The Use of Poison Gases in the First World War
Overview
It is estimated that there were a million casualties from the use of poison gases in the First World War. Official figures list 180,983 British soldiers as being gassed, of whom 6,062 died in the trenches, but these figures are often considered to be an under-estimate. Apart from the difficulties of accurate reporting from the trenches, there developed a debate towards the end of the First World War and in the years before the Second World War about the ethics of using these materials as a weapon.
Background
At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Fritz Haber (1868-1934) was director of the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry at Berlin-Dahlem, having held the professorship of physical chemistry and electro-chemistry at Karlsruhe from 1906 to 1911. The son of a dye manufacturer, Haber was born in Bresslau, Silesia (now in Poland). He married Clara Immerwahr, the thirty-year-old daughter of another respected Jewish family in 1901. Although the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 stipulated that warring countries would "abstain from all projectiles whose sole object is the diffusions of asphyxiating or deleterious gases," German scientists developed poison gases and used them by 1915.
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