Fritz Haber conflict World War I
Fritz Haber (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁɪt͡s ˈhaːbɐ] (listen); 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilisers and explosives. It is estimated that one-third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half of the world's population.  Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.
Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponising chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement, to develop Zyklon B, used for the extermination of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust.
After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Haber was forced to resign from his positions because he was Jewish. Already in poor health, he spent time in various countries, before Chaim Weizmann invited him to become the director of the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, Mandatory Palestine. He accepted the offer, but died of heart failure mid-journey in a Basel hotel on 29 January 1934, aged 65.
Haber has been called one of the most important scientists, if not the most important, in human history and possibly the greatest industrial chemist who ever lived.World War I
Haber greeted World War I with enthusiasm, joining 92 other German intellectuals in signing the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three in October 1914. Haber played a major role in the development of the non-ballistic use of chemical warfare in World War I, in spite of the proscription of their use in shells by the Hague Convention of 1907 (to which Germany was a signatory). He was promoted to the rank of captain and made head of the Chemistry Section in the Ministry of War soon after the war began.: 133  In addition to leading the teams developing chlorine gas and other deadly gases for use in trench warfare, Haber was on hand personally when it was first released by the German military at the Second Battle of Ypres (22 April to 25 May 1915) in Belgium.: 138  The team Haber assembled consisted of more than 150 scientists and 1300 technical personnel. Haber also helped to develop gas masks with adsorbent filters which could protect against such weapons.
A special troop was formed for gas warfare (Pioneer Regiments 35 and 36) under the command of Otto Peterson, with Haber and Friedrich Kerschbaum as advisors. Haber actively recruited physicists, chemists, and other scientists to be transferred to the unit. Future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz, and Otto Hahn served as gas troops in Haber's unit.: 136–138  In 1914 and 1915, before the Second Battle of Ypres, Haber's unit investigated reports that the French had deployed Turpenite, a supposed chemical weapon, against German soldiers.Gas warfare in World War I was, in a sense, the war of the chemists, with Haber pitted against French Nobel laureate chemist Victor Grignard. Regarding war and peace, Haber once said, "during peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country." This was an example of the ethical dilemmas facing chemists at that time.Haber was a patriotic German who was proud of his service during World War I, for which he was decorated. He was even given the rank of captain by the Kaiser, which Haber had been denied 25 years earlier during his compulsory military service.In his studies of the effects of poison gas, Haber noted that exposure to a low concentration of a poisonous gas for a long time often had the same effect (death) as exposure to a high concentration for a short time. He formulated a simple mathematical relationship between the gas concentration and the necessary exposure time. This relationship became known as Haber's rule.Haber defended gas warfare against accusations that it was inhumane, saying that death was death, by whatever means it was inflicted and referred to history: "The disapproval that the knight had for the man with the firearm is repeated in the soldier who shoots with steel bullets towards the man who confronts him with chemical weapons. [...] The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing".Haber received much criticism for his involvement in the development of chemical weapons in pre-World War II Germany, both from contemporaries, especially Albert Einstein, and from modern-day scientists.
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