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consciousness and died within a few hours.
22
On February 1, a small ceremony was held which close relatives attended at the crematorium of the
Hörnli Cemetery at Basel. The funeral oration was delivered by Richard Willstätter. Haber had written his last
will in the winter of 1933 and in this so-called “Cambridge will”, he had ordered the following:
My body is to be cremated, and the ashes are to be buried in the cemetery in Dahlem, just like
those of my first wife, whose ashes lie in the same place. If the anti-Jewish movement in
Germany makes it impossible or disagreeable for my son or his survivors to carry out this
request, or should he or his survivors later want to alter it having carried it out, then he should
take my first wife‟s ashes and mine to the place where he would like to see them buried. The
grave should be marked with the inscription of my name, Fritz Haber, my date of birth, 9
December 1868, and the day of my death. Perhaps there can be added, “He served his country in
war and peace as long as was granted him.”
23
Hermann Haber would choose to lay his father‟s ashes to rest in Basel, the place in which his long and
sad journey in exile ended. In accordance with his final wishes, Clara Haber‟s ashes were moved to Basel in
1937 to share a grave with her once husband. And so ended the life of Fritz Haber, but his memory and the
scientific advancements that he left behind would never be forgotten.
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Notes
1.
Stoltzenberg, Dietrich.
Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew. Philadelphia, PA:
Chemical Heritage Press, 2004, page ix.
2.
Ibid, 249.
3.
Charles, Daniel. Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the
Age of Chemical Warfare. New York, NY: HarperCollins
Publishers, 2005, page 204-205.
4.
Ibid, 206.
5.
Stoltzenberg,
Chemist, Nobel Laureate, 250.
6.
Ibid, 259.
7.
Ibid, 266.
8.
Ibid, 265-268.
9.
Charles,
Master Mind, 220.
10.
Stoltzenberg, Chemist, Nobel Laureate, 278.
11.
Charles, Master Mind, 221.
12.
Ibid, 222.
13.
Ibid.
14.
Charles, Master Mind, 225.
15.
Ibid, 226.
16.
Ibid.
17.
Ibid, 230-231.
18.
Stern, Fritz. Einstein's German World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, page 135.
19.
Stoltzenberg, Chemist, Nobel Laureate, 289.
20.
Ibid, 290.
21.
Ibid, 291.
22.
Ibid, 299-300.
23.
Ibid, 300.
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Richard Willstätter: The Relationship between Fritz Haber and his Oldest Friend and Colleague
1911 – 1934
Richard Willstätter was, like Haber, a Jewish chemist. Born in 1872, only four years after Haber, he
knew he wanted to go into chemistry from a young age. His studies took him to the Institute of Chemistry in
Munich in 1890, where he did his doctoral research on cocaine derivatives; he was appointed associate professor
in 1902. The next year he married Sophie Leser; their son was born the next year. In 1905, Willstätter was
appointed professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he studied chlorophyll. He continued
this work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.
1
Willstätter met Fritz Haber in 1911, while Haber was on vacation in Zurich. They had many common
interests, including science and many recreational activities, and their friendship continued in Berlin, where they
went for walks each evening before going to bed.
2
However, for the most part the two were separated by
geography for most of their lives, meeting up only rarely, as they did in 1930 when they took a cruise off
Madeira with some relatives.
3
Instead, they wrote letters back and forth until Haber died in 1934.
At first, the letters involved mostly business, discussing chemical advances Haber made recently. As
time passed, and the two became better friends, becoming close enough that they began to address each other
with the German familiar second-person pronoun “du”, Haber began to write Willstätter about more personal
matters, including his declining health. In 1927, he wrote:
Dear Richard!
It‟s nighttime, and I‟m afraid to sleep. The heart spasms, my latest achievement, only wake me
when they‟ve progressed to the point where I can‟t cut them off immediately with the alcoholic
nitroglycerin solution. I don‟t know if it takes one minute or four before I‟ve managed
successfully to fiddle with the medicine dropper, put the drops on my tongue, and felt relief. But
they‟re very bad minutes.
As Charles points out, “[n]owhere else does Haber reveal similar depths of despair.”
4
If Haber felt this comfortable about revealing his true self to Willstätter, it was only because there was a