Friedrich Bergius

Friedrich Karl Rudolf Bergius was born on 11 October 1884 in Germany and trained as a chemist at a time when the country was desperate for fuel independence. He developed the Bergius process, a method for synthesizing liquid fuel from coal using high-pressure chemistry, and in 1931 shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Carl Bosch for pioneering chemical high-pressure methods. During World War II he worked with IG Farben, the industrial conglomerate later notorious for its role in the Nazi war effort. When the war ended, his citizenship came under scrutiny, and rather than face whatever reck…