Russo-German Eastern Front. Fritz Haber, the German chemist who synthesized and used chlorine at Ypres, Belgium, leaves for the Eastern Front to prepare the same deadly weapon of mass destruction. Chlorine destroys the blood vessels in the lungs, and the victim drowns in his own body fluid while attempting to repair the damage. Fritz Haber’s wife committed suicide the night before using her husband’s pistol. It is unclear whether the suicide was due to the chemical warfare perpetrated by her husband, who, however, appears untroubled. Chemistry lost its innocence with the First World War, with gases used as chemical weapons. Haber himself, a few years earlier, had invented the process for extracting nitrogen from the air and thus producing ammonia, useful as a fertilizer (a process later perfected by Carl Bosch). At the end of the 20th century, approximately 45% of the world’s population (3 billion people) ate a diet dependent on the Haber-Bosch process.
