Some figures resolve. You weigh the good against the harm, the sum comes out, and you file them away. Fritz Haber does not resolve. That is the reason this episode exists.

He pulled nitrogen out of the air — a locked room nobody living had ever gotten into — and about half the people breathing right now are eating because of it. Three to four billion people are alive who otherwise would not be. That is not generosity toward him; it is a demographic fact, and it does not care what you think of the man.

The same man built the first modern chemical weapons program, stood at Ypres in April 1915, and gave the order to open the valves on a hundred and sixty-eight tons of chlorine. Then he went to the Eastern Front to do it again. His defense was that death is death — an argument that only works if you are not going to be one of the ones doing the dying.

The night before he left, his wife shot herself in their garden. Clara Immerwahr was a chemist, magna cum laude, better than he was, handed a doctorate her country would never let her use. She has spent a hundred and ten years as a paragraph in his story. This episode gives the paragraph back.

He was Jewish. His institute's chemistry fed the compound they called Zyklon B. In 1933 Germany threw him out for his blood; he died stateless in a hotel, and members of his family were later killed with a descendant of his own work.

The bread and the gas came from the same hands, and you cannot keep the one and give back the other. April Rain lays the whole record out and hands you no verdict, because the facts do not make one. You are meant to hold it, feel how heavy it is, and refuse to set it down somewhere more comfortable.

The weight is the point.

Velvet Guillotine is dark history and institutional cover-ups. Dastardly Figures drops every Monday. Part of The Downpour. Hosted by April Rain.

Stay Dark!