Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  Clara committed suicide early on the morning of 2 May 1915, just over a week after her husband’s scientific weapon was released on unsuspecting French Algerian troops near Ypres. In the silence of that night, Clara had written several farewell letters. Then she took her husband’s pistol from its holster, went out into the garden and, after first firing into the air, she shot herself. She lived for a few hours after Hermann found her. Fritz had refused to listen to her protests about his misuse of science. Thanks to the sleeping pills, he didn’t hear her pistol shots either.

  According to some, Clara had warned her husband that if he did not stop working on the new weapons, she would kill herself. Her biographer has argued that she saw chemical weapons as a perversion of science, corrupting a discipline that should be offering insights into life, not inventing ever more terrible means of destroying it.6 Many years later, after both Fritz and Hermann were dead, the Institute’s engineer, Hermann Lütge, offered another motive for her suicide. He claimed that during the reception that evening, Clara had surprised her husband kissing Charlotte Nathan, the young woman who would become Haber’s second wife in 1917.7 No one could corroborate this claim, but it is clear that the Habers were by no means happily married. Charlotte Nathan archly described Clara and Fritz’s difficult relationship as a ‘Strindberg marriage’.8 Clara’s final letters could have revealed her true motive. Unfortunately, none have survived, and neither her family nor Haber’s ever discussed the matter. Her protest against the misuse of science – if that is what she intended – went unnoticed.

  On the same day as his wife’s suicide, Fritz Haber departed for the Eastern Front. He had been ordered to supervise a gas attack on Russian forces. His young son must have been distraught at being left in these circumstances, without either of his parents. Six weeks later, on 12 June 1915, Haber wrote to a friend that it was good to be at the front line where the bullets were flying. ‘There,’ he wrote, ‘only the moment counts and what one can do within the confines of the trench is one’s only duty.’9

  In the same letter he wrote passionately about how the experience of war awoke in him romantic notions of heroism inspired by patriotic poetry. He also admitted that when the din of battle finally abated, he could still hear the voice of his dead wife. But he remained fixated on his task of perfecting his chemical weapon, and he pursued this terrible grail with a religious fervour. For Haber, his success or failure would determine the outcome of the war: ‘The responsibility is the most terrible of all,’ he wrote, ‘the awareness that a wasted day or a delayed order costs blood that I could have spared with more hard work and energy. That is the whip that I always feel hanging over me.’10

  ‘Perhaps chemistry is the final weapon, the superior weapon, which will give the people who use it properly – who master it! – world wide supremacy. Perhaps even the Empire of the World!’11 These are not Haber’s words, but those of a fictional scientist, Professor Hoffman, in André Malraux’s haunting study of warfare, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, written during World War II. Hoffman is an unmistakable portrait of Haber. Malraux’s novel is based on an eyewitness account of a real gas attack that took place on 12 June 1915, the day that Fritz Haber was writing to his friend about his memory of Clara.12

  After leaving Berlin and his traumatized son, Haber travelled east to the Carpathian front. However, he soon realized that the terrain there was unsuited to an attack using poison gas, and proceeded to the sector of the front line nearly forty miles west of Warsaw, near Bolimó w on the River Bzura. This is where the gas attack in Malraux’s novel takes place. In reality the first attack was a failure, causing fifty-six casualties among the German troops. In Malraux’s novel, as the professor arrives at the front to supervise the second attack he is ‘beaming with joy’ at the favourable conditions: ‘The wind’s still perfect, still perfect!’13

  On the evening of the attack, Professor Hoffman praises chemistry as the ‘superior weapon’. The other German officers are not convinced, and the professor seizes the opportunity to enthuse about poison gas, reciting a litany of noxious war gases and their effects. Chlorine: ‘easy to liquefy, disastrous to the human organism, very cheap, mind you!’ Phosgene: ‘ten times as strong as chlorine’. Mustard gas: ‘the best fighting gas of all’.14

  Malraux’s German narrator, Vincent Berger, says that Hoffman has ‘the infectious power of those extreme neurotics who impose the atmosphere of their own genius or madness’.15 Like Griffin, H. G. Wells’s mad scientist in The Invisible Man, Professor Hoffman has become addicted to the drug of his own scientific power. The professor tries to sway the sceptical officers with an argument that became familiar in the interwar years: poison gas is ‘the most humane method of warfare’, he argues.16 Fritz Haber himself infamously claimed that chemical warfare was ‘a higher form of killing’.17 But despite the Professor’s coldly rational arguments, a question from one of the German officers is left hanging unanswered in the air: ‘why are we despised?’18

  An aerial view of a German gas attack on the Eastern Front in World War I.

  The next morning, Berger and the other soldiers watch the cloud of gas as it drifts silently across the River Bzura and over the Russian trenches:

  A long cloud of dust was floating in the sunshine. Not feathering out like the dust in the wake of a car, but uniformly thick and tall, like a wall… The sheet of gas went on growing, swamping the parallel trunks of the apple-trees to the same height, then their branches. Soon the bottom of the valley was only a yellow fog…19

  This scientific fog has the ‘look of a war machine’ as it rolls towards the Russian lines. A riderless horse charges wildly at the yellow cloud and is ‘swallowed up in the vast silence’.20 Then the order comes to advance. What the German soldiers discover is unlike any wartime experience they have had. The Professor has described the human effects of the noxious mix of phosgene and chlorine: ‘The opaque cornea first goes blue, the breath starts to come in hisses, the pupil – it’s really very odd! – goes almost black.’21 But this clinical description falls far short of the full horror of the actual gas attack.

  The chemical superweapon leaves in its wake a scene worthy of Dante’s Inferno. It is a scientific apocalypse, a hell created by humankind, revealing (as Malraux puts it) that the depths of the earth ‘teemed with monsters and buried gods’.22 The Russian trenches now lie in a ‘valley of death’23 where everything – from the plants to the birds and the bees – appears to be dead and already rotting:

  The path began to slant more steeply… In the middle of it a man was leaping on all fours, with such spasmodic jerks that it seemed he was being bounced along. Naked. Two yards off, the apparition lifted its grey face and whiteless eyes, opened its epileptic mouth as though to scream…Mad with pain, moving like any madman, as though its body was now only possessed by torment, with a few frog-like leaps it plunged into the putrescence.

  Then, in the prehistoric silence, there was a scream, a scream of utter agony which ended up in a mew…

  Above the path there were some Russian greatcoats scattered all over the place, shirts hanging, as though carbonized, on the fantastic branches; but not a sign of an explosion. And close by, in a tiny clearing concealed behind a row of sunflowers, some thirty men lay crumbling in a T-shaped trench: an enemy advanced post.

  All dead, more or less naked, scattered across a pile of tattered clothes, clutching each other in convulsive groups… Feet were sticking out of this petrified swarm of dead bodies, big toes curled like fists.24

  But what particularly appals Berger, more than their ‘lead-coloured eyes, more than those hands twisting in the empty air’, is ‘the absence of any wound. The absence of blood.’25 Death had come without warning and without mercy, a silent, creeping chemical killer.

  Malraux’s novel gives voice to the widespread feeling after World War I that humankind had stepped beyond the pale in developing such scientifically efficient weapons of mass destruction. Poison gas seemed to be an expression of our da
rkest and most deadly desires. ‘The Spirit of Evil was stronger here than death’, says Berger.26 He feels that a ‘human apocalypse… had just seized him by the throat’.27

  When they see the human effect of the new weapon, the German soldiers throw down their guns and carry to the ambulances those among their former enemies who are not yet dead, seeking through individual acts of kindness to overcome the ‘inhumanity’ of what had been done that day. The military advance becomes what Malraux memorably describes as an ‘assault of pity’.28 But tragically, compassion comes at a price: as they help the Russians, the German soldiers unwittingly expose themselves to potentially lethal doses of the gases that are still hanging invisibly in the air. In the actual attack there were 350 German gas casualties. No one counted the number of Russians killed or injured. Exact figures were not kept, but there could have been as many as half a million Russian military gas casualties in the course of the war.29

  Professor Hoffman is unperturbed by the human suffering. He only has eyes for the effectiveness of his weapon: ‘You see! You see! Absolutely decisive!’30 Malraux’s description of Hoffman/Haber is haunting. The chain-smoking professor is obsessed with his quest for what he calls the ‘superior weapon’. He has a chilling gleam in his eye as he enthuses about the science of destruction, driven by his eagerness to please his political masters and his superweapon fantasies.

  André Malraux wrote his novel in the first half of 1942, the year in which Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi successfully unleashed the atom’s energy in Chicago. This was also the time when the Third Reich was planning the Final Solution, at the Wannsee Conference. And it was another gas developed at Haber’s Institute that would permit this scientifically efficient genocide to take place – hydrogen cyanide. It was developed as a fumigant for pest control between 1919 and 1923 in the form known as Zyklon B. One of the chief researchers was Ferdinand Flury, whom Haber had placed in charge of chemical weapons research during World War I. The gas acts on the nervous system and causes instant death. The Germans rejected hydrogen cyanide as a battlefield weapon in World War I, although the French did use it in shells.31

  Malraux’s Professor Hoffman describes hydrogen cyanide as a ‘perfect poison’ in an enclosed space: ‘the victim is seized with convulsions and falls dead in a tetanic rigor’.32 The SS first used Zyklon B to gas some six hundred Soviet prisoners of war at Birkenau. This gas, which was invented to kill vermin, was used with appalling efficiency as a means of mass murder. Among its many thousands of victims at Auschwitz were Fritz Haber’s own relatives.

  Another scientist who worked with Haber on the Eastern Front judged the June attack ‘a complete success’. Otto Hahn described how initially a change in wind direction caused panic among the German troops. Unarmed, but wearing his gas mask (at this stage only members of Haber’s gas warfare unit had respirators), Hahn rallied the German soldiers and led the attack. ‘Not a single shot was fired,’ he recalled. Thanks to the gas they advanced nearly four miles. Like Vincent Berger, he saw ‘a considerable number of Russians poisoned by the gas’. According to Hahn, they ‘lay or crouched in a pitiable condition… I felt profoundly ashamed and perturbed. After all, I shared the guilt for this tragedy.’33

  Before joining Haber’s chemical warfare unit, Hahn had fought on the Western Front. The chemist had been awarded the Iron Cross (2nd Class) for forming an impromptu machine gun unit with captured Belgian weapons. Called up at the start of the war, he had experienced the extraordinary Christmas of 1914, when English, French and German troops called a spontaneous truce and left their trenches to celebrate Christmas in no man’s land. Hahn later recalled how ‘The English gave us their good cigarettes, and those among us who had candied fruit gave them some. We sang songs together, and for the night of 24/25 December the war stopped.’34 But by Boxing Day the unofficial truce had ended, and it was back to legalized murder.

  As early as the 1880s, Friedrich Engels had predicted that Germany would wage a world war ‘of an extension and violence hitherto undreamt of’. It was the logical outcome of the ‘mutual outbidding in armaments’ in which nations were involved. He warned that the future would bring a massacre on an unprecedented scale. Tomorrow’s conflicts would be total wars.35 All the benefits of the modern industrial society – railways, telephones, aircraft – meant that war could now be waged faster and with ever more destructive weapons. Some thought that new technology would usher in an era of lightning wars. But they were wrong. Instead, new inventions such as machine guns and barbed wire favoured defenders, and in World War I, Engels’s prediction came true. Faced with the new technologies of war, Alfred von Schlieffen’s master plan for a rapid conquest of France quickly fell apart, and in its place a network of defensive trenches spread from Belgium to Switzerland. Within weeks Europe was transformed into a ‘mausoleum of mud’.36

  While recuperating behind the lines, Hahn was told to report to Fritz Haber at a Brussels hotel. The two chemists already knew each other. The 34-year-old Hahn worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, next door to Haber’s Institute in Dahlem, conducting research into radium and radioactivity. Hahn knocked on Haber’s hotel door at noon, and was surprised to find the eminent professor still lying in bed. ‘From his bed he gave me a lecture’, Hahn recalled, ‘about how the war had now become frozen in place and that the fronts were immobile.’37 Haber told him that what was needed to break the stalemate was the introduction of ‘new weapons’. He intended to use chlorine gas clouds to force the enemy out of their trenches. Hahn pointed out that this would be in breach of the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, which banned ‘poison or poisoned weapons’.38 Such an attack would be universally condemned, he predicted. Haber did not disagree, but he argued, somewhat disingenuously, that as the French had already used tear-gas grenades, Germany would not be the first to use gas weapons. More importantly, he said, it was an opportunity to bring the war to a speedy conclusion: ‘countless lives’ could be saved.39

  Hahn was convinced, and joined Haber’s gas warfare unit, initially code-named the ‘decontamination unit’, but known later as the Pioneer Regiment. Other scientists who were recruited included James Franck and Gustav Hertz, both of whom later won Nobel prizes, as did Hahn. Hans Geiger, who invented the radiation counter that bears his name, also worked on chemical weapons during World War I. Hahn’s colleague Lise Meitner supported his decision to work on chemical weapons, telling him in March 1915 that lives would be saved if a winning weapon could be invented. And in any case, she said, ‘if you don’t do it someone else will’.40 Such reasoning would lead eventually to the alliance of scientists and generals that became a feature of the cold-war arms race.

  Some scientists did resist, however. The physicist Max Born ‘hated the idea of chemical warfare and… refused to take any part in it.’ He even ‘broke off all personal relations with Haber’ and chose to work instead on aircraft radios.41 A former colleague of Haber, the chemist Hermann Staudinger, asked the Red Cross to condemn the use of chemical weapons. Haber angrily attacked him as unpatriotic.42 But such principled scientists were in the minority. As Haber’s biographer, Margit Szöllösi-Janze, says, there is no doubt that, like Haber, most scientists were ‘fascinated’ by the possibility of applying science to war. They were eager to take part.43

  At just after 5 p.m. on Thursday 22 April 1915, another German artillery barrage began. High-explosive shells rained down on the French Algerian troops dug in around Langemarck near the ancient Belgian market town of Ypres. Those brave enough to poke their heads above their trenches, saw a strange cloud drifting slowly towards them across the shell-pocked no man’s land. At first the cloud looked white, but as it approached it became thicker and turned a sulphurous yellow-green colour. Carried on the light north-easterly breeze, it moved at about a foot a second, never rising much above the height of a man.

  Some soldiers had stripped to the waist in the warm weather. Now they watched curiously as the cloud drew nearer. They were not espe
cially alarmed, having no idea what it was. The cloud crept towards them like an eerie sea mist. The opposing front-line trenches were close here, just fifty yards apart at some points, and the cloud soon reached the first French soldiers. Chlorine gas is twice as dense as air. When it reached the parapets of the French trenches, it rolled down on top of the men like a slow waterfall. It was then the soldiers realized that they were being attacked by a new and deadly weapon.

  Samuel Auld, a British chemistry professor, saw the attack. He described the reaction of the soldiers: ‘First wonder, then fear; then, as the first fringes of the cloud enveloped them and left them choking and agonized in the fight for breath – panic. Those who could move broke and ran, trying, generally in vain, to outstrip the cloud which followed inexorably after them.’44

  Initially they felt ‘an intense pricking in the nasal passages and also in the throat’.45 But then, as they inhaled more, it felt as though their eyes, nose and throat were on fire. Uncontrollable spasms of coughing racked their bodies. Chlorine kills by destroying the lining of the lungs. As the lungs become inflamed, fluid builds up, frothing out of the victim’s mouth. According to one man who was gassed by chlorine, it felt as though his chest was filling up with soap bubbles.46 There follows a slow, terrible death, in which the victim drowns in his own liquefied lungs. The poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action in 1918, describes the horror of a gas attack:

  As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

  In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

  He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.47

  Disoriented and terrified, soldiers threw away their guns and struggled desperately to climb into fresh air. Any thought of the war vanished from their minds as they fought for breath and for dear life. Many never made it out of their trenches. Afterwards, the shiny brass buttons of all the soldiers caught in the gas had turned green.