Clara Immerwahr

Clara Immerwahr earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Breslau on 12 December 1900, examined by her advisor Richard Abegg, becoming the first woman to receive a doctorate from that university; her dissertation studied the solubility of metal salts. Barred by the professional norms of the time from a research career of her own, she gave public lectures on chemistry and household science and worked without pay or credit in her husband Fritz Haber's laboratory circle after their 1901 marriage. On the night of 1 to 2 May 1915, days after Haber returned from personally directing the German army's first large-scale chlorine gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres and hosted a dinner marking it, Immerwahr took his army revolver into the garden of their Berlin home and shot herself; she died the following morning in the arms of her thirteen-year-old son, Hermann, who had run to her after hearing the shot. No note from her survives.

Historians dispute why Clara Immerwahr took her own life. A widely repeated account, popularized by a 1993 biography, holds that she acted principally in protest of her husband's direction of chemical warfare, and some contemporaries described a bitter argument between the couple the night before her death. Researchers including Bretislav Friedrich and Dieter Hoffmann have argued this reading is too simple and is hard to reconcile with surviving letters; they point instead to an accumulation of personal strain, including the recent deaths of her doctoral advisor Richard Abegg and a close friend, professional isolation after a promising start to her own scientific career, and difficulty in her marriage that had little to do with gas warfare specifically. No surviving document written by Immerwahr herself states her reason, and scholars caution against reading her, one way or the other, through present-day assumptions about what a woman scientist of her time would have believed.