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2 results

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

  • Peter Thompson, Michigan State University
  • Book:
    The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany
    Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023, pp 14-53

  • 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.

The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany
  • Visions of Chemical Modernity
  • Peter Thompson
  • Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023
  • Exploring the history of the gas mask in Germany from 1915 to the eve of the Second World War, Peter Thompson traces how chemical weapons and protective technologies like the gas mask produced new relationships to danger, risk, management and mastery in the modern age of mass destruction. Recounting the apocalyptic visions of chemical death that circulated in interwar Germany, he argues that while everyday encounters with the gas mask tended to exacerbate fears, the gas mask also came to symbolize debates about the development of military and chemical technologies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He underscores how the gas mask was tied into the creation of an exclusionary national community under the Nazis and the altered perception of environmental danger in the second half of the twentieth century. As this innovative new history shows, chemical warfare and protection technologies came to represent poignant visions of the German future.