S1E22 Fritz Haber Dulce Et Decorum Est: The Legacies of Fritz Haber Before we begin. This episode contains a description of a poison gas attack in World War I and a discussion of the injuries caused by different gases. I do not dwell on the details, but even the bare facts can be disturbing. There is also a discussion of suicide. Take care of yourself, and thank you. The summer of 1919, the German scientist Fritz Haber went on the run. He had heard a rumor that his name was on a list of Germans that the Allies wanted to prosecute for war crimes. In August, Haber, with his wife and children, fled to Switzerland. He grew a beard to disguise his appearance. The idea of prosecuting war crimes was relatively new and untested. It was unclear if such trials would actually happen. But Haber had reason to worry. He was despised outside of Germany. He was considered responsible for one of the most horrifying weapons unleashed on the Western Front, a nightmare that had haunted the trenches: poison gas. Within a month or two, word reached Haber that he was in no danger. His name wasn't on any list, and anyway the Allies were not pushing for tribunals. It was safe for Haber to return to Germany. So the 51-year-old scientist was back in Berlin and again clean-shaven when he received more news. He had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He had gone from hunted man to laureate in a matter of weeks. Haber received his award for the invention of a process for synthesizing ammonia. You likely have a jug of an ammonia-based cleaner somewhere in your house, and you likely have never given it much thought. But Haber's process is one of the single most important scientific inventions in all of history. Really. In terms of the number of lives that have been directly affected, Haber's process may be the most important scientific discovery. Why? It is keeping you alive. Ammonia is a key ingredient in synthetic fertilizer. The widespread adoption of fertilizer in the 20th century allowed for stupendous growth of the world's population, which jumped from 1.65 billion in 1900 to 7.4 billion in 2015. Scientists believe that without fertilizer, the planet's agricultural system would only be able to support about 3.8 billion people. What this means is that roughly half of the people alive right now only exist because of fertilizer produced in a factory based on Haber's design. To be clear: you are probably here on Earth because of the work of a man many believe should be considered a war criminal. This is The Year That Was: 1919. So. It's been a while. A long while, actually. Mea culpa. What can I say? Life in the time of COVID has been difficult for, well, everyone, and family responsibilities combined with work combined with the general mess of it all made podcasting a task beyond my capabilities. But things have settled down, we're all vaccinated, everyone is healthy, and I am again excited about diving deep into 1919. Let's take a quick minute to look at where we are and chart out where we're going. Last summer--oh my god, that was so long ago--we looked at issues in the United States in 1919 including the Red Scare, Red Summer, the Black Sox scandal, woman suffrage and prohibition. I’m now going to move back to international issues with two episodes on science and technology, followed by one last international political episode on the Mexican Revolution. Then we will officially wrap up our look at the year 1919 with a concluding episode. After that, we, and I need your help on this, will decide what's next. I would like to continue the podcast with a deep dive on another big year in history, and I want your help deciding which year. So keep that in mind. Do we go forward? Go back? How far? 1845? 1492? 1939? Think about it, and let me know. For now, let's get back to Fritz Haber and nitrogen. We'll start with nitrogren, which is element number 7 on the Periodic Table. It is abundant in the Earth's atmosphere--about 78 percent of air is composed of elemental nitrogen, which means you're swimming in it right now. You don't notice, because in its most common form, nitrogen is a colorless, odorless and generally nonreactive gas. This gas is known as dinitrogen and is made up of two nitrogen atoms tightly bonded to one another. Breaking that bond requires an enormous amount of energy. Nitrogen can also be found naturally as ammonia, nitric acid and nitrates, although in much smaller quantities. Life on earth has evolved to be dependent on these substances. Nitrogen is an essential building block in every cell in every plant and every animal, including you. Animals get their nitrogen from plants. Plants get their nitrogen from soil. This nitrogen is so critical that it acts as one of the primary limiting factors in most plant ecosystems, right up there with water. Anyone who has ever tried to grow a garden or a field of wheat must deal with this fact. Crops grown in soil with lots of nitrogen thrive. Those in soil with little nitrogen wither. It's a cumulative problem. Over time, nitrogen reserves diminish. Farmers have known this forever. They have also known that they could renew soil productivity to some degree by mixing compost or dung into the soil. The ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Chinese were well aware of this, and the Romans had in their pantheon a god of manure, Stercutius. We now know compost and dung contain small quantities of nitrogen. Early farmers also understood the importance of crop rotation. This means alternating grains with certain crops that, for some reason unknown to the ancients, help replenish the soil. Chinese farmers relied on soybeans, Indians grew lentils, and Europeans peas. In the 19th century, scientists learned that these crops were among the few that could "fix" nitrogen. "Fixing" is the term for breaking the dinitrogen bonds and converting the nitrogen into a form accessible to plants. Now, there are two primary ways to fix nitrogen. One is brute force. Under extreme temperatures, dinitrogen's bonds break. On Earth, generally only lightning packs enough punch to fix nitrogen. Every year, a fairly large amount of nitrogen is fixed this way, but you can't count on lightning to fertilize your fields. The other way is through bacteria. Certain bacteria, known as diazotrophs, evolved to take in dinitrogen from the air and convert it to a usable form. Isn't that an amazing fact? That some bacteria minding their own business evolved millions of years ago to do something so incredibly useful? Some of these bacteria also evolved a symbiotic relationship with plants such as soybeans, lentils and peas. Now crop rotation makes sense. However, even the most efficient bacteria work slowly. A season growing peas only contributes a small amount of nitrogen to the soil. It helps, but it's not a miracle. The miracle arrived in the early 1800s. A new type of fertilizer was discovered that transformed agriculture. That miracle was bird poop. Well, guano, but guano is just a refined name for poop. Some bird guano contains up to 21 percent nitrogen, compared to 2 to 3.5 nitrogen in most manure. The west coast of South America and Peru in particular were rich in guano, since for millions of years, seabirds had done their business on islands off the coast. They had built up enormous deposits of guano, mountains of guano, peaks of guano. In 1802 the scientist and explorer Alexander von Humbolt, traveling in South America, observed indigenous farmers using guano as fertilizer. This kicked off what is known as, and I am not making this up, the Guano Era. Farmers were amazed at the results when they put guano on their fields. Europeans began mining this miracle substance and shipping it in vast quantities back home. Its export at one point accounted for three-quarters of the national budget of Peru. Nations fought wars over guano. But birds can only poop so much. Guano is technically a renewable resource, but not at the rate we were consuming it. In a few decades, all of the guano had been stripped from the Peruvian islands, millions of years of poop gone in a generation. By 1900, other natural sources of fixed nitrogen, such as the Atacama Desert in South America, were also running low. Scientists warned that the planet faced starvation if a new source of high-nitrogen fertilizer could not be found. German chemists paid particular attention to the problem. They saw it much in the same way that modern nations see access to oil, as a matter of national interest. Germans had no doubt that they would go to war sometime soon--it was the only way the country could establish its supremacy among inferior nations. They anticipated that one of the first things the British would do in that war would be impose a blockade and cut off supplies of South American fertilizer. This would create another problem, one particularly alarming to military leaders. By the turn of the 19th century, most of the world's fertilizer came from the Atacama Desert as nitrates. Nitrates are a category of nitrogen-based compounds in which nitrogen bonds with oxygen. Nitrates make great fertilizer, but they have another use as well. They also make great explosives. Chinese alchemists created the first gunpowder by mixing sulfur, cabon and a nitrate known as saltpeter back in the 9th century A.D. The invention spread around the world, and over the centuries new, more powerful explosives employing nitrate were developed, including nitroglycerin, TNT, and dynamite. Every nation that could afford it bought up South American nitrates both to fertilize fields and to build bombs. The German army had been stockpiling nitrates for years. Military leaders assured civilian authorities that they had enough to get through any war, but experts still worried. The good news was that solving one problem would go a long way toward solving the other. The difference between fertilizer and explosives is small, so small that some nitrates can be employed for either use. A fertilizer explosion in Beirut in August 2020 killed at least 207 people. Timothy McVeigh used a bomb made out of fertilizer to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people. Ammonia requires processing to be converted into a nitrate suitable for explosives, but that process was well known by the early 1900s. If German scientists could find a method for fixing nitrogen, they could ensure that Germany would have enough food and enough explosives to get through any war. This brings us back to Fritz Haber. Fritz Haber was born in 1868 in Wroclaw, a town then part of Germany but now part of Poland. His mother died giving birth, and he was raised by his father, a dye and paint manufacturer. His family was Jewish. Anti-semitism was in no way as bad as it had been in the past, or as it would be in the future, but Haber, an ambitious young man, wanted to avoid any social stigma. He converted to Christianity at age 24. Haber studied chemistry and received his doctorate in 1891. He landed a job at regional university and built a reputation as a painstaking researcher. Haber divided his talents among multiple interests--he never really settled on one field of study. His discontent was to some degree intellectual, but he was also never content with his professional status. He wanted more--more honors, more respect, more prizes, more money. On the other hand, he was a delight at dinner parties. He was an entertaining conversationalist. Perhaps his most admirable quality was his loyalty as a friend. For example, he and Albert Einstein formed a close bond that last decades. When Einstein's first marriage fell apart in 1914, Einstein leaned on Haber, who helped him with practical matters and provided emotional solace, as when he stayed up with Einstein all night after Einstein's wife and children departed Berlin. Haber knew something about unhappy marriages, which brings us to one of his least admirable qualities. He was terrible husband. In 1901, Haber married Clara Immerwahr, who herself had earned a Ph.D. in chemistry, a remarkable achievement for a woman in that era. Haber seemed to appreciate her intelligence, but as soon as they were married, he insisted that she devote herself to housework. He was distant, emotionally unavailable, and demanded the entire household revolve around his work schedule, his ego, and his health--Haber routinely worked himself into a state of nervous collapse. Clara wrote a friend about her husband's quote "overwhelming assertion of his own place in the household," stating, quote "Everybody has a right to live their own life, but to nurture one's 'quirks' while exhibiting a supreme contempt for everyone else and the most common routines of life--I think that even a genius shouldn't be permitted such behavior." unquote. And Fritz Haber was no genius. Haber first got involved in the quest to synthesize ammonia around 1904 when an Austrian chemical firm hired him to take a look at the problem. There was no mystery about fixing nitrogen--chemists understood exactly what happening on the atomic level. No scientific paradigm shift was necessary. The synthesis of ammonia was going to be hard--perhaps impossible--but the problem was straightforward. Two things had to happen. First, the bond holding dinitrogen together had to be broken. Then the nitrogen had to be convinced to bond with hydrogen to form ammonia. The problem was that the dinitrogen would only break apart under extremely high temperatures--Haber's first experiments reached 1000 degrees Celsius. These temperatures immediately destroyed any ammonia that managed to form. Haber played around with the problem, trying different ways to cool the ammonia before it broke apart, but he only produced traces of the desired chemical. So he wrote up his findings, submitted them to a journal and moved on. It's likely he never would have bothered with ammonia again--if Walther Nernst hadn't written him a letter. Nernst was an esteemed German chemist, far more esteemed than Haber at this point. In 1906, Nernst wrote Haber questioning the results of his ammonia research. Nernst informed Haber that his numbers must be wrong and that he, Nernst, planned to present a paper to this effect at a scientific conference. Haber was livid. He began rerunning his experiments, then started tinkering with the setup. He increased the pressure. He swapped out catalysts. The work was promising. Haber began to think he might just succeed. Perhaps he could solve one of the era's signature problems. It would make him famous--it would make him rich. And think of how grateful Germany's leaders would be. Haber would save Germany. There was never a single moment of breakthrough; ammonia synthesis required fine-tuning the heat and pressure under which dinitrogen's bonds were broken in the presence of the right catalyst. It was tedious, painstaking work, but that was what Haber was good at. Finally, in 1908, he decided it was time to show his work to potential investors. He needed funding to continue his experiments and a partner that could finance ammonia synthesis on an industrial scale. He decided to contact the chemical giant BASF. BASF had started as a dye company and made a fortune when it synthesized indigo. (If you are wearing blue jeans, they were likely dyed using a compound developed by BASF.) The company saw enormous potential in Haber's work, so itsigned a contract to fund his research in exchange for control of the eventual patents. In July 1909, a test of Haber's process was performed for a team of BASF representatives. The equipment, which fit on a table top, was a maze of hoses, pumps, valves, and chambers, like that Mousetrap game from the 70s (I'll post a photo online for the non-Gen-Xers among us) except running at dangerously high pressures and temperatures and likely to send red hot sharpnel flying if it exploded. So, you know, a potentially deadly Mousetrap. The morning of the test a seal had failed, nearly ruining the trial. But Haber and his team finally got the contraption running and ammonia began dripping into a clear flask, a cup of liquid about every two hours. The team calculated the yield. Between six and eight percent of the dinitrogen that went into the machine came out as ammonia. It was enough for BASF to move ahead with industrial production. Haber threw a party and got drunk. His life would never be the same. At this point, Haber began playing an advisory role to BASF and the engineer assigned to the project, Carl Bosch. Scaling up Haber's model presented incredible challenges--BASF was inventing modern high-pressure chemistry on the fly. But Bosch was confident, creative and a brilliant engineer. There's a reason we now talk about the Haber-Bosch process. Bosch made significant contributions as he refined and enlarged the process. The work was often dangerous--test equipment frequently exploded. Nevertheless, in May 1911, construction began on the first factory. This was a remarkable breakthrough.The company was going to produce tons and tons of ammonia, enough to end German reliance on South American imports. And Germany was just the beginning. Every nation on earth would want to license the Haber-Bosch process. BASF would make a metric shit-ton of money. Beyond that, the world's food supply would be transformed. Carl Bosch was not an emotional man. But in his quiet, engineer-like way he was amazed at their accomplishment. Haber . . . not so much. He was more interested in using the discovery to propel his career. Announcement of the ammonia breakthrough brought him international acclaim. His financial situation was improving, thanks to his deal with BASF. And then Haber was invited to serve as the founding director of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, located just outside of Berlin. Walther Nernst could no longer look down his nose at Fritz Haber. Some of Haber's colleagues thought all the honors went to Haber's head. They mocked Haber's conviction that he might be summoned to meet the Kaiser at any minute and snickered when he was found practicing court etiquette in his office. The idea of further helping his nation intoxicated Haber, who became more patriotic by the day. He worked his way into government circles and became an advisor on scientific and technical matters . As Haber's star ascended his wife was fading. Clara hated moving to Berlin; she felt isolated there, especially since her husband was almost never home. It's hard to judge at this distance, but she seems to have been profoundly depressed. Haber found the atmosphere at home gloomy, so he avoided it. He joined a private club in Berlin that was a favorite of politicians and industrialists. There he met the club's business manager, a charming and beautiful young woman named Charlotte Nathan. Remember her name--she will be important later. Then on July 28, 1914 Archduke Ferninand was assasinated in Sarajevo, and the war everyone had both feared and longed for began. Haber immediately volunteered for service. The German military began the war confident they would be in Paris by October and home by Christmas. It was only when that dream died that the army began to look seriously at its supplies. The army believed it had stockpiled enough South American nitrates for about six month's worth of explosives. But it was clear that they had vastly underestimated both the length of the war and the firepower needed to fight it. By mid-autumn 1914, nitrate supplies were already running low. As predicted, no more nitrates would be arriving from South America, despite the German Navy's best efforts. The first major sea battle of World War I happened, at all places, off the coast of Chile on November 1, 1914. A squadron of German warships sank several old British vessels tasked with protecting nitrate sources. For a few weeks Germany was optimistic it could control the nitrate trade. But the German Navy was no match for the British, and on December 8 the German squadron was blown out of the water. That was the last time Germany got anywhere close to the South American nitrates. Haber had sniffed out the problem long before anyone in the government had dared voice it and one month into the war was trying to forestall a crisis. The solution was obvious. Convert the fertilizer factory into an explosives factory. This was a big ask. Even though the two chemicals are closely related, ammonia must go through a separate process to be converted into a nitrate. At the scale BASF operated, it would take months of work and millions of marks to reconfigure the factory. But in 1914 the needs of the military outweighed all other concerns. Plus, the government would pay whatever BASF asked. In May 1915, nitrates began flowing out of the plant. Now Germany could make as many explosives as it liked as long as it liked. Bosch wasn't particularly happy about it. He had liked the idea of making fertilizer to feed people. Now he was making explosives to blow them up. Haber didn't seem to mind at all. Bosch's headaches weren't over. The BASF factory was located in southwestern Germany, close enough to the French border to be within range of the first generation of military aircraft. The French began bombing the plant. Their efforts now seem primitive--at the beginning, crews just heaved small bombs out of a window--but they caused enough damage to be disruptive. Bosch convinced BASF to build a second, larger factory in eastern Germany, far out of the range of French bombers. It opened in April 1917. Haber devoted himself to war work. He was too old to serve in the troops and, as one biographer put it, quote "too Jewish to be an officially commissioned officer," unquote, since the military was bastion of antisemitism. But he could carry an honorary title, wear a uniform, and run his lab like a military unit. The discontented lack of focus that had characterized him before the war was replaced with cold- blooded focus. Haber was convinced that chemistry could lead Germany to victory. By the fall of 1914, it was obvious that the war had reached a stalemate. Haber believed the solution was poison gas. The idea of gas warfare wasn't new. The concept had been batted around for decades, and in 1899 the Hague Peace Conference had banned the use of quote "asphyxiating or deleterious gases." That didn't stop either the Germans or the French from experimenting with tear gas early in the war. Haber witnessed some of these tests, and he wasn't impressed. At best, the gas only irritated enemy soldiers. He began imagining a far more dangerous weapon, one that would not just incapacitate but kill. Fatalities were essential, because Haber's goal was to put enemies permanently out of action and terrify any that managed to survived. Haber envisioned a creeping fog that would sink into trenches and smother combatants. It would be silent and horrifying. The effect would be as much psychological as physiological, a fact that deeply satisfied Haber. Haber assembled a top-notch team of researchers that included three future Nobel laureates aside from himself. He settled on chlorine as his gas. Chlorine is slightly heavier than air, so it travels near the ground in a cloud, and it is highly toxic, causing vomiting, chest pain, damaged vision, skin blisters, lung damage, and death. The team decided that shells would cause the gas to disperse too much. Instead, they would fill canisters with the gas and position them along a stretch of No Man's Land. Here was the plan: On a day when the wind was blowing toward the enemy, German troops would open all of the canisters simultaneously. The gas would creep across the enemy line, and the Allied soldiers would either fall dead or retreat in a panic. Behind the cloud, German troops would advance. Next stop, Paris. Haber supervised numerous field tests, perfecting every element. These were perhaps the happiest days of his life. He was in uniform, he was working for the fatherland, and he was going to save Germany. Again. The tests were dangerous, but that was part of the thrill. One day Haber rode his horse too close to the gas cloud and nearly suffocated. And yet when Haber presented his system to military officials, they were ambivalent. Many argued that if Germany began using poison gas, the Allies would in turn employ gas on German troops. Haber dismissed this; if his weapon worked as he imagined, the war would be over before the Allies had time to respond. Another objection of military experts was more emotional, even sentimental. Fighting with a toxic gas seemed . . . unsporting. What about chivalry, some of them said? What about civilized warfare and a fair fight? Let us all now take a moment to appreciate the irony of this statement. Haber had no sympathy for such scruples. All that mattered was winning the war; the end justified the means. Besides, a quick victory would save countless lives. Poison gas would do the world a favor. The German High Command overcame its distaste as its casualties mounted. Authorities gave permission for Haber to mount an attack at Ypres at the western end of the front not far from the Channel coast. In March 1915, troops began placing gas canisters along the line, working at night to avoid detection. Then everyone waited for the weather to cooperate. The military had chosen a less than ideal location--the prevailing winds blew directly in the faces of the Germans. Day after day went by, and the wind continued to blow in exactly the wrong direction. Leadership began to lose faith in the project. If it could be halted by the wind, what good was it? Reserve troops had been brought in to reinforce the planned German assault, but they were desperately needed elsewhere and in dribs and drabs were sent away. Haber pleaded with the generals for patience. Finally, on April 22, the wind decided to cooperate. About 5:00 p.m., the canisters were opened and the greenish-yellowish gas spilled out and crept along the ground toward the enemy. Here's a description of what happened next, from the memoirs of a British officer: Quote. Dusk was falling when from the German trenches in front of the French line rose that strange green cloud of death. The light north-easterly breeze wafted it toward them, and in a moment death had them by the throat. One cannot blame them that they broke and fled. In the gathering dark of that awful night they fought with the terror, running blindly in the gas-cloud, and dropping with breasts heaving in agony and the slow poison of suffocation mantling their dark faces. Hundreds of them fell and died; others lay helpless . . . . They too would die later – a slow and lingering death of agony unspeakable. Unquote. Troops fled the front line in panic. Officers on horseback retreated at a full gallop. Enlisted men ran as fast they were able, their packs and rifles abandoned. A four-mile-wide hole had been ripped in the Allied line. About fifteen minutes after the canisters were opened, German troops advanced. They walked unhindered through a silent and surreal landscape. They moved forward several miles, and the way seemed open before them. But dark was falling, and the German troops were terrified of encountering the gas, for which they had no protection. Pockets of Allied resistance remained, especially Canadian troops positioned on the edges of the broken line. Firing picked up. The Germans dug in. That night was a blur of activity for the Allies, who regrouped and rushed in troops to fill the gap. By dawn, they were in position. They had taken an appalling blow. Roughly 15,000 Allied soldiers were wounded and 5000 dead. In comparison, about 200 German troops were treated for gas poisoning and only 12 died. Haber was ecstatic, and so was Kaiser Wilhelm. He ordered the scientist to appear at military headquarters. Haber finally got to practice his court etiquette when the emperor awarded him the Iron Cross. But the war had not been won. The German position at Ypres had improved, but only incrementally. It didn't take long for Haber's delight to sour. If the military had listened to him and been ready to take advantage of the opening his weapon had created, troops could now be marching into Paris. Meanwhile, the rest of the world united in outrage at the German gas assault. The commander of British forces, condemned the quote "cynical and barbarous disregard of the well-known usages of civilized war." unquote. Then he ordered immediate creation of a British chemical weapon program. Civilized war indeed. All across Europe, engineers scrambled to invent gas masks and gas weapons. Haber continued his chemical warfare program for the rest of the war. By 1917, he was running a team of 1500 people, including 150 scientists, all refining methods to exterminating their fellow humans. Similar programs were launched by every warring nation. Chemical weapons evolved rapidly. First was phosgene, introduced at almost the same time by Germany and France. A colorless gas that smells of new-mown hay, it asphyxiated victims. Then Germany and Britain both deployed mustard gas, a sulfur- based compound that smells of, yes, mustard. It causes excruciating blisters on the skin and in the lungs. Haber called it a, quote, "fabulous success." Oh. Haber was right about one thing: poison gas evoked horror among the troops. I think the best evocation of the terror of a gas attack is from the poet and soldier Wilfred Owen. Here is the actor Christopher Eccleston reciting from Owen's poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est:" POEM I've included a link to the entire reading on the website. Poison gas injured about 1.23 million combatants in the Great War and killed about 90 thousand. For context, total combatant deaths are estimated at 8.5 million. For some of those injured, the effects lasted the rest of their lives. Many soldiers were blinded or suffered permanent lung damage. Amongst so much death, the loss of one woman hardly registers. Shortly after the first gas attack at Ypres, Haber made a short trip home to Berlin, arriving in late April. His last night home, the night of May 1st, Clara Haber took her husband's army-issued revolver out to the garden and shot herself. The couple's son Hermann, then twelve years old, heard the shot and found her body. We don't know why Clara Haber took her own life. We have nothing to go on but rumor and supposition. However, many people believed at the time that Clara acted out of revulsion at her husband's work. One of Haber's colleagues claimed years later that Clara argued with her husband about the use of gas the night of her death and called his work a, quote, "perversion of science." Maybe. Another account claimed that Clara found her husband in a compromising embrace with Charlotte Nathan, the young woman who ran Haber's private club. Maybe. We simply don't know. We will never know. If she left a note, Haber destroyed it. He avoided ever after speaking of his wife's death. Haber returned to the front the very next day. This was what was required of him, a German officer in war time. It would have been more remarkable had he broken down. Six weeks after Clara's death, he wrote a friend, quote, For a month I doubted that I could keep going. But now the war . . . has made me calmer. . . . I have no time to look left or right, to reflect or sink into my own feelings. It really does me good, every few days, to be at the front, where the bullets fly. There, the only thing that counts is the moment. . . . But then it's back to command headquarters, chained to the telephone, and I hear in my heart the words that the poor woman once said, and, in a vision born of weariness, I see her head emerging from between orders and telegrams, and I suffer. I feel little sympathy for the suffering of Fritz Haber. I only wonder, what were the words that haunted him? What had Clara said? Whatever pain Haber experienced, it didn’t linger. By spring 1917, he was engaged to Charlotte Nathan. They married in October. Charlotte was twenty years younger than her husband, vivacious and full of life. Within a few weeks, she was pregnant. But, Haber remained a lousy husband. As overbearing as ever, he demanded Charlotte transform overnight into the perfect housewife. What is it with some people? Haber had presumably been attracted to Charlotte's high spirits, just as in years past he had been attracted to Clara's intelligence. So why did he demand they stamp out those exact qualities the moment he married them? Let's give some credit to Charlotte, who complained loudly and at length about Haber's extended absences and high-handed ways. Fritz was shocked, shocked that a woman known for speaking her mind spoke her mind. By the middle of 1918, Haber had worked himself into physical and mental collapse. His breakdown mirrored that of his nation. By the autumn of 1918, everything was falling apart. Haber wrote a friend: Quote "You know the feeling when you're on a snow-covered slope, sliding downward? You don't know until you get to the bottom whether you'll arrive with all of your limbs intact or with broken legs and neck. All you can do during the slide is stay calm." unquote Meanwhile, Carl Bosch had as much reason for a nervous breakdown and no time to have one. He had been running both BASF factories at full capacity, and every gram of nitrates went straight into explosives. This was a massive contribution to the war effort, far more significant to the outcome than poison gas. Without BASF, Germany would have run out of weapons, full stop. Without Haber-Bosch, World War I would have ended a year earlier, two years earlier, perhaps even three years earlier. Bosch was named one of the representatives to attend the Peace Conference in Paris. The Allies flatly informed him that they wanted both factories shut down. Bosch argued that BASF was already converting the plants back to fertilizer production to help feed the starving populations of Europe. His arguments were ignored. One night, Bosch snuck out of the hotel where the Germans had been housed behind barbed wire and armed guards. He made his way to a secret meeting with a representative of the French chemical industry. He played the only card he had available. He offered the French exclusive rights to the Haber-Bosch process and help constructing an ammonia factory in exchange for permission to keep both BASF factories running. Bosch single-handedly saved BASF. In the summer of 1919, the events I described at the start of the episode played out. Haber learned he might be tried for war crimes and fled to Switzerland. But then he returned to Berlin and, in November, was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize. One minor point: the war had disrupted the work of the Nobel committee. No prizes were awarded some years, and some prizes were awarded for previous years. So, Haber won the 1918 prize in 1919. Just go with it. Haber had been nominated several years running for his work on ammonia, so the Swedish Academy of Sciences could claim with a straight face that Haber was overdue the highest prize in chemistry. Nevertheless, the announcement prompted a howl of international fury. Two French Nobel winners refused to accept their prizes. It was bad enough that at the same time the Swedish committee had given two other prizes to Germans. But Haber's award was considered egregious. He had developed poison gas. A New York Tribune editorial declared, quote, "It is an offense to the humanitarian spirit to honor a man who helped to introduce this illicit weapon. . . . The Nobel Prize Fund was established to encourage humane intellectual effort and to promote progress in the civilizing arts and sciences. It is being misused when it rewards a scientist, whatever his work in other branches of his profession, who has aided in spreading death." Unquote. To be fair, the editorial is bit disingenuous. It states that, quote "no Allied government would have thought of adding this new terror to warfare," which is just . . . not true. But there was a lot of disingenousness going around. The Nobel Committee claimed to be interested only in recognizing scientific achievement. In fact, pro-German members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences were making a deliberate point of awarding prizes to German scientists. It was a political decision. I have scoured old newspapers for an account of the Nobel Prize ceremonies, held in June of 1920, and found nothing. I did come across a video on the website of the Nobel Prize. It is nothing much. Six scientific prize winners stand in a row, their wives in chairs in front of them. At the far left stands Fritz Haber. Charlotte sits in front him, dressed all in white and wearing a straw hat decorated with daisies. At first the group is stiff, obviously posing. But then they relax, smile and begin to speak to one another. Haber leans down to say something to his wife. He takes off his glasses and points to something in the distance. That's it. The video is only about 20 seconds long. I have watched it several times. I don't know what I expect it to tell me. That Fritz Haber wasn't a monster? Surely I knew that. And yet I watch it again and again. The Nobel Prize seems to have perked up Haber's spirits. Soon he was as busy as ever. He worked on gas insecticides to keep bugs out of grain stores. But secretly he began a new project. He had decided, again, to save Germany. Like most Germans, Haber had been appalled by the war debt imposed on the country in the Treaty of Versailles. The Allies had imposed reparations totalling 132 billion gold marks. Haber felt this was manifestly unjust. So he decided that he, Fritz Haber, would pay the reparations. Himself. This sounds bonkers. Because it was. Here’s the deal. Scientists have long known that the world's oceans contain trace amounts of dissolved minerals and metals, including gold. Haber had read an article some fifteen years earlier in which a chemist estimated that every ton of seawater contained about six milligrams of the precious metal. That is not much gold. But the world's oceans are really big. Haber was accustomed to thin margins. And hadn't he pulled another element out the air? Haber saw himself presenting the stunned Allies with stacks of gold bars, wiping out Germany's debt in one payment, and returning the nation to a sound financial footing. No one then would dare call him a war criminal. Haber estimated that he needed about fifty thousand tons of gold. That is a lot of gold. According to the World Gold Council, an organization I just now learned exists, slightly less 200,000 thousand tons of gold have been mined in all of human history. Well. Haber liked to think big. He swore a few colleagues to secrecy and they began work. Haber decided he needed to sample water from several different oceans, reasoning that some bodies of water might contain greater amounts of gold than others. This was going to be tricky. He would need to operate a specialized laboratory at sea, in secret. This kicked off one of the most bizarre episodes of Haber's career. In the summer of 1923, the ship Hansa departed Germany for New York carrying 932 passengers. Among the crew was a new paymaster, a genial balding man named Haber. He seemed to have little to do with the ship's finances but rather went about mysterious tasks with a few other crewmembers. Rumors circulated that the men were involved in secret tests of new ways to propel ships, or stop them in the water, or generate electricity from the water. Something like that. In fact, Haber had convinced the Hamburg-America Line to allow him to build a laboratory below decks and disguise himself and other scientists as part of the crew. They took water samples all along the route and isolated the minute amounts gold within. When Haber landed in New York, the press quickly discovered the Nobel Laureate for chemistry and inventor of poison gas had, for some reason, traveled to America as a ship's paymaster. Haber waved away questions and publicly visited several laboratories as a distraction; he raised a lot of eyebrows, but no one suspected what he was up to, because how would anyone guess anything as absurd as the truth? Haber returned home a worried man. There was much less gold in the water than he had expected--five hundred times less than he expected. No matter--he would try again. This time he sailed to Buenos Aires. Another bust. More voyages were taken by Haber and others, and samples assembled from around the world. Finally Haber had to admit the published estimates had been flat wrong. The average ton of seawater doesn't hold six milligrams of gold. It contains only about 0.01 milligrams. This is simply not enough to make extraction practical. It would cost far more to get the gold out of the water than the gold could ever be worth. In 1927 Haber shut down the program. Gone were his dreams of saving Germany singled-handed. He had wrung nitrogen from air, but even Haber could not extract gold from the sea. The next part of Haber's story takes us far beyond 1919, and so I will tell it quickly. Haber's world began collapsing not long after he shut down the gold program. First Charlotte divorced him, which served him right. Then the American stock market crash kicked off the global Great Depression. The Nazi Party began its climb to power by promising a return to German greatness. Adolf Hilter became chancellor in 1933. The antisemitism that had long tormented the nation was channeled into merciless laws. On April 7, 1933, Hitler issued an order removing all Jews from government service. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which received funding from the government, was included in the decree. Haber was handed a list of employees he would have to dismiss. He would be allowed to stay because he was a veteran, but on sufferance. The fact that Haber had converted to Christianity as a young man was irrelevant. He had been born a Jew, and to the Nazis, he remained a Jew. All of his hard work, his connections, his years of service to his nation, none of that mattered. I have been hard on Fritz Haber, and I don't think I've been unfair. But he was not a monster. He realized he couldn't stay while others were driven out. He could not give even tacit support to Nazi policies. On April 30, 1933, Haber resigned. He was a man dispossessed. Haber decided to accept a position in Cambridge and spent some time in England. But he had developed heart problems, and the least exertion exhausted him. He decided, in the winter of 1934 to travel to Switzerland for a stay at a health sanatorium. He died in Basel on January 29, 1934. Is it too fanciful to say Fritz Haber died of a broken heart? A few months earlier, he wrote a friend, quote, "I am bitter as never before, and the feeling that this is unbearable increases by the day. I was German to an extent that I feel fully only now." unquote. Haber's extreme patriotism was of his time. Far more rare was the attitude of Haber's friend Einstein, who despised German nationalism. Einstein had never understood Haber's passionate love of country, just as Haber had never understood Einstein's distate for it. But Einstein, already living in America, did understand Haber's delimma. He wrote his friend in May 1933, quote "I can imagine your inner conflicts. It is somewhat like having to abandon a theory on which you have worked for your whole life." unquote. There is a tragedy to the end of the life of Fritz Haber. It is not a tragedy on the scale of the war and the camps and the slaughter of millions. It is a very human-scale tragedy of a man who gave his soul to cause that proved unworthy. I find it . . . pitiful. Carl Bosch, meanwhile, had been awarded his own Nobel Prize in 1931 in belated recognition of his contributions to the Haber-Bosch process. But he struggled to reconcile his opposition to the Nazi regime with the interests of his company. He began drinking heavily. The BASF board feared he might say something embarrasing and removed him from authority. He fell into a deep depression and died in April 1940. BASF was absorbed into the German chemical conglomorate IG Farben and spent the war years producing fertilizer, nitrates, synthetic gasoline and synthetic rubber. The last two were particularly important, as they provided fuel for the Luftwaffe's planes and tires for the Army's trucks. Charlotte Nathan moved with her two children to Britain in 1936; they lived quiet and apparently happy lives. Hermann Haber and his family escaped war-torn Europe in 1940, ending up in Hoboken, New Jersey. Hermann seems to have inherited his mother's tendency toward depression; he took his own life in 1946. Poison gas remains a terror. It was banned in the Geneva Protocol in 1925. Nevertheless, all belligerent nations during World War II developed chemical weapons programs. Only Japan used these weapons, in its war against China. Do not think that the choice to hold back chemical weapons was a moral decision, although many leaders on both sides were revolted by gas. Mostly, each side wanted the other side to get the blame for using gas first. We all know, to our horror, that chemical weapons were used in Hitler's death camps. They have been employed many times since, for example in the Iran-Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, and often against civilian populations. Around the globe, factories are at this moment pumping out tons of synthetic fertilizer using the Haber-Bosch process. In 2019 these plants produced 235 million metric tons of ammonia. All of this fertilizer has fed the planet--that is not in question. Famine still strikes some countries. But hunger is caused by problems with food distribution, not food availability. Yemen, for example, has been in a state of famine since 2016--because Saudi Arabia has blocked imports of food and targeted means of food production. I will restate what I told you at the start of this episode. The current global population is about 7.5 billion people. Without synthetic fertilizer, the planet could feed only about 3.8 billion. So just under half of the people on earth are alive today because of the Haber-Bosch process. That's mind-boggling. Furthermore, people eat much better than they would have without Haber-Bosch. Consider China. China was one of the last nations to get Haber-Bosch plants, and the country had a devastataing famine between 1959 and 1961 in which tens of millions of people died. Conditions improved by the early 1970s, but still most cities rationed food, only the rich ate meat, and most people subsisted on rice with a few vegetables. When Richard Nixon went to China 1972, the country signed a deal to build thirteen Haber-Bosch plants. Within a few years, agricultural production soared. I am oversimplifying a very complicated situation--both the famine and the recovery had multiple causes. My point is that that most people would likely eat like the Chinese in the early 1970s without Haber-Bosch. Synthetic fertilizer allows for enormous quantities and varieties of grains, fruits and vegetables. It supports the massive livestock industry, since we grow enough plants to feed not only ourselves but also cows, pigs, and chickens. But. There's always a but. This process is not without cost. The industry is worth about $100 billion annually, although that $100 billion makes a lot of ammonia. In 2020, you could buy a ton of ammonia for about $500. No, the real cost is the amount of energy used in production. About 1 percent of the world's total energy consumption is dedicated to ammonia production. Furthermore, the industry's carbon footprint is huge, with Haber-Bosch plants pumping out about 451 million tons of carbon dioxide annually--also about one percent of worldwide totals. And then there's the fact that we are conducting an uncontrolled worldwide experiment on our ecosystem. We are pumping nitrogen into the environment, and we're not sure what that will mean long term. Some consequences are easy to see. A significant amount of fertilizer dumped onto fields ends up in our groundwater, streams, and lakes. The level of nitrates in the Mississippi is four times what it was in 1900. Levels in the Rhine are double those in Mississippi. These nitrates fuel blooms of algae and massive growths of weeds that pull oxygen out of the water and cause die-offs of fish, shellfish and mollusks. When nitrates hit the ocean, algae and aquatic plants go into overdrive. Animal life suffocates, and the entire system goes haywire. Nitrate levels of the Gulf of Mexico have more than doubled in the past 40 years. The result is a Dead Zone off the coast of Louisiana that can cover up to 7000 square miles. These are just the results we know about it. What does it mean, long term, to change the chemical balance of the planet? We have no idea. Science writer Charles C. Mann said in his book The Wizard and the Prophet, quote, "Were it not for climate change, the spread of nitrogen's empire would be our biggest ecological worry." unquote. Scientists are working on all of these problems. We got into this, maybe we're smart enough to get out. For now, we're alive, thanks to Haber-Bosch. Which brings us to the question, how do we . . . reconcile Fritz Haber? A man who deserves at least a tiny bit of credit for keeping us alive? In my opinion--and you may disagree--we owe Fritz Haber nothing. He was a lousy human being who happened to do some important work. He wasn't driven by the thought of feeding future generations but by ego, greed and nationalism. He liked the idea of feeding Germany, but I suspect the rest of the globe could have starved to death and he wouldn't have batted an eye. Of course, it doesn't matter what I think of Fritz Haber. He certainly wouldn't have wasted any thought on me. All Haber really cared about was himself and Germany. And of course that's the final irony. The nation he loved didn't give a damn about him. While we're dealing with ironies, let me introduce a last one. I mentioned in passing that immediately after World War I, Haber and his team at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute worked on developing insecticides to keep bugs out of grain stores. One of the chemicals they produced was a cyanide-based gas called Zyklon A. The primary inventor of Zyklon A ended up moving to another research institute and eventually developed a new version of the insecticide called Zyklon B. It was used to wipe out insect infestations in grain mills. And then the Nazis came along and rounded up Jews, Romani, homosexuals and other people they considered undesirable. Hitler called for a Final Solution. And so it was that some 1.1 million people were poisoned by Zyklon B in the gas chambers. Among them were members of Fritz Haber's own family. Thank you so much for listening to The Year That Was. I'm so glad to be back at it, and I'm already working on my next episode. It will also be about science in 1919, and I am so happy that the scientist I will be telling you about could not be a greater constrast to Fritz Haber. Arthur Eddington was a genuinely good human being. Look for that episode in about two weeks. I want to thank my husband, Chris McAdams, for his help drafting and reviewing the script. Chris last provided critical baseball information in the Black Sox episode, and this week his Ph.D. in chemistry came in really handy. Thank you, and happy birthday, babe. I also want to thank Maggie S, Laura L. and Laura B, three amazing sponsors who continued to send me money even when the content stopped flowing. Oh my gosh, y'all. It's a really wonderful thing you've done, and while I feel . . . really, really guilty about not fulfilling my end of the bargain, I am so grateful for your faith in my and hope I can make it up to you with some great stories. Check out the website at www.theyearthatwaspodcast.com for links to sources and photos and other good stuff. Thank you again for listening. This is The Year That Was.