radiolab010912b.mp3_ywr3ahjkcgo_dd2b00ca72179e1491d770954d65ca9f_20471326

This is a podcast episode that explores the emotions of Americans with ties to Gaza during the ongoing war. It then transitions to a discussion about Fritz Haber, a scientist who made significant contributions to nitrogen production and agriculture. However, he also played a role in developing chemical weapons during World War I. The episode delves into the complexities of his character and the ethical dilemmas surrounding his work. As the carnage of war grows in Gaza, many Americans with ties to the region are struggling as they watch from afar. I'm Tyrae, and this week on Notes from America, an exploration of the emotions that come with bearing witness. Visit wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, okay. They're going to record it over there. I mean, I'm going to record it here, too. All right. Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab, and today, evil? Although, I don't know if that's the right word for this next thing. Yeah, because it's sort of... More complicated. When you call someone evil, then you're kind of done with them. Yeah. But there's been a fellow. I've been thinking about him for a better part of the year, as you know. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. He's such a puzzle to me. I can't quite place him. Though, it's very fun to try. And I heard about him from science writer Sam Kean. Well, let's talk about Fritz Haber. So, first of all, could you just, like, when did he live and when did he die? Yeah. So, he was a scientist. He was a scientist. He was a scientist. He was a scientist. What did he look like and that kind of stuff? He was doing his great science work right around the turn of the 20th century, so right around 1900. Very distinctive-looking man, bald on top, trim, nice mustache, wore a little piznez. Is that how you say that? I call it prince-nez. I'm not sure. Prince-nez. Okay. One of those very tiny, old-fashioned pair of glasses that would pinch on your nose. And he was someone who had very big ambitions. Just to put that in context, to bring a few other of our storytellers in, he comes from Breslau, Germany. That's Fred Kaufmann, reporter. Which is a fairly small, you know, smallest sort of town. And so does Clara. That's Fritz Haber's wife. We're going to meet her later. Right. Clara comes from the same town. And they're both secularized Jews. This is a moment in German history, he says, when Jews had a decent amount of freedom. And this is the difference between Kaiser Wilhelm and, of course, Hitler's Germany. Yeah. To put it in context. Dan Charles, he's a historian. His was the first generation when a young Jewish boy could truly imagine that he could just be a regular part of that society. He could do anything. And he believed it. Fast forward 10 years, Fritz Haber is a professor. Small university. He's working with chemicals. It's about 1880. And he throws himself at one of the central issues facing Germany at that time. Germany has a problem. A big problem. It has enough, what they used to call then, solar energy, you know, energy from the sun to grow crops, to feed about 30 million people. However, that leaves behind 20 million Germans. Do you mean they're looking at 20 million people going hungry? That's what we're heading towards. I mean, you have to remember, during the Crimean War in the 1850s, Europe starved. So around the turn of the century, for German scientists like Haber, this was the challenge. He wants to feed. He wants to feed Germany. And actually, this wasn't just a German thing. A lot of people were beginning to worry that with about a billion and a half people on the planet at that point, that maybe we were maxing out, that the earth couldn't support this many people. And everyone thought, well, we know the solution. Yeah, we just need a whole lot more of one simple element. Nitrogen. Nitrogen. Nitrogen. Nitrogen. They needed more nitrogen. Nitrogen is an essential part of amino acids and proteins. And when you stick a seed, like a wheat seed, in the ground, one of the reasons it grows is because it's sucking up all the nitrogen in the soil. To make it sell walls. Without nitrogen, you don't have life. Now, of course, you could find some nitrogen out in the world. Natural deposits would be like seaweed or... Uh, manure was one. You know, you could find it in cow manure or... Guano, which was basically bat poop and seagull poop. Which made that poop valuable. And actually, two nations in South America went to war... Literally over bat s***. You could say people were bat s*** crazy. By the way, that's reporter Latif Nasser. You know, this was like oil is today. This is... Everybody was desperate for sources, new sources of nitrogen, and to make the problem even more annoying? The most common source of nitrogen is in the air around us. It makes up four out of every five or so molecules that we breathe. So it's very... That's a lot. So all the nitrogen you'd ever need was right there. You can't, like, throw that air onto a plant. It couldn't deploy it. They couldn't deploy it. Meaning they couldn't capture it. That's right. And part of the problem here, and although, once again, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves... We'll be right back to that, but let's just finish this. Is that nitrogen is trivalent. Trivalent. Trivalent. Trivalent. In other words, nitrogen has really strong attachments to itself. What he means is that when nitrogen atoms are just free-floating in the air, they will cling to each other. These little nitrogen atoms will fiercely hold together, and it's almost impossible to pry them apart. His calculations showed that it couldn't be done, at least not without a tremendous amount of energy. More energy than seemed, like, possible to make. Yeah. Yes. But, you know... Being ambitious. In order to do this, we need to pressure this. We need to put it under a lot of pressure. So he starts experimenting. He figures out a way to take a lot of air that's filled with these little nitrogen bonds clinging to each other and pump it to a big iron tank under extreme, extreme pressure at high temperature, and then he forces hydrogen into the tank. Get in there! And you have a number of chemical reactions. What happens is that you're elbowing the nitrogen apart from itself and then forcing it to bond with the hydrogen in a new way. And when hydrogen and nitrogen bond together, the thing you get is ammonia. A liquid that has captured the nitrogen right out of the air. You literally get a drip, drip, drip of ammonia. It is arguably the most significant scientific breakthrough of them all. Bread from the air was the phrase. Because Hopper had figured out a way to take nitrogen from the air, put it into the barren ground and grew wheat. This has allowed the world to have 7 billion people. This is what's driving the world towards 10, 12 by 2050. Now we're seeing about 100 million tons of synthetic fertilizer produced industrially each year, and that tonnage then moves into our food source. Our food source then moves into our bodies. And the rough statistics are that half of each of our bodies contains nitrogen from the Hopper process. No, really. And so in 1918, Fritz Hopper gets a Nobel Prize. But this is why this is such an interesting guy. Officials in the U.S. government are calling him a war criminal. After Hopper's nitrogen discovery, he was promoted. He takes over the leadership of this institute in Berlin and he starts hobnobbing with a whole different level of society. That's Dan Charles again. I mean, it's a pretty heady thing for, you know, a Jewish kid from Breslau to be hobnobbing with the emperor and cabinet ministers. He's part of the club and he really, really relished it. And not just because he was vain, which everyone agrees he was, but because he loves his country. He loves the fatherland and he loves Germany. So when World War I begins, he signs up immediately, sends a letter volunteering for duty saying, you know the process that I use to make food? Well I can use that same process to make explosives. Because the thing that you put into the ground to grow more food is also the thing you can explode to make a bomb? That's correct. Because it takes such energy and pressure to separate it, this trivalent bond is so strong that when it comes back together, that energy that's released, it can be used for life or death. In any case, back to World War I, there's trench warfare, it gets bogged down, and Haber has an idea. He goes straight to the German high command and he pitches this idea. He says, well, we can drive those enemy soldiers out of trenches with gas. Chlorine gas. We'll basically bring it to the front and when the wind is right, we'll just spray it. But the generals were not all that convinced. No. They just didn't like it. A lot of them were like, this is not how you fight a war. It's like playing dirty. Yeah. Sort of unsportsmanlike. But he organizes soldiers, he organizes whole gas units. And nobody even had to ask. He takes command of them partially. He travels to the front. And on April 22nd, 1915, Haber finds himself in a little town in Belgium called Ypres. Y-P-R-E-S. Actually, the Americans called it Ypres. Whatever you call it. This was one of the bloodiest arenas on the Western Front. The Germans were on one side, the French, the Canadians, and the British on the other. And there, behind the German lines, is our friend, our frenemy, Fritz Haber. He's bald, he has a potbelly, he has these Ponsnes spectacles, he's chomping on a Virginian cigar. He was always smoking these Virginian cigars. And he's wearing a fur coat in what is basically like the Baghdad of his time. Nobody had done what he was about to do on the scale that he was about to do it. So basically, at 6 p.m. on April 22nd, when the wind was just right, he says, Haber's gas troops unscrew, they open the valve on almost 6,000 tanks containing 150 tons of chlorine. That's like an adult blue whale of chlorine. I'm just trying to imagine that. Is that like a green cloud? Some people describe it as a cloud, and then others describe it as this kind of 15-foot wall kind of hugging the land, and it's just sort of approaching. And it's moving at about one meter per second. And according to some accounts, as it crept across no man's land, the leaves would just sort of shrivel, and the grass was turning to the color of metal. Birds would just fall from the air. Within minutes, the gas reached the Allied side, and as soon as it did, soldiers began to convulse. They were gagging. They were choking. Hundreds of them were falling to the ground. What is the gas doing to them exactly? I think what it's doing is it's, if you breathe it in, it sort of irritates your lungs to the extent that they sort of build up with fluid so quickly that you sort of drown in your own phlegm. So they were actually drowning? They were actually drowning on land. Yellow mucus was frothing out of their mouths. Those who could still breathe would turn blue. This is a description of hell. Yeah. But Haber saw it as a wonderful success and wished, wished that the Germans had been better prepared to exploit it, because he felt like they really could have made a terrific advance if they had had more confidence. And he is celebrated for it. He gets promoted to the rank of captain. And he goes home for a few days a hero. But when he gets there, he has to contend with his wife, Clara Imarvar. Clara, also from Breslau, also from a Jewish family, and also a scientist, unusually so in those times. She was actually sort of a genius herself. She was one of the first women to earn a Ph.D. in her country. And shortly after his return, Clara allegedly confronts him and says, look, you are morally bankrupt. How could you? But Haber just kind of ignored her. And according to legend, he actually threw a dinner party in celebration of the big victory, invited his friends over. Now, we don't actually know if he threw a party. I consider that apocryphal. Dan doesn't think so. But what's clear is that he saw no reason to question what he had done. And that infuriated Clara. Especially because she found out he was leaving the next day to direct more gas attacks. And they probably had an argument. Yeah. Undoubtedly, they had an argument. That's historian Fritz Stern, who also happens to be Fritz Haber's godson. They had a quarrel. More than that. Let's call it a fight. And later that night after the party, Haber takes a bunch of sleeping pills, goes to sleep. And she takes a service revolver. Fritz Haber's pistol. Walks outside to the garden. Pulls a trigger. Shoots herself in the chest. And is found by her son. By her son? Yes. Age 13, I think. And he finds her actually still alive, with the life about to run out of her. Haber, it's unknown what happens for the rest of that evening. But it is a well-documented fact that the very next morning. On schedule, he goes back to the front. To the eastern front. Leaving his son alone. With his dead mother. That's cold, huh? Yeah. Heartless. It was a terrible moment. Did he run away? Was it duty? The son eventually, after he emigrates to America, kills himself. See, now, around this point, I just don't want to have anything to do with this guy. This is... I just want to take a shower. Walk away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, me too. You know, on the other hand, I mean, if you look at the grand calculus, people he's helped or fed versus people he's killed, I mean, he's fed billions of people. I don't know that you could entirely call him bad. I might even tilt towards saying he's a little good. To be honest. You wouldn't, though, would you really? Would you really think that this guy's a good guy? Honestly, yeah. You know, just because of a mathematical summing up? We're talking billions of people. He's standing there, on the front, pushing the gas into the lungs of other human beings. Now, admittedly, it's a war, but still, then he goes and, you know, and celebrates that. And then walks away from his child and his wife dead in the garden and says, more of that, please. There's something distasteful about the fact that he was too into it. But like, I do think on some level, you have to divorce the man from his deeds. And you got to ask, is the world better with him or without him? I think you got to answer it with him, right? Well, should we keep going with the story? Yeah. All right. So Sam, what happened to this guy after World War One? He actually was very humiliated that Germany had lost. And especially humiliated over the fact that they had to pay enormous war reparations to other countries. So he decided he was going to invent a process to pay for these reparations by himself. And what he decided to do is go into the ocean, into seawater, which contains very small levels of gold. But, you know, over the entire ocean, there's a lot of gold dissolved into the sea. And he spends five years in a futile effort to distill gold from the ocean's waters. Sounds insane. On the other hand, if anyone could do it, he was trying to repeat this master stroke. Needless to say, he failed. It was actually a crushing blow for him. And then things really take a turn. 1933 comes and Hitler takes over. And one of the first acts that the Nazis do is to basically issue an order that says there shall be no Jews in the civil service. Now Haber was Jewish, but because he'd served in World War One, he technically would be exempt. But 75% of the people who worked for him at the Institute, they were Jewish and they would have to be dismissed. So he decides to take a stand and says, this is intolerable. I'm going to resign. He says that he's always been hiring people based on how smart they are and not who their grandparents were. So he sends a letter to the Ministry of Education, resigning, and he leaves Germany, telling a friend he felt like he'd lost his homeland. And then he starts this period of roaming. He eventually goes to England. But in a famous incident, one of England's leading scientists refuses to shake his hand. And he is basically homeless at this point. You know, he's a man adrift. Meanwhile, his health is failing. In 1934, he takes a trip to Switzerland to a sanatorium. But before he can get there, his heart fails and he dies. Now there's a footnote to this that is very strange. I got a little, my dorsal hair stood up when I read the end of this. Right. So during World War I, Haber's Institute had developed a formulation of insect killing gas called Zyklon, Zyklon A, which was originally just a pesticide, and once again, another nitrogen compound. It was developed in his institute. He knew about it. In fact, his chemists had given this particular pesticide a smell. It was a warning smell so that people didn't inadvertently breathe it in and get sick. But after the Nazis take over, this is after he died, they reach back to the shelf and they find this Zyklon stuff. And they asked for it to be reformulated to take out the warning smell. And it becomes Zyklon B, the killing gas of the concentration camps. Did members of Haber's family die in the concentration camps? Yeah, members of his extended family did. Many friends of his did. There's something deeply, deeply wounding, distressing, upsetting at the thought that he had anything to do with Zyklon B. But he did. The use of it, you couldn't have imagined. So, how do you feel about him now? Because, I don't know, I can't help but feel bad for the guy. Despite the chlorine gas, he didn't intend for that to happen. He could have never imagined that. No, but there's part of me that says, you know, here's a guy who just wanted to do everything better than had ever been done before, whether it was feeding or killing. And he does. And he does. But he does it with a kind of amoral athleticism, you know, he does it without humility, without a lot of doubt. And, you know, it's a craft, but it's a craft with consequences. And to approach it with kind of crazy joy, I don't know. I would rather have scientists who carry doubt with them as they proceed. Yeah, I agree with that. Maybe it's all about doubt in the end. Thanks to all our great storytellers, Dan Charles, Sam Keen, Latif Nasser, Fred Kaufman and Fritz Stern. You can find out more information about all those guys on our website, Radiolab.org.