Haber Is A Name To Be Remembered

To all my left-wing friends, those moderate, those radical, those progressive, those liberal, I just wanted you to know that this story is quite symbolic of what I think is a central problem of yours: "finding favor"

Fritz Haber: Jewish chemist whose work led to Zyklon B

...Fritz Haber's inventions both saved millions, and were eventually used to kill millions...No-one personifies better than Fritz Haber the debate over science's capacity for good and evil...in the cruellest of all the ironies, his work was developed under the Nazis to create the gas used to murder millions in the Holocaust - including his relatives.

...He went to study chemistry in Berlin - the ideal formula, he hoped, for transforming a provincial Jewish boy into a successful German...anti-Semitism also grew as the century drew to a close, which preyed on Haber's mind despite his decision to convert to Christianity.

...in 1909 Haber found a way of synthesising ammonia for fertiliser from nitrogen and hydrogen...But the process was also highly useful for the military in making explosives...when World War I broke out soon afterwards, Haber - now working for the Kaiser's research institute in Berlin - was desperate to prove his patriotism.  He began experimenting with chlorine gas which, he said, would shorten the war...Awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on ammonia, he also feared arrest as a war criminal for his poison gas research.

...By the early 1930s he could see vicious anti-Semitism spreading around him, and his claim to be a German patriot was no protection.  "In early 1933", his daughter Eva told me, "he went to his institute. There was the porter, who said: 'The Jew Haber is not allowed in here.'"...Haber resigned, devastated, went briefly into exile, and died of a heart attack in 1934.

...There was one other area of research in the 1920s in which Haber and his colleagues were successful: developing pesticide gases. Of Haber's legacies, this was the bitterest. For this research was later developed into the Zyklon process, used by the Nazis to murder millions in their death camps, including his own extended family.

And as for his tortured relationship with Germany, Einstein concluded: "Haber's life was the tragedy of the German Jew - the tragedy of unrequited love."

Today, the 'patriotism' may be humanism, human rights, et al.  But it is the same process: not realizing the primacy of your Judaism and obligations to the national existence of the the Jewish people.  And not realizing how all your 'good works' can be invidious and existentially-threatening to Jews, no matter how much they seem to allure you.

^