It’s the 22nd. April 1915: ever Since the days of the French front to observe soldiers in the vicinity of the Belgian town of Ypres buried, strange activities of the enemy. German soldiers with eerie masks, heavy steel bottles, which are drawn with extreme caution on ropes through the mud. Shortly after, suddenly hear a hiss and a yellow-green cloud of gas creeps up to the French position. The first use of poison gas in the history of the attack with 150 tons of chlorine gas to die of 1,200 Frenchmen.
a Few weeks later, also use French and British units of gas that was on the Front. What hardly anyone knows: the germ cell of the gas war, of all things, the chemistry laboratory of Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical chemistry and electrochemistry in Berlin-Dahlem is.
Historical classification
Fritz Haber, developed in 1909, in his laboratory, a high-pressure process that uses the breath of air-bound nitrogen to synthesize ammonia. A milestone that is on the one hand, the starting point for the production of the first industrial fertilizers, the food can be ensured to the growing population in Europe.
From 1914, he produced, however, also nitric acid, which is, in turn, fuels the basis for the development of explosives and military-grade chlorine gas. In conjunction with water, hydrochloric acid, which corrodes a person from the inside is formed. Poison gas kills during 1. World war 90,000 people and maimed 1.2 million. The new weapon of war is so cruel that it is banned in 1925 by the Geneva Protocol on chemical weapons. Even Hitler is shying away from the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield – for fear of retaliation.
This article was written by world of wonder magazine
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