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Taking the horrific events that took place at Ypres in 1915 as its point of departure, this volume traces the development of chemical weapons from their first use as weapons of mass destruction by German troops in Belgium to their deployment in Syria in the summer of 2013. The book has emerged from a conference commemorating the centenary of the events at Ypres, held at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. The contributions focus on the preconditions and immediate consequences of this war crime, but also cover, by way of examples, the subsequent history of chemical weapons, including their role in World War II, their global spread, and their recent deployment. The volume ends with a documentation of the commemoration ceremony closing the conference, comprising speeches of the Green Cross director Paul Walker, the Belgian ambassador Ghislain D’hoop, and the Nobel laureate Gerhard Ertl.

In the course of the First World War, scientists who would in peacetime generate new knowledge assumed the role of experts, i.e., professionals who made extant knowledge accessible to non-scientist clients. The deepest conviction of Fritz Haber, the 1918 Chemistry Nobel laureate, was that problems faced by mankind could be solved by means of science and technology. Herein, Haber is interpreted as a personification of an early German expert culture. Acting as both mediator and organizer, Haber coaxed politicians, generals, industrial leaders, and scientists to join forces in developing new processes for the mass-production of war-relevant chemicals and in establishing large-scale industries for their manufacture. Among the chemicals produced were poison gases—the first weapons of mass extermination. Haber’s leadership resulted in a conglomerate of enterprises similar to what we now call “big science”. In close contact with “big industry”, traditional science was transformed into a new type of applied research. With borderlines between the military and civilian use blurred, Fritz Haber’s activities also represent an early example of what we now call “dual use”. He initiated modern pest control by toxic substances, whereby he made use of a military product for civilian purposes, but went also the other way around: During the Weimar era, he used pest control as a disguise for illegal military research. Having emerged under the stress of war, scientific expertise would remain ambivalent—a permanent legacy of the First World War.

There is little doubt that Fritz Haber (1868–1934) was the driving force behind the centrally directed development of chemical warfare in Germany, whose use during World War I violated international law and elicited both immediate and enduring moral criticism. The chlorine cloud attack at Ypres on 22 April 1915 amounted to the first use of a weapon of mass destruction and as such marks a turning point in world history. Following the “success” at Ypres, Haber, eager to employ science in resolving the greatest strategic challenge of the war—the stalemate of trench warfare—promptly transformed his Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem into a center for the development of chemical weapons and of protective measures against them. This article traces in some detail the path from Berlin-Dahlem to the fronts of World War I, lays out the indispensible role of Fritz Haber in German chemical warfare and provides a summary of his views on chemical weapons, which he never renounced.

We examine the life of Clara Haber, nee Immerwahr (1870–1915), including her tragic suicide and its possible relation to the involvement of her husband, Fritz Haber, in chemical warfare. Clara earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Breslau, in 1900, as the first woman ever, and married the physical chemist Fritz Haber within a year of her graduation. With no employment available for female scientists, Clara freelanced as an instructor in the continued education of women, mainly housewives, while struggling not to become a housewife herself. Her duties as the designated head of a posh household hardly brought fulfillment to her life. The outbreak of WWI further exacerbated the situation, as Fritz Haber applied himself in extraordinary ways to aid the German war effort, which included his initiative to develop chemical weapons. The night that he celebrated the “success” of the first chlorine cloud attack and his promotion to the rank of captain, Clara committed suicide. However, we found little evidence to support express claims that Clara was an outspoken pacifist who took her life because of her disapproval of her husband’s engagement in chemical warfare. We examine the origin of this “myth of Clara Immerwahr” that took root in the 1990s from the perspective offered by the available scholarly sources, including those that have only recently come to light.

Although France had been experimenting with chemical weapons when Germany launched its first lethal chemical offensive in spring 1915 in Langemark, the German initiative came as a huge tactical surprise to the country. Soon after the initial shock and the controversy that ensued on whether Germany had violated the laws of war that day, French authorities rapidly decided, without real political debate, to retaliate in kind. Although the country had to face heavy constraints, and due to a considerable scientific, industrial and financial effort, the French army was able to launch its first drifting cloud chemical attack on the battlefield only a few months after the German offensive. In the storm of the war and at this stage of conflict, when urgency was the only consideration and political influence far less than military, the French authorities did not realize that adopting chemical weapons in retaliation, ten months before Verdun, was one of the steps that would lead to the totalization of warfare and characterize the rest of the Great War.

Allied political and military leaders have frequently been credited both with considerable foresight and with strategic and moral leadership for avoiding chemical warfare during the Second World War. Scholars have not, however, fully acknowledged how close Allied forces came to launching a full-scale chemical onslaught in various theatres of war. The paper offers a thorough reconstruction of Allied chemical warfare planning which takes a close look at the development of Britain’s chemical weapons program since the First World War. The findings suggest that no “lack of preparedness,” as it existed in the initial stages of the conflict in 1939/1940, would have deterred the Allies from launching chemical warfare if the military situation had required it. Allied forces were planning to launch retaliatory chemical warfare ever since they had been attacked with chlorine gas in 1915. Just War theorists at first opposed the use of this new weapon and campaigned for an internationally enforced legal ban. The paper argues, however, that post-war military and political exigencies forced the advocates of the Just War tradition to construct new arguments and principles which would make this type of war morally and militarily acceptable. The paper explores the ways in which military strategists, scientists, and government officials attempted to justify the development, possession, and use of chemical weapons, and contextualizes Britain’s delicate balancing act between deterrence and disarmament in the interwar period.

The German gas attack of April 22, 1915, took place immediately after intense efforts in international law to make war more civilized and to restrict poisonous weapons. Legal restrictions on war technologies reached a provisional peak at the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907. During World War I, the attitude of the German military became more radical, to the point of evading and denying international law. The silence in the face of the poison-gas attack was deafening, even among German scholars of international law. Older traditions from the history of ideas and collective mentalities played a crucial role in this, especially the idea of or military necessity, which were supposed to annul international law in case of military emergency. After the end of World War I, there was a lively international discourse on the legality of the German approach. Their debate was marked by a strong nationalist polarization of viewpoints. In subsequent agreements between states, the prohibition of poison gas was rewritten and strengthened.

This chapter examines the development of chemical warfare on the Western Front in the context of the large-scale technological systems developed by each of the major powers—Germany, France, Britain, and later the United States—in order to coordinate their industrial, academic, and military resources. As chemical warfare intensified from the tentative, small-scale experiments of 1914–1915 to the massive bombardments of 1918, it also changed qualitatively. Each side’s innovations forced similar responses from their opponents, in an escalating arms race in which military exigencies increasingly overrode ethical concerns while tending to institutionalize chemical warfare. This process exemplified the war’s increasingly “total” nature as a technological meta-system integrating the fighting fronts and home fronts on each side and across the lines. On the verge of permanently institutionalizing chemical warfare and militarizing its supporting industries, the process abruptly ended as the German system collapsed. But by then the war had transformed the image of chemical science and technology from a progressive force to one associated with the horrors of war.

Contemporary claims that gas warfare proved “a failure” during the First World War would have baffled wartime adversaries, who invested heavily in the research, development, and production of gas warfare. If poison gas, like other conventional weapons, never broke the stalemate of the trenches, it evolved into a weapon of harassment that compounded the effects of conventional weapons and degraded the effectiveness of enemy forces compelled to wear gas masks for protracted periods of time. The introduction of mustard gas in July 1917 greatly increased the number of gas casualties, and set the scene for a steady increase in the use of chemical weapons during the later stages of the war. Like the tank and aircraft, gas was not strategically decisive, but continuing investment in this form of warfare underscored its potential utility.

The gas attacks during the First World War stood for a new kind of warfare and shaped the soldiers’ experience of living through an apocalypse never before imagined. This article examines the literary and artistic topics and forms used to express this ordeal by German, British and French writers, poets and painters, the majority of whom had fought in the war. There are striking similarities in their representation of the gas war: the impersonality of this enemy, the feeling of helplessness in gas attacks, the shock of seeing one’s comrades “guttering, choking, drowning” and not least the exposure to an infernal landscape. Nearly all of the authors and painters condemned the waste and pointlessness of the ongoing or past war, but their vision of the future often differed according to their national background. The second part of this article addresses the public battle over the interpretation and collective remembrance in the war’s aftermath. Particularly at the end of the 1920s, a wave of publications mainly in England and Germany displayed a renewed public interest in the preceding war. The written recollections and paintings of the gas warfare played a significant role here.