kimster12271988
04-10-2011, 02:02 AM
Fritz Haber - The Father of Modern Chemical Warfare
When WW1 broke out in 1914, the German high command were confident of an early victory. However the war quickly stagnated into a trench-bound war of attrition, before one of Germany's leading scientists Fritz Haber, offered the Fatherland a way out of the impass. By 1914, Dr. Fritz Haber was already an internationally respected scientist, having perfected a process for extracting nitrates from the atmosphere. Used initially to produce fertilizer, then later the mass production of explosives vital to Germany's war effort. Haber dedicated himself to Germany in it's hour of need, determined to use his scientific knowledge to put an end to the deadlock on the western front. Originally of Jewish origin Haber had renounced Judaism and become a Christian, apparently driven by an overwhelming desire to prove his patriotism and worth to the fatherland. Realizing that huge amounts lethal gases were already produced as a by-product of the chemical industry, Haber saw the possibility that these gases could weaponized and applied to the battlefield. In his Berlin institute, he began investigating the lethal capabilities of a toxic gas used by the dye industry, chlorine. Throughout this research, Haber had faced strong opposition from his wife and fellow PHD chemist Clara Immerwahr, who felt that this work into chemical warfare of was a gross perversion of the humanitarian values that science stood for. Haber paid no heed her objections and continued his research in secret, until a laboratory accident claimed the life of one Clara’s friends and fellow researchers. Her objections became total hatred of the project. Haber pressed on regardless. At the end of 1914 Haber approached the military with promises of victory that would result from his new weapon. However, he faced strong scepticism as chemical warfare was both a new concept, and at odds with their sense of honour and military tradition. Germany had also signed the Hague convention banning the use of gas in war. Though they initially rejected his ideas, in late 1915 as the casualties began to mount they reconsidered. Assigned a military rank, he set to work developing a gas Corps for them. Chlorine gas irritates the respiratory system, reacting with the moisture in the eyes and lungs forming hydrochloric acid. Because it is heavier than air it clings to the ground, ideal for use against an entrenched enemy. Forming a grey-green cloud, it was described by soldiers as having a distinctive smell, a mixture between pepper and pineapple. At high concentrations and prolonged exposure it also causes death by asphyxiation. At Ypres on April 22nd 1915 the valves on the gas cylinders were released, and a deadly cloud drifted across the battlefield towards the unsuspecting French and Algerian troops. Ten thousand men died where they fell as the gas enveloped them. Everything in the clouds path was stained green, watches, bayonets, even human skin. The face of war had been irrevocably changed. Though the death toll was enormous the Germans failed to capitalise on the attack, even though it had created an 8,000 yard (7 km) gap in the Allied line. The Entente governments quickly claimed the attack was a flagrant violation of international law, but Germany argued that the Hague treaty had only banned chemical shells, rather than the use of gas projectors. Despite what Haber perceived to be a failure, he was hailed a hero and promoted to the rank of Captain, a rare honour to be bestowed on a civilian. Horrified by her husbands participation in the deaths of such a huge number of people, his wife Clara committed suicide with his service pistol, shooting herself in the heart. Seemingly unaffected, the next morning Haber made his way to the Eastern Front to personally oversee the next gas attack against the Russians. Allied troops were caught entirely unaware by this sinister new weapon, against which there seemed to be no protection. Soldiers were advised by the military commanders to use cloths moistened with urine as makeshift gas masks. Initially horrified by the use of gas, the British quickly gave the go-ahead to develop gas weapons. At the Battle of Loos on 25th September, in an operation codenamed Red Star, the British launched their own gas attack using Chlorine. The attack quite literally backfired, with prevailing winds blowing the gas back towards their own lines, highlighting an obvious drawback with such weapons. Both sides were soon using gas on a regular basis. As more effective means of protecting troops were introduced, the race to create even more lethal gases accelerated. The deficiencies of chlorine were overcome with the introduction of phosgene, a gas many times more deadly. Colourless and nearly odourless (likened in smell to "mouldy hay,"), phosgene was difficult to detect, making it a more effective and insidious weapon. French forces developed a technique for delivery of phosgene in a non-explosive artillery shell, overcoming many of the disadvantages of gas released from cylinders by delivering the agents close to the target. Then in July 1917, the Haber institute introduced a new horror, mustard gas. This attacked the skin as well as the lungs of soldiers rendering gas masks largely ineffective. Where the chemical came into contact with exposed skin it caused severe blistering, the effect on more sensitive tissues such as eyes and lungs was truly horrific and utterly debilitating. Mustard is what is now known as a "persistent" agent, meaning that it remains active even after that initial attack has ended. If mustard gas contaminated a soldier's clothing and equipment, then other soldiers coming into contact with it would also be poisoned. One nurse, Vera Brittain, wrote: "I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke." Haber himself declared it's effectiveness as a weapon of terror, writing "Every sensation in the nose and mouth nags in the mind. It creates utter confusion, eroding the soldiers inner strength". Others saw it as the most inhumane weapon of a war, which had already plumbed the depths of mans inhumanity to man. As the war reached it's climax, the Germans used mustard gas a key weapon in their campaign, with over 100,000 shells being fired at the Allies. By September 1918 the British had developed their own variant of mustard gas, unleashed on the Belgian front against the 16th Bavarian reserve infantry. An obscure corporal by the name of Adolf Hitler was one of it's victims, temporarily blinded in the attack. He later wrote that it was horror of being gassed that drove him out of the army and into politics. In November 1918 Germany surrendered. Gas had added hugely to the horror of the war, but had failed to provide the rapid victory the high command had hoped for. What it had done was kill over one hundred thousand men, and maim over a million more. Men who would bear the physical and mental scars long after the war had ended. Thanks to gas masks, and vagaries of the wind, the first weapon of mass destruction had failed to decide the outcome of the world's first great war. After the war, Dr. Haber was fearfull he would face trial as a war criminal. However he was awarded the Nobel prize for his pre-war work on nitrates, leaving him free to continue his research into gas weapons. Under the cover of developing pesticides, in the 1920s he developed another toxic gas from hydro-cyanic acid. A powerful insecticide, in enclosed space it was also highly effective at killing humans. 20 years later Zyklon B would be used to commit mass murder in Nazi death camps. Millions of victims of this genocide were Jews, Haber's own people. A cruel twist of fate he could not have foreseen. The use of gas had been forbidden by international law. But Hitler and the Nazis considered it a vital component of their coming war plans and continued research in secret. Scientists had been commanded to develop new weapons for the Fatherland. But Haber, who had created the first effective bond between scientists and the military, was forced to leave Germany in 1933 because of Nazi persecution of persons of Jewish ethnicity. His Nobel Prize winning work in chemistry, and subsequent contributions to Germany's war efforts in the form of chemical fertilizers, explosives and poison munitions, were not enough to prevent his vilification by the Nazi regime. Rejected by the country he had strived so hard to serve above all other considerations, he left Germany a broken man. An exile, he died in Switzerland in 1934 at the age of 65 of heart failure. He was cremated and his ashes, together with his wife Clara's, were buried in Basel's Hornli Cemetery.
ADDITIONAL INFO:
Fritz Haber (9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development for synthesizing ammonia, important for fertilizers and explosives. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid. He has also been described as the "father of chemical warfare" for his work developing and deploying chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. Haber was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), into a Hasidic family. His was one of the oldest families of that town. Haber later converted from strict Judaism to Christianity. His mother died during childbirth. His father was a well-known merchant in the town. From 1886 until 1891, he studied at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen, at the University of Berlin (today the Humboldt University of Berlin) in the group of A. W. Hofmann, and at the Technical College of Charlottenburg (today the Technical University of Berlin) under Carl Liebermann. He married Clara Immerwahr during 1901. Clara was also a chemist and an opponent of Haber's work in chemical warfare. Following an argument with Haber over the subject, she committed suicide. Their son, Hermann, born in 1902, would later also commit suicide because of his shame over his father's chemical warfare work. Before starting his own academic career, he worked at his father's chemical business and in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich with Georg Lunge. During his time at University of Karlsruhe from 1894 to 1911, he and Carl Bosch developed the Haber process, which is the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen under conditions of high temperature and pressure. In 1918 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. The Haber-Bosch process was a milestone in industrial chemistry, because it divorced the production of nitrogen products, such as fertilizer, explosives and chemical feedstocks, from natural deposits, especially sodium nitrate (caliche), of which Chile was a major (and almost unique) producer. Naturally extracted nitrate production in Chile fell from 2.5 million metric tonnes (employing 60,000 workers and selling at $45/tonne) in 1925 to just 800,000 tonnes, produced by 14,133 workers, and selling at $19/tonne in 1934. as also active in the research of combustion reactions, the separation of gold from sea water, adsorption effects, electrochemistry, and free radical research (see Fenton's reagent). A large part of his work from 1911 to 1933 was done at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Elektrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem. In 1953, this institute was renamed for him. He is sometimes credited, incorrectly, with first synthesizing MDMA (which was first synthesized by Merck KGaA chemist Anton Köllisch in 1912). Haber played a major role in the development of chemical warfare in World War I. Part of this work included the development of gas masks with absorbent filters. In addition to leading the teams developing chlorine gas and other deadly gases for use in trench warfare, Haber was on hand personally to aid in its release despite being proscribed by the Hague Convention of 1907 (to which Germany was a signatory). Future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz, and Otto Hahn served as gas troops in Haber's unit. Gas warfare in WW I was, in a sense, the war of the chemists, with Haber pitted against French Nobel laureate chemist Victor Grignard. Regarding war and peace, Haber once said, "During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country." His wife Clara, a fellow chemist and the first woman to earn a Ph.D at the University of Breslau, committed suicide with his service revolver in their garden, possibly in response to his having personally overseen the first successful use of chlorine at the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915. She shot herself in the heart on 15 May, and died in the morning. That same morning, Haber left for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russians. Haber was a patriotic German who was proud of his service during World War I, for which he was decorated. He was even given the rank of captain by the Kaiser, rare for a scientist too old to enlist in military service. In his studies of the effects of poison gas, Haber noted that exposure to a low concentration of a poisonous gas for a long time often had the same effect (death) as exposure to a high concentration for a short time. He formulated a simple mathematical relationship between the gas concentration and the necessary exposure time. This relationship became known as Haber's rule. Haber defended gas warfare against accusations that it was inhumane, saying that death was death, by whatever means it was inflicted. During the 1920s, scientists working at his institute developed the cyanide gas formulation Zyklon B, which was used as an insecticide, especially as a fumigant in grain stores. During the Holocaust it was used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps in the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and others viewed by the Third Reich as inferior races or socially unwanted. In the 1920s, Haber exhaustively searched for a method to extract gold from sea water, and published a number of scientific papers on the subject. After years of research, he concluded that the concentration of gold dissolved in sea water was much lower than those concentrations reported by earlier researchers, and that gold extraction from sea water was uneconomic. Haber's genius was recognized by the Nazis, who offered him special funding to continue his research on weapons. As a result of fellow Jewish scientists having already been expelled from working in that field, he left Germany in 1933. His Nobel Prize-winning work in chemistry, and subsequent contributions to Germany's war efforts in the form of chemical fertilizers, explosives and poison munitions, were not enough to prevent eventual vilification of his heritage by the Nazi regime. He moved to Cambridge, England, along with his assistant J J Weiss, for a few months, during which time Ernest Rutherford pointedly refused to shake hands with him, due to his involvement in poison gas warfare. Haber was offered by Chaim Weizmann the position of director at the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, in Mandate Palestine, and accepted it. He started his voyage to what is today Israel in January 1934, after recovering from a heart attack. His ill health overpowered him and on January 29, 1934, at the age of 65, he died of heart failure in a Basel hotel, where he was resting on his way to the Middle East. He was cremated and his ashes, together with Clara's ashes, were buried in Basel's Hornli Cemetery. He bequeathed his extensive private library to the Sieff Institute.
:eusa_snooty::eusa_snooty:
When WW1 broke out in 1914, the German high command were confident of an early victory. However the war quickly stagnated into a trench-bound war of attrition, before one of Germany's leading scientists Fritz Haber, offered the Fatherland a way out of the impass. By 1914, Dr. Fritz Haber was already an internationally respected scientist, having perfected a process for extracting nitrates from the atmosphere. Used initially to produce fertilizer, then later the mass production of explosives vital to Germany's war effort. Haber dedicated himself to Germany in it's hour of need, determined to use his scientific knowledge to put an end to the deadlock on the western front. Originally of Jewish origin Haber had renounced Judaism and become a Christian, apparently driven by an overwhelming desire to prove his patriotism and worth to the fatherland. Realizing that huge amounts lethal gases were already produced as a by-product of the chemical industry, Haber saw the possibility that these gases could weaponized and applied to the battlefield. In his Berlin institute, he began investigating the lethal capabilities of a toxic gas used by the dye industry, chlorine. Throughout this research, Haber had faced strong opposition from his wife and fellow PHD chemist Clara Immerwahr, who felt that this work into chemical warfare of was a gross perversion of the humanitarian values that science stood for. Haber paid no heed her objections and continued his research in secret, until a laboratory accident claimed the life of one Clara’s friends and fellow researchers. Her objections became total hatred of the project. Haber pressed on regardless. At the end of 1914 Haber approached the military with promises of victory that would result from his new weapon. However, he faced strong scepticism as chemical warfare was both a new concept, and at odds with their sense of honour and military tradition. Germany had also signed the Hague convention banning the use of gas in war. Though they initially rejected his ideas, in late 1915 as the casualties began to mount they reconsidered. Assigned a military rank, he set to work developing a gas Corps for them. Chlorine gas irritates the respiratory system, reacting with the moisture in the eyes and lungs forming hydrochloric acid. Because it is heavier than air it clings to the ground, ideal for use against an entrenched enemy. Forming a grey-green cloud, it was described by soldiers as having a distinctive smell, a mixture between pepper and pineapple. At high concentrations and prolonged exposure it also causes death by asphyxiation. At Ypres on April 22nd 1915 the valves on the gas cylinders were released, and a deadly cloud drifted across the battlefield towards the unsuspecting French and Algerian troops. Ten thousand men died where they fell as the gas enveloped them. Everything in the clouds path was stained green, watches, bayonets, even human skin. The face of war had been irrevocably changed. Though the death toll was enormous the Germans failed to capitalise on the attack, even though it had created an 8,000 yard (7 km) gap in the Allied line. The Entente governments quickly claimed the attack was a flagrant violation of international law, but Germany argued that the Hague treaty had only banned chemical shells, rather than the use of gas projectors. Despite what Haber perceived to be a failure, he was hailed a hero and promoted to the rank of Captain, a rare honour to be bestowed on a civilian. Horrified by her husbands participation in the deaths of such a huge number of people, his wife Clara committed suicide with his service pistol, shooting herself in the heart. Seemingly unaffected, the next morning Haber made his way to the Eastern Front to personally oversee the next gas attack against the Russians. Allied troops were caught entirely unaware by this sinister new weapon, against which there seemed to be no protection. Soldiers were advised by the military commanders to use cloths moistened with urine as makeshift gas masks. Initially horrified by the use of gas, the British quickly gave the go-ahead to develop gas weapons. At the Battle of Loos on 25th September, in an operation codenamed Red Star, the British launched their own gas attack using Chlorine. The attack quite literally backfired, with prevailing winds blowing the gas back towards their own lines, highlighting an obvious drawback with such weapons. Both sides were soon using gas on a regular basis. As more effective means of protecting troops were introduced, the race to create even more lethal gases accelerated. The deficiencies of chlorine were overcome with the introduction of phosgene, a gas many times more deadly. Colourless and nearly odourless (likened in smell to "mouldy hay,"), phosgene was difficult to detect, making it a more effective and insidious weapon. French forces developed a technique for delivery of phosgene in a non-explosive artillery shell, overcoming many of the disadvantages of gas released from cylinders by delivering the agents close to the target. Then in July 1917, the Haber institute introduced a new horror, mustard gas. This attacked the skin as well as the lungs of soldiers rendering gas masks largely ineffective. Where the chemical came into contact with exposed skin it caused severe blistering, the effect on more sensitive tissues such as eyes and lungs was truly horrific and utterly debilitating. Mustard is what is now known as a "persistent" agent, meaning that it remains active even after that initial attack has ended. If mustard gas contaminated a soldier's clothing and equipment, then other soldiers coming into contact with it would also be poisoned. One nurse, Vera Brittain, wrote: "I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke." Haber himself declared it's effectiveness as a weapon of terror, writing "Every sensation in the nose and mouth nags in the mind. It creates utter confusion, eroding the soldiers inner strength". Others saw it as the most inhumane weapon of a war, which had already plumbed the depths of mans inhumanity to man. As the war reached it's climax, the Germans used mustard gas a key weapon in their campaign, with over 100,000 shells being fired at the Allies. By September 1918 the British had developed their own variant of mustard gas, unleashed on the Belgian front against the 16th Bavarian reserve infantry. An obscure corporal by the name of Adolf Hitler was one of it's victims, temporarily blinded in the attack. He later wrote that it was horror of being gassed that drove him out of the army and into politics. In November 1918 Germany surrendered. Gas had added hugely to the horror of the war, but had failed to provide the rapid victory the high command had hoped for. What it had done was kill over one hundred thousand men, and maim over a million more. Men who would bear the physical and mental scars long after the war had ended. Thanks to gas masks, and vagaries of the wind, the first weapon of mass destruction had failed to decide the outcome of the world's first great war. After the war, Dr. Haber was fearfull he would face trial as a war criminal. However he was awarded the Nobel prize for his pre-war work on nitrates, leaving him free to continue his research into gas weapons. Under the cover of developing pesticides, in the 1920s he developed another toxic gas from hydro-cyanic acid. A powerful insecticide, in enclosed space it was also highly effective at killing humans. 20 years later Zyklon B would be used to commit mass murder in Nazi death camps. Millions of victims of this genocide were Jews, Haber's own people. A cruel twist of fate he could not have foreseen. The use of gas had been forbidden by international law. But Hitler and the Nazis considered it a vital component of their coming war plans and continued research in secret. Scientists had been commanded to develop new weapons for the Fatherland. But Haber, who had created the first effective bond between scientists and the military, was forced to leave Germany in 1933 because of Nazi persecution of persons of Jewish ethnicity. His Nobel Prize winning work in chemistry, and subsequent contributions to Germany's war efforts in the form of chemical fertilizers, explosives and poison munitions, were not enough to prevent his vilification by the Nazi regime. Rejected by the country he had strived so hard to serve above all other considerations, he left Germany a broken man. An exile, he died in Switzerland in 1934 at the age of 65 of heart failure. He was cremated and his ashes, together with his wife Clara's, were buried in Basel's Hornli Cemetery.
ADDITIONAL INFO:
Fritz Haber (9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development for synthesizing ammonia, important for fertilizers and explosives. Haber, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid. He has also been described as the "father of chemical warfare" for his work developing and deploying chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. Haber was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), into a Hasidic family. His was one of the oldest families of that town. Haber later converted from strict Judaism to Christianity. His mother died during childbirth. His father was a well-known merchant in the town. From 1886 until 1891, he studied at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen, at the University of Berlin (today the Humboldt University of Berlin) in the group of A. W. Hofmann, and at the Technical College of Charlottenburg (today the Technical University of Berlin) under Carl Liebermann. He married Clara Immerwahr during 1901. Clara was also a chemist and an opponent of Haber's work in chemical warfare. Following an argument with Haber over the subject, she committed suicide. Their son, Hermann, born in 1902, would later also commit suicide because of his shame over his father's chemical warfare work. Before starting his own academic career, he worked at his father's chemical business and in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich with Georg Lunge. During his time at University of Karlsruhe from 1894 to 1911, he and Carl Bosch developed the Haber process, which is the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen under conditions of high temperature and pressure. In 1918 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work. The Haber-Bosch process was a milestone in industrial chemistry, because it divorced the production of nitrogen products, such as fertilizer, explosives and chemical feedstocks, from natural deposits, especially sodium nitrate (caliche), of which Chile was a major (and almost unique) producer. Naturally extracted nitrate production in Chile fell from 2.5 million metric tonnes (employing 60,000 workers and selling at $45/tonne) in 1925 to just 800,000 tonnes, produced by 14,133 workers, and selling at $19/tonne in 1934. as also active in the research of combustion reactions, the separation of gold from sea water, adsorption effects, electrochemistry, and free radical research (see Fenton's reagent). A large part of his work from 1911 to 1933 was done at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Elektrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem. In 1953, this institute was renamed for him. He is sometimes credited, incorrectly, with first synthesizing MDMA (which was first synthesized by Merck KGaA chemist Anton Köllisch in 1912). Haber played a major role in the development of chemical warfare in World War I. Part of this work included the development of gas masks with absorbent filters. In addition to leading the teams developing chlorine gas and other deadly gases for use in trench warfare, Haber was on hand personally to aid in its release despite being proscribed by the Hague Convention of 1907 (to which Germany was a signatory). Future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz, and Otto Hahn served as gas troops in Haber's unit. Gas warfare in WW I was, in a sense, the war of the chemists, with Haber pitted against French Nobel laureate chemist Victor Grignard. Regarding war and peace, Haber once said, "During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country." His wife Clara, a fellow chemist and the first woman to earn a Ph.D at the University of Breslau, committed suicide with his service revolver in their garden, possibly in response to his having personally overseen the first successful use of chlorine at the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915. She shot herself in the heart on 15 May, and died in the morning. That same morning, Haber left for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russians. Haber was a patriotic German who was proud of his service during World War I, for which he was decorated. He was even given the rank of captain by the Kaiser, rare for a scientist too old to enlist in military service. In his studies of the effects of poison gas, Haber noted that exposure to a low concentration of a poisonous gas for a long time often had the same effect (death) as exposure to a high concentration for a short time. He formulated a simple mathematical relationship between the gas concentration and the necessary exposure time. This relationship became known as Haber's rule. Haber defended gas warfare against accusations that it was inhumane, saying that death was death, by whatever means it was inflicted. During the 1920s, scientists working at his institute developed the cyanide gas formulation Zyklon B, which was used as an insecticide, especially as a fumigant in grain stores. During the Holocaust it was used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps in the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and others viewed by the Third Reich as inferior races or socially unwanted. In the 1920s, Haber exhaustively searched for a method to extract gold from sea water, and published a number of scientific papers on the subject. After years of research, he concluded that the concentration of gold dissolved in sea water was much lower than those concentrations reported by earlier researchers, and that gold extraction from sea water was uneconomic. Haber's genius was recognized by the Nazis, who offered him special funding to continue his research on weapons. As a result of fellow Jewish scientists having already been expelled from working in that field, he left Germany in 1933. His Nobel Prize-winning work in chemistry, and subsequent contributions to Germany's war efforts in the form of chemical fertilizers, explosives and poison munitions, were not enough to prevent eventual vilification of his heritage by the Nazi regime. He moved to Cambridge, England, along with his assistant J J Weiss, for a few months, during which time Ernest Rutherford pointedly refused to shake hands with him, due to his involvement in poison gas warfare. Haber was offered by Chaim Weizmann the position of director at the Sieff Research Institute (now the Weizmann Institute) in Rehovot, in Mandate Palestine, and accepted it. He started his voyage to what is today Israel in January 1934, after recovering from a heart attack. His ill health overpowered him and on January 29, 1934, at the age of 65, he died of heart failure in a Basel hotel, where he was resting on his way to the Middle East. He was cremated and his ashes, together with Clara's ashes, were buried in Basel's Hornli Cemetery. He bequeathed his extensive private library to the Sieff Institute.
:eusa_snooty::eusa_snooty: