Hell's Cartel

by Diarmuid Jeffreys

  Despite his Jewish background—or perhaps because of it—Haber adopted all the outward manifestations of a Junker aristocrat. His square, shaven head was disfigured by a dueling scar; he had a fondness for military-style tunics and he carried himself as though conscious of his superiority over lesser men. Proud, obdurate, and stiffly patriotic, he seemed the quintessential Prussian. But this steely exterior hid a sensitive soul. Haber was a keen reader of romantic poetry and an amorous suitor, frequently entangled in complex relationships; many counted him a loyal, warm, and devoted friend. He was also a brilliant scientist who could throw enormous energy at cracking problems in the laboratory, happy to put in the long, grinding hours necessary for finding solutions.

  In late 1908 Haber’s reputation as an original thinker—and the support of influential patrons—won him a plum job. He was appointed director of one of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Berlin’s Dahlem suburb. These had been established a few months earlier under the German emperor’s patronage with the express intention of maintaining German preeminence in the sciences. Haber was given responsibility for the institute devoted to chemistry (Albert Einstein and Max Planck were appointed to similar positions nearby) and it was here that he took up the challenge presented by Sir William Crookes over a decade earlier.

  The nitrogen problem wasn’t new to him, of course. Like many other chemists around the world he had been applying his mind to possible solutions. But whereas others had focused their energies on duplicating the effects of lightning, Haber believed that the only realistic answer lay in a process known as hydrogenation, combining airborne nitrogen with hydrogen to form ammonia. The chemical composition of ammonia, one atom of nitrogen to three atoms of hydrogen, had been discovered by scientists in the late eighteenth century and chemists had tried unsuccessfully to synthesize it ever since. Haber knew that if this synthesis could be achieved, it would supply nitrogen in a practical fixed form; the ammonia could be combined with phosphates and potash for use as a fertilizer. But he also realized that any such method would necessarily involve very high temperatures and the application of quite extraordinary pressure—about two hundred times the atmosphere at sea level. No one had yet been successful but, typically, Haber was undaunted. Once he had settled himself in at Dahlem, he began work with the help of an English assistant, Robert LeRossignol. After weeks of experiments they had managed to devise a process, but unfortunately it yielded only a trickle of ammonia and even that took an age to form. Something was missing—a catalyst to speed up the synthesis. After several more months, tediously testing likely candidates, Haber finally found one that worked, the rare metal osmium, followed a few days later by a second, uranium. It was time to get in touch with his sponsors.

  For much of the previous year Haber’s experiments had been financially supported by a grant from BASF. Unimpressed by the prospects for the Norwegian nitrogen project, the company had switched horses when it heard about Haber’s work. Now, eager to see what Haber was up to, BASF’s general manager, Heinrich Brunck, accompanied by one of his favorite young technical specialists, Carl Bosch, traveled to Dahlem. Brunck came away impressed, although greatly daunted by the enormous technical challenges of a process that had no precedent in the chemical industry. His younger colleague was more optimistic. The son of a Cologne businessman, Bosch had often demonstrated his acuity and determination since joining BASF from Leipzig University in 1899, and now he exercised these talents on his boss. On the way back to Ludwigshafen he persuaded Brunck to continue funding Haber’s research. If the scientist could manage to fix nitrogen in the laboratory, a way could probably be found to replicate the process industrially. After all, the potential rewards were enormous—not least from the German government, which could perhaps be persuaded to come up with subsidies.

  Thus it was that on July 1, 1909, Carl Bosch, this time accompanied by BASF’s catalysis expert, Alywin Mittasch, returned to Haber’s laboratory to see a demonstration. Things didn’t quite go as planned. A section of the vital pressure apparatus burst and it took most of that day and night to get it fixed. Bosch left in frustration to catch the train home, but Mittasch stayed and was rewarded the following afternoon with an extraordinary sight. Haber’s hydrogenation equipment began producing seventy drops of ammonia a minute. At least in theory, one of the world’s most serious problems had been solved. Now the only challenge was how to make engineering reality of a remarkable stroke of scientific genius, transforming a few beakers of liquid ammonia into a commercial process that could generate thousands of tons.

  As BASF moved quickly to arrange a royalty agreement with Haber and to file the appropriate patents, this seemingly intractable production problem was at the forefront of everyone’s minds. The undertaking was enormous (some of the company’s directors feared it might even be impossible), and it would take a man with truly remarkable qualities to guide it. Heinrich Brunck was convinced that Carl Bosch was the right candidate. Although he was young, just thirty-five, Bosch had very special skills. He was not just a brilliant chemist but also a highly trained metallurgical engineer, a rare combination, even in that intensely technological industry. Moreover, he had already displayed his decisiveness and foresight in supporting Haber, qualities that Brunck believed would be vital.

  Over the next three and a half years, Carl Bosch tried his best to live up to Brunck’s expectations. The difficulties were immense. Haber’s hydrogenation process relied on extreme pressures and temperatures: scaling up his apparatus into an industrial installation capable of withstanding these extremes—an installation, moreover, that would later have to operate as an efficient mass-production unit—posed scientific and engineering problems that no one had encountered before. Bosch and his team had to identify cheaper and more readily available catalysts than osmium and uranium to speed up the process of ammonia synthesis—extraordinarily laborious work that involved over two thousand experiments—and then develop new heat-resistant alloys to stop the plant from exploding. But their biggest problem was building a high-pressure reactor chamber in which the Haber process could take place. Bosch worked night and day developing prototypes made from steel, which at first seemed to be strong enough. But tests soon showed that the carbon in the steel reacted badly with the hydrogen given off by Haber’s apparatus, making the metal brittle and liable to fracture. There seemed to be no way around this obstacle until February 1911, when, during a late-night beer-drinking session with his team of researchers—a rare moment of relaxation in an otherwise relentless schedule—Bosch thought up a method of containing the process in a giant double-skinned tube of iron and steel. Iron, which had no carbon element, was unaffected by hydrogen and Bosch realized that if he used it as an inner sleeve to contain the reactants he could reduce hydrogen’s weakening effect on the tube’s steel outer skin to a minimum and increase atmospheric pressure throughout the chamber to the levels the process required. A further innovation, putting a few tiny holes in the outer shell, allowed any hydrogen seeping through welding points on the iron inner core to dissipate harmlessly into the atmosphere.

  These were significant advances, but, even so, Bosch had to contend with those on the BASF board who were concerned at the huge capital investment the venture required. And when Brunck died unexpectedly at the end of 1912, Bosch had to fight even harder to keep the work going. Finally, however, his vision began to take shape in a huge new plant at Oppau on the Rhine, a few miles from BASF’s Ludwigshafen headquarters. By the winter of 1913 the complex was operational, and Bosch’s huge double-skinned tubes were producing hundreds of tons of synthetic ammonia for use as fertilizer. It was an extraordinary achievement, an engineering and technical marvel without parallel in the industrialized world, and it won Bosch huge plaudits from across the scientific community. Before long this universal applause had elevated his reputation to near parity with that of Fritz Haber, and the process he had worked so hard to bring to fruition was being identified by their joint names. Carl Bosch, many of his peers dec
lared, was a miracle worker whose skill and determination had quashed fears that the developed world might one day face starvation. In the short term, though, the Haber-Bosch process had other, deadlier consequences. For nitrogen was vital for more than replenishing the soil; it was a key ingredient of high explosives, too, and soon that particular commodity would be in great demand

  * * *

  FOR MUCH OF its comparatively brief existence the German chemical industry had kept clear of national politics. Many of its leaders were members of the Society for the Protection of the Interests of the German Chemical Industry—which assiduously lobbied governments at home and abroad to adopt probusiness policies—and generally they were firm believers in free trade and economic liberalism. But on the whole their active participation in national and international affairs had been industry-specific, restricted to such matters as patent legislation, tariffs, and financial support for the sciences. As time went by, however, and the industry’s economic power and influence grew (between 1890 and 1913, for example, exports of dyes and pharmaceuticals provided Germany’s largest source of income from foreign trade), they found it harder to stand aloof from the larger questions of the day.

  At a local level these were most clearly apparent in the challenges posed by workers’ rights and trade unionism. The chemical companies were big employers; tens of thousands of men (it was still an exclusively male world) worked in their factories, often in dirty and dangerous conditions and with little in the way of protection. The industry’s extraordinarily rapid growth had brought with it a degree of job security, in that demand for workers, especially skilled ones, was consistently high. But the vast majority (about 75 percent in a company like BASF in 1900) were unskilled or semiskilled. The specialist tradesmen, the foremen, and those with some measure of responsibility (who were all on long-term contracts) were reasonably well paid by the standards of the time, but ordinary shop floor employees most certainly were not. At the turn of the century, the industry’s average daily wage was around three marks, barely above subsistence level, and this was for a twelve-hour shift and a six-day workweek, often spent in a poisonous and badly ventilated atmosphere close to hazardous chemicals and complicated apparatus. Accidents and injury were common, fatalities were distressingly frequent, and the long-term consequences of working with potentially harmful substances were largely unknown. Although the chemical companies generally abided by the limited safety standards set by government inspectors, in reality these were woefully inadequate and rarely kept pace with an industry that was constantly inventing new products and developing complicated procedures to make them.

  At the same time the heads of the chemical industry were not simply rapacious capitalists, bent on exploiting labor and maximizing profits at the expense of their employees’ health and well-being. Most of them had been brought up in a tradition of Christian philanthropy and charity and believed there was some commonality of interests between the worker and the firm. In their view, the employer was obliged to provide an adequate wage and some degree of social benefits, while the employee’s duty was to respond with diligence, loyalty, and hard work. Thus firms like Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF built workers’ housing next to their plants, donated sums to local schools and hospitals, and established workers’ libraries, public baths, and saving associations. Occasionally they also offered health checkups for their employees and families, which, if somewhat basic, were at least free.

  Yet when set against the realities of low pay, often fearsomely strict factory discipline, and the dreadfully dangerous working conditions that many workers endured, these provisions are hard to see as outstandingly generous, especially as they were often motivated by self-interest. Companies were keen to avoid industrial strife, to bind employees closely to the firm and hold organized labor at bay. As early as 1884, BASF’s board had been horrified by a critical report from the government’s factory inspectorate, not because of the serious questions it raised about plant safety but because of its potential threat to “social peace”: “Such official pronouncements in the possession of a socialist agitator constitute inestimable material for the promotion of class hatred.” If tightening up safety procedures and providing a bit of health insurance for workers could keep the unions outside the factory gates, they were a price worth paying.

  By the turn of the century, the relationship between German capital and labor had begun to change: the days when a little corporate patronage could mitigate wider social problems were drawing to a close. For some years the left-wing SPD (Social Democrats) had been the nation’s fastest-growing political party and the trade union movement was starting to show its strength. The chemical business was no more immune to these developments than any other industry. Ad hoc workers’ associations and committees that emerged in 1900 became powerful enough to strike several times by the end of the decade. Collective bargaining for wages and better conditions was gradually being forced on businesses that had once prided themselves on their ability to fend such things off. In 1903 Carl Duisberg had lectured Americans on the dangers (as he saw them) of organized labor; within a few years he and his peers were facing a comparably difficult situation back home. Fearful of the chaos that industrial unrest would wreak on their businesses, they slowly became more involved in the increasingly complex domestic political situation. They moved toward overt backing for conservative probusiness political groups such as the National Liberal Party, with its manifesto of “the maintenance of the Reich” and its support for those with property and commercial interests. Inevitably, this political engagement attracted more attention from the social democracy movement, which in any case tended to view the chemical industry’s attempts at social provision (by 1912 these had extended to workers’ pubs, theater groups, and other such sponsored cultural activities) as strategies to shore up the capitalist system and prevent the trade unions from recruiting members.

  German society at large was fracturing, too. The 1912 Reichstag elections saw the election of 110 socialist deputies—an unprecedented number that made Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s task of liasing between the Reichstag and the autocratic Wilhelm II (with his coterie of aristocratic military advisers) that much harder. The kaiser was growing frustrated by Germany’s inability to carve out “a place in the sun,” to establish an imperial role that could rival that of Britain, France, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. To Bethmann-Hollweg, increasingly worried by the prospect of civil strife, it seemed as though a short, sharp war in support of Wilhelm’s ambitions might be the only way of avoiding a serious political crisis at home. And by now there were many in business—even in export-dependent industries like the chemical trade—who were coming around to the same view. Patriotism, the sense that German aspirations were being stifled by hostile European rivals, and hope that the glorious triumph of Sedan in 1870 could be repeated were now as openly expressed in the Rhineland boardrooms and laboratories of Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, and BASF as they were in the aristocratic salons of Potsdam, the bourgeois cafés of Berlin’s Unter den Linden, and the working-class beer Keller of Essen and Hamburg.

  So what shape was the German chemical industry in on the brink of war? Its companies had their various preoccupations, of course—Bayer’s struggles with pharmaceutical patent issues, BASF’s engineering problems with nitrogen—but collectively they were stronger than they had ever been. They had responded to the challenges of internal competition by forming two powerful associations and had planted the seeds of closer future cooperation. Although prices were leveling off, they still controlled over 85 percent of global dye production and they continued to flood the world with other products, from paints to photographic chemicals. Innovation, so amply demonstrated by the Haber-Bosch nitrogen process, was vital and thriving: Hoechst’s Paul Ehrlich had developed Salvarsan, a synthetic pharmaceutical product for the treatment of syphilis (a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize), while Bayer had started exploring promising new technologies for making synthetic rubber. The companies had begun to
realize they had much to lose if the coming conflict went against them and perhaps much to gain if Germany was able to prevail over its enemies and secure an economic advantage for its industries. Although chemistry was not as obviously crucial to warfare as, say, the Krupp armaments empire, it was clear to those in the industry (if not yet to the German high command) that it might still have some strategically significant role to play. And so in that last golden period of peace, they quietly drew up their own plans for what was to come, attempting to camouflage their financial assets in potentially hostile countries and making arrangements (woefully inadequate though they turned out to be) with likely neutrals in Spain, Portugal, the United States, and elsewhere, in the hope of circumventing any future enemy blockades of essential raw materials.

  And then, on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo and the world went to war.

  3

  THE CHEMISTS’ WAR

  It was supposed to be a brief campaign, a reprise of Prussia’s crushing victory over France forty-four years earlier. When the kaiser’s troops marched west in August 1914, they were under orders that had their genesis at Sedan in 1870. The aim of the Schlieffen Plan (named after its principal architect, the late Count Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German general staff until 1905) was very simple. While a small force contained Russia, the bulk of the German army would brush aside neutral Belgium and smash into France in an overwhelming assault to bring about its collapse before its allies could come effectively to its aid. Germany’s full strength could then be brought to bear on Russia, quickly securing defeat, and Britain, alone and isolated, would have no choice but to sue for peace.