The ENTIRE History of the First World War

Most people say the First World War was decided by generals, trenches and artillery. It was decided by a chemist, five years before it started. In 1909, in a laboratory in Karlsruhe, Fritz Haber pulled a few drops of ammonia out of a steel tube. He had taken nitrogen out of the air. That meant fertiliser without limit — and it meant explosives without limit. When the Royal Navy cut Germany off from Chilean saltpetre in 1914, the German army had roughly six months of shells left. Historians of the subject are blunt about what happened next: without Haber's process, Germany would have been beaten in a matter of months. This is the whole war in twenty-five minutes — Sarajevo to the armistice carriage, Ypres to the Somme — told alongside the man who kept it supplied, who directed the first chlorine attack in April 1915, whose wife shot herself eight days later, who won a Nobel Prize while being named a war criminal, and who was thrown out of Germany in 1933 for being Jewish. The process he started in 1909 now supplies the nitrogen behind roughly half the food grown on earth. Around four billion people are alive because of it. CHAPTERS 0:00 Decided in 1909 1:08 Europe in 1913 2:32 Nitrogen out of the air 4:02 Sarajevo and the timetables 5:14 Belgium, the Marne, and the line that stopped 6:36 The blockade and six months of shells 7:58 Why nothing could break the line 9:30 Ypres, 22 April 1915 10:57 Clara Immerwahr 12:20 The date this war turns on 13:22 Verdun and the Somme 14:55 Gas becomes an industry 16:23 Turnip winter, Russia, America 17:48 1918 19:12 Counting the dead 20:30 Versailles, and a Nobel Prize 22:12 Haber, 1919 to 1934 23:48 What is still standing Quotations from Fritz Haber and from Albert Einstein are from published sources and are attributed in the video. Casualty totals for this war are disputed; where historians disagree, the range is given rather than a single number. Illustrations are AI-generated historical paintings, not photographs or archive footage. #FirstWorldWar #WWI #History #Documentary #FritzHaber