Master Mind Read online

  Master Mind

  The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber,

  the Nobel Laureate Who Launched

  the Age of Chemical Warfare

  Daniel Charles

  To my parents

  “At the end, he was forced to experience all the bitterness of being abandoned by the people of his circle, a circle that mattered very much to him, even though he recognized its dubious acts of violence…. It was the tragedy of the German Jew: the tragedy of unrequited love.”

  —Albert Einstein, in a letter about Fritz Haber

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Preface

  One

  Young Fritz

  Two

  Diversions and Conversion

  Three

  Ambition

  Four

  Clara

  Five

  The Enthusiast

  Six

  Fixation

  Seven

  Myths and Miracles

  Eight

  Empire Calls

  Nine

  “The Greatest Period of His Life”

  Ten

  Like Fire in the Hands of Children

  Eleven

  Dispossession

  Twelve

  Requiem

  Thirteen

  The Heirs

  Fourteen

  Lessons Learned

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Daniel Charles

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  IT’S POSSIBLE to walk in Fritz Haber’s footsteps without knowing it, for the trail is rarely marked. Twenty-five years ago, as a teenager, I wandered occasionally through the courtyards of the university in Karlsruhe, Germany, where Fritz Haber first achieved fame. No statue marked his accomplishments. A few times, I rode streetcars past the hotel in Basel, Switzerland, where he died. There, too, one finds no marker.

  In 1989, a month after Berlin’s wall crumbled, I spent a few weeks in a disappearing country called East Germany, writing about the country’s various environmental disasters. I ended up standing in the darkness on a hill near the town of Leuna, staring at distant flames that consumed exhaust gas from a chemical plant that stretched for miles across the landscape. I had no idea that this factory, the Leuna-Werke, was the fruit of Haber’s labors; that it had been Germany’s primary source of both munitions and fertilizer during World War I.

  Eight years later, I visited the institute in Berlin that once was Fritz Haber’s fiefdom. Since 1952, it has borne his name: The Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society. I never asked who Fritz Haber was while I was there, and no one bothered to tell me. The name is mildly controversial at the institute; occasionally someone suggests that it be changed.

  In the fall of 2001, the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks waved Fritz Haber’s name in front of me with a passion that I could no longer ignore. Sacks was promoting Uncle Tungsten, a book about his boyhood love of chemistry. This cheerful book arrived in bookstores during a dark and fearful time, immediately after the attacks of September 11 and the mysterious release of deadly anthrax spores in Florida, New York, and Washington, D.C. Naturally, an interviewer at National Public Radio asked Sacks about the ominous side of science, its power to kill and terrify. And Sacks started talking about Fritz Haber, a man who embodied the capacity of science to nourish life and destroy it.

  Intrigued, I began to trace the path of Haber’s life. At every turn, it led to places that were already familiar, from Karlsruhe to Berlin. And I soon realized that the legacy of this forgotten scientist was present in every day’s newspaper headlines and in every bite of food.

  Actually, Fritz Haber’s name wasn’t so much forgotten as it was driven from view. Haber died homeless in 1934, an exile from the Nazis, his name suppressed in his homeland. Later generations, both in Germany and abroad, preferred to ignore his memory.

  The reason, I suspect, is that he fits no convenient category. Haber was both hero and villain; a Jew who was also a German patriot; a victim of the Nazis who was accused of war crimes himself. Unwilling to admire him, unable to condemn him, most people found it easier to look away.

  Yet while Haber’s name disappeared from view, the shadow of his work continued to grow.

  Haber was the patron saint of guns and butter. He was a founder of the military-industrial complex and the inventor of the chemistry through which the world now feeds itself.

  The Leuna Works were torn down in the early 1990s, after German unification, but a hundred factories around the world have sprouted in their place. These chemical behemoths throb with the energy of a chemical reaction first mastered by Fritz Haber, then replicated on an industrial scale by Carl Bosch.

  The “Haber-Bosch process,” churning out fertilizer, powers a global green revolution. It has liberated food production from the most important limits once set by nature—the limits of the soil’s fertility.

  The reason, in a word, is nitrogen. When we eat meat, bread, or anything containing protein, we consume nitrogen. That nitrogen comes from plants—wheat, corn, or rye—that extract it from the earth. But the earth has to be fed, too, and nature cannot on its own supply enough nitrogen to grow the food that six billion people on earth expect to eat.

  Haber’s process is a source of limitless nitrogen. It takes nitrogen from the air—which consists mostly of an indigestible form of nitrogen that plants can’t use—and links it to hydrogen, “fixing” it in the form of ammonia. Ammonia is plant food, the most potent form of nitrogen fertilizer, though it’s often converted into other forms that farmers can handle more easily.

  Today, about half of all the nitrogen consumed by all the world’s crops each year comes not from natural sources such as bacteria in the soil, but from ammonia factories employing the Haber-Bosch process. It has become an essential pillar of life on earth, a fountain that feeds its growing population. According to the most careful estimates, some two billion people who live on our planet today, mainly in Asia, could not survive in the absence of Fritz Haber’s invention.

  Hand in hand with the promise of plentiful food comes the other piece of Haber’s legacy, the interweaving of science and military power. Before Fritz Haber, science and war-fighting stood at arm’s length from each other. Military commanders were happy to take advantage of any technological innovation that industry or inventors might deliver—aircraft, tougher steel, steam turbines for driving ships—but the military did not run its own laboratories, and scientists did not carry new weapons into battle. As Haber once described the situation: “In the house of the German Empire, the general, the scholar, and the technologist all lived under the same roof. They greeted each other on the stairs. But there was never a fruitful exchange of ideas.” The same was true in other countries.

  The First World War—and Fritz Haber, the scientist-warrior—linked those worlds together more intimately than ever before. Scientists on both sides of the Atlantic created tools of warfare, but none had a greater impact than Fritz Haber. His ammonia-making process kept Germany fighting; it was Germany’s main source of nitrogen, which was essential for making explosives. Haber’s most notorious accomplishment, however, was the invention of a new form of warfare, as he personally directed the deployment of poisonous gas against Germany’s enemies.

  What began during World War I came to full fruition a few decades later, after Haber’s death. Looking at pictures of Haber’s institute in 1918, a fenced military compound employing hundreds of scientists and thousands of employees, one feels a premonition of the nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos, of secret cities in Russia, and scientific compounds tu
cked away in every other nation that lusts after the ultimate weapons of its time.

  When the American military roars into battle today, airmen in supersonic jets release bombs that fly toward their targets on the wings of radio signals from orbiting satellites. Pictures of the scene arrive at my computer courtesy of the Internet, conceived and originally developed by military-funded scientists. Every part of this scene—the aircraft, the pilot, the missiles, satellites, and computer networks—represents one small piece of a scientific and military juggernaut that follows a path blazed by Fritz Haber.

  Whenever Fritz Haber entered a room, his hand clenching a cigar, his bald head erect, his voice booming, he claimed the spotlight. He moved among scientific giants—Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, James Franck, Max von Laue, Lise Meitner, and Otto Hahn—and he seemed the most vital force of them all.

  Einstein and Bohr looked more deeply into nature’s mysteries than Haber; Planck possessed more mental stamina. But none could match the speed of Haber’s mental reflexes or the force of his words. Haber was an intellectual gunslinger. While others, confronted with any new idea, struggled to arrange their thoughts into logical order, Haber unleashed quick volleys of criticism and advice.

  He was extravagant, impetuous, and occasionally pompous. His conversations disregarded all limits of topic or time. He loved an audience and worked out his ideas by talking aloud. But when his audience left, the internal fires subsided. In private, Haber struggled with doubts and insecurities. He was often anxious, sometimes depressed, always restless.

  Lise Meitner, the codiscoverer of nuclear fission and an equally keen observer of human nature, was struck by the contrast between Haber and another prominent member of Berlin’s scientific establishment, Adolf von Harnack. Harnack, she wrote, possessed an inner stability that made him seem remote and detached. Haber was the opposite, “divided within himself, and extremely passionate, which as you can imagine sometimes made things difficult for himself and for others…. His spontaneous reactions could be very violent and not always objective. But in the long run his generosity and reason always triumphed.”

  Science alone wasn’t enough for Haber. He needed to do, change, create. He moved confidently between laboratory, factory, and battlefield. And wherever he went, his antennae responded to the desires of those around him. Like a boat’s taut sail filled with wind, Haber absorbed the energy of his times and converted it into motion.

  In any recounting of Fritz Haber’s life, the Holocaust stands in the shadows, just out of sight. We know what’s coming, but Fritz Haber doesn’t.

  With our gift of hindsight, many of Fritz Haber’s passions and choices—especially his devotion to Germany—seem foolish and shortsighted. One aspect of his work seems downright macabre.

  During the years immediately following World War I, Haber oversaw the research that led to the insecticide called Zyklon, then its successor, Zyklon B. A decade after his death, the SS ordered tons of that poison for the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Among those who died in those gas chambers were Haber’s own relatives.

  Despite all that, it’s worth repeating the obvious: During the years when Fritz Haber climbed toward fame and fortune, the Holocaust was still unimaginable, and it was not inevitable. Haber’s Germany was a nation with the same potential for good and evil as any other, unburdened by any particular load of guilt. He lived in an era of globalization, imperial rivalries, and breathtaking technological change. His life takes place, in other words, within surroundings that look surprisingly familiar to a twenty-first-century reader. And the moral choices that he confronted during his life were not so different from those that we face today.

  Haber lived the life of a modern Faust, willing to serve any master who could further his passion for knowledge and progress. He was not an evil man. His defining traits—loyalty, intelligence, generosity, industry, and creativity—are as prized today as they were during his lifetime. His goals were conventional ones: to solve problems, prosper, and serve his country. And this is what makes his story tragic, for those goals, however familiar and defensible, led down twisting paths toward destruction.

  ONE

  Young Fritz

  He was a patriot, even more extreme than I was. He was thirteen years older. The influence of time and surroundings can’t be denied.

  —Nobel laureate James Franck,

  speaking about Fritz Haber in 1958

  RAISE A BLOODY CURTAIN on the year 1871. German armies encircle and capture tens of thousands of French soldiers along the border with Belgium. Napoleon III, emperor of France, surrenders. Princes from Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and many other German states gather in the court of their enemy, at the palace of Versailles near Paris. They proclaim Prussia’s King Wilhelm I emperor of a new German Reich. Germany unites; a popular dream is fulfilled. A fever of exultation sweeps the nation.

  A few pessimistic voices—a tiny minority—warn of perils to come. Friedrich Nietzsche, still a young professor of classical languages, writes sourly of the “evil and perilous consequences” of wars, especially ones that have ended in victory. He complains about the delusion that German culture and civilization have triumphed, rather than simply its weapons; this delusion, he warns, was likely to lead to “the extirpation of the German spirit for the benefit of the German empire.”

  In the Prussian city of Breslau, a young boy bravely faces the camera, perhaps for the first time. He appears to be three or four years old. He wears his finest clothes for this portrait, and fine clothes they are. The buttons on his jacket march upward toward his neck; his hair is neatly parted and combed. He stands stiffly, left hand supporting himself on the seat of an elaborately carved chair that’s just a bit taller than he is. His right hand holds the barrel of a toy gun.

  The boy carries the name Fritz, the most German of names. It recalls “old Fritz,” Frederick the Great, Prussian leader of the previous century.

  This Fritz, however, does not appear triumphant. He looks sad and a little bit lost. His eyes are anxious. This is a picture of a motherless child.

  Fritz Haber was born into a large and tightly knit Jewish clan. His parents, Paula and Siegfried, were cousins. When Paula and Siegfried were young, their families had even lived in the same house for a time, filling it with the noise and chaos of fifteen children.

  Fritz was the couple’s first child, arriving on December 9, 1868. It was a hard and painful birth, and Paula never recovered. She died three weeks later, on New Year’s Eve.

  Siegfried, twenty-seven years old and already a successful dye merchant, was devastated. For years, he could barely face the world. He retreated into his expanding business and, according to one family member, “lived from his memories.” It’s unclear who cared for his infant son; one of Fritz’s many aunts may have taken the boy into her home.

  It was seven years before Siegfried Haber found love again. He met and married nineteen-year-old Hedwig Hamburger, noted for her beauty and her talent on the piano. Music and laughter entered the Haber house once again. And children: Three daughters—Else, Helene, and Frieda—were born within five years.

  By all accounts, Hedwig became a loving stepmother to Fritz, and Fritz returned her affection. Siegfried, on the other hand, doted on his daughters; he never found it within himself to fully love or accept the son whose birth had brought so much sadness.

  Fritz grew into a talkative, energetic teenager, an enthusiastic student but not a spectacularly gifted one. He soaked up everything available to an upper-middle-class boy in Breslau: theater, an education heavy in classical philosophy and literature at the elite school known as the Gymnasium, and hours of friendly debate and drinking in the city’s beer cellars.

  At home, he fought with his father. “The two of them were too different,” wrote one relative. The father was cautious; the son reckless. Siegfried was a “born pessimist”; Fritz found promise in every new possibility. Siegfried regularly chased guests out the door at ten o’clock by openi
ng windows and remarking that he “liked to air things out before everyone leaves”; Fritz, throughout his life, lost track of time when engaged in conversation. Where Siegfried was “devoid of imagination,” Fritz fairly bubbled with fantastic ideas and creatively embroidered tales. Siegfried kept close account of his money; Fritz let it run through his fingers.

  One younger relative was moved to wonder what Paula Haber had been like, since Fritz seemed to have inherited nothing of his father’s temperament. Another, however, suggested that dour Siegfried, rather than Fritz, was the oddity in the family tree. Several of Siegfried’s sisters and brothers had led lives of adventure, settling in far-off places such as Japan and the United States. And all, apart from Siegfried, had been irrepressible talkers, “a characteristic that’s been inherited by Fritz Haber and his generation.”

  While Siegfried Haber acted as patriarch and domestic despot, Fritz became the court jester. Stories of him in this role abound. Once, when his sisters were six, four, and two years old, their mother discovered them lined up in small chairs in their room while Fritz marched back and forth in front of them, speaking loudly but incomprehensibly. Asked what he might possibly be doing, Fritz replied, “I need to acquaint my sisters with the sound of the Greek language!”