With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Fritz Haber: Jewish chemist whose work led to Zyklon B

It has been claimed that as many as two out of five humans on the planet today owe their existence to the discoveries made by one brilliant German chemist.

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.
Read entire article at BBC News