1 - The Structures of Violence: Fritz Haber and the Institutionalization of Gas Warfare

Summary

By bridging the world of academic chemistry and the major German chemical companies, the chemist Fritz Haber was able to effectively deliver chemical weapons to the German military over the course of World War I. While the first German chlorine gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres on April 22, 1915, is often described as the commencement of the chemical war and a major breach in the international rules of warfare, it can also be productively viewed as a merging of academic science and industrial chemistry into the bureaucratic structures of the German military. Thus, Fritz Haber’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry, the major site of German chemical weapons research, should be read as an early blueprint for later historical developments in Big Science and the military-industrial-academic complex.