Kampfstoff-Forschung im Nationalsozialismus: Zur Kooperation von Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten, Militär und Industrie [Weapons Research in National Socialism]

  • Florian Schmaltz
Wallstein: 2005. 676 pp. €39 3892448809 | ISBN: 3-892-44880-9

Germany started developing chemical weapons nearly a century ago, during the First World War. Fritz Haber, then director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry in Berlin, collaborated with the chemical industry and the army to set up Germany's powerful industrial–military complex (see Nature 438, 158–159; 200510.1038/438158b). After the war, research on chemical weapons in the Weimar Republic was forbidden by the Allies, but it was still done secretly on a small scale. In Kampfstoff-Forschung im Nationalsozialismus, Florian Schmaltz tells how this research re-emerged under the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Germany no longer had a centre for research on chemical warfare. Haber was still director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute but he was told that his group leaders must be fired because they were Jewish. Haber, who was also Jewish, decided to go too, leaving the institute in ruins. Three young chemists from Göttingen, all members of the Nazi party, were sent to Berlin to take over.

Gerhart Jander, an inorganic chemist, had friends in the SA (the stormtroopers) and was forced to leave after the Röhm putsch, when Hitler purged the SA. Rudolf Mentzel, an inexperienced chemist, had no interest in doing research himself and became a science administrator in the Reichsforschungsrat, a German funding agency. In 1935, Peter Adolf Thiessen, a physical chemist, became the institute's director. The research focused on an explosive known as N-Stoff (chlorine trifluoride), which Thiessen hoped would prove more destructive than nitroglycerol. Despite being produced in large amounts, it was never successfully used. After the war, Thiessen made a career as a research administrator in East Germany, although Schmaltz does not discuss that here. He does, however, discuss five other Kaiser Wilhelm institutes that worked on gas warfare. Most were occupied with perfecting gas masks, clothing and shoes as protection against weapons such as mustard gas.

The most disquieting part of the book is the story of Richard Kuhn, who won a Nobel prize in 1938 for his work on carotenoids and vitamins. One-third of his lab at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg was occupied with research on poisons that could be used as weapons. When his colleague Otto Meyerhof left the institute in 1938, Kuhn took over some of his lab space. This gave him access to the nerve poisons tabun and sarin, synthesized in secret in 1936 and 1939 by chemists of the IG Farben companies. The Allies only learned of their existence shortly before the end of the war. Kuhn's colleagues showed that the poisons worked by inhibiting acetylcholine esterase, and his laboratory synthesized an even more effective acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, soman, in 1944. These poisons were synthesized in large quantities for use in grenades, but they were never used. One reason is that it was impossible to protect German soldiers and civilians from the poisons. According to Schmaltz, “these poisons were a present for the future”.

Kuhn was also a great science administrator. As a member of the Reichsforschungsrat, he chose to finance the mustard-gas experiments of his colleague Otto Bickenbach, who proposed to test vitamin B6 as a possible protective agent against the gas. For his experiment, he mainly used gypsies from the concentration camp of Natzweiler-Struthof, four of whom died. Bickenbach was later condemned by a French court to 20 years in jail. During the lawsuit, Kuhn wrote to Bickenbach's lawyer, saying that the experiments were “scientifically perfect” and “a blessing for future generations”. Bickenbach was released in 1955 after a German medical court found nothing wrong with his experiments and allowed him to practice medicine again.

Schmaltz, a historian, presents all this and much more in great detail. The flow of money between industry, the army and science, in particular, is well documented, but the chemistry is flawed in places. The structures of sarin and soman are given, but that of tabun is missing, and the structure of pinacoline alcohol, a precursor of soman, lacks an OH group. In addition, not everything presented in the book is new. And the author also acknowledges that some documents may have been destroyed or lost in Russia, so the story is not complete.

The book should appeal to all those interested in chemical warfare or in the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes — but it may be too detailed for the general reader.