A Higher Form of Killing (13 page)

The U.S. government’s reaction to the German promulgation of unrestricted submarine warfare was much harsher than exchanges with Britain about the blockade or the use of neutral flags. On February 10 President Wilson declared that Germany’s action violated the rights of neutral countries and that it would be held “to a strict accountability” for any consequent loss of American life and any deprivation of American citizens’ “full enjoyment of their acknowledged rights on the high seas.” The two words “strict accountability” would achieve great significance in the months ahead. However, von Pohl expected Britain to be brought to its knees by the submarine campaign within a few weeks and von Tirpitz was soon rejoicing in the “magnificent” work of the German submarines, thinking their war diaries “as exciting as novels.”

The U.S. threat to hold Germany to account was quickly tested when, on March 28, 1915, the
U-28
sank the SS
Falaba
, an unarmed British passenger-cargo ship of five thousand tons, in the recently declared war zone off the southern Irish coast. More than one hundred people died including one American, mining engineer Leon Thresher, bound for West Africa from Liverpool. The
Falaba
was given some warning by the
U-28
’s commander, who had surfaced. However, he did not allow many minutes—twenty-three according to the U-boat war diary, seven according to British accounts—for evacuation before firing a single torpedo. The American press called the sinking “a massacre” and “piracy” but President Wilson avoided invoking the doctrine of “strict accountability” or reacting formally in any way.

Churchill thought the U-boat campaign was in fact having little impact. By the end of its first week, out of 1,381 vessels arriving or departing from British ports only eleven had been attacked and seven sunk. During the second week, only three ships were attacked and all escaped. By April the British press was rejoicing that inward and outward sailings were now running above fifteen hundred a week. Churchill even believed certain political advantages could be found in the new situation. On February 12, he had written to the president of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman, that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany . . . For our part we want the traffic—the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.”

Churchill had, however, on February 10 issued instructions to merchant captains to avoid headlands, steer a mid-channel course, operate at full speed off harbors, and post extra lookouts. If attacked by a submarine they should do their “utmost to escape” but if they could not they should steer for the submarine “at utmost speed” to force it to dive. The word “ram” was not used but ramming was clearly what was meant. When the Germans discovered these instructions they protested, saying any merchant captain who attempted to ram would, if captured, be treated as a criminal. On July 27, 1916, the German authorities would execute Captain Charles Fryatt, a British merchant captain who in March 1915 had saved his ship from a U-boat by attempting to ram it but had been captured on a subsequent occasion. Prime Minister Asquith would describe their action as “terrorism,” continuing: “It is impossible to guess to what further atrocities [the Germans] may proceed. His Majesty’s Government therefore desire to repeat emphatically that they are resolved that such crimes shall not . . . go unpunished . . . They are determined to bring to justice the criminals, whoever they may be and whatever their station . . . The man who authorises the system under which such crimes are committed may well be the most guilty of all.”

Although he had not accepted Fisher’s intemperate proposal to promulgate that captured zeppelin crews would be shot, Churchill ordered that in the future any captured U-boat crewmen should not be treated as ordinary prisoners of war but segregated for possible trial as pirates at the conclusion of hostilities. In retaliation, the German authorities placed in solitary confinement thirty-nine captured British officers, picking those whom they supposed related to the most prominent families in Great Britain. Among them was one of Sir Edward Grey’s relations. An outraged British press demanded that any special privileges given to von Tirpitz’s son, a naval officer captured earlier in the war, should be removed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Something That Makes People Permanently Incapable of Fighting”

As well as considering new strategies to secure a quick victory, the German high command had begun to consider new weapons to achieve the same end. As early as September 1914, General Erich von Falkenhayn, minister of war at the war’s start but since mid-September chief of the general staff succeeding General Helmuth von Moltke, whom the kaiser had ordered to report sick following what he thought of as his mistakes at the Battle of the Marne, concluded that “the ordinary weapons of attack had often failed completely . . . A weapon had, therefore, to be found which was superior to them but would not excessively tax the limited capacity of the German war industry . . . Such a weapon existed in gas.” He turned to Germany’s industrialists and scientists to provide it.

Among those who responded was a bespectacled, shaven-headed, forty-six-year-old Prussian chemist and future Nobel Prize winner, Fritz Haber, the director of the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. Haber’s path to prominence had not been straightforward. Born in 1868 into a wealthy Jewish family in Breslau (now Polish Wroclaw), his mother had died three weeks later, a loss from which his father, Siegfried, took many years to recover. Siegfried Haber was a businessman trading primarily in dyes. Since he had started his business the nature of dyes had been changing—formerly they were made from mainly organic substances but now most were synthetic dyes of which Germany had become the world’s leading producer, as with so many other chemicals.

The nineteenth century is often said to be the century of chemistry, just as the twentieth is that of physics. To the young Haber, as to many, chemistry seemed the key to Germany’s economic advance. In 1886, restless and with little interest in the family business, he convinced his father to allow him to study chemistry at Berlin University. Finding the work less than stimulating he moved to Heidelberg to study under Robert Bunsen—inventor of the eponymous burner—only to find him a dull teacher and return to Berlin. When he reached twenty, the one year’s military service that was the minimum obligation for all German males intervened and he was posted to an artillery regiment in his hometown of Breslau—his first contact with the military. He enjoyed the army, became a noncommissioned officer, and aspired unsuccessfully to be an officer.

Military service over, Haber returned to Berlin again where in 1891 he completed his doctorate. By now interested in physical chemistry, a new subject combining the two sciences, he applied to join the Leipzig laboratory of the leading exponent but was rejected. Using his business contacts and still hoping his son would join the family firm, Siegfried Haber then arranged three short apprenticeships in chemical companies for him to gain industrial experience. Perhaps despite himself the young Haber found industrial processes stimulating, supplementing as they did his academic knowledge. At a Budapest distillery he saw how potash was extracted from residues left over from distilling molasses. At a chemical plant northwest of Kraców he first became acquainted with the new Solvay process using ammonia to produce sodium carbonate, a key component in the production of glass and soap. Although he dismissed the neighboring countryside as a monotonous “wasteland of sand, swamp, and fever”—(it would become the site of Auschwitz)—he thought the plant was dominated by “a splendid and energetic intelligence” and was grateful to visit. His third apprenticeship was at a cellulose factory.

Shortly afterward at his father’s urging he reluctantly joined the family business. Six months of tension and argument followed, culminating in a major dispute over a business venture in which the young Haber purchased a large amount of chloride of lime for use as a disinfectant during a cholera outbreak in Hamburg, only to be left with it when the outbreak subsided unexpectedly quickly. As a result of the argument, he left Breslau and his father’s business to work as an unpaid laboratory assistant in Jena while studying chemistry again. He also converted to Christianity—a gesture that friends and family interpreted as underlining his rift with his father but behind which other factors may also have lain. Although there was no overt or legal religious discrimination in the newly unified Germany, the position of Jews within German society—especially their commitment to the newly formed nation—remained an issue, debated in the press and by right-wing political parties and in the military. Conversion symbolized his loyalty and commitment to Germany and might have made it easier for him to obtain an academic post.

In 1894 Haber did get a junior position in the chemical institute of Karlsruhe’s Technical University. There he specialized in the physical chemistry that had roused his interest in Berlin. Publishing papers on electrochemistry and working ferociously hard and successfully—though frequently bemoaning the state of his “nerves”—within four years he was close to becoming a full professor. His rapid thinking and fast talking as well as his energy impressed many. However, he could also appear combative, aggressive even. Viennese physicist Lise Meitner, later the discoverer with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann of nuclear fission, admired his intellect but observed that “his immediate reactions could be very violent and therefore not always objective.” She also said that sometimes Haber wanted to be “both your best friend and God at the same time.” When in 1900 Haber applied for the newly created chair in physical chemistry at the Karlsruhe chemical institute and it went to a rival, he vented his disappointment in even harder work, robustly challenging the successful candidate’s theories. In doing so he drove himself to near nervous breakdown as he had done on earlier occasions in his life—from 1898 he had been a regular visitor to sanatoriums. In 1906 when the holder of the chair of physical chemistry moved on, Haber was at last appointed to it.

To supplement his academic income, Haber was already acting as a consultant to the chemical industry. Germany’s rapidly expanding population meant that one of the great challenges was producing enough food and that required more fertilizers. The German chemical industry was therefore focusing on producing artificial fertilizers containing potassium, phosphorous, and vitally nitrogen. A major source of nitrogen was saltpeter imported from Chile. However, estimates that Chile’s saltpeter deposits would be exhausted by 1930 led to pressure to discover a way of extracting gaseous nitrogen from the air and bonding or “fixing” it in another form.

Haber became one of several scientists investigating whether nitrogen could be combined with hydrogen before being “fixed” in the form of ammonia and then used for conversion into fertilizer. While other scientists abandoned the idea as unfeasible on an industrial scale, Haber persisted. In 1908 the industrial giant Badische Anilin—& Soda-Fabrik (BASF) became his sponsor and the following year he succeeded in synthesizing ammonia, excitedly shouting to a colleague, “You have to see how the liquid ammonia is pouring out.” He reported to BASF the success of his process which involved heating nitrogen and hydrogen with an osmium catalyst under pressure of around 175 atmospheres to between 500 degrees Celsius and 550 degrees Celsius. The company was doubtful whether such a technology could safely be applied on an industrial scale but a member of the staff, the future Nobel Prize winner and industrialist Carl Bosch, convinced his colleagues that the technical obstacles to large scale production could be overcome and that “we should risk it.” On the eve of war, BASF was profitably producing thirty thousand tons of sulfate of ammonia fertilizer a year.

In the summer of 1911, Haber took up his new directorship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. Among the scientists who accepted his invitation to join him there was Albert Einstein, nine years his junior, who in 1905 had published his theory of special relativity and the ideas expressed in the world’s most famous equation: E = mc
²
. Einstein thought Haber a “splendid man” but one suffering from “personal vanity.” Other colleagues would recall his “hunger for power” though also his generosity, loyalty, and personal courage.

When the war began, Walther Rathenau, a prominent industrialist and head of the major German electrical company AEG and an adviser to von Bethmann Hollweg among others, was already concerned that if the short war implicit in all German planning had to be prolonged, Germany would run short of imported raw materials. The inevitable British naval blockade would, for example, deprive the country of both Chilean copper and saltpeter, the latter essential for explosives production as well as fertilizer. On August 9, 1914, Rathenau approached von Falkenhayn, then minister of war, and finding his concerns chimed with those of some of the military, persuaded von Falkenhayn to found the Kriegsrohstoffsamt (KRA)—the Wartime Raw Materials Office—within the Ministry of War with himself as its head. KRA’s purpose was to put German industry on a war footing and find substitutes for scarce strategically important materials.

Soon afterward, Rathenau approached Haber to lead the KRA’s chemistry department. A proud patriot, Haber accepted with alacrity. As early as 1909 Haber had spoken of “the relationship of chemistry to war” and in 1912 unsuccessfully sought to link his institute with the Prussian Ministry of War. Haber would soon, like Röntgen and Planck, be one of the ninety-three “representatives of German science and arts” to sign the “Proclamation to the Civilised World” denying that Germany was responsible for the war and had committed atrocities at Louvain and refuting the accusation “that our warfare pays no respect to international laws.” Einstein, now a professor at Berlin University, saw matters differently, shortly afterward being one of the few to sign a counter-manifesto arguing for an end to the war and calling on Europe to unite. In 1917 Einstein would liken Germany’s “much-praised technological progress and civilization” to “an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.”