Do we like Fritz Haber?
Our score: 2 out of 10. His own wartime work on chemical weapons did real harm, with some good set against it in the fertiliser breakthrough and his 1933 resignation.
Fritz Haber was born in Breslau on 9 December 1868 into one of the town's oldest Jewish families, and later converted to Lutheranism. He became one of the great industrial chemists. With BASF's Carl Bosch he worked out how to make ammonia from the nitrogen in the air, the basis of industrial fertiliser, the so-called bread from air. It won him the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he actually received in 1919.
Then came the war. One account says he personally oversaw the first successful chlorine release at the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915, and he is widely called the father of chemical warfare for developing and deploying chlorine and other poison gases. A man who could feed the world was also, in his own time, the one who showed an army how to gas a trench.
On the harm test, this is a fail on his own acts, not the company he kept. He was the driving scientist behind a weapon that was designed to harm people. The page we read records a line attributed to him: a scientist belongs to the world in peacetime and to his country in wartime. That is a handy way to excuse what he did. Nothing we found speaks to modern questions about LGBTQ+ people or the planet, and it would be unfair to invent a position for him there.
The darkest irony comes later. JTA reports that his research eventually led to the invention of Zyklon B, after his death, and that it was later used to kill millions of Jews. He did not live to see that and didn't invent it as a weapon, so we leave it as a grim footnote rather than a charge.
When the Nazis took power in 1933, the country he had served was turning on him. He was classified as non-Aryan and resigned as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry, in protest at the anti-Jewish laws. One account says the Nazis offered special funding for weapons research, but he left anyway. At his memorial in late 1934, a fellow scientist said he was a Jew like most of his collaborators and that he did not long survive the blow.
The good stuff is real and enormous. Ammonia synthesis changed how humanity grows food, and the Nobel committee recognised it. He then rebuilt relationships with scientists from former enemy nations and was heading to take up a research post in Palestine when he died in Basel on 29 January 1934. That's a decent final act for a man who spent his best years on something else.