Context: Fritz Haber was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize for inventing artificial fertilizer. A revolutionary invention that is responsible for around half of all food produced in the world even today.
However, he was also a staunch German nationalist and pioneered the weaponization of chlorine and other gases for use in warfare, earning the title “father of chemical warfare”.
Because of his contributions to chemical warfare in world war 1, nobody talked to him after the awards ceremony.
And by that point in time his first wife Clara Immerwahr had already killed herself in 1915, very likely as response to the first use of gas warfare in Ypres.
Yeah. Shot herself in the chest IIRC.
Remember that the Nobel Peace Prize was possibly created to distract from the fact that Alfred Nobel also invented dynamite.
He invented it for use in mining, I believe, but of course ot was then used as a weapon in the Crimean(?) War, as well as by terrorists. The tipping point came when a newspaper mistakenly printed Nobel’s obituary while he was still alive, calling him the “merchant of death”, so something had to be done.
