Not far off is a hundred years since the outbreak of the First World War. A war that turned the familiar world upside down and became, as it were, a borderline in the development of our civilization, spurring progress. Too many things that became familiar only 25 years later, during the Second World War, were used here with the prefix “for the first time”. Aircraft, tanks, submarines, toxic substances, gas masks, depth charges. I would like to tell you about one of the humble "war workers". Because the assessment of its role in history deserves at least a long scratching in the back of the head and considerations.
Fritz Haber
Prominent German scientist Fritz Haber was born on December 9, 1868 in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) in the family of a Jewish merchant. That is, 100% Jewish. This is not a minus, but below it will become clear why I am focusing on this. As a child, he received a very good education, including classical languages. He received his chemical education in Berlin and Heidelberg (from Bunsen and Liebermann). After receiving his doctorate, I could not find a job to my liking for a long time. In 1891–1894 he changed many places; worked in a distillery, then in a fertilizer factory, in a textile company and even as an agent for the sale of dyes produced in his father's factory. His real career began at the Higher Technical School in Karlsruhe, where he got a job as an assistant in 1894. There he took up a new field for himself - physical chemistry. To get the position of assistant professor, he conducted research on the decomposition and combustion of hydrocarbons. A few years later he became a professor of chemistry. In 1901, Haber married his colleague Clara Immerwald.
Fritz Haber
During their stay at the University of Karlsruhe from 1894 to 1911, he and Karl Bosch developed the Haber-Bosch process, in which ammonia is formed from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen (under high temperature, high pressure, and in the presence of a catalyst).
In 1918 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. By the way, it is quite deserved, since the total production of fertilizers based on synthesized ammonia at the moment is more than 100 million tons per year. Half of the world's population feeds on food grown with fertilizers obtained through the Haber-Bosch process.
And in 1932 he became an Honorary Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
It's white. Very white. Now I will allow myself to go black.
Fritz had one oversight. I will quote him: "In times of peace, a scientist belongs to the world, but in times of war he belongs to his country." One cannot but agree with this. And, starting in 1907, having assembled a team that also included future Nobel laureates James Frank, Gustav Hertz and Otto Hahn, he began work on the creation of chemical weapons. Naturally, it could not but lead to a natural result: the creation of mustard gas and other pleasures.
In addition, this gang invented an adsorbent gas mask, the descendants of which are still used today. In his work on the effects of toxic gases, Haber noted that long-term exposure to low concentrations on a person always has the same effect (death) as exposure to high concentrations, but for a short time. He formulated a simple mathematical relationship between the gas concentration and the required exposure time. This relationship is known as the Haber Rule.
The First World War began. And Haber completely surrendered himself to the creation of BOV, since no one interfered, but on the contrary, he was encouraged in every possible way. The Hague Convention is not for geniuses. The only obstacle to freedom of creativity was his wife - a very good chemist at the time. Some sources claim that she was present with Haber and company on April 22, 1915 and witnessed the first chlorine application with her own eyes. Some deny this. But the result was her protest, expressed on May 15 with a revolver. A resolute woman, you can’t say anything here, you can only regret this fact. It was necessary, on good, not to shoot at myself. And Haber went to the Eastern Front in order to personally witness the use of poison gases against the Russians.
In a gas attack against the Russians, Haber was the first to use phosgene, an additive to chlorine, which, unlike chlorine, penetrated the then existing defenses. As a result of this gas attack, 34 officers and 7,140 soldiers were poisoned (according to other sources, about 9,000 people were poisoned), of which 4 officers and 290 soldiers died. Haber was convinced that the use of gas weapons in war is more humane than the use of conventional weapons, as it leads to shorter periods of the war itself. However, during the First World War, 92,000 soldiers died from gases and more than 1,300,000 soldiers were left disabled. At the end of the First World War, the Allies present Germany with a list of 900 war criminals, including Fritz Haber.
Russian trenches during the German gas attack near Baranovichi
Apparently, everything went as well as possible, Haber was even awarded the rank of captain by the Kaiser - an event rare for a scientist whose age did not allow him to enter military service. And in 1916, Haber became the head of the Military Chemical Department of Germany. As the leader and organizer of the military-chemical industry in Germany, Haber was personally responsible for the "introduction" of chemical weapons into military affairs. Responding to his critics, including those in his entourage, Haber stated that this is the fate of any new type of weapon, and that the use of poisonous gases is fundamentally no different from the use of bombs or shells.
But the war is over. And when the question arose about the award of the Nobel Prize in 1919, Haber was among the applicants. Many "admirers" of his merits in the field of chemistry raised an unimaginable shout, but when did the Swedish Committee listen to whom? And in the end, the Nobel Prize was awarded for the Haber-Bosch synthesis. Probably fair. More was fed with the help of cheap fertilizers than was poisoned by gases, so it was decided there. And the fact that nitrogen is used in the production of gunpowder - well, so Nobel did not make a fortune on soap … In general, they gave it.
"Haber's discoveries," said AG Ekstrand, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in his speech at the presentation, "appear to be extremely important for agriculture and the prosperity of mankind."
In 1920, on Haber's advice, the lines for the production of chemical weapons, the dismantling of which Britain and France demanded, were converted to the production of chemical disinfectants, which was not prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles. The necessary research and development was presented by Haber and his institute. Among the substances developed in those days by the Haber Institute is the later infamous Cyclone-B gas.
"Zyklon B" (German Zyklon B) - the name of a commercial product of the chemical industry in Germany, used for the mass extermination of people in the gas chambers of death camps. "Cyclone B" is a hydrocyanic acid-impregnated granules of an inert porous carrier (diatomaceous earth, pressed sawdust). It also contains 5% odorizing agent (ethyl ester of bromoacetic acid), since hydrocyanic acid itself has a faint odor. In the period after the First World War, it was widely used in Germany as an insecticide. During the Second World War, Cyclone B "was required by the army of the Third Reich and concentration camps for disinfection measures. Over 95% of the "Cyclone B" supplied to the camps was actually used to kill bedbugs as carriers of diseases.
For the first time for the mass extermination of people "Cyclone B" was used in September 1941 in the Auschwitz camp, at the initiative of the first deputy commandant of the camp Karl Fritzsch, for the extermination of 900 Soviet prisoners of war. The camp commandant Rudolf Goess approved of Fritzsch's initiative, and later it was in Auschwitz (and then not only in Auschwitz) that this gas was used to kill people in gas chambers. Mostly Jews.
But Haber won't know about it. But his son from his first wife, Herman, who immigrated to the United States during World War II, knew perfectly well who invented this deadly gas that claimed the lives of millions of people. As well as many people in the United States knew. In 1946, Herman, like his mother, commits suicide.
In 1933, after Hitler came to power, Haber's position became more than precarious, since he was a Jew (not by religion, but by origin). One of the first actions of the Nazi government was the issuance of civil code laws to prevent Jews from serving in academic and government institutions. Since Haber was in the German service during the First World War, an exception was made for him, but on April 7 of the same year he had to dismiss 12 Jews from his staff. Haber was very worried about the dismissal of his colleagues because of nationality and soon sent a letter of resignation himself.
"For more than 40 years of service, I have selected my employees for their intellectual development and character, and not on the basis of the origin of their grandmothers," he wrote, "and I do not want to change this principle in the last years of my life." His resignation was accepted on April 30, 1933.
Haber moves to England, to Cambridge. But he didn't manage to work there. Ernst Rutherford gave him a form of bullying, which resulted in a heart attack. Then the chemist and future first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, offered Gaber to work at the Daniel Siff Palestinian Research Institute in Rehovot (later renamed the Weizmann Institute). And in January 1934, Haber went to Palestine.
He died at the age of 65 on January 29, 1934, while on a rest stop in Basel, Switzerland.
The epitaph to everything written can be Haber's words that "the welfare and prosperity of mankind require the cooperation of all peoples, which mutually complement each other with natural wealth and scientific experience." It sounds more than peculiar.
And the life and activity of this outstanding figure in science and industry, full of contradictions, provides rich food for thought and can serve as a lesson for the next generations of scientists.
