The Lives of Fritz Haber and of International Law: Entwined Tales of Tragedy and Irony

Abstract This article recounts the life of international law through the story of a single individual. This is the narrative of biographical international law . The subject — equally protagonist and antagonist — of this article is Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish scientist born in 1868. Devoted to the Kaiser, Haber was declared a war criminal by the Allies following World War I for having been ‘the father’ of chemical warfare. Haber argued that chemical weapons were more humane than conventional weapons. While under this shadow, Haber also won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1920 for his pioneering work with ammonia fertilizer: Haber’s method of synthesizing fertilizer has wildly expanded global food production to this date. In the 1930s Haber was persecuted for his Jewish heritage by the very nation he had zealously served. Haber’s research ultimately constituted one of the bases for the development of Zyklon-B gas, which became deployed against humans rather than Haber’s initial conception as an insecticide. Haber died, a tormented and broken man, in Basel, Switzerland, in 1934. In addition to being, variously, hero and villain, Haber was also both oppressor and oppressed. Through an exploration of Haber’s life, this article unfurls key aspects and unresolved corners of international criminal law. This article discusses: the criminal responsibility of scientists for their research; the intersection of scientism, militarism, and nationalism; humanitarian concerns in the deaths of soldiers; the legal status of chemical weapons in contradistinction to conventional and nuclear weapons; the historiographical place of World War I in the development of international criminal law; and the sheer complexity of identity.