Karl Wirtz

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz (24 April 1910 – 12 February 1994) was a

Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Epsilon
.

Education

From 1929 to 1934, Wirtz studied

University of Leipzig. During this period, he became a member of the Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund (NSLB, National Socialist Teachers League), but not the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers Party).

Some of the more established scientists, such as

Habilitationsschrift, which was a prerequisite to attaining the rank of Privatdozent necessary to becoming a university lecturer.[2] Hence joining such organizations became a tactical career consideration. In 1938, he completed his Habilitation at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a Habilitationsschrift on the electrochemical foundations of electrolytic heavy water production.[3]

Career

In 1937, Wirtz became a staff scientist at the

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft ) and located in Dahlem-Berlin. In 1940, he worked on the horizontal layer reactor design with Fritz Bopp and Erich Fischer. In 1941, he also became a Privatdozent at the Humboldt University of Berlin
.

In 1944, Wirtz was appointed head of the experimental department at the KWIP, which had been moved to

Farm Hall for six months under Operation Epsilon.[3]

From 1946, Wirtz worked at the

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and had been opened in the British Occupation Zone in Göttingen
.

From 1948 to 1957, he was also an extraordinarius professor at the

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft.[3]
From 1957 to 1979, Wirtz was an ordinarius professor of physical foundations of reactor technology at the
Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe and director of the Institute of Neutron Physics and Reactor Technology at the Center for Nuclear Research, which was established in 1957 in Karlsruhe. From 1965 to 1967, he was chairman of the scientific council of the Karlsruhe Center for Nuclear Research. From 1974 to 1976, he was dean of the faculty of mechanical engineering at Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe.[3]

Organizations

Internal Reports

The following reports were published in

Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center and the American Institute of Physics.[4][5]

Selected Literature

  • Horst Korsching and Karl Wirtz Trennung von Flüssigkeitsgemischen mittels kombinierter Thermodiffusion und Thermosiphonwirkung: Methode von Clusius und Dickel, Naturwissenschaften Volume 27, Number 7, Page 110 (February, 1939)

Books

  • Horst Korsching and Karl Wirtz Trennung der Zinkisotope durch Thermodiffusion in flussiger Phase (Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1939)
  • Karl Heinrich Beckurts and Karl Wirtz Neutron Physics (Springer-Verlag, New York, NY, 1964)
  • Karl Winnacker and Karl Wirtz Das unverstandene Wunder: Kernenergie in Deutschland (Econ, 1975)
    ISBN 3-430-19792-9
  • Karl Winnacker and Karl Wirtz Atome Illusion ou Miracle? (P.U.F., 1977)
  • Karl Wirtz Lectures on Fast Reactors (Universität Karlsruhe, 1978, 1982)
  • Karl Winnacker and Karl Wirtz Nuclear Energy in Germany (American Nuclear Society, 1993)
    ISBN 0-89448-018-9

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ Hoffmann, 2004, 293-329.
  2. ^ Hentschel, 1996, Appendix C; see the entry for the NSDDB.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Hentschel, 1996, Appendix F; see the entry for Karl Wirtz.
  4. ^ Hentschel and Hentschel, 1996, Appendix E; see the entry for Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte.
  5. ^ Walker, 1993, 268-274.

Further reading

  • Powers, Thomas, "The Private Heisenberg and the Absent Bomb" (review of Werner and Elisabeth Heisenberg, My Dear Li: Correspondence, 1937–1946, edited by Anna Maria Hirsch-Heisenberg and translated from the German by Irene Heisenberg, Yale University Press, 312 pp., $40.00), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIII, no. 20 (22 December 2016, pp. 65–67. "[Werner] Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and... Karl Wirtz [during World War II led] an effort [to prevent] a complete shutdown [of work toward a German atom bomb], which would condemn young physicists to military service... or takeover by Nazi extremists who might think an atomic bomb could still give Hitler a complete victory." (p. 66.) Desiring on ethical grounds to prevent the introduction of nuclear weapons into the world, the key German nuclear physicists "'agreed... not to deny [the feasibility of] an atomic bomb, but... to [argue] that it could not be implemented within a realistic time frame...'" (p. 67.)

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Karl_Wirtz&oldid=1198283497"