JAD ABUMRAD: Oh, okay.

PRODUCER: They're gonna record it over there. I mean, I'm gonna record it here, too.

JAD: All right. Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today?

ROBERT: Evil?

JAD: Although I don't know if that's the right word for this next thing.

ROBERT: Yeah, because it's sort of ...

JAD: More complicated.

ROBERT: When you call someone evil then you're kind of done with them.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But there's a fellow, I've been thinking about him for the better part of a year, as you know.

JAD: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: He's such a puzzle to me. I can't quite place him.

JAD: Though it's very fun to try.

ROBERT: And I heard about him from science writer Sam Kean.

ROBERT: Well, let's talk about Fritz Haber. So first of all, could you just like—when did he live and what did he look like, and that kind of stuff?

SAM KEAN: 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 pince-nez? Is that how you say that?

ROBERT: I think I call it pince-nez, so I'm not sure.

SAM KEAN: Pince-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.

JAD: Just to put that into context, and to bring a few other of our storytellers in.

FRED KAUFMAN: He comes from Breslau, Germany.

JAD: That's Fred Kaufman, reporter.

FRED KAUFMAN: Which is a fairly small—you know, a small sort of town. And so does Clara.

JAD: That's Fritz Haber's wife.

ROBERT: We're gonna meet her later.

FRED KAUFMAN: Right? Clara comes from the same town. And they're both secularized Jews.

JAD: But this was a moment in German history, he says, when Jews had a decent amount of freedom.

FRED KAUFMAN: And this was the difference between Kaiser Wilhelm and, of course, Hitler's Germany.

DAN CHARLES: Yeah. Put it in context ...

JAD: Dan Charles, he's a historian.

DAN CHARLES: ... 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.

JAD: And he believed it. Fast forward 10 years, Fritz Haber's a professor.

ROBERT: Small university.

JAD: He's working with chemicals. It's about 1880.

ROBERT: And he throws himself at one of the central issues facing Germany at that time.

FRED KAUFMAN: Germany has a problem.

ROBERT: A big problem.

FRED KAUFMAN: It has enough what they used to call then solar energy.

ROBERT: You know, solar energy from the sun to grow crops.

FRED KAUFMAN: To feed about 30 million people. However, that leaves behind 20 million Germans.

JAD: You mean they're looking at 20 million people hungry?

FRED KAUFMAN: That's what we're heading towards. I mean, you have to remember, during the—during the Crimean War in the 1850s, Europe starves.

ROBERT: So around the turn of the century, for German scientists like Haber, this was the challenge.

FRED KAUFMAN: He is—he wants to feed—he wants to feed Germany.

JAD: And actually, this wasn't just the 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.

ROBERT: And everyone thought, "Well, we know the solution."

JAD: Yeah. We just need a whole lot more of one simple element.

ROBERT: Nitrogen.

FRED KAUFMAN: Nitrogen.

SAM KEAN: Nitrogen.

DAN CHARLES: Nitrogen.

ROBERT: They needed more ...

JAD: Nitrogen.

SAM KEAN: Nitrogen is an essential part of amino acids and proteins.

JAD: And when you stick a seed, like a wheat seed in the ground ...

ROBERT: One of the reasons it grows is because it's sucking up all the nitrogen in the soil.

JAD: To make its cell walls.

SAM KEAN: Without nitrogen you don't have life.

JAD: Now of course, you could find some nitrogen out in the world.

ROBERT: Natural deposits would be like seaweed or ...

SAM KEAN: Manure was one.

JAD: You know, you could find it in cow manure or ...

SAM KEAN: Guano.

ROBERT: Which was basically ...

SAM KEAN: Bat poop and seagull poop.

JAD: Which made that poop valuable.

SAM KEAN: And actually, two nations in South America went to war.

JAD: Literally over bat[bleep].

LATIF NASSER: You could say people were bat[bleep] crazy.

JAD: By the way, that's reporter Latif Nasser.

LATIF: You know, this was like oil is today. This is ...

ROBERT: Everybody was desperate for sources, new sources of nitrogen. And to make the problem even more annoying ...

SAM KEAN: 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 ...

ROBERT: That's a lot!

SAM KEAN: Yes. Eighty percent of the air is nitrogen atoms.

ROBERT: So all the nitrogen you'd ever need ...

JAD: Was right there!

SAM KEAN: But you can't, like, throw that air onto a plant.

ROBERT: [laughs]

SAM KEAN: They couldn't deploy it. They couldn't deploy it.

JAD: Meaning they couldn't capture it?

SAM KEAN: That's right. And part of the problem here, and although once again, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves ...

ROBERT: We'll be right back to Haber, but let's just finish this.

SAM KEAN: ... is that nitrogen is trivalent.

JAD: Trivalent.

SAM KEAN: Trivalent. In other words, nitrogen has really strong attachments to itself.

JAD: And 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.

SAM KEAN: His calculations showed that it couldn't be done. At least not without a tremendous amount of energy.

JAD: More energy than seemed, like ...

ROBERT: Possible to make.

SAM KEAN: Yeah. Yeah, yes. But, you know ...

JAD: Being ambitious ...

SAM KEAN: Haber starts thinking, "In order to do this we need to pressure this. We need to put it under a lot of pressure."

JAD: 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 ...

SAM KEAN: Into a big iron tank

ROBERT: Under extreme, extreme pressure.

SAM KEAN: At high temperature.

ROBERT: And then he forces hydrogen into the tank.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Get in there!]

SAM KEAN: And you have a number of chemical reactions. And what happens is that you're—you're elbowing the nitrogen apart from itself, and then forcing it to bond with the hydrogen in a new way.

JAD: And when nitrogen and hydrogen bond together, the thing you get ...

SAM KEAN: Is ammonia.

JAD: A liquid that has captured the nitrogen right out of the air.

SAM KEAN: You literally get a drip, drip, drip of ammonia. It is—it is arguably the most significant scientific breakthrough of them all. 'Bread from the air' was the phrase.

ROBERT: Wow!

ROBERT: Because Haber had figured out a way to take nitrogen from the air, put it into the barren ground and grow wheat.

SAM KEAN: This has allowed the world to have seven 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 tonnages 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 Haber process.

JAD: No [bleep]! Really?

ROBERT: And so in 1918, Fritz Haber gets a Nobel Prize. But this is why he's such an interesting guy. Around the same time, officials in the US government are calling him a war criminal.

JAD: All right. Just to back up for one second.

ROBERT: After Haber's nitrogen discovery ...

JAD: He was promoted.

DAN CHARLES: You know, he takes over leadership of this institute in Berlin and he starts hobnobbing with a whole different level of society.

ROBERT: That's Dan Charles again.

DAN CHARLES: 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.

JAD: And not just because he was vain—which everyone agrees he was—but because he loves his country.

DAN CHARLES: He loves the fatherland and he loves Germany. So ...

JAD: When World War I begins ...

DAN CHARLES: He signs up immediately, sends a letter volunteering for duty.

ROBERT: Saying, "You know the process that I used to make food? Well, I can use that same process ..."

DAN CHARLES: To make explosives.

ROBERT: Because the thing that you put into the ground to grow more food is also the thing you can explode to make a bomb?

DAN CHARLES: 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 could be used for life or death. In any case ...

JAD: Back to World War I.

DAN CHARLES: There's trench warfare. It gets bogged down. And Haber has an idea.

LATIF: He goes straight to the German high command and he pitches this idea.

DAN CHARLES: He says, "Well, we can drive those enemy soldiers out of trenches with gas."

JAD: Chlorine gas.

LATIF: "We'll basically bring it to the front, and when the wind is right, we'll just spray it."

DAN CHARLES: But the generals were not all that convinced.

LATIF: No.

DAN CHARLES: They just didn't like it.

JAD: A lot of them were like, "This is not how you fight a war."

LATIF: It's like playing dirty.

DAN CHARLES: Yeah.

LATIF: Sort of unsportsmanlike.

DAN CHARLES: But he organizes soldiers, he organizes whole gas units.

LATIF: And nobody even had to ask.

DAN CHARLES: Takes command of them, partially. He travels to the front.

ROBERT: And on April 22 ...

JAD: 1915?

LATIF: 1915.

ROBERT: Haber finds himself in a little town in Belgium called Ypres.

LATIF: Y-P-R-E-S. Actually, the Americans called it Yeeps.

ROBERT: Whatever you call it ...

LATIF: This was one of the bloodiest arenas on the Western front.

ROBERT: The Germans were on one side, the French, the Canadians and the British on the other. And there behind the German lines is ...

LATIF: Our friend. Our frenemy, Fritz Haber.

JAD: [laughs] Our frenemy.

LATIF: He's bald. He has a pot belly. He has these pince-nez spectacles. He's chomping on a Virginian cigar. He was always smoking his Virginian cigars. And he was wearing a fur coat.

JAD: Really?

LATIF: In what is basically like the Baghdad of his time.

JAD: But ...

LATIF: Nobody had done what he was about to do on the scale that he was about to do it. So basically at 6:00 pm on April 22 ...

JAD: When the wind was just right, he says.

LATIF: Haber's gas troops unscrew, they open the valves on almost 6,000 tanks containing 150 tons of chlorine. That's like an adult blue whale of chlorine.

JAD: I'm just trying to imagine that. Is that like a—like a green cloud?

LATIF: Some people described 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.

JAD: And according to some accounts, as they crept across no man's land ...

LATIF: The leaves would just sort of shrivel, and the grass was turning to the color of metal. Birds would just fall from the air.

JAD: Within minutes, the gas reached the Allied side. And as soon as it did, soldiers began to convulse.

LATIF: They were gagging, they were choking. Hundreds of them were falling to the ground.

JAD: What is the gas doing to them exactly?

LATIF: I think what it's doing is if you breathe it in, it sort of irritates your lungs to the extent that they sort of fill up with fluid so quickly that you sort of drown in your own phlegm.

JAD: So they are actually drowning?

LATIF: Literally drowning on land.

JAD: Wow!

LATIF: Yellow mucus was frothing out of their mouths. Those who could still breathe would turn blue.

JAD: This is a description of hell!

LATIF: Yeah.

DAN CHARLES: 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.

LATIF: And he is celebrated for it. He gets promoted to the rank of Captain.

ROBERT: And he goes home for a few days a hero. But when he gets there, he has to contend with his wife.

DAN CHARLES: Clara Immerwahr.

ROBERT: Clara.

DAN CHARLES: Also from Breslau. Also from a Jewish family. And also a scientist.

ROBERT: Huh!

DAN CHARLES: Unusually so in those times.

SAM KEAN: She was actually sort of a genius herself. She was one of the first women to earn a PhD in her country.

ROBERT: And shortly after his return, Clara allegedly confronts him and says, "Look, you are morally bankrupt. How could you?"

SAM KEAN: But Haber just kind of ignored her and ...

JAD: According to legend ...

SAM KEAN: ... he actually threw a dinner party in celebration ...

JAD: Of the big victory.

SAM KEAN: Invited his friends over.

JAD: Now we don't actually know if he threw a party.

DAN CHARLES: Like, I consider that apocryphal.

JAD: 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.

SAM KEAN: Especially because she found out he was leaving the next day to direct more gas attacks.

FRITZ STERN: And they probably had an argument.

LATIF: Yeah.

FRITZ STERN: Undoubtedly they had an argument.

ROBERT: That's historian Fritz Stern, who also happens to be Fritz Haber's godson.

LATIF: They had a quarrel?

FRITZ STERN: More than that.

ROBERT: Let's call it a fight.

SAM KEAN: And later that night ...

LATIF: After the party, Haber takes a bunch of sleeping pills, goes to sleep. And she takes his service revolver ...

FRITZ STERN: Fritz Haber's pistol.

ROBERT: Walks outside to the garden.

LATIF: And pulls the trigger.

ROBERT: Shoots herself in the chest.

DAN CHARLES: And is found by her son.

ROBERT: By her son?

DAN CHARLES: Yes.

SAM KEAN: Aged ...

FRITZ STERN: Thirteen, I think.

LATIF: And he finds her actually still alive with the life about to run out of her.

DAN CHARLES: Haber, it's unknown what happened for the rest of that evening, but it is a well-documented fact that the very next morning ...

SAM KEAN: On schedule.

LATIF: He goes back to the—to the front.

DAN CHARLES: To the eastern front.

FRITZ STERN: Leaving a son alone with his dead mother.

ROBERT: That's ...

DAN CHARLES: Cold, huh?

ROBERT: Yeah.

DAN CHARLES: Heartless.

FRITZ STERN: It was a terrible moment.

DAN CHARLES: Did he run away? Was it duty? The son eventually, after he immigrates to America, kills himself.

ROBERT: So, you know, 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—walk away.

JAD: 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.

ROBERT: You wouldn't though. Would you really? Would you really think that this guy's a good guy?

JAD: Honestly, yeah.

ROBERT: You know, just because of a mathematical summing up?

JAD: We're talking billions of people.

ROBERT: 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 ...

JAD: I think ...

ROBERT: ... "More of that please."

JAD: Well, there's something distasteful about the fact that he was too into it, but 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?

ROBERT: Huh. Well ...

JAD: Should we keep going with the story?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: All right.

ROBERT: So Sam, what happened to this guy after World War I?

SAM KEAN: 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.

DAN CHARLES: And he spent five years in a futile effort to distill gold from the ocean's waters.

JAD: Sounds insane. On the other hand, if anyone could do it ...

DAN CHARLES: He was trying to repeat this masterstroke.

ROBERT: Needless to say ...

JAD: He fails!

DAN CHARLES: It was actually a crushing blow for him.

JAD: And then things really take a turn.

DAN CHARLES: 1933 comes, and Hitler takes over. And one of the first acts that the Nazis do is to ...

ROBERT: Basically issue an order ...

DAN CHARLES: That says there shall be no Jews in the civil service.

JAD: Now Haber was Jewish, but because he'd served in World War I ...

DAN CHARLES: He technically would be exempt.

JAD: But 75 percent of the people who worked for him at the institute, they were Jewish.

DAN CHARLES: And they would have to be dismissed.

JAD: So he decides to take a stand.

DAN CHARLES: And says, "This is intolerable. I'm gonna resign." He says that he's always been hiring people based on how smart they are and not who their grandparents were.

JAD: 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.

SAM KEAN: And then he starts this period of roaming. He eventually goes to England.

JAD: But in a famous incident, one of England's leading scientists refuses to shake his hand.

SAM KEAN: And he is basically homeless at this point. You know, he's a man adrift.

JAD: Meanwhile ...

SAM KEAN: His health is failing. In 1934, he takes a trip to Switzerland to a sanatorium.

JAD: But before he can get there ...

SAM KEAN: His heart fails and he dies.

ROBERT: Now there's a footnote to this that is very strange. I got a little—my—this is my dorsal hairs stood up when I read the end of this.

SAM KEAN: Right. So during World War I Haber's institute had developed a formulation of an insect-killing gas called Zyklon.

ROBERT: Zyklon A.

JAD: Which was originally just a pesticide.

DAN CHARLES: And once again, another nitrogen compound. It was developed in his institute. He knew about it.

ROBERT: In fact, his chemist had given this particular pesticide a smell. It was a warning smell so that people didn't inadvertently breathe it in and get sick.

SAM KEAN: But after the Nazis take over ...

JAD: This is after he died.

SAM KEAN: They reached back to the shelf and they find this Zyklon stuff, and they ask for it to be reformulated to take out the warning smell. And it becomes Zyklon B, the killing gas of the concentration camps.

ROBERT: Did members of Haber's family die in the concentration camps?

SAM KEAN: Yeah. Members of his extended family did. Certainly friends of his did.

FRITZ STERN: There's something deeply, deeply wounding, stressing, upsetting at the thought that he had anything to do with Zyklon B. But he did. The use of it, he couldn't have imagined.

JAD: 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. Like, he didn't intend for that to happen. He could have never imagined that.

ROBERT: No. But—but there's part of me that says, you know, here's a guy who just wanted to do everything better than it had ever been done before. Whether it was feeding or killing or ...

JAD: And he does.

ROBERT: And he does. But he does it with a kind of amoral athleticism. You know, he does it without humility, without—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. I ...

JAD: Yeah, I agree with that. Maybe it's all about doubt in the end. Thanks to all our great storytellers: Dan Charles, Sam Kean, Latif Nasser, Fred Kaufman and Fritz Stern. You can find out more information about all those guys on our website, Radiolab.org.

[LISTENER: Hi, my name's Josh and I'm calling from Harlem, New York. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks.]

 

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