The Eventful Life of Fritz Houtermans

JUL 01, 1992

Fleeing Hitler, he went to England in 1933. Soon, driven by idealism and English cooking, he moved to the Soviet Union. Eventually the NKVD shipped him back to the Gestapo. Through it all he managed to do ground‐breaking physics.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881313

Iosif B. Khriplovich

“Why are you interested in this man?” they usually ask me. I don’t know the answer. It just happened. Maybe my interest in the life of Fritz Houtermans started when I began coming across repeated references in various books to a gifted German physicist who emigrated to the USSR after Hitler came to power, was arrested by the Soviets in 1937 as a German spy and then was extradited back to Germany in 1940, only to return to occupied Kharkov two years later with the conquering Nazis.

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References

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2. H. von Buttlar, in Leonium und andere Anekdoten um den Physikprofessor Dr. F. G. Houtermans, Bochum (1982).
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“Nachdruk als Beitrag zur Geschichte der Kernspaltung in Deutschland,” letter to USSR Acad. Sci., 20 January 1987.
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21. F. G. Houtermans, “Zur Frage der Auslösung von Kern‐Kettenreaktionen,” unpub. rep. from lab. of M. von Ardenne, Berlin‐Lichterfelde‐Ost, Germany, August 1941, G 94 in microfilm archive of captured German documents, Natl. Tech. Inf. Service, Oak Ridge, Tenn.
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More about the Authors

Iosif B. Khriplovich. Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, Russia.