- Person
- Fritz Haber
- Lived
- 1868–1934
- Field
- Chemistry
- From
- German
The story
Fritz Haber was born in 1868 into a Jewish family in Breslau, converted to Christianity as a young man, and considered himself a German patriot. He had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for synthesising ammonia, served the state in the First World War, and since 1911 had directed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, which he had built into an international centre of science. By 1931 he was increasingly worried about the rise of National Socialism and about the safety of his friends, colleagues and family.
On 7 April 1933 the new Nazi government passed its Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which required the dismissal of Jewish employees from public institutions. Jewish scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society were particular targets. Because of his war service and conversion, Haber was legally entitled to keep his post, but a Nazi science journal attacked him as a Jew all the same.
Ordered to dismiss all Jewish personnel, Haber tried to delay their departures long enough to find them somewhere to go. According to his Nobel biography, rather than agree to the dismissals, he resigned himself. On 30 April 1933 he wrote to the education minister Bernhard Rust and to Max Planck, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, resigning as director and as university professor with effect from 1 October. He wrote that although he might be legally entitled to remain, he no longer wished to do so.
Haber left Dahlem in August 1933. British colleagues, including Sir William Pope, arranged an invitation to Cambridge, where he lived and worked for a few months with his assistant Joseph Weiss. He urged that his younger children, at boarding school in Germany, leave the country, and they moved to Britain. Chaim Weizmann then invited him to lead a research institute in Rehovot, but Haber, suffering from heart disease, died in Basel on 29 January 1934 on his way there.
His Nobel biography says his spirit had been broken by his rejection by the Germany he had served. Yet his resignation letter stood as an act of solidarity with colleagues who had no such legal protection, and after the war his institute was renamed in his honour.
Why it matters
Haber's resignation was a public refusal to take part in the Nazi purge of Jewish scientists, made at great personal cost.
About Fritz Haber
Nobel chemist whose ammonia synthesis made the fertilisers that feed billions, who also led Germany’s WWI poison-gas programme, and who was driven out by the Nazis.
More about Fritz Haber
- Fritz Haber's surface idea inspired LangmuirFritz Haber observed that the adsorbing power of a solid can come from unsaturated valence forces on its surface, an idea on which Irving Langmuir founded his theory of adsorption.
- Haber–Bosch fertiliser helps feed half the worldScaled up by Carl Bosch from 1913, Fritz Haber's ammonia process made cheap fertiliser possible. Food grown with it is estimated to support nearly half the world's population.
- Fritz Haber co-invented the glass electrodeWith his colleague Cremer, Fritz Haber invented the glass electrode for measuring the acidity of liquids, a device his Nobel biography describes as now widely used.
- Fritz Haber rebuilt his institute into a world centreIn the 1920s Fritz Haber reorganised his Berlin-Dahlem institute, giving directors such as James Franck and Michael Polanyi full freedom and making it an international centre of science.
- Fritz Haber linked electrochemistry to industryFritz Haber's 1898 textbook on technical electrochemistry and his discovery that controlling electrode potential yields specific products became classics of the field.
- Fritz Haber invented a whistle to protect minersIn 1913 Fritz Haber unveiled a firedamp whistle that used sound to warn miners of explosive methane, and he also devised a quartz-thread gauge for very low gas pressures.
- Fritz Haber made ammonia from the air in 1909In 1909 Fritz Haber and Robert Le Rossignol became the first to synthesise ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, solving a problem chemists had pursued for decades.
- Fritz Haber wrote a model book on gas reactionsFritz Haber's 1905 book Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions was later regarded as a model of accuracy and critical insight in chemical thermodynamics.
Sources
- Fritz Haber Wikipedia
- Fritz Haber: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.