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.

References

1. W. M. Elsasser, Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age, Science History, New York (1978).
2. H. von Buttlar, in Leonium und andere Anekdoten um den Physikprofessor Dr. F. G. Houtermans, Bochum (1982).
3. G. Gamow, My World Line, Viking, New York (1970).
4. O. Frisch, What Little I Remember, Cambridge U.P., New York (1979).
5. V. Weisskopf, The Joy of Insight, Basic Books, New York (1991).
6. L. Rosenfeld, interview by C. Weiner, 1968, Archives for History of Quantum Physics, AIP, New York.
7. H. B. G. Casimir, Haphazard Reality, Harper and Row, New York (1983).
8. G. Gamow, F. G. Houtermans, Z. Phys. 52, 496 (1928).https://doi.org/ZEPYAA
9. R. d’E. Atkinson, F. G. Houtermans, Z. Phys. 54, 656 (1929).https://doi.org/ZEPYAA
10. R. Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, Harcourt, Brace, New York (1958).
11. G. Gamow, in Earth Science and Meteoritics, J. Geiss, E. D. Goldberg, eds., North‐Holland, Amsterdam (1963), p. vii.
12. R. Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Simon and Schuster, New York (1986).
13. In den Fängen des NKVD, Dietz, Berlin (1991).
14. G. E. Gorelik, V. Ya. Frenkel1, Matvey Petrovich Bronshtein, Nauka, Moscow (1990).
15. A. S. Weissberg, The Accused, Simon and Schuster, New York (1951).
16. Collected correspondence of (and about) F. Houtermans, MS.SPSL.330, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
17. R. V. Jones, Most Secret War, Hodder and Stoughton, London (1978).
18. F. Beck, W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confessions, Hurst and Blackett, London (1951).
19. M. von Ardenne, Ein Glückliches Leben für Technik und Forschung, Kindler, Zurich and Munich (1972);
“Nachdruk als Beitrag zur Geschichte der Kernspaltung in Deutschland,” letter to USSR Acad. Sci., 20 January 1987.
20. F. G. Houtermans, A. I. Leipunskii, L. Rusinov, Sov. Phys. 12, 491 (1937).
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.
22. E. P. Wigner, J. Phys. (Paris) 8, 317 (1982).https://doi.org/JPQCAK

More about the Authors

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