Fritz Haber: the damned scientist.

The even row of portrait photographs of Lower Silesian Nobel Prize winners displayed on the wall of the club Salon Śląski, or Silesian Salon, one of the city‟s magic places, right across the street from the Baroque main building of the Wrocław University, is rather unorthodox as far as the standards of picture exhibitions go. Two of the laureates observe the cosy interior of the club having assumed postures that are somewhat unusual for respectable learned men: hanging upside down. One of the two is Philipp Lenard, the cathode ray discoverer who subsequently developed the conception of creative „Aryan physics‟ as opposed to secondary and mendacious „Jewish physics‟. The other one is Fritz Haber, who invented a method for synthesizing ammonia and later pioneered the use of poison gases on World War I battlefields. In the gallery of famous people tracing their origins to Wrocław, few are as controversial, as complex, or as tragic as Fritz Haber. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1919 for developing a method for the direct synthesis of ammonia from its elements: hydrogen and nitrogen. The reaction made possible industrial-scale production of artificial fertilizers to provide grain crops with necessary nitrogen. For hundreds of millions around the world, the discovery averted the spectre of famine and linked Haber‟s name with the concept of „bread from air‟. It would be difficult to find a better illustration of Alfred Nobel‟s last will, which instructed his heirs to bestow prizes on those who confer the greatest benefit on mankind.