(Note: The following article was the second one I posted on Substack. Since I only had a handful of subscribers then, hardly anyone read it. I thought it deserved more reads so I’m posting it again. It’s not about nutrition or health, though, but it is an example of the type of writing I’d like to periodically include here on my Substack page, assuming you, the reader, are amenable. Maybe let me know in the comments section?)
I first heard the following story on NPR's Radiolab ("The Bad Show") several years ago, but I've never forgotten it. It's about science and innovation, but it's also about warfare, death, ambition, patriotism, and most prominently the dualistic nature of man. In its totality, the story asks the question, can any man be labeled "good" or "evil," or are we all a baffling mixture of the two? And if it's only the totally good who deserve our admiration, just how many figures of history do we have to cancel out?
Let me put this as succinctly as I can -- you probably owe your very existence to Fritz Haber. Quite possibly, everyone you know owes their very existence to Fritz Haber.
Given that, you'd think there'd be pigeon-shit covered statues of the man all over the place. You'd think that at least one out of every ten kids in the world would have gone to a Fritz Haber Elementary School, but no, hardly anybody outside of a few scientists have ever heard of him.
The only way he's acknowledged today at all is by the chemical process that bears his name, the one he invented that made it possible for earth to support its 7.7 billion people.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised by his virtual anonymity, though. While Haber ultimately saved millions or even billions of lives and won the Nobel Prize, he was also directly responsible for the horrible, inhumane deaths of thousands while also playing a role in the nightmarish murder of millions of others.
That kind of thing understandably leaves statue makers and elementary school namers kinda’ conflicted -- hence the dearth of monuments or reminders of any kind about Fritz Haber.
So, who was Fritz Haber and what exactly did he do?
The Good: Making Bread from Air
The story begins in Germany during the first few years of the 20th century where Fritz Haber was a professor of chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe. In some of his pictures, he looks a lot like Mr. Evil from the Austin Powers movie, albeit with a scrub-brush moustache and a pair of those funky pince-nez glasses that lack earpieces and clip directly onto the nose.
While Haber was Jewish (but later converted to Lutheranism for career purposes), this was a time before the meteoric rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and there were no restrictions on what a Jewish man wanted to do or accomplish. Haber was also a fierce patriot committed to solving Germany's grim math problem: A population of about 50 million with only enough food to feed 30 million.
What his country – along with most of the countries in the world -- was lacking was fertilizer, specifically nitrogen. The main source of it was bird shit and bat shit, known more formally as guano and it was to the world back then what oil is to the world today.
But it was hard to find enough guano to grow the food they needed. The logistics were nightmarish. Most of it came from islands off Peru that were lousy with seagulls, but the seagulls couldn't shit enough to keep up with mankind’s demands and supplies were nearing depletion.
Consequently, finding alternate sources of nitrogen was a big priority but it was made all the more frustrating because the element, while so damn abundant, was simultaneously inaccessible. Even though nitrogen makes up about 80% of the air we breathe, every nitrogen atom is triple bonded to another nitrogen atom to form molecular nitrogen, N2. Suffice it to say that that triple bond is really strong and hard to break.
It might as well have been on the bottom of the ocean, or on the moon.
But Haber figures it out. He forces large amounts of air into an iron tank and exposes it to high temperature and high pressure, which crowbars the nitrogen bonds apart, thereby allowing it to bond with hydrogen. What results is a steady drip of ammonia, which can then be used to make ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
The Haber Process, as he names it, makes "bread from air." It changes everything. It allows countries to feed their burgeoning populations. It allows the population of the world to grow from approximately 1.5 billion to the current 7.7 billion.
The process is still used today and it's responsible for producing roughly 50% of the nitrogen in your body. You can also make an argument that had it not been invented when it was, it could have cancelled out a good portion of your ancestry. Without sufficient food, your great-great-great grandfather Mordecai or grandmother Tooty could have died before they had a chance to procreate, thus throwing a troublesome monkey wrench into your cosmic journey.
Existential arguments aside, Fritz Haber goes on to win the Nobel Prize in 1918. It's extremely controversial, though, because by that time he's also considered to be an unrepentant war criminal of the worst kind.
The Bad: From Savior of the World to War Criminal
After inventing the process that bears his name, Haber, quite predictably, becomes a hero, particularly among his countrymen. He gets promoted and is given the reins to a scientific institute in Berlin. He starts getting invited to parties and events. He meets with cabinet members and even the Emperor.
But then World War I starts. Haber, being patriotic, signs up immediately. He also offers his superiors a pretty significant by-the-way, as in "By the way, you know the energy it takes to separate the nitrogen bonds to make ammonia? Well, when the nitrogen atoms are brought back together again, they release all that energy, making a very big kaboom!"
In other words, he lets them know that the Haber Process can be used to create bombs. That gets him a bunch of atta-boys from Command, but that's not what gets him labeled a war criminal. No, not by a long shot.
Haber had been thinking about solving a particular problem that was endemic to the war: trench warfare. Soldiers from opposite sides would dig long, well-fortified trenches that were protected from small arms fire and artillery. Because the soldiers were so well protected, nothing much happened.
The two sides would sit there for days or weeks cultivating their trench mouth and various fungal infections while waiting for some sort of headway, but shy of a suicide rush across an open battlefield, progress stalled.
Haber, however, wants to grease the wheel. He wants to drive the enemy out of their trenches with poison gas. At first, the generals were skeptical. They considered it to be cheating; you know, unsportsmanlike.
Haber poo-poos them. He organizes soldiers into gas units, takes command of them, and ushers them to the front, which happens to be near a small town in France named Ypres. It's close to 6:00 PM on April 22nd, 1915, and Haber, wearing his pince-nez glasses, a fur coat, and chomping on a cigar, commands his gas units to open the valves of close to 6,000 tanks that contain 150 tons of chlorine gas.
A 15-foot-tall, greenish wall wafts towards the British, French, and Canadian troops at a rate of about a yard a second. As it moves across the landscape, leaves wither. The grass turns a metallic grey. Birds fall out of the sky.
As soon as it hits the Allied side, the soldiers start to convulse. Their throats start burning and the alveoli in their lungs begin bursting. The inflammatory reaction is fierce and quick. Lungs begin to fill with fluid and phlegm. Yellow mucus pours out of the soldiers' mouths and their skin turns blue. They are, in effect, drowning -- not from water but a fiery combination of chlorine, mucus, and spittle. Hundreds die.
Haber is delighted with his success. The initially reluctant Commanders, the ones who thought gas warfare was unsportsmanlike, promoted him to the rank of Captain.
However, not everyone was happy with him.
Death in the Garden
After his great "victory," Haber goes home for a few days where he's greeted by his wife, Clara Immerwahr. Clara was a bit of an anomaly as she was also a chemist, one of the few women in Germany at the time to be awarded a PhD. She was also a women's rights activist and a pacifist.
Predictably, she's appalled by what her husband has done. She tells him that he's morally bankrupt; that he can't keep doing this. Haber, probably still giddy from his perceived successes, ignores her. It's even said he threw a dinner party for himself where he divulged to his wife and friends that he was leaving the very next morning to direct more gas attacks.
Later, after the guests leave, Fritz and Clara have an explosive argument, but Haber is undeterred. He takes some sleeping pills and goes to bed. Clara, in turn, takes Haber's service revolver, walks outside to the garden, and shoots herself in the chest to protest his actions. The couple's 12-year-old son, Herman, finds her there, just as her last breaths are leaving her.
No one knows the specifics of what happened immediately afterwards or even whether Haber felt any remorse at all. We do know, however, that he left for the front the next day to continue his monstrous mission, leaving his young son alone with his dead mother.
A Terrible, Terrible Irony
While chlorine gas only accounted for about 1% of the deaths in World War I (it was introduced too late to take full advantage of it), its "psy-ops," or fear factor, was considerable -- the Allies were constantly afraid of being gassed.
Nevertheless, Germany of course lost the war, agreeing during the surrender negotiations to pay huge war reparations, a fact that Haber took personally. He tried to invent a process through which he could extract gold from seawater so he could single-handedly pay off Germany's debts.
I don't need to tell you that he failed, but that personal disappointment paled in comparison to what happened in 1933 when Hitler achieved power. One of Hitler's first acts was to declare that Jews weren't allowed in the civil service. Haber was exempt, though, because he served in WWI, but 75% of the people who worked for him were Jewish and had to be dismissed.
Haber resigns in protest. He leaves Germany for England where he flounders, a man without a country. His health begins failing and in 1934, on the way to a sanatorium in Switzerland, his heart gives out and he dies.
That's not the end of the story, though. Something strange, terrible, and ironic happens soon after Haber's death. If this were a cinematic Citizen Kane-ish take on Haber's life, the camera would pan to another one of Haber's inventions on a dusty shelf, another nitrogen compound that his institute developed during WWI.
It was an insecticide, one that was given a particular smell to warn people not to inadvertently breathe it. Haber's institute named it Zyklon. A few years later, when the Nazis took over, they dusted off Haber's insecticide and repurposed it. They removed the warning scent and gave it a new name: Zyklon B.
The scentless gas was then used to kill Jews in gas vans or in stationary gas chambers. Along with the millions of Jews who died from Haber's gas were no doubt extended member of his family and many of his friends.
How Do We Judge Fritz Haber?
Haber, while saving millions of lives and making the lives of billions of others possible, deliberately invented a method to kill thousands of others and inadvertently invented a chemical that killed millions of his fellow Jews. He also exhibited breathtaking callousness towards his wife and son.
How then, should we judge him? Was he a hero or a terrible war criminal? A good person or an evil schmuck?
Obviously, the use of one of his inventions by the Nazis to kill his fellow Jews was inadvertent and most arbiters of morality would give him a pass on that, but did the overall good he accomplished outweigh the overall bad?
Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the hosts of the Radiolab segment where I first heard the story of Fritz Haber, had differing opinions. Abumrad thought that if you looked at the "grand calculus" of people Haber helped or fed versus people he killed, Haber comes off as being a "little good."
Krulwich can't get over the "pushing of gas into the lungs" of other beings and walking away from his dead wife and his traumatized son, but ultimately, both hosts reluctantly agree that they could/should divorce the man from his deeds and that the world was better with him than without him.
Me? I don't look at him as good or evil. To take the measure of a man, you have to look at his motivations, and Haber didn't have a devil on one shoulder and a better angel on the other, both vying for his attention. From what I see, everything Haber did was a bid for fame, or more accurately, something fame provides, which is approval.
Quite simply, he wanted to be admired, accepted, and respected. He didn't have the requisite self worth needed to become an evolved, actualized human being, so he needed others to verify his worth. Developing fertilizer to feed the masses earned him approval, but the emotionally evolved rationale for developing it would have been a desire to ease the suffering of mankind.
But we can guess that the easing of suffering probably wasn't his primary motivation, not when he was so eager to wage chemical warfare and was so unresponsive to the horror his actions inflicted on his wife and son.
Waging chemical warfare earned him approval; not developing it would have earned his wife's approval, but the approval of one person, even one who presumably loved him, was a meager meal. He needed a feast.
Regardless, I'm tired of debating whether any historical figure or current personality is good or evil, whether their works or achievements should be dismissed because their "grand calculus" didn't measure up.
If we don't separate the achievements or works of men and their perceived morality, very few of us, aside from traditional paragons of virtue like Jesus, Gautama Buddha, or Lao Tzu would pass muster.
How many of history's icons will bear up to our scrutiny if we start digging around? How many literary works, pieces of art, or accomplishments in general will have to be flushed down the judgmental toilet if the moral math doesn't add up?
The beloved Charles Dickens, author of the tear-jerker “Christmas Carol” and other hugely empathetic novels, tried to have his perfectly sane wife committed to an asylum so he could pursue another woman. Abraham Lincoln initially had no interest in integrating slaves into American society; he wanted to send them back to Africa. Do we cancel both of those gentlemen?
How about the opposite situation, when someone famous for being evil displays a good side? Hitler liked animals and instituted a slew of animal rights legislation. Does that give him a pass?
The list of contradictory behavior among famous people is inexhaustible and, for the most part, maddening and futile.
I'll appreciate Haber's "bread making" discovery without weighing it against his other actions. Likewise, I'll continue to respect other various great accomplishments throughout history and continue to read books, listen to songs or comedy routines, or, in general, appreciate the art of people whose moral compasses occasionally pointed south.
##
Heya,
Looking into the abyss, one always wonders what horrors you will see, possibly yourself? Thought provoking, the dichotomy is stark, and appreciated, given many of today's issues.
Something to ponder this weekend, hope your vacation was refreshing and revitalizing.
Take care.
Enjoyed the article TC. Also thanks for the “Walmart jockey…” jokes, a month ago. I had surgery (lots of ab insult) and needed a chuckle but I had to actually take it in tiny doses for fear of too much ab contraction. I look forward to your thoughts in general and this one on Haber allowed more threads to be woven into your stories. Taking on the complexity of humans reflects a compassionate reality, more difficult but worthy. Thanks TC. Your Surrey BC fan.