The seventh chapter examines the writings of gas specialists in their various gas protection journals. Through the publication of articles and books, this group of personally and professionally connected scientists and engineers continued to heighten the German public’s concern for gas preparedness, calling for both increased gas drills and civilian familiarization with gas protection technology. This then created a greater public desire for visible steps toward national protection, including civilian gas mask distribution. With the creation of the Reichsluftschutzbund, the Nazis intended to centralize national gas protection services and to dramatize the possibility of aero-chemical attack. As part of this theatrical staging, they attempted to provide gas masks for every German civilian. Practically speaking, this endeavor proved impossible, but the distribution of gas masks was also meant as a way to visually and psychologically armor the German populace. Civilians who received gas masks were required to always keep them nearby, ready to pull them onto their faces at a moment’s notice. Thus, by forcing the individual to respond to a seemingly imminent chemical attack, the mask could ostensibly reveal the collective power of a Third Reich comprised of militarized “Nazi chemical subjects.”

By bridging the world of academic chemistry and the major German chemical companies, the chemist Fritz Haber was able to effectively deliver chemical weapons to the German military over the course of World War I. While the first German chlorine gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres on April 22, 1915, is often described as the commencement of the chemical war and a major breach in the international rules of warfare, it can also be productively viewed as a merging of academic science and industrial chemistry into the bureaucratic structures of the German military. Thus, Fritz Haber’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry, the major site of German chemical weapons research, should be read as an early blueprint for later historical developments in Big Science and the military-industrial-academic complex.

The eighth chapter returns to poison gas, relating the ways in which the Nazis’ efforts in national chemical protection were intimately tied to their search for new offensive chemical weapons. The chapter then provides a reading of the Nazi relationship to poison gas and their attempt to realize a specifically “Nazi chemical modernity” in which poison gas would serve as a litmus test that would determine the masters and victims in a chemically hazardous world. Without drawing direct lines of causation between the 1915 German deployment of militarized gas and its reapplication in the Final Solution, this chapter explores the rhetorical and conceptual threads that developed across the interwar technological proposals of the gas specialists, the rhetorical racism of Nazi geopolitics, and the attempted chemical genocide in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

On April 22, 1915, the German chemist Fritz Haber and a hand-selected group of technicians coordinated the first large-scale chlorine gas attack of World War I. In the days that followed this assault against Allied troops, the German state celebrated its supposedly successful use of poison gas and Haber was given a military rank with near total control of future chemical weapons development. Historically, Haber’s attack signified a massive escalation of chemical warfare, which had previously been either rudimentary or conceptual in nature.

The sixth chapter examines German intellectual understandings of chemical warfare technologies. Several of the most influential interwar intellectuals were veterans of World War I, having experienced gas attacks and used gas masks during their wartime service. Revealing the salience of poison gas in the interwar imagination, this chapter explores the numerous literary, artistic, and cinematic works that attempted to grapple with the individual soldier’s relationship to chemical weapons. Indeed, the continued contact with relentlessly changing and often dangerous technology such as poison gas and the gas mask exemplified the mental uncertainty and political instability of early twentieth-century Germany. As part of a larger debate surrounding militarized technology, arguments over the controllability of poison gas and the viability of gas discipline most clearly played out in the writings of Ernst Jünger and joint projects of Walter Benjamin and Dora Sophie Kellner. These three thinkers constructed highly theoretical visions of aerial warfare technologies that neatly represented two of the major political commitments in the continuing debate over Germany’s potential rearmament and the use of poison gas.

The fourth chapter examines how German military doctors attempted to treat the injuries caused by poison gas. World War I medical professionals often downplayed reports of gassing by claiming that the affected men had predispositions to pulmonary illness or constitutional weakness. Furthermore, many physicians and psychologists saw what was then termed “gas-neurosis,” or psychological discomfort stemming from poison gas exposure, as an affront to both their concept of German masculinity and national health. Due to both this cultural commitment and a lack of knowledge regarding poison gas exposure, doctors tended to dismiss gas symptoms such as chronic coughing, dizziness, lung inflammation, insomnia, and hallucinations that could develop years after initial exposure. Much like the scientists who had developed poison gas at Fritz Haber’s Institute, most German physicians continued to view the weapon as something that could be controlled and treated with the proper application of scientific and medical knowledge.