Horst Korsching

Horst Korsching (1912 – 1998) was a German physicist. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Epsilon.

Contents

Education

Korsching began his studies of physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1932. In 1937, he joined the scientific staff at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics), an institute under the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG, Kaiser Wilhelm Society) and located in Dahlem-Berlin. He received his doctorate under Hermann Schüler.[1][2]

Career

At the KWIP, he was a colleague of Karl Wirtz, and his research was on determination of the nuclear moment and thermodiffusion. During the war years, he worked on isotope separation under Kurt Diebner and Werner Heisenberg. He went with the staff of the KWIP when it was moved to Hechingen in 1943 to avoid bombing casualties. In late spring 1945, Korsching was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months under Operation Epsilon.[3][4]

From 1946, after his incarceration, Korsching worked at the Max-Planck Institut für Physik (MPIP), which was the renamed Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik and had been opened in the British Occupation Zone in Göttingen. In 1958, he moved with the MPIP when it was relocated to Munich.[5]

Internal Report

The following were published in Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte (Research Reports in Nuclear Physics), an internal publication of the German Uranverein. Reports in this publication were classified Top Secret, they had very limited distribution, and the authors were not allowed to keep copies. The reports were confiscated under the Allied Operation Alsos and sent to the United States Atomic Energy Commission for evaluation. In 1971, the reports were declassified and returned to Germany. The reports are available at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center and the American Institute of Physics.[6][7]

Selected Literature

Books

Bibliography

External links

References

  1. ^ Hentschel, 1996, Appendix F; see the entry for Horst Korsching.
  2. ^ MPIWG – Horst Kant Werner Heisenberg and the German Uranium Project Preprint 203 (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2002)
  3. ^ Hentschel, 1996, Appendix F; see the entry for Horst Korsching.
  4. ^ Bernstein, 2001, 365.
  5. ^ Hentschel, 1996, Appendix F; see the entry for Horst Korsching.
  6. ^ Hentschel and Hentschel, 1996, Appendix E; see the entry for Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte.
  7. ^ Walker, 1993, 268.
  8. ^ Walker, 1993, 271.
  9. ^ Walker, 1993, 273.