Jewish Invention Myths: (Modern) Chemical Warfare

Chemical Warfare as we know it in modernity is often credited by both pro-jewish and anti-jewish sources as a ‘jewish invention’ based upon the simplified historical perception that Fritz Haber – who was indeed jewish – ‘created modern chemical warfare’ or ‘first developed chlorine gas as a weapon’. (1)

This is largely an argument from ignorance however because chemical weapons have a long history stretching all the way back to the Homeric epics (circa 1200 B.C.) and the Chinese (circa 1000 B.C.) and includes the migration into what we might call proto-chemical warfare in the sixteenth century in Europe with the creation of ‘stinkpots’ and other common ballistic chemical weapons.

However if we move on to when modern chemical weapons were actually created; it is actually during the American Civil War not World War One with wide if sporadic use of such weapons by both sides in the conflict, which also includes the first chlorine gas shell - which Haber is often falsely credited with inventing - that was first designed and submitted to the Union army by John Doughty – a schoolteacher from New York – on 5th April 1862 but never actually deployed. (2)

The fact that the Hague Declaration of 1899 and the Hague Convention of 1907 explicitly prohibit using weapons that have ‘the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases’ (3) should already have warned people against the idea that modern chemical warfare was ‘invented by Fritz Haber’ but apparently it did not.

Indeed, the Germans weren’t even the first to use chemical weapons and gas shells in World War One as Verwey explains:

‘Of these, ethyl bromoacetate and chlroacetone were in fact the first agents used by the French since late 1914 and before the Ypres attack by the Germans, and both of them are two or three times as toxic as chlorine. Indeed, the British Daily Mail reported in October 1914 already about “Germans killed by poison gas”.’ (4)

So no Fritz Haber (and thus jews) most certainly did not invent (modern) chemical warfare nor were they the first to invent the chlorine gas shell which was in fact – as we have seen – John Doughty in 1862.

References

(1) For example: https://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i8/100-years-chemical-weapons.html and https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fritz-Haber

(2) Jeffrey Smart, n.d., ‘Chemical and Biological Warfare Research and Development during the Civil War’, U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command, pp. 1-5 (https://web.archive.org/web/20150714165422/http://www.wood.army.mil/ccmuseum/ccmuseum/library/Civil_War_CBW.pdf)

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hague_Conventions_of_1899_and_1907#Hague_Convention_of_1899

(4) Wil Verwey, 1977, ‘Riot Control agents and Herbicides in War: Their Humanitarian, Toxicological, Ecological, Military, Polemological, and Legal Aspects’, 1st Edition, A. W. Sijthoff: Leyden, p. 33