Christopher Hitchens, writing about visiting his Polish ancestors’ land Breslau/Wrocław …
One must beware of the temptation to invest everything with significance in retrospect, yet it chills the soul a bit to learn that from this great city-centre of humane science and medicine, which produced the good doctor Alois Alzheimer as well as the physicist Max Born, Professor Fritz Haber moved his operations to Berlin in 1914 in order to place his chemistry skills at the service of a military government in search of weapons of mass destruction. (He oversaw the German chlorine-gas attack at Ypres and after 1918 concerned himself with the development of Zyklon-B, thus radically attenuating his own posterity.)
That phrase ‘radically attenuating his own posterity’ is perfect.
Hitch 22 p 420 ‘The Jewish Question’.
– P
