Fritz Haber: Jewish chemist whose work led to Zyklon B (original) (raw)
Yet this is the same chemist denounced by young German students today as a "murderer".
No-one personifies better than Fritz Haber the debate over science's capacity for good and evil.
And there is more to his dramatic life even than this. For Haber personifies too the tragedy of a Jew desperate to be a patriotic German, whose life was destroyed after the Nazis came to power.
And in the cruellest of all the ironies, his work was developed under the Nazis to create the gas used to murder millions in the Holocaust - including his relatives.
Fritz Haber was born in 1868 in Breslau, in what is now Poland.
As a young man he was bursting with ambition. "We only want one limit, the limit of our own ability," he wrote.
He went to study chemistry in Berlin - the ideal formula, he hoped, for transforming a provincial Jewish boy into a successful German.
Historian Fritz Stern, whose parents were close friends of Haber, says he was "ambitious but also vulnerable".
It was an exhilarating time, as Germany, newly unified under the Kaiser, powered ahead with scientific research at the forefront.
But anti-Semitism also grew as the century drew to a close, which preyed on Haber's mind despite his decision to convert to Christianity.
By the early 1930s he could see vicious anti-Semitism spreading around him, and his claim to be a German patriot was no protection.
"In early 1933", his daughter Eva told me, "he went to his institute. There was the porter, who said: 'The Jew Haber is not allowed in here.'"
Haber resigned, devastated, went briefly into exile, and died of a heart attack in 1934.
Despite the significance of his discoveries he remains much less well known than his friend and colleague Albert Einstein - perhaps because his reputation is so disputed.
It was not just the poison gas. There was one other area of research in the 1920s in which Haber and his colleagues were successful: developing pesticide gases.
Of Haber's legacies, this was the bitterest. For this research was later developed into the Zyklon process, used by the Nazis to murder millions in their death camps, including his own extended family.
His godson, historian Fritz Stern, says we must remember Haber "in all his complexity". He was a man of "scientific greatness, deeply cultivated".
But in an "excess of patriotism" he invented gas warfare, which "has come to define… the unspeakable horror of the First World War".
And as for his tortured relationship with Germany, Einstein concluded: "Haber's life was the tragedy of the German Jew - the tragedy of unrequited love."
You can hear Chris Bowlby's The Chemist of Life and Death on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 12 April at 2100 BST and again on Wednesday 13 April at 1630. You can also