Overview

It is estimated that there were a million casualties from the use of poison gases in the First World War. Official figures list 180,983 British soldiers as being gassed, of whom 6,062 died in the trenches, but these figures are often considered to be an under-estimate. Apart from the difficulties of accurate reporting from the trenches, there developed a debate towards the end of the First World War and in the years before the Second World War about the ethics of using these materials as a weapon.

Background

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Fritz Haber (1868-1934) was director of the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry at Berlin-Dahlem, having held the professorship of physical chemistry and electro-chemistry at Karlsruhe from 1906 to 1911. The son of a...