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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2021
In April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.
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8 Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 201; Kristen Kopp, Germany's Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).
9 This paper attempts to think across the early twentieth century in search of Sebastian Conrad's “shared colonial archive,” which attempts to reveal “ways of behaving, rituals, forms of knowledge, and imagination, that link solely within the short-lived German colonial empire.” See Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism, 165.
10 Lara Day and Oliver Haag, eds., The Persistence of Race: Continuity and Change in Germany from the Wilhelmine Empire to National Socialism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 1–2.
11 Of course, as scholar Sabine Hake has pointed out, the Nazis’ adapted conception of race complicated and often conflated traditional skin-deep dichotomies and “drew upon such overdetermined concepts of national community and racial state.” See Sabine Hake, “Making the Native Body: On Africa and the Colonial Film in the Third Reich,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sarah Friedrischmeyer, Sarah Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 163–87, esp. 178.
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13 The British also initially considered using tear gas to quell Indian riots at the turn of the twentieth century. However, the lack of control over gas convinced the British to forgo this option until the 1940s. David Arnold, “The Armed Police and Colonial Control in South India, 1914–1947,” Modern Asian Studies 11, no. 1 (1977): 116.
14 Lepick, La Grande Guerre Chimique, 1914–1918, 55.
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18 Eric Brose Dorn, The Kaiser's Army: The Politics of Military Technology in Germany during the Machine Age, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3.
19 Rolf-Dieter Müller, “Total War as a Result of New Weapons? The Use of Chemical Agents in World War I,” in Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95–112, esp. 108.
20 Eric Croddy, Chemical and Biological Warfare: A Comprehensive Survey for the Concerned Citizen (New York: Springer, 2002), 131.
21 Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv (BA-MA) Nachlass Gerhard Tappen. Tappen to Reichsarchiv, July 16, 1930.
22 Diana Preston, A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 87.
23 It is certainly interesting that the German military first used tear gas against the Russians and then chlorine against Algerian troops. This strongly suggests that the Germans hoped that the other Western powers would forgive the use of poison gas as long as it was not directed against other “white Europeans.” However, the decision to first use chlorine at Ypres was also simply tied to the fact that no German generals, other than Albrecht of Württemberg, were willing to employ gas on their respective fronts.
24 Gerhard Hirschfeld and Gerd Krumeich, eds., Deutschland im ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2013), 24–25.
25 Tim Cook, “Creating the Faith: The Canadian Gas Services in the First World War,” Journal of Military History 62, no. 4 (October 1998): 761.
26 Robert W. Kestling, “Blacks Under the Swastika: A Research Note,” Journal of Negro History 83, no. 1 (1998): 89.
27 Fatima El-Tayeb, Schwarze Deutsche. Der Diskurs um “Rasse” und Nationale Identität 1890–1933 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2001), 37.
28 Jeff Bowersox, Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 68; David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 259; Claudia Siebrecht, “Seeing the ‘Savage’ and the Suspension of Time: Photography, War and Concentration Camps in German South West Africa, 1904–1908,” in The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History, ed. Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 37–57, esp. 39.
29 Klaus Bachmann, Genocidal Empires: German Colonialism in Africa and the Third Reich (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018), 194.
30 Heather Jones, “Imperial Captivities: Colonial Prisoners of War in Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918,” in Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 175–94, esp. 181.
31 Historian Geoffrey Wawro notes that the Germans suspected Berbers in the French army of every atrocity during the war. Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 130.
32 Bretislav Friedrich, “A Brief Biography of Fritz Haber (1868–1934),” Angewandte Chemie International Edition 44, no. 3957 (2005): 11.
33 Trumpener, “The Road to Ypres,” 472.
34 Even Fritz Haber himself was nearly killed by gas when he accidently rode into a German gas cloud. See Max Bauer, Der Grosse Krieg in Feld und Heimat (Tübingen: Osiander'sche Buchhandlung, 1922), 69.
35 (BA-MA) Nachlass Karl von Einem gen. v.-Rothmaler. Einem to his wife, April 23, 1915.
36 Kim Coleman, A History of Chemical Warfare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 21.
37 Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 181.
38 Landesarchiv Baden Württemberg-Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe (LBWK), Mitteilungen des Kriegsministeriums fur den Gasschutzoffizier, January 1916–April 1917, 456 F 3, 1115.
39 (LBWK) Anweisungen und Verfugungen uber die Gasschutzlager, die Ausbildung, den Bedarf von Gasschutzmitteln und den Gaskampf, 1915–1917, 465 F 3, 620.
40 Otto Hahn, Mein Leben: Die Erinnerung des Grossen Atomforschers und Humanisten (München: Piper, 1986), 120.
41 Maciej Górny, “A Racial Triangle: Physical Anthropology and Race Theories between Germans, Jews and Poles,” European Review of History 25, no. 3–4 (2018): 50.
42 Dietrich Schäfer, Aufsätze, Vorträge und Reden (Jena: Fischer, 1913), 416.
43 Kristin Kopp, “Gray Zones: The Inclusion of ‘Poland’ in the Study of German Colonialism,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, ed. Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 33–45, esp. 38.
44 Otto Gerhard, Auszug aus dem Kriegstagebuch von Otto Gerhard Lt. im Res Reg 201 und ab Marz 15 bei den Gastruppen (Institut fur Zeitgeschichte Stuttgart) N 60.14/1–16.
45 Erich Ludendorff, Der Totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1935), 5. The unabashed antisemitism in this 1935 quote was likely influenced by the rise of the Nazis. Directly after World War I, however, Ludendorff was already a notably antisemitic adherent to the Dolchstosslegende. See Will Brownell and Denise Drace-Brownell, The First Nazi: Erich Ludendorff: The Man who made Hitler Possible. (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016).
46 Sebastian Conrad, “Wilhelmine Nationalism in Global Context: Mobility, Race, and Global Consciousness,” in Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives, ed. Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 281–96, esp. 288–89.
47 Birgit Haehnel, “‘The Black Jew’: An Afterimage of German Colonialism,” in German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker M. Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2010), 238–59, esp. 244.
48 Fears of Jewish chemical weapons could also meld into older stories of Jewish magic and the blood libel. For instance, during the war, rumors that “Jews had poisoned some boys with gas” justified the looting of Jewish households in Rzeszow. William H. Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 282.
49 Raymond Stokes, Divide and Prosper: The Heirs of I.G. Farben under Allied Authority, 1945–1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 9.
50 Ludendorff, Der totale Krieg, 5.
51 Jones, “Imperial Captivities,” 179.
52 Rudolf Hanslian, Der chemische Krieg (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1927), 200.
53 This included postwar German attempts to justify their own imperial violence by comparing it to that of Britain and France. By revealing similarities in methods and means of imperial control (e.g., poison gas), the Germans intended to express commonalities with their fellow western European empires. Sean Andrew Wempe, Revenants of the German Empire: Colonial Germans, Imperialism, and the League of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 46.
54 Gisela Lebzelter, “Die ‘Schwarze Schmach.’ Vorurteile- Propaganda- Mythos,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11, no. 1 (January 1985): 37.
55 Mahon Murphy, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire 1914–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 7.
56 Julia Roos, “Nationalism, Racism and Propaganda in Early Weimar Germany: Contradictions in the Campaign against the ‘Black Horror on the Rhine,’” German History 30, no. 1 (2012): 45–46.
57 Sandra Maß, “The ‘Völkskorper’ in Fear: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Weimar Republic,” in Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century, ed. Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C. T. Geppert (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 233–51, esp. 239.
58 See Heinrich Schnee, German Colonization Past and Future: The Truth about the German Colonies (London: George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1926), 33.
59 Michael Geyer, “The Dynamic of Military Revisionism in the Interwar Years: Military Politics between Rearmament and Diplomacy,” in The German Military in the Age of Total War, ed. Wilhelm Deist (Warwickshire UK: Berg, 1985), 100–52, esp. 105.
60 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrarri (Washington DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1998) 182.
61 Stadtsarchiv Lübeck, Polizeiamt, 3335 22 GV, Heft 1, Lübecker General Anzeiger, Nr. 245, October 18, 1928.
62 Susanne Kuss and Andrew Smith, German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 144.
63 Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Gestalt, trans. Dirk Leach (Albany: SUNY Albany Press, 1990), 142. Reflecting on his own experience as a gas officer in the trenches, Jünger saw the soldiers of the First World War as the most apt to fully integrate themselves into a technological Gestalt. Variations of this idea were proposed by other former soldiers-turned-writers such as Franz Schauwecker and Werner Beumelburg. The former WWI artilleryman and proto-Nazi geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer also made it known that the men who survived the “shower of gas, fire, and steel” were best qualified to lead the nation into the future. Holger H. Herwig, The Demon of Geopolitics: How Karl Haushofer “Educated” Hitler and Hess (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 71.
64 Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Life, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1976), 51.
65 Ulrich Müller-Kiel, Die Chemische Waffe. Im Weltkrieg Und Jetzt (Berlin: Verlag Chemie, GMBH, 1932), 5.
66 See Hahn, Mein Leben, 127.
67 Sebastian Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 147
68 Michael R. Ebner, “Fascist Violence and the ‘Ethnic Reconstruction’ of Cyrenaica (Libya), 1922–1934,” in Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World, ed. Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 197–218, esp. 202–03.
69 Aram Mattioli, “Entgrenzte Kriegsgewalt. Der Italienische Giftgaseinsatz in Abessinien 1935–1936,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 51, no. 3 (2003): 337.
70 Dierk Walter, Colonial Violence: European Empires and the Use of Force (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 190.
71 Adolf Bölling Overweg, Die chemische Waffe und das Völkerrecht. Eine rechtshistorische und rechtskritische Studie (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1937), 38.
72 These peace movements enjoyed substantial support in the early and mid-1920s. One of their crowning political achievements was the passing of the Geneva Protocol in 1925.
73 Gertrud Woker, “Ueber Giftgaskrieg,” Die Friedens-Warte 23, no. 11–12 (November 1923): 393.
74 Getrud Woker, “Erwiderung,” Die Friedens-Warte 25, no. 9 (September 1925): 268. The belief that darker skin was more resistant to chemical weapons persisted through the early 1940s. For this reason, the United States military conducted several race-based toxicity studies with mustard gas during the early 1940s. See Susan L. Smith, Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 10.
75 In the mid- to late 1930s, some Germans were also clearly concerned by Japan's use of poison gas against China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. See Ricky W. Law, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 229.
76 (BA-MA) Russland V, 1932–1934. Sig 50, Ort 22, Mag H3EG.
77 The German view of the East as a place where Slavs encroached upon their Raum (or ethno-racially demarcated living space) increasingly took hold in the Weimar Republic. Maß, “The ‘Völkskorper’ in Fear,” 234. This ethno-national fear and resentment helped to foster a broad societal consensus for German rearmament in the early 1930s. Geyer, “The Dynamics of Military Revisionism in the Interwar Years,” 115.
78 Luftschutz-Rundschau, September/October 1932, Jahrgang 1, Heft 1/2. See also Die Sirene, Nummer 4, Februar Heft 1936; (BA-MA) Geyer-Denkschrift über den Gaskampf 1919. N/221/ Sig 23, Ort 22, Mag H1EG.
79 Vossische Zeitung 125, May 30, 1928; Hamburger Stimmen 119, May 13, 1928. Staatsarchiv Hamburg (SH) Giftgas Unglück auf der Veddel 1928. 135-1, I–IV, 4069.
80 Erich Mühsam, “Phosgen,” Fanal. Anarchistische Monatsschrift, Jahrgang 2, no. 9 (June 1928): 208–10; Rudibert Kunz and Rolf-Dieter Müller, Giftgas gegen Abd El Krim: Deutschland, Spanien und der Gaskrieg in Spanisch-Marokko, 1922–1927 (Freiburg: Verlag Rombach Freiburg, 1990), 72.
81 Gasschutz und Luftschutz, Jahrgang 5, Heft 3, 1935.
82 Gasschutz und Luftschutz, Jahrgang 7, Heft 1, 1937.
83 This was best demonstrated by the wide range of German apocalyptic literature that was published after 1928. Frequently featuring aerial wars among various European nations, these novels depicted German civilians as the ultimate victims of imagined future gas raids. See, for example, Axel Alexander, Die Schlacht über Berlin (Berlin: Verlag “Offene Worte,” 1933); Hanns Gobsch, Wahn-Europa 1934 (Hamburg: Fackelreiter-Verlag, 1931); Johann von Leers, Bomben auf Hamburg (Leipzig: R. Voigtländers Verlag, 1932); Karl August von Laffert, Giftküche (Berlin: August Scherl, 1928).
84 The Reichsluftschutzbund was one of the largest civic organizations in Nazi Germany, with a formal membership of 15 million by 1939.
85 At the same time, the Nazis pursued the offensive abilities of chemical weapons by expanding mustard gas production in chemical factories throughout Germany and funding the research and manufacture of nerve gas at military laboratories, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, and the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben. (BA-MA) Besprechung bei Herrn Generalmajor Thomas, September 5, 1939. RG/61/, Sig 726, Ort 22, Mag H3EG, Reihe 191, Regal 4, Gefach 1.
86 These arguments were also made in the field of chemical protection. Hugo Stoltzenberg routinely labeled the other gas mask companies as Jewish monopolies in order to garner government contracts. He wrote to the Nazi government: “The construction of [my] mask is based solely on German inventions, while the previous mask types were invented and developed primarily by Jews both during the war and today.” (BA-MA) Geratetechnisches, Konstruktion, Erfindungen, Versuche, Formveranderungen usw, 1933–36. RH/12/4, sig 84, Ort 22, Mag H3EG, Reihe 125, Regal 2, Gefach 4.
87 (BA-MA) Ausnutzung der deutschen chemischen Industrie fur eine entscheidungsuchende Kriegfuhrung, 1938. R/3113/, Sig 133, Standort 51, Mag M 2 05, Reihe 24.
88 Rolf-Dieter Müller, “World Power Status through the Use of Poison Gas? German Preparations for Chemical Warfare, 1919–1945,” in The German Military in the Age of Total War, ed. Wilhelm Deist (Warwickshire UK: Berg, 1985), 171–210, esp. 186.
89 Hermann Büscher, Giftgas und Wir? Die Welt der Giftgase Wesen und Wirkung, Hilfe und Heilung (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1937), x.
90 Hermman Göring, Hermann Göring. Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Erich Gritzbach (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1942), 21–22, 26–27.
91 Dietmar Süss, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Survived the Bombing in World War II, trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38–39.
92 Julia S. Torrie, “For Their Own Good”: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 19–20; Hugo Grimme, Der Reichsluftschutzbund: Ziele, Leistungen und Organisation (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1936).
93 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 2 (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1927), 772.
94 Birgitte Hamann, Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 347.
95 Andreas Musolff, “What Role Do Metaphors Play in Prejudice? The Function of Anti-Semitic Imagery in Hitler's Mein Kampf,” Patterns of Prejudice 41, no. 1 (2007): 26–27.
96 Hake, “Making the Native Body,” 173.
97 Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 91.
98 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 255.
99 Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 57.
100 In a bitterly ironic twist of fate, Fritz Haber was forced to leave his research position in Germany due to the rise of the Nazis in 1933. He died in exile on January 29, 1934. In a darkly poetic sense, he was killed by the regime that had coopted his own justifications for chemical violence.
101 Shelly Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 329–330.
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106 The Greek word khloros, which is also the root for the word chlorine, can mean either pale or greenish-yellow. In the Old Testament, the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, or Death, rides a horse described in the original Greek as χλωρός, or khloros.
