Two years after his wife Clara’s suicide Fritz Haber married Charlotte Nathan. Charlotte was very attractive and twenty years younger than Haber. During this time the war was still going on so Haber wore his war uniform. In about ten months when the war was about over Haber and Charlotte were going to have a new baby girl. The problem was that their marriage was failing. After their baby was born Haber left to relax at a health spa. Charlotte gossiped with her friends about how he was never home and was working all the time and his huge ego. The difference between Clara and Charlotte was Charlotte told Haber about the problems, but there was no difference in what Haber did about it. Haber did nothing he didn’t really care. As the war ended his beloved Germany was in pieces he was devastated. Another problem came in 1919 when he was on the list of German war criminals. He fled with his family to Switzerland. He found out months later he wasn’t even on the list. After coming back to Germany he was in the dumps until he heard he had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for making synthetic ammonia. This led to Germany coming back into the world powers of science. Some french and American Nobel Prize winners wouldn’t accept their prize or show up to the ceremony because of the German scientists who had won (there was three of them). After this Haber went back to work and his job at the University of Berlin and the head of the German Chemical Society. What no one knew was that Haber’s chemical warfare research never stopped. He wanted Germany to rise again. What it looked like they were doing in public was making pesticides and destroying all war related chemicals. Haber was getting into the shady business and started to sell his findings to Soviet Russia and Spain. Haber started to construct a poisonous gas plant for the Russians. The bill for the destruction to the Allied forces summed up to be about 132 billion gold marks. Haber wanted to pay these by turning seawater into gold. The sea has about six milligrams of gold per ton of sea water. Haber thought since there was so much water that it could make millions of tons of gold. Many scientists had tried this, but it was too hard to take all the gold from the water. Haber needed to find a way to pull the gold out. Haber calculated that 50,000 tons of gold was needed to pay off the Allied forces. First Haber needed to find a system to find the amount of gold in the water to find the best place to get gold from. The machinery they made to measure this had to be gold free so it wouldn’t mess up the measurements. In a few months they had came up with a system. The scientists tried many ways to get the gold. They decided on cupellation which used Lead Sulfide to precipitate a mixture of gold, silver, and lead. They burned off the lead and separated the silver. The next step was to take samples of all the seas to find the best place to get the gold from. He needed to talk to a banker secretly so the trip around the world could be funded. They couldn’t use a regular ship because the ship needed a complete lab in it. In 1923 the Hamburg-American liner Hansa went from Germany to new York City. Haber and other scientists were on board the cruise testing the waters in the full lab. Many of the cruisers didn’t know why they disappeared all the time. Many rumors popped up about what they were doing, but most of them were started by the scientists so no one would find out what they were really doing. When he tested the Atlantic ocean he was expecting much bigger amounts of gold, but was left with a small ball of gold. He thought that this ocean had a very low concentration of gold. Once in New York City Haber and other scientists went sight seeing so reporters would stay off their trail. Haber thought that the ocean just had low amounts of gold so he checked other oceans which he became disappointed again with the low amounts. Haber checked for five years until concluding the old studies had been wrong about the amounts of gold in the water. He didn’t publish his findings and left the idea of paying for Germany’s reparations himself.
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