In April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

1915 年 4 月，德裔犹太化学家弗里茨·哈伯 (Fritz Haber) 监督了对法国殖民军队的首次工业化化学武器的部署。这次袭击的不确定性，无论是在执行还是结果上，都导致许多德国军人质疑毒气的可控性。在接下来的三十年里，随着航空化学袭击似乎越来越迫在眉睫，德国人将继续进行这种调查。这篇文章讲述了德国在两次世界大战之间寻求控制化学武器的过程，揭示了两次世界大战之间的技术民族主义者将毒气的掌握与德国人的种族定义联系起来的方式。在纳粹统治下，民用航空化学防御领域的领导人抓住了两次世界大战之间的线索，并提倡危险的气体拥抱，据称这将把技术上优越的德国人从其他低等种族中剔除。尽管这种化学饱和世界的愿景并未充斥德国社会，但这种逻辑确实在大屠杀的毒气室中发挥了作用。