 1934, almost one year to the day after Adolf Hitler rose to power, Fritz Haber died. He was buried in Basel, Switzerland. Haber requested that his tombstone be engraved with the sentence, “In war and peace, as long as it was granted him, a servant of his homeland.” Fritz’s son, Hermann, ashamed of his country’s atrocities, couldn’t bring himself to honor that wish. One request was honored. Even though he had been married a second time, Haber asked that he be buried next to his first wife, Clara. So Clara’s body was exhumed from Dahlem, Germany, and transported to Basel, Switzerland, where both are now buried under a tombstone that bears only their names and dates. Perhaps the most fitting epitaph was written by Albert Einstein who, when he learned of his friend’s death, wrote a letter to Hermann lamenting that Haber had suffered “the tragedy of the German Jew; the tragedy of unrequited love.”
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ONE FINAL IRONY.
On February 15, 1917, Fritz Haber and several German industrialists met to discuss the best methods for pest control, primarily for agriculture. The meeting spawned the Technical Committee for Pest Control; Haber was the chairman. The best way to control pests, all agreed, was with hydrogen cyanide (HCN). The question was how to administer it.
At the time of the meeting, body lice, which carried deadly typhus bacteria, plagued German soldiers at the front. And moths were a huge problem in flour mills. Under the supervision of Fritz Haber, German scientists developed methods to administer HCN. First, they simply released the chemical from steel canisters. Then they developed a vat method, where sodium or calcium cyanide was added to vats of sulfuric acid, releasing HCN gas. Finally, they developed a method where HCN pellets were exposed to hot air, releasing the gas. (The final product was called Zyklon.) Although many countries used HCN as a pesticide, no country used it more efficiently or more universally than Germany. The Germans effectively fumigated granaries, barracks, trains, warships, and entire buildings, which were emptied, sealed, and pumped with Zyklon.
One problem with HCN gas was that it was odorless and colorless. As a consequence, some people unknowingly exposed to HCN gas died. To prevent accidental exposure, Haber and his team added cyanogen chloride, a benign chemical that gave the gas a foul odor. The foul-smelling preparation of Zyklon was called Zyklon A. In 1920, the inventors of Zyklon A moved to another institute, although Haber still retained an association. There, they developed Zyklon B, later used by the Nazis to kill more than a million Jews in concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz and Treblinka. (The Nazis removed the cyanogen chloride so that those being gassed wouldn’t know what was coming.) Several of Fritz Haber’s relatives died there, including the daughter of his half sister, Frieda (Hilde Glucksmann), her husband, and their two children. Frieda was the daughter of Siegfried Haber’s second wife.
Although Haber had supervised the manufacture of Zyklon—a chemical that would kill millions of his fellow Jews—he could never have conceived of its eventual use. Indeed, at the beginning of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Fritz Haber realized that he had inadvertently provided the Nazis with the munitions and chemicals necessary for their reign of terror. “I have put fire in the hands of small children,” he lamented.
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IN THE DEUTSCHES MUSEUM in Munich, separated from onlookers by a small barrier, stands the tabletop device Fritz Haber and Robert Le Rossignol built to fix nitrogen from the air. Onlookers occasionally stop, stare for a few seconds, and walk past, thinking little of this machine that launched the worldwide manufacture of synthetic fertilizer, a process that has given so many people their lives and—due to ongoing contamination of the environment with excess nitrogen—a process that has probably started the clock on their eventual destruction.
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FRITZ HABER HAS ALLOWED three billion more people to live on the face of the Earth than would ever have been possible. His accomplishment is nothing short of phenomenal. The price tag for Haber’s invention, however, has been the gradual death of streams, lakes, waterways, and oceans. The lesson here is this: Everything has a price; the only question is how big. Most people would be surprised to know that even the most dramatic, lifesaving, medical and scientific breakthroughs like vaccines, antibiotics, and sanitation programs have unintended and occasionally tragic consequences. We’ll talk about this in the last chapter.
CHAPTER 4
AMERICA’S MASTER RACE
“Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.”
—Matthew 7:17
On June 16, 2015, real estate mogul and Apprentice star Donald Trump launched his bid for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. He did it by attacking Mexican immigrants. If Americans wanted to know how their country could become great again—how they could rid themselves of the social, political, and financial woes of the recent decade—all they had to do was look south of the border. There they would find their bogeyman. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best,” said Trump. “They’re sending you people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing their problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
The facts tell a very different story: (1) First-generation Mexican immigrants actually commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans; (2) as rates of immigration have increased, rates of crime have decreased; and (3) the percentage of illegal immigrants in prison is actually less than
that in the general population. The reasons are obvious. Because they risk deportation, undocumented immigrants have a strong desire to stay out of trouble. “Immigrants in general—unauthorized immigrants in particular—are a self-selected group who generally come to the U.S. to work,” said Marc Rosenblum, deputy director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program. “And once they’re here, most of them want to keep their nose down and do their business; they’re sensitive to the fact that they’re vulnerable.”
Trump had found a way to galvanize the American public. When he made Mexican immigrants the cornerstone of his campaign, his favorability among Republican voters leaped from 16 percent to 57 percent, a spike greater than any of his challengers. Other candidates vying for the Republication nomination began echoing his ideas, calling for increased security and fencing. Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas and a Hispanic American himself (though of Cuban descent, not Mexican), noted in his immigration plan that “the unsecured border with Mexico invites illegal immigrants, criminals, and terrorists to tread on American soil.”
As the Republican primary went on, the attacks were not limited to Mexican immigrants. In response to a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015, Trump and other conservative politicians called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Not only were illegal immigrants from Mexico “murderers” and “rapists,” now, apparently, legal immigrants of the Muslim faith were potential terrorists. The ban, which would apply to about a billion Muslims, presumably would include those visiting family members, academics, and parents seeking specialized medical care for their children. “Anyone who thinks [Trump’s] comments will hurt him don’t know the temperature of the American ppl,” tweeted radio host Laura Ingraham. At the time, 59 percent of Republicans supported the ban, but only 36 percent of the general American public viewed it positively. But just a few months later in March 2016, 51 percent of Americans expressed support for a ban on Muslims entering the country.
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