You may have never heard of German chemist
Fritz Haber, but there is a 50% chance that you owe your own existence to this man’s
invention. The process he designed to convert atmospheric
nitrogen into ammonia made it possible to produce fertilizers on a large scale, ensuring
much more plentiful harvests than ever before in the history of mankind and therefore saving
billions of people from starvation. It is estimated that the food base of half
of the current World population is based on his Haber-Bosch process. This achievement granted Dr Haber the highest
of accolades, the Nobel Prize for chemistry, in 1918. And yet, there is a darker side to this benefactor
of humanity. A story of family abuse, suicide, blind loyalty
taken to the extreme and the first ever use of weapons of mass destruction on a battlefield. This is the story of how Fritz Haber, the
man who ended famine, became the father of chemical warfare. This is the story of how Fritz Haber, the
Jewish scientist, unwittingly created the ultimate weapon that brought about the Holocaust. The life of Fritz Haber has been described
as worthy of a Greek tragic hero, featuring from its very first years all the ingredients
of a Classic tragedy: father and son relationship conflict, the early shadow of death, hubris. And explosives. Fritz Haber was born on December the 9th,
1868, in Breslau, Prussia, now Wroclaw in Poland. His parents, Siegfried and Paula, were both
members of a wealthy Jewish family, well established in the area since the early 1800s. To be more precise, they were members of the
same family: they were in fact first cousins who had married against the will of their
relatives. Haber’s life had barely started when it
was already struck by tragedy: his mother died from complications only three weeks after
childbirth. His father Siegfried was devastated, leaving
Fritz in the care of relatives. As a consequence, the two grew cold and distant,
and their relationship never recovered. When his son was six, Siegfried remarried
and had three daughters, Else, Helene and Frieda, with whom Fritz actually got along
well. But the life of Fritz was to be shaped by
his own ambitions, rather than his family’s influence: the ambition to master science
from an early age and the ambition to prove that he was first a German, then a Jew, ready
to serve his Kaiser and his recently unified fatherland. After completing high school in 1886, Fritz
declined an offer to become an apprentice at his father’s dye company. The two men frequently clashed and simply
could not work together. Instead, Fritz applied to study chemistry
in Berlin, earning his doctorate cum laude in 1891. Having achieved a doctorate in less than five
years was already impressive enough – moreover, Fritz had to interrupt his studies for one
year of compulsory military service in an artillery regiment. This was to be his first experience with the
explosive power of modern warfare.
