Fritz Haber Character Analysis

With cheap industrial fertilizers now available, farmers no longer were limited to compost piles or dung to nourish their soil. Even by the time World War I broke out, Haber had likely saved millions from Malthusian starvation, and we can still thank him for feeding most of the world’s 6.7 billion people today.

What’s lost in that summary is that Haber cared little about fertilizers, despite what he sometimes said to the contrary. He actually pursued cheap ammonia to help Germany build nitrogen explosives […] It’s a sad truth that men like Haber pop up frequently throughout history—petty Fausts who twist scientific innovations into efficient killing devices.

In 1919, before the dust (or gas) of World War I had settled, Haber won the vacant 1918 Nobel Prize in chemistry (the Nobels were suspended during the war) for his process to produce ammonia from nitrogen, even though his fertilizers hadn’t protected thousands of Germans from famine during the war. A year later, he was charged with being an international war criminal for prosecuting a campaign of chemical warfare that had maimed hundreds of thousands of people and terrorized millions more—a contradictory, almost self-canceling legacy.

With cheap industrial fertilizers now available, farmers no longer were limited to compost piles or dung to nourish their soil. Even by the time World War I broke out, Haber had likely saved millions from Malthusian starvation, and we can still thank him for feeding most of the world’s 6.7 billion people today.

What’s lost in that summary is that Haber cared little about fertilizers, despite what he sometimes said to the contrary. He actually pursued cheap ammonia to help Germany build nitrogen explosives […] It’s a sad truth that men like Haber pop up frequently throughout history—petty Fausts who twist scientific innovations into efficient killing devices.

In 1919, before the dust (or gas) of World War I had settled, Haber won the vacant 1918 Nobel Prize in chemistry (the Nobels were suspended during the war) for his process to produce ammonia from nitrogen, even though his fertilizers hadn’t protected thousands of Germans from famine during the war. A year later, he was charged with being an international war criminal for prosecuting a campaign of chemical warfare that had maimed hundreds of thousands of people and terrorized millions more—a contradictory, almost self-canceling legacy.