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mutual shared respect and friendliness between the two men, and in fact Willstätter thought quite highly of
Haber. For Haber‟s sixtieth birthday, Willstätter contributed to the commemorative edition of Die
Naturwissenschaften.
His greatness lies in his scientific ideas and the depth of his searching. The thought, the plan,
and the process are more important to him than the completion. The creative process gives him
more pleasure than the yield, the finished piece. (…) We should misjudge this scientist seriously
if we were to judge him only by his harvest. The stimulation of research and the advancement of
younger scholars become ever more important to him than his own achievements.
5
On the other side of this friendship, Haber felt equally as strong toward Willstätter, putting this into words in one
letter written in 1929.
Humans are so many-sided, and in old age they are crusty, like bread browned in the fire,
distrustful and temperamental. But you, with the gentle sincerity of your indulgent gratitude,
have broken through all the hard crust and made me happy. Now my life is so bound up with
yours that I can spend weeks and months in great inner turmoil without exchanging ideas with
you and without expressing my feeling of connectedness. But as soon as there is a turning point,
or something causes me to stop, the need arises to reach you and to ask when we will see each
other again, talk together again, argue again, and as much as I can, make a life out of the course
of days by meeting again.
6
The relationship between these two men was definitely solid. Haber trusted Willstätter so much, in fact,
that when things in Germany began to go downhill, it was to Willstätter that Haber communicated his feelings of
unhappiness. It‟s arguable whether or not Haber took earlier threats to Jewish men and women seriously, but
once Hitler was granted complete power, he began to realize just what a Nazi government might mean for him.
The first sign of this new awareness shows up in a letter Haber wrote to Willstätter in early April, 1933, shortly
after all Jewish judges were forced to take leaves of absence from their jobs. What had happened to the judges,
he thought, might happen to Jewish scientists as well.
I just read in the newspaper the directive of the Prussian minister of justice, which states, that it
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should be suggested to all officiating Jewish judges that they should submit immediate leave of
absence petitions, and that these should be granted immediately, and in the cases where Jewish
judges refuse to submit a leave of absence petition, they shall be prohibited from entering the
courthouse. While such a decree will not be directly affecting our area, it suggests that what
happens today in one area of the Prussian government will soon happen in the other areas in the
same manner, and the question arises, how we ought to react. At the same time, in my
newspaper, the Berliner Börsen-Courier no. 155 of April 1, 1933, the interpretation given to the
minister‟s decree by the head judge of the state court Berlin-Moabit, namely, “Reporters of the
Communist or Marxist persuasion or of Jewish ethnicity…” demonstrates that it is not the
religion, but rather, the ethnicity that is considered decisive and is equated with being disloyal to
the state.
7
This was also the point at which Haber noted that the Nazis were defining a person‟s Jewishness by blood,
instead of by practice; the fact that he had converted so many years ago was now irrelevant.
8
Shortly after this development, a new law came into effect which, within six months, would remove all
Jews from civil service except for those who had been soldiers in the war. At first, Haber accepted that he was
one of the exceptions, believing that he could do more good by staying at the institute and helping younger
Jewish scientists find new jobs for themselves. However, when he received a questionnaire about his heritage, he
marked himself down as non-Aryan, going so far as to say that all his family, including both his wives, were
non-Aryan.
While this may have helped him, it angered the government, which proceeded to single out the institute,
ordering the Kaiser Wilhelm Society to dismiss some Jewish scientists. Haber resisted at first; in the end, he let
go of two of the most renowned scientists at the institute, both of whom already had offers from abroad. A few
days later, on April 30, he wrote a letter of resignation and sent it.
9
As he wrote, shortly after this, to Willstätter:
In the meantime I have spent time in agonies that come partly from the soul and partly from the
body. Perhaps contributing to them is that I can no longer imagine how I can ever again get to
work and to be effective. I am bitter as never before, and the feelings of irritability inside me
increase daily. I have been German to an extent that I only now perceive fully, and I feel an
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unprecedented disgust in that I can no longer work well enough to dare take up a new position in
another country. I admire the composed tranquility with which you bear up against the pressures
of these times.
10
Given all of this, it was clear that Haber could not stay in Germany, and during the summer of 1933 he began to
travel.
He went to Holland, to France, and to England before returning to Germany. He left once more on the 3
rd
of August, after which he planned to visit his son in Paris, go to Spain for a conference, and then return home.
However, in Paris he received an offer from three Englishmen at Cambridge; this offer was an honorary position,
and required very little in the way of research, and nothing in the way of teaching. Eventually, Haber accepted
the position, and after a period during which his health began to fail, moved to Cambridge.
11
Here, Haber settled in as best he could, and wrote to Willstätter sometime before Christmas, 1933:
Personally, I have two wishes: one concerns morphine and the other NaCy [sodium cyanide].
Presumably you will not want to make easier my struggle to get hold of these reserve supplies
for old age. I feel exceptionally well here. I enjoy the kindliness, namely that of [William
Jackson] Pope, but I would have to begin my life anew were I to regain the sense of an existence
that is complete. The life‟s work I have lost is for me irreplaceable.
12
The morphine may have been in response to his still-failing health; cyanide, however, is mostly used in suicides.
Given that information, it‟s clear that, although Haber appreciated what his hosts were doing for him, he was still
unhappy, and while he may not have been willing to actually go so far as to kill himself, the thoughts had
crossed his mind more than once. The option was taken from him, however, on January 29, 1934, when he died
in his sleep; the cause of death was coronary sclerosis.
13
Toward the end of his life, what lay in the depths of Haber‟s mind was at times unfathomable. However,
through his correspondence with Richard Willstätter, one of his oldest friends, it is possible to see more clearly
his true feelings. Here it is easy to see Haber as a man torn between what he once thought himself to be, a
German who happened to have Jewish heritage, and what his government now considered him, a Jew who
happened to be born in Germany. He revealed, in these letters, the great misery this caused him, and the
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