One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences

Author: Bretislav Friedrich • Dieter Hoffmann Jürgen Renn • Florian Schmaltz • Martin Wolf

This book is a collection of the contributions to the symposium organized at the Fritz Haber Institute in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the gas attack at Ypres during the First World War. A centennial is normally a celebratory event, but certainly not so in this case: The centennial of the first large-scale gas attack in Ypres is an event that we commemorate as a dark hour in human history, an event where I as a chemist—as many chemists—feel ashamed, and it is also an event that gives us reason to consider the responsibility of scientists for their actions—or the lack thereof. If one reads the reports, even now, one hundred years later, one can only feel deeply affected by the suffering inflicted on the gas-attack victims and on their families.