Writing beneath the amber glow of coal gas lighting, Clara Immerwahr, 46, penned a goodbye on the night of May 2, 1915. At arm’s length, waiting with the patience of a stone, sat a loaded revolver.
Letter completed, Clara exited her Berlin mansion, slipped off her shoes, and walked into the dark serenity of an exterior garden. She was 44, outrageously intelligent, and well-heeled. By the standards of the day, she was atop the world. Her extraordinary husband, Fritz Haber, heralded across the planet, had solved the agricultural puzzle of the age and pulled nitrogen from bare air to provide sustenance to the masses. Food forever, it seemed.
Barrel to breast, Clara pulled the gun’s trigger and ripped a bullet through her heart. Hours later, body barely cold, Haber, the father of fertilizer, hopped a train and left the burial of Clara’s corpse to the couple’s 12-year-old son, Hermann, who himself would commit suicide 30 years later.
Bound for a macabre appointment, the brilliant Haber, chrome-domed and bespectacled, looked the part of a Bond villain pulled from central casting. Despite the death of his wife and mother of his only child, Haber was duty-bound: He had horrors to unleash and men to slaughter. By the thousands.
Welcome to triumph, tragedy, irony, and absurdity, linked by a surreal chain of scientific genius, mass carnage, Nazis, and farming’s pursuit of the impossible. Simply, Haber’s phenomenal agriculture achievements are toe-tagged with the wildest contradictions in history. Food for all. And death.
Farm or Fight
In the 1800s, strip-and-step was common on many a farm: Strip out soil nutrients and step toward new land. When 30-bushel corn shriveled to 15 bushels, it was time to move along. Soil health was largely a mystery, the realm of guesswork and tradition.
Farmers dumped on barrels of faulty fertilizer: sawdust, seaweed, urine, blood, fish, coal byproducts, chalk, or the latest snake oil sold by huckster salesmen.
However, the top-tier soil additive, and legitimately so, was bird guano, generally composed of 20% nitrogen. Available on numerous islands off the west coast of South America and further into the Pacific, guano waited in yellow layers of caked avian excrement sometimes reaching 150’-plus in depth.
For a brief blink, guano ruled the world. By the 1850s, Peruvian entrepreneurs sold guano in U.S. ports at approximately $50-plus per ton, triggering a wildfire of demand from farmers who watched corn and cotton yields triple, quintuple, or even decuple, thanks to a fertilizer that vastly outperformed animal manure. By 1860, guano sales made up roughly 45% of the U.S. fertilizer market and averaged $73 per ton.
In tandem, guano was a key ingredient in gunpowder. Therefore, to farm or fight, a nation needed beaucoup bird feces.
In 1868, in the heart of guano madness, Fritz Haber was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Prussia (now Poland), the first son of a chemical merchant. As Haber grew, so did the looming global threat of guano deficiency for both agriculture and armaments. Literally, the poop supply was running low.
Yet, nitrogen was everywhere, abundant beyond measure, invisibly hanging in the air. However, extracting nitrogen was a grail quest that defeated all comers. Until Haber.
The hunt for nitrogen was driven by green and gold, writes Vaclav Smil, author of How the World Really Works: “The need for this breakthrough was obvious. Between 1850 and 1900 the total population of the industrializing countries of Europe and North America grew from 300 million to 500 million, and rapid urbanization helped to drive a dietary transition from a barely adequate grain-dominated supply to generally higher food energy intakes containing more animal products and sugar. Yields remained stagnant but the dietary shift was supported by an unprecedented expansion of cropland: between 1850 and 1900, about 200 million hectares of North and South American, Russian, and Australian grasslands were converted to grain fields.”
Enter the highly complex Haber. He would solve the nitrogen puzzle, no matter what or who got blown up in the process.
Amigo Einstein
In 1904, Haber picked up the ball dropped by the leading chemists of the day and began researching how to pluck nitrogen from thin air. He was 36, an under-the-radar researcher at the University of Karlsruhe, and married to Clara Immerwahr, the first woman in Germany to earn a doctorate in chemistry.
He toiled with tubes and tanks for five years, convinced he was on the cusp of synthetic fertilizer. In March 1909, via high temperature, high pressure, and a catalyst, he attained the impossible, synthesizing ammonia from air. The ammonia (82% nitrogen by weight at its purest) could then be injected into soil or processed into other fertilizers like urea.
Haber’s achievement is difficult to overstate. Simply, he performed agricultural alchemy and unlocked an eternal supply of plant food by boosting crop yields, eventually preventing billions from starving to death. His discovery was historically monumental, riding shotgun beside the combustion engine, electricity, nuclear fusion, DNA, and digital technology.
Germany’s premier chemical company, BASF, pushed Haber’s research toward mass production, with engineering and scaling steered by Carl Bosch, who built industrial reactors and launched the planet’s first industrial ammonia plant in 1913, in Oppau, ginning up 5 tons of ammonia per day via the “Haber-Bosch” process.
The world’s population stood at 1.6 billion when Haber first tackled the synthetic fertilizer puzzle, but partially due to the calories ultimately supplied by his breakthrough, world population would soon quadruple. In a sense, Haber fed 4 billion souls. Even today, some estimates trace half of all nitrogen atoms in an average human to the Haber-Bosch process.
Forty-six years young, Haber was suddenly ensconced in the catbird seat, promoted to founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin, and at the cusp of a Nobel Prize. He was awash in wealth and feted in the press as the man who “made bread out of air.” Revered in the scientific community, Haber rubbed elbows with the biggest names in science, playing host to a visit from Albert Einstein, who slept in Haber’s spare bedroom.
And then the wheels came off. Everything went sideways. The revered father of modern agriculture became the reviled father of chemical warfare.
A Fiendish Death
Only months after its debut as the first-ever commercial ammonia plant, the Oppau facility changed horses in midstream: It began producing nitrate for explosives in 1914. Why? World War l broke out, and within a few slim months, the German army was low on ammo. Ammonium nitrate was a superb fertilizer; it also made quite the bang on the battlefield.
Haber, a full-throated patriot, volunteered for military service. Very quickly, the Haber-Bosch process was integral to German armament production. Chemicals, Haber insisted, could play a far bigger role in warfare as a direct field weapon, and if directed accordingly, might end the war faster than conventional weapons. Harness the horror of gas to save lives, per Haber.
The Germans, British, French, and Russians had all tinkered with chemical warfare weaponry, but reliability and predictability were akin to a snowflake in summer. Haber put shoulder to door. The man who conjured nitrogen for corn could surely whip up a batch of chlorine for poison gas. His wife, Clara, pushed back, urging Haber to consider the moral implications of gas attacks.
Skirting Clara’s concerns, Haber set to work, experimenting alongside Otto Sackur, a renowned scientist in his own right, and one of Clara’s former doctoral classmates. Sackur had obtained a prestigious research post at Haber’s side via Clara’s recommendation. Haber and Sackur’s lab work, rushed and risky, was a volatile walk on a wire. In December 1914, as Haber mixed a beaker of dichloromethylamine and cacodyl chloride, the concoction exploded, hurtling Sackur to his death and blowing the hand off an assistant researcher. Haber was unharmed.
Five months beyond Sackur’s death, Haber’s finished product, weaponized gas, was ready for the battlefield. The German military, with Haber’s nod, chose Ypres, Belgium for opening night of Operation Disinfection. At 5 p.m., April 22, 1915, a westerly breeze blew across a maze of German trenches and toward the Allied lines. It was time to turn on the gas—arguably the first weapon of mass destruction in history.
Organized by Haber, roughly 6,000 containers, containing 168 tons of chlorine across a 4-mile front, were buried and buttressed with sandbags. Pipes and hoses ran from cylinder valves overtop trench lips, pointed directly at Allied lines.
After several aborted attempts due to wind direction, valves were spun simultaneously at 5 p.m., turning liquid to vapor in open air, and sending a 60’-high, bleach-smelling, green cloud rolling across no man’s land. The foul clouds were launched repeatedly over several days, sinking into Allied trenches.
A British solider described the impact: trundling along with the wind came the queer fog that seemed strangely out of place in the bright atmosphere of that clear April day. It reached the parapet, paused, gathered itself like a wave and ponderously lapped over into the trenches. Then passive curiosity turned to active torment—a burning sensation in the head, red-hot needles in the lungs, the throat seized as by a strangler. Many fell and died on the spot.
Another soldier’s recollection: gray faces and protruding eyeballs, clutching their throats and choking as they ran, many of them dropping in their tracks and lying on the sodden earth with limbs convulsed and features distorted in death.
Another battlefield description: It produces a flooding of the lungs—it is an equivalent of death to drowning, only on dry land. The effects are these—a splitting headache and terrific thirst (to drink water is instant death), a knife-edge of pain in the lungs and the coughing up of a greenish froth off the stomach and the lungs, ending finally in insensibility and death. The color of the skin turns a greenish black and yellow ... and the eyes assume a glassy stare. It is a fiendish death to die.
The Ypres gas attack resulted in 15,000 casualties and nearly 5,000 dead.
Haber was celebrated. Instant promotion to captain by the Kaiser. Placement as director of Germany’s expanding chemical warfare program with 1,500 people working under his command on a massive budget. He was given an official green light to weaponize chemicals on an industrial scale. Haber would go on to conduct and provide research for the weaponization of chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas. BASF took the lead on production and supply for chlorine and phosgene gas, and participated, along with Bayer, in the manufacture of mustard gas.
Yet, days after he achieved his initial battlefield success by sending a deadly cloud across no man’s land at Ypres in April 1915, his wife, Clara, shot a hole through her heart. Incredibly, Haber’s son, and his granddaughter, would follow Clara down the suicide road.
Auschwitz Calling
Leaving the Western Front for a two-day furlough following the April 22 attack, Haber temporarily returned to his home in the Berlin suburbs, attending an evening dinner party in his honor on May 1. The historical detail is a blur: Purportedly, Haber and Clara argued the afternoon/night of the party, although the source of their quarrel is unknown. Whether an unfulfilled life, unhappy marriage, disagreement over the moral implications of chemical warfare, Haber’s philandering, a sexual indiscretion committed at the party, or something else, Clara, 44, used Haber’s service pistol, possibly an M1883 Reichsrevolver, to kill herself past midnight, into the hours of May 2.
She walked into her home’s garden and fired a shot into her chest. Haber never stirred from his bed, sedated with a daily dose of sleeping pills. However, young Hermann, 12 years old, heard the shot and ran downstairs to find his mother’s crumpled body still clinging to life. Clara bled to death in Hermann’s arms.
(Historical accounts differ as to who attended the dinner. Several sources contend Charlotte Nathan, 26, Haber’s subsequent wife who he married in 1917, was in attendance. In her memoir, written decades later, she denied being present. Also, whether Clara wrote farewell letters to friends, family, or both, is unclear. If she did, the letters did not survive.)
As for Haber, orders were orders. Leaving Clara’s body for his boy to bury, Haber boarded a train for the Eastern Front to orchestrate for another gas attack—the first against the Russians. Several months later, the Allies reacted with their own chemical warfare attack. By war’s end in November 1918, roughly 100,000 deaths and 1.3 million total casualties were attributed to chemical warfare. Haber was temporarily declared a war criminal by the Allies, but the charges were later dropped.
Haber’s name and reputation permanently were stained, although he did receive a Nobel Prize for ammonia synthesis in 1918. He spent part of the 1920s in a failed attempt to distill gold from seawater. However, also in the 1920s, in the cruelest of ironies, Haber developed Zyklon A, a cyanide-based pesticide and grain fumigant.
Haber’s Zyklon A research came with a macabre twist, among the darkest ironies of the twentieth century: His formulation was later modified by other German scientists into Zyklon B—the infamous agent used by the Nazis to gas millions of Jews at Auschwitz and numerous other death camps during World War 2. Several members of Haber’s extended family died in those same camps.
A Glass of Tears
When Hitler came to power in 1933, Haber, of Christian faith, but Jewish blood, was a marked man. He fled Germany in 1934 and died the same year of heart failure in Basel, Switzerland. Today, his remains are buried alongside Clara’s in Basel.
In 1946, Hermann, 44, roughly 31 years after finding his own mother, Clara, dying in her Berlin garden, killed himself in Nassau County, New York. Three years later, in 1949, his daughter, Claire Haber, a 21-year-old PhD chemist like both of her grandparents, killed herself in Cook County, Illinois.
The contradictory life of Fritz Haber is almost too impossible for fiction. Success over success, breakthrough after breakthrough, patent on patent, and loss atop loss. Among the most brilliant minds of all time, Haber performed farm magic, opening the door to a food supply unparalleled in history.
Haber’s discovery of ammonia synthesis is a cornerstone of modern agriculture, and therefore, modern civilization. Today, the Haber-Bosch process produces roughly 200 million standard tons (180 million metric tons) of ammonia annually. Almost 80% of that output goes into agricultural fertilizer.
Yet, so much success, acclaim, achievement, and wealth—all washed down with a glass of tears.
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Stealing the Farm: China Continues Raid of US Agriculture by Theft and Agroterror
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing
Georgia Watermelon Heist Explodes into Epic Night of Pandemonium
Sisters of Farm Fraud: How 4 Siblings Fleeced USDA for $10M
When Conservation Backfires: Landowner Defeats Feds in Mindboggling Private Property Case
Cold-Busted: Frozen Deer Decoy Nabs Poachers and Cocaine in Spectacular Sting
Sticky Fingers: USDA Fraudster Steals $200M in Stunning Scam
