Fritz Haber

He received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 1918, and it was awarded under international protest: he had himself directed the first gas attack—chlorine at Ypres on 22 April 1915.

He was born a Jew in Breslau and baptised a Lutheran during his Jena years, between 1892 and 1894, aged twenty-four to twenty-six, probably for the sake of an academic and military career. There is no exact date, and none may be printed as exact.

Three corrections to the usual account. First: his wife Clara Immerwahr, the first woman to take a chemistry doctorate at Breslau, shot herself with his service revolver in their garden on 2 May 1915, ten days after Ypres; their twelve-year-old son Hermann found her, and Haber left for the Eastern Front the next day. That this was a protest against the gas war is an inference: the content of the quarrel is not recorded.

Second: in 1933 he was not dismissed—he resigned. On 30 April he tendered his resignation as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry rather than carry out the order to dismiss his Jewish staff. A resignation in protest is stronger than a dismissal, and more accurate.

Third: he did not invent Zyklon B. Scientists at his institute developed Zyklon A in the 1920s as an insecticide; Zyklon B was a later product of another firm, without his involvement, and the gas-chamber use came after his death. What is true, and worse, is this: the line of cyanide fumigants that began in his institute ended in the chambers where his relatives were killed—his niece Hilde Glücksmann, her husband and their two children.

He died on 29 January 1934 in a Basel sanatorium on his way to a rest cure, having received from Chaim Weizmann an offer of work at Rehovot. His son Hermann, the boy who found his mother, killed himself in 1946.