A Higher Form of Killing (14 page)

The KRA chemistry department soon became known as the “Bureau Haber” and Haber himself became involved in the debate about the best way to synthesize nitrates to replace saltpeter. Haber and Carl Bosch argued for a massive expansion of the ammonia synthesis program to produce the essential ammonia feedstuff. After much debate, not only with other scientists proposing competing technologies but also with other industrialists keen to promote and protect their financial and commercial interests, the KRA agreed to expand the Haber-Bosch process plant at the BASF factory, eventually increasing its capacity thirtyfold.

Meanwhile, in September 1914 Haber had been one of several chemists invited by von Falkenhayn to consider the viability of “developing shells that contained solid, gaseous, or liquid chemicals that would damage the enemy or render him unable to fight.” The idea had originated with Major Max Bauer, an artillery expert who was acquainted with Haber as well as with some of Germany’s leading industrialists. Von Falkenhayn was attracted to the idea of the new weapon, both as a way to gain the desired quick victory and also to provide an alternative to the high explosive-shells of which Germany was running short. At one stage in mid-November, von Falkenhayn would calculate he had only enough for four more days of fighting in Flanders.

In addition to Haber, the chemical weapons group included chemists Walther Nernst and Carl Duisberg, the latter an “imperious Prussian who would not tolerate dissent in either his personal or his business life” and an enthusiastic advocate of chemical warfare—a fact some thought not unrelated to his position as head of the Bayer chemical company.
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As Duisberg knew, Germany’s chemical industry was exceptionally well placed to conduct chemical weapons research. The techniques and equipment developed by companies like his own to gain their prewar dominance in world trade could be readily turned to the bulk production of toxic gases just as that of BASF could be to the production of fixed ammonia for nitrates.

Tests of such gases began quickly. Duisberg and Nernst experimented with dianisidine chlorosulphate—a compound used in the synthetic dyes familiar to Haber—which caused sneezing fits. The German army fired shrapnel shells filled with this powder at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in France in late 1914 but to no noticeable effect. German scientists also experimented with xylyl bromide—a liquid that vaporized on contact with air to form a variety of tear gas. Shells specially designed to hold liquid— known as “T-shells” after their creator Dr. Hans von Tappen—were filled with the xylyl bromide and used against the Russians on the eastern front at the end of January 1915, again with little effect. The scientists pondered why, then realized that the extreme cold might have inhibited the chemical’s vaporization. Hoping T-shells would perform better in the warmer climate of the western front, scientists oversaw the manufacture of a further batch of shells, this time mixing xylyl bromide with bromacetone. However, these new shells, fired at Nieuwpoort in Flanders, in March 1915 again had no obvious effect on the enemy. German scientists concluded for such irritant gases to succeed in temporarily incapacitating the enemy, they would need to be deployed in greater concentration and quantity.

In the interim, however, General von Falkenhayn’s views on the use of gas had hardened. He no longer wanted weapons that would merely incapacitate but “something that makes people permanently incapable of fighting”—a step that, even more than the deployment of irritant gases, was entirely illegal under the provisions of the Hague Conventions prohibiting the use of poison, poison weapons, and asphyxiating gases. Duisberg thought the production of such a weapon would require an immense effort by “all suitable forces in the German Empire” and might indeed be beyond their capability. However, Emil Fischer, a leading organic chemist, suggested the possibility of using phosgene, which could kill “even in extraordinarily great dilution” and Duisberg began experimenting with it.

Haber too explored toxic gases at his institute where, an employee recalled, “the work was pushed day and night.” Every morning members of the military arrived in “steel-grey cars” to inquire about progress. The exhausting pace was not conducive to safety. On December 17, Haber was called away just as two colleagues were about to combine two chemicals—dichloromethylamine and cacodyl chloride—in a test tube. Moments later he heard a tremendous explosion and ran back to find one of the scientists dying and the other with his hand blown off. Within two weeks of learning of von Falkenhayn’s changed and lethal requirement, Haber suggested deploying liquid chlorine which, on coming into contact with the air, would immediately gasify and form a low, heavy cloud that would roll over the enemy trenches, suffocating or driving out the enemy and clearing the way for German troops to advance. Chlorine gas had first been characterized in 1774, then in 1810 established as a pure element by scientist Sir Humphry Davy who, because of its distinctive color, named it from the ancient Greek
khloros
meaning “pale green.”

Having witnessed some of the early T-shells trials, Haber was convinced that “owing to the small area affected by each shell it would be necessary to fire a large number simultaneously to produce any technical effect.” The remedy, he suggested, was “the use of a large number of mortars.” Told that such a quantity could never be provided in time, he proposed storing the chlorine in liquid form in pressurized steel canisters, each large enough to hold twenty kilograms. The canisters would be buried in the ground a meter apart in a long line. Inserted in the top of each would be a lead pipe which could be raised above the trench and directed toward the enemy. When the wind was in the right direction, they would be opened simultaneously to release the vaporizing chlorine. He asked for some of Germany’s existing stock of twelve thousand gas canisters in which liquid chlorine used as an industrial bleaching agent was stored to be put at his disposal.

In mid-January 1915, von Falkenhayn endorsed Haber’s proposals. Although it seems inconceivable that the use of gas would not have been discussed with the kaiser, no record of this appears to have survived either in the official sources or elsewhere. Haber began his preparations. Unlike Duisberg whose progress was being hindered by the scarcity of phosgene, Haber had no shortage of chlorine—another by-product of the dye industry. Even before war broke out the group of chemical companies including Bayer and BASF (who in 1916 would combine their relevant activities to form the Interessengemeinschaft [IG]) had been producing forty tons a day. However, he had quickly to assemble a suitable scientific team, as well as recruit and train five hundred soldiers in the delicate task of handling the gas canisters.

The scientists whom Haber—who retained his rank of noncommissioned officer (NCO) in the army reserve dating from his military service in Breslau—assembled into what became Pioneer Regiments 35 and 36 included future Nobel laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz, and Otto Hahn as well as Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger counter for radiation monitoring. Hahn was summoned by Haber to a meeting at a hotel in Brussels in January 1915 to find him “lying in bed.” Haber told him “how the war had now become frozen” so that “the fronts were immobile.” Because of this “the war now had to be fought by other means . . . He then gave me a lecture on chlorine gas clouds which had to blow over the enemy trenches in order to force the enemy to come out of them.” When Hahn objected that this surely violated the Hague Convention, Haber responded that the French had already started it “by using rifle ammunition filled with gas.” (In fact, the French had not done so at this time but there is some evidence that they would in March experiment in battle with nonlethal tear gas cartridges and grenades.) Haber also argued that “it was a way of saving countless lives, if it meant that the war could be brought to an end sooner.”

Hahn and the other chosen scientists received special training in Berlin in the handling of poisonous gases and also in observing wind and weather conditions. Some, like Hahn, were then deployed to regiments on the western front as “gas pioneers”—soon to be nicknamed “Stinkpioneere” by other German troops— tasked with selecting positions from which gas might be deployed and instructing officers “in the nature of the new weapon” as well as actually releasing the gas.

The problem for von Falkenhayn was where to launch the chlorine attack. Most of his commanders refused outright to have anything to do with the indisputably illegal poison gas, ignoring his arguments that its use was essentially humane because by shortening the war it would save lives. Colonel-General Karl von Einem denounced gas as dishonorable and claimed its use would provoke a worldwide reaction that could only damage Germany’s reputation. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria agreed that poison gas was unchivalrous and also pointed out that except for a brief period in the spring, the prevailing winds along the western front blew toward the German lines not away from them. He also predicted that if gas proved a success, the Allies would swiftly follow suit and deploy it against German troops.

Von Falkenhayn found a more receptive ear in fifty-year-old Albrecht, Grand Duke of Württemberg, commander of the Fourth Army in Flanders. In October 1914, the Grand Duke had almost succeeded in taking the moated fourteenth-century city of Ypres, a quiet backwater in the western corner of Belgium—the only significant portion of the country the Germans had failed to occupy and one that blocked the route to the strategically important Channel ports whose capture was a key German war aim. Ypres and its outlying villages and farms lay in a fertile basin intersected by canals, including the Yser Canal, and surrounded to the north, northeast, and south by wooded hills.

However, by mid-November 1914 in the First Battle of Ypres the British Expeditionary Force had halted the German army’s advance in three weeks of fighting that had almost exhausted stocks of shells in both armies and produced casualties of eighty thousand killed and wounded on the German side and fifty-four thousand on the British. Consequently, German troops were now occupying a network of trenches they had dug for themselves east of Ypres. Facing them were British, Canadian, and French divisions, similarly dug into the Ypres Salient, an elongated tongue of land projecting eastward into German-held territory from the village of Steenstraat, five miles north of Ypres, to St. Eloi some three miles to the south.

The Grand Duke hoped poison gas might deliver the breakthrough that had so far eluded him. Satisfied that he had finally identified a suitable place to deploy chlorine, von Falkenhayn ordered Haber to make the necessary preparations. Haber decided the gas should be transported in liquid form to a railhead in German-occupied territory, then poured into the metal canisters ready to be brought up to the front. By February 1915 he was ready to travel to the German front lines near Ypres to oversee the arrangements in person. His wife Clara—herself a scientist, the first woman to obtain a doctorate from Breslau University and according to James Franck a gifted woman “with outspoken views that often contradicted her husband’s”—was fundamentally opposed to chemical weapons and tried to dissuade him. Haber ignored her pleas and by March had settled into lodgings in the small German-held town of Geluveld east of Ypres.

The senior German officer who would actually superintend the attack was Major General Berthold von Deimling. By his own account, “when von Falkenhayn informed us that a new weapon, poison gas, was to be deployed for the first time in my sector” he was shocked. “I must admit that the task of poisoning the enemy as if they were rats went against the grain with me as it would with any decent sentient soldier.” What convinced him to continue was the thought that “using poison gas might perhaps lead to the fall of Ypres, perhaps even make the entire campaign victorious. With such an important goal, all inner doubts had to be silenced. We had to go on, come what may. War is self-defence and knows no law. That will always be so as long as war exists.”

Haber decided to position his gas cylinders on Hill 60, a German-held sixty-meter-high heap of spoil dug out during construction of a new railway cutting in the nineteenth century, which faced the southeast sector of the Ypres Salient. Before the war locals called the hill “Lover’s Knoll.” Working at night to avoid being spotted, his soldiers dug some six thousand of the heavy, unwieldy steel canisters requisitioned from civilian use into the earth. Otto Hahn, who was assisting, found himself so close to the British lines that “at times we could only talk in whispers. We were not very well entrenched and we were constantly under enemy fire so the installation of the gas cylinders for the proposed attack was very difficult indeed. [To protect] against enemy hand grenades we used wire netting that catapulted the grenades back into the enemy lines.”

In early March, British shells by chance ruptured two chlorine cylinders, gassing several German soldiers including one who died coughing up blood. Not long after, similarly random Allied rifle fire damaged further cylinders, releasing chlorine gas which injured fifty German soldiers and killed three. Deimling, who visited the wounded, wrote, “They suffered terribly. These incidents severely shook the troops’ confidence in the horrible devices.” By March 10, all six thousand cylinders were in place but the required wind from the east refused to blow steadily and consistently enough. Deimling rode over to Haber’s command post to yell at the “pale and exhausted” scientist. An officer who was present recounted how Deimling called him “a charlatan and a lot else besides for making false claims to the high command about the utility of poison gas.” Deimling’s accusations left Haber “extremely unhappy.”

On March 25 the Grand Duke—under relentless pressure from von Falkenhayn to launch the attack “at the first possible favourable opportunity”—ordered Haber to set up an “alternate gas front” facing the northern curve of the Ypres Salient. On April 5, shortly after Haber himself suffered the effects of gas after riding too close to some fumes during a test, the work began. Six days later 5,730 chlorine canisters—some new, some dragged laboriously from the earlier position on Hill 60 and containing 168 tons of chlorine gas—were in place.