Haher considered the horror evoked by the use of poison gas irrational. He saw no reason why asphyxiation should be considered more ghastly than, for instance, having one’s leg blown off and gradually bleeding to death. He viewed war, and gas in particular, with the cool eye of the technocrat. He thought of gas warfare as an intellectual challenge, or an intricate game that had more psychological impact.
Haber argued that the psychological power of traditional weapons was quickly spent as soldiers quickly got used to them. Chemicals, on the other hand, represented a many-faceted and ever-changing threat. Each new poison thus posed a new lethal threat, and a new psychic challenge to the foe, “unsettling the soul.” They produced, as he noted enthusiastically in 1925, “more fright and less destruction!” Gas worked to the advantage of the most advanced industrial societies, Haber argued. He knew well enough that his weapons were widely hated, but he dismissed it. He saw only one explanation for it: prejudice against anything new and disruptive.
As Germany’s economy crumbled and its political system came apart at the seams after the war and the crippling demands of the Treaty of Versailles, Haber suffered as well. It was a time of honor and dishonor. One day he feared being placed on trial as a war criminal; the next he received science’s most prestigious prize. He also encountered moral condemnation from an old acquaintance who was appalled by the use of poison gas. Haber sent a brief, dismissive response, suggesting that his hostility to chemical weapons was outdated and that use of such weapons was legal. The acquaintance wrote back, asking Haber to consider not just whether gas weapons were legal, but also whether they were moral:
I hoped that you might agree with this view: That we, as chemists, have a special responsibility in the future to point out the dangers of modern technology, and in so doing to promote peaceful relations in Europe, since the devastation of another war would be almost unthinkable.
Haber was angry at the world. He considered himself and his country victims of political persecution. The Versailles Treaty prohibited German chemical weapons, but they did not prohibit the victors from researching into them. Haber was quite ready to violate the treaty’s terms if he could get away with it. When the British chemist Harold Hartley, acting as an international arms inspector, arrived at Haber’s institute in 1921 to check for research on forbidden weapons, Haber probably did not tell him about a nearby laboratory that routinely worked with banned chemicals that Germany had once used as weapons.
Fritz Haber had written off the possibility of getting a Nobel prize. Members of the Nobel Committee in Stockholm, however, understood the enormous significance of the ammonia synthesis. When the news arrived in mid-November 1919 that he had won the prize after all, Haber seemed happier for his country than for himself. But it led to an immediate howl of indignation, particularly in Belgium and France, who had been at the receiving end of the as warfare. There were no protests at the ceremony itself though many Allied diplomats and Nobel laureates found reasons not to attend.
Events of the 1920s and his own increasing age forced Haber, more frequently as the years passed, to reflect on the past. In a speech to Breslau’s Academic-Literary Association, he recalled the naive complacency of his youth when he had felt that his Jewish ancestry did not matter. He spoke of unthinking German patriotism and how the war destroyed both prosperity and illusions of national unity. He ended his speech with a plea for tolerance, intellectual freedom, and democracy.
As Hitler’s movement swelled in power, Haber’s mood grew dark. On occasion, he even seemed to question technical progress which he had always believed in. Early in 1932, he confessed that the previous half-century’s technical innovations appeared to be merely “fire in the hands of small children.” One year later, Adolf Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor, and Haber wrote in a letter that he had "the feeling that I’ve made serious mistakes in life." He did not say what those mistakes had been.
He dimly foresaw Germany’s political catastrophe but he never imagined that it could strip him so completely of his dearest possessions and turn his proudest accomplishments into ashes. What counted now was ancestry alone and Haber’s forebodings became reality. The government unveiled a law ordering the removal within six months of all Jews from the German civil service. The law covered every German university professor and nearly every scientist at the institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.
Haber, too, soon would find his situation intolerable. Apart from Einstein, who was traveling at the time and immediately declared that he wasn’t coming back to Germany, Haber was the most prominent Jewish scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Max Planck, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, tried to save Haber by trying to convince the führer that forcing valuable Jews to emigrate amounted to Germany’s “self- mutilation" but Hitler flew into such a rage that Planck could only leave the room.
The remainder of Haber’s life is a chronicle of losses: his villa and institute, his fortune, and his remaining reserves of strength. Equally shattering, though, was a kind of spiritual dispossession, the loss of his faith and identity. He’d helped feed the ravenous beast that was turning on him. “I am bitter as never before, and the feeling that this is unbearable increases by the day.
