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Haber, Fritz (1868–1934) Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Fritz Haber was born in Breslau on 9 December 1868, the son of a prosperous chemical and dye merchant, who was an alderman of the city. After a period in business, Haber, who was essentially self-taught in his chosen field of physical chemistry, began research in Karlsruhe in 1894. He was especially interested in the influence of electricity on organic substances and was the first to demonstrate the significance of electrode potential in oxidation and reduction. In 1904 he developed a successful synthesis of ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918. Another outstanding achievement was his optical analysis of gases which led to the gas interferometer that bears his name. From 1906 Professor of Physical and Electrochemistry in Berlin, Haber was appointed five years later as Director of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Research Institute in Berlin-Dahlem. In 1916 he became chief of the chemical warfare service at the Institute, which had been turned over entirely to war work. During the 1920s, under Haber's direction, the Institute became the leading centre in the world for physical chemistry. Although Haber was a completely assimilated Jew and personally immune because of his war service and longstanding academic status from the immediate effects of the Nazi civil service purge at German universities in 1933, it effectively brought his career to an end. Ordered to dismiss all Jews on his staff, Haber objected to the new measures and to any privileged status for himself, resigning on 30 April 1933 in a letter of protest to the Prussian Ministry of Education. Following a visit to Cambridge in the summer of 1933, Haber, whose health had deteriorated, decided to head south for a sanatorium in Italy, but died en route of a heart attack, in Basel (Switzerland) on 29 January 1934. A year later a memorial meeting was held in his honour, arranged by Max Planck (q.v.) under the auspices of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in defiance of orders from the Ministry of Education. The meeting, which stressed Haber's patriotic services to Germany and his scientific achievements, was the only public demonstration of protest made by German scientists during the Third Reich. Haber's most important books included his Grundriss der techniscben Elektrochemie auf theoretischer Grund-lage (1898), Die elektrolytischen Protesse der organischer Chernie (1910) and Über die Synthese des Ammoniaks (1922).