Fritz Haber: The Man Who Invented Chemical Warfare | BEHIND THE BASTARDS
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Fritz Haber: The Man Who Invented Chemical Warfare | BEHIND THE BASTARDS
In episode 81, Robert is joined by Karah Preiss and Oz Woloshyn (Sleepwalkers Podcast) to discuss Fritz Haber.
Original Air Date: August 29, 2019
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There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating. Behind the Bastards dives in past the Cliffs Notes of the worst humans in history and exposes the bizarre realities of their lives. Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater’s insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.
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When Robert described Haber as a great manager of scientists, I thought of Oppenheimer (yes, I saw the movie). And when he mentioned Einstein's warning to Haber, it made me wonder if Haber was who Einstein was actually thinking of when he warned Oppenheimer...
Let me tell you, as a scientist that runs a lab, being a genius at managing scientists to maximize research progress is a rare trait
On the German name "Hamburger", I had an ex who was the child of a German immigrant with the last name "Bunzmann". Can you imagine if people with those names got married and hyphenated it to Hamburger-Bunzmann?
The term Mongoloid was part of an obsolete racial classification that also gave us the terms Caucasian and Negroid. Men like the Kaiser used Mongoloid for pretty much all east Asian ethnic groups. Conveniently, for racists, it also carries the stigma of being named after the last great invaders of Europe from the east.
Been listening to the show religiously, but Robert's off the cuff correct spelling of entomology won my forever support.
Good analysis of all of the story. Fun thing is, when you started to read about how chlorine gas works in the body, I had an add break for "Vicks Vaporub". The irony.
What is really tragic is chemical weapons didn’t end the trench stalemate. Victory did not come from poison gas. Even though the Entente would retaliate with their own gas, it isn’t what led to their victory.
Haber created a means to cause so many people to suffer…for essentially nothing.
Small quibble: Breslau (now Wroclaw) didn't belong to "another country" before 1871. It had been a German city and ruled by various German dynasties since the 14th century, it just hadn't been part of _Germany_ until 1871 since a unified country of Germany didn't exist before then.
So, in other words, it was under... another country?
My impression (perhaps incorrect) was that he was saying it was a _Polish_ city under foreign rule, not just a city in another country. @@origami_dream
"Have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. If you want to get anywhere you have to run twice as fast as that!"
Fun fact: Daniel Immerwahr, author of how to hide an empire, touched on this in that book as he's a descendant. Was excited to hear more!
Great podcast but gotta give a bit of a correction as someone with a little of a background in chemistry. You do not need oil for the haber bosch process and in principle you don't need fossil fuels at all, this is a common misconception. The process uses natural gas (Methane) as a source of hydrogen. The reaction between nitrogen and hydrogen yields ammonia. The energy for the process can in principle come from renewable sources or nuclear and the hydrogen can in principle be green hydrogen from electrolysis which can also be made using any other green energy.
I say in principle because at the moment fossil fuels are simply the cheapest, at least when you don't look at the externalised costs of boiling the planet.
I hate meeting people that are unjustly afraid of nuclear power.
Oz was really giving Robert a run for his money. Really great questions. I'm going to have to check out their podcast, lol
I laughed a bit when the question "how exactly does haber Bosch get nitrogen out of the air?" And there's this long drawn out silence.
Also, the other guest was full of good and apt questions...the answers to most of which were very unlikely to have been part of Robert's research hahaha
Chemical warfare, and indeed poison gas, predates Haber as a specialist tool for particular situations. It was common in Early Modern siege warfare, for instance, for sappers to burn sulfur and direct the fumes into an enemy sap (you know, the tunnel you try to dig under the other guy's wall so you can burn the supports and collapse the wall). And that was obviously quite a solid example of what we'd now call chemical warfare (not a sort-of case like poisoning wells). But it was a specialized situation, not part of the general toolkit. Haber and his contemporaries absolutely did make it general.
Wonderful analysis. I thought I knew a lot of about Haber, but you gave me more to think about.
Wow. So add Nitrogen to the list of things being over-exploited to the point of global bottlenecking with disastrous knock-on effects, just like clean water, healthcare, education, money being the catchall for a lot of these but it all boils down to the same machine
23:26 this is already a form of a scene in the movie paprika
When they get confused about the mongols:
Western europeans have long viewed russians, poles, etc. As "asiatic hordes" and basically mongolian. The "mongol invasion" that was "incited" was probably a reference to the eastern front with russia.
I bet Kaiser Wilhelm was freaked out about Mongolian tentacles because he spent too much time watching hentai
54:19 the Kaiser was obsessed with the 'yellow peril' aka Japan taking German's Pacific Colonies , Japan being an ally of England at the time couldn't have helped .
38:33 I think the rationale was "A-bombs are probably possible and Americans should figure it out before the Nazis do," which was probably a good sentiment
The Nazi atomic weapons program was pretty poor. They didn't invest in that because Germany didn't anticipate the war would last long enough to need a weapon which would take such a long term to develop - they would be better off spending their research resources on more conventional weapons, like heavier artillery and improved aircraft. They did make some enriched uranium, but not enough to make a bomb.
@@vylbird8014 Sure, but Einstein, Fermi, FDR, and so forth didn't know that at the time.
@vylbird8014 The obsession with 'Deutsche Physik' also had an effect on the program. The effect is often overstated, but there was an effect.
@@vylbird8014 The interesting thing about that is... they were fully right. Though they also didn't adequately plan for supply line issues rolling out some of their improvements, nor test some of them rigorously enough in battlefield conditions. So it's arguable it hurt them more than it helped on some fronts due to bureaucratic consequences, but still, the basic idea was right; the bomb was only completed after Germany was defeated. Heck, after Japan was, really. They were already seeking to negotiate surrender. The bomb did nothing to hasten the end of the war except *maybe* provide a convenient excuse to justify surrendering. The US effectively *did* waste all that effort and money, if we're just looking at the war and the bomb as a weapon.
Potential intro for a re-upload or re-record of this: "What's gassin' my minoritieeeeeeeeeeeeeees!" :p
No Boston accent intro 😭
Father of toxic gas and chemical warfare
His dark creation has been revealed
Flow over no man's land, a poisonous nightmare
A deadly mist on the battlefield
Who hates butterflies?? Weird
These are some of the besy guests you've had in terms of how calm they are and the insightful questions they ask. Maybe less funny, though.
As someone from new Jersey and a chemist this is my least favorite episode. You can disagree with his opinions in the time of " for nation and country" as reasons to make bullets. However at the start you say ~4 billion people are alive today because of his work. Pardon my math but 4 billion is more than 20 million. Both world wars were unavoidable no matter who were turning the levers of power
That calculation assumes that Haber's influence is irreplaceable - on both sides of the equation. As in, without Haber, humans would NEVER figure out how to suck nitrogen out of the air *and* without Haber Germans would NEVER figure out chemical warfare. Being the first to do something =/= being the only one capable of doing that thing. Given that chemical warfare has a pretty long history, and given that both poisons and nitrogen were the subject of research at the exact time that Haber developed his solutions, it seems pretty much irrelevant what numbers you put on either side of that equation. Would fewer people have lived had the other guy figured nitrogen out before Haber? Would more people have died had someone even more capable replaced Haber at the front during WWI?
On the other hand, both Haber's family life, his academic life, his political positions, and his lack of moral qualms with regards to his services "for nation and country" suffice to name him as a bastard. A toxic person who hurt plenty of people because of his convictions, who made a massive contribution to science and humanity out of sheer spite, and then poured himself into the work of murdering as many people he didn't know as possible. Seems to me a legit bastard :)
People not having been born is not the same as people who are alive dying horrifically. He didn't *save* 4 billion people from death, even putting aside that someone else would've got there pretty quickly.
Also, you can have a net good effect on the course of human history and still be a gigantic piece of shit.
Those 4 billion don’t pop up without Native American agriculture and agriscience. Synthetic fertilizer also is not a finished story - microbes that produce plant available nitrogen shut off when surrounded by synthetic fertilizer, resulting in loss of biodiversity/ecological shifts that end up driving erosion. This lays the groundwork for some shattering environmental effects that will no doubt effect (already does effect) the global food supply. But the invention is still quite cool, just not the god send it seems
this podcast is total USA propaganda. calling fritz a mediocre chemist is mad. when will they realise a professor doesn't do hands on lab experiments they have PhDs and Researchers working under them. this podcast guy has no idea how chemical research works thats why he said Fritz used Uranium 😅to synthesise ammonia
Cool story bro
"this podcast guy has no idea how chemical research works"
Yes, he even says so himself 33:57.
Evans does call Haber "mediocre" once - describing how he may have seemed like to Clara Immerwahr early on. He also calls Haber a genius. If this is supposed to be "USA propaganda," I'd love to be enlightened what exactly it's supposed to be propagating?