The Pale Death: Poison Gas and German Racial Exceptionalism, 1915–1945

In April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Liebig’s Law and Haber’s Tragedy

The fertilizers commonly used by gardeners have many ingredients, but the biggest two are nitrogen and phosphorus, either of which can limit plant and algal growth. The idea that only one nutrient limits growth is encapsulated by Liebig’s Law of the Minimum, named after Justus von Liebig, a 19th-century German chemist. Liebig is also called the “father of fertilizer” because of his work on formulating and promulgating commercial fertilizers. However, he wasn’t the first to discover the Law, and he was wrong about the most important ingredient of fertilizers. This chapter outlines the arguments among limnologists, oceanographers, and geochemists about whether nitrogen or phosphorus sets the rate of algal growth and thus production of the organic material that drives oxygen depletion. The chapter discusses that the limiting nutrient varies with the type of aquatic habitat. In dead zones like the Gulf of Mexico, parts of the Baltic Sea, and Chesapeake Bay, bioassay experiments have shown that nitrogen is usually limiting. The nitrogen necessary for fertilizer and ammunitions comes from the Haber-Bosch process. The chapter reviews the life of one of the two German inventors, Fritz Haber, and how it was full of contradictions if not tragedy.

A VISITA DE FRITZ HABER AO BRASIL

FRITZ HABER VISIT TO BRAZIL. Fritz Haber was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for the ammonia synthesis from its gaseous components. This work was fundamental to stop starvation around the world. On the opposite, his engagement to produce chemical weapons during the First World War is also an important fact in the life of this scientist. This polemic scientist visited Brazil in 1923, carrying out a project to extract gold from the sea. The present work tries to recover the historical fact behind the visit of this scientist to Brazil.

Nitrogen Fixation before Haber

Much has been written about the German chemist Fritz Haber (1868-1934), who embodies at once the best and the worst that chemistry has offered to humankind. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry a century ago (1918) “for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements,” an industrial process that led to the pervasive use of nitrogen-based fertilizers in agriculture and enabled the unprecedented population growth experienced in the world ever since. On the other hand, Haber is often considered the “father of chemical warfare” for his role in the development and deployment of chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. This note, however, is not about Haber’s legacy but pays tribute instead to two resourceful Norwegians who preceded him in the quest for converting atmospheric nitrogen into more reactive, bioavailable forms of the element.