The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

by Thomas Hager

It was estimated, for instance, that up to 20 percent of Germany’s scientists were Jewish.

The Germans have a name for the way an inanimate object like a machine can pick the worst possible moment to break down: Tücke des Objekts, “the spite of things.”

Inside, he and his assistants were working on Haber’s secret weapon. He had been thinking about trench warfare and believed that an enemy who was well dug in was almost invincible. The war would not be won with bombs and massed attacks, he thought. Victory would require something very different. Something terrifying.

In any case, he argued, if the chlorine attack worked, the war would end more quickly and “countless lives would be saved.”

He became a sort of middleman for a shadowy business in illicit arms, fielding high-level inquiries about gas warfare and passing them on to a man he knew who had run a mustard-gas plant during the war. One of the interested parties was Spain,

The company had long been worried about repaying the millions of marks it had borrowed from the government during the war to build Leuna. When the inflation hit, BASF was able to pay off its enormous debt in greatly devalued marks, essentially paying back pennies on the dollar.

Four weeks after Hitler took the chancellor’s office, Germany’s parliament building was destroyed in a mysterious fire. The nation went into crisis. A young communist was arrested and charged with the crime, and the next day Hitler started suspending civil liberties. Within a few weeks Germany’s lawmakers passed an act that allowed the chancellor to take control and make laws as he saw fit. Even the middle-of-the road parties voted to bestow dictatorial powers on Hitler.

Leuna had better air defenses than Berlin, and, as one American flyer said after a Leuna attack, “Boy, could they shoot.”

During one string of Allied raids, 119 planes were lost without a single bomb falling on Leuna.

As fast as the Allies knocked out parts of Leuna, they fixed them. The German motto was “Everything for oil.”

But the Germans had been hoarding aviation fuel, saving their planes, and waiting to spring a trap. Swarms of German fighters rose to meet the Americans, more than four hundred German planes, including some of the new “rocket planes”—early jets—that would fly almost six hundred miles per hour and ran rings around the U.S. fighters.

After the war Speer testified that if the Allies had done nothing but destroy Leuna and the other synthetic fuel plants by bombing them day and night, the war would have been over in eight weeks.

Hungry peasants began eating their livestock. When the animals were gone, they turned to wild vegetables, made grass soup, and in some places stripped the bark from trees and ate it. Cannibalism was reported. Despite everything, by 1961 an estimated thirty million Chinese had died from malnutrition.

The average diet in China in 1970 was worse than it had been a generation earlier. All it would take was one big flood, one long drought, to tip the world’s most populous nation into another mass famine. That was thirty-five years ago. Today, China is battling a significant increase in obesity. The difference is Haber-Bosch.

the demand for their products is so great that Haber-Bosch plants today consume 1 percent of all the energy on earth, and the largest factories produce so much ammonia that it has to be transported in pipelines (one of the first ammonia pipelines in the United States, built in the late 1960s, for instance, runs from the plant in Texas to the corn fields of Iowa). This huge, almost invisible industry is feeding the world. Without these plants, somewhere between two billion and three billion people—about 40 percent of the world’s population—would starve to death.