Fritz Haber as a Gas Warrior

There is an expressive charcoal drawing in the KIT Archives created by Ernst Schlumberger (1887–1943). It depicts Fritz Haber (1868–1934) in uniform, assisted by a winged monster, spraying poison gas on a battlefield. Schlumberger had studied under Haber at Karlsruhe Polytechnic and then become an assistant at the Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry under Haber’s successor, Georg Bredig, who also supervised his doctorate. In 1911, Haber was appointed as the founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Dahlem, near Berlin. In this role, he collaborated with the German General Staff in 1914 to develop chemical warfare agents. He allocated his institute’s resources to this effort and personally oversaw the deployment of poison gas on the battlefield. The German gas attack near Ypres, Belgium, in April 1915, which involved the release of 150 tons of poison gas, marked the first use of chemical weapons as tools of mass destruction. Schlumberger’s undated drawing was probably made after the poison gas attack near Ypres. Created by a colleague at Haber’s former Karlsruhe Institute, this work is a critical commentary from within his own field of expertise. Ernst Schlumberger, his Jewish wife Käthe, and their daughter Beate committed suicide in 1943, when Käthe Schlumberger’s deportation to an extermination camp was impending. In Berlin-Lichterfelde, engraved memorial stones, so-called “Stolpersteine” — stumbling blocks — created by the artist Gunter Demnig, remind passers-by of that family’s fate. as