As early as September 1914, General Erich von Falkenhayn, minister of war at the war’s start but since mid-September chief of the general staff succeeding General Helmuth von Moltke, whom the kaiser had ordered to report sick following what he thought of as his mistakes at the Battle of the Marne, concluded that “the ordinary weapons of attack had often failed completely . . . A weapon had, therefore, to be found which was superior to them but would not excessively tax the limited capacity of the German war industry . . . Such a weapon existed in gas.” He turned to Germany’s industrialists and scientists to provide it.Among those who responded was a bespectacled, shaven-headed, forty-six-year-old Prussian chemist and future Nobel Prize winner, Fritz Haber, the director of the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. Haber’s path to prominence had not been straightforward. Born in 1868 into a wealthy Jewish family in Breslau (now Polish Wroclaw), his mother had died three weeks later, a loss from which his father, Siegfried, took many years to recover.
