 Both of Nernst's sons died fighting in World War I.With his colleagues at the University of Leipzig , Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff and Svante Arrhenius , was establishing the foundations of a new theoretical and experimental field of inquiry within chemistry and suggested setting fire to unused coal seams to increase the global temperature.He was a vocal critic of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, and two of his three daughters married Jewish men.