Everything about Fritz Strassmann totally explained
Friedrich Wilhelm "Fritz" Strassman (
February 22,
1902 -
April 22,
1980) was a
German chemist who, with
Otto Hahn in 1938, identified barium in the residue after bombarding uranium with neutrons, which led to the interpretation of their results as being from nuclear fission. Strassman was recognized by
Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as
Righteous Among the Nations.
Life and Career
Born in
Boppard, he began his chemistry studies in
1920 at the
Technical University of Hannover and earned his
Ph.D. in
1929. He did his Ph.D. work about the solubility of iodine gaseous carbonic acid.
Strassman started an academic career because the employment situation in the chemical industry was much worse than at the universities at that time.
Strassman worked at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in
Berlin-Dahlem, from 1929.
In 1933 he resigned from the Society of German Chemists when it became part of a Nazi controlled public corporation. He was blacklisted. Hahn and Meitner found an assistantship for him at half pay. Strassmann considered himself fortunate, for "despite my affinity for chemistry, I value my personal freedom so highly that to preserve it I'd break stones
for a living." During the war he and his wife Maria Heckter Strassmann concealed a Jewish friend in their
apartment for months, putting themselves and their three year old son at risk.
Strassmann’s expertise in
analytical chemistry was employed by
Otto Hahn and
Lise Meitner in their investigations of the products of
uranium bombarded by
neutrons. In December 1938, Hahn and Strassmann sent a manuscript to
Naturwissenschaften reporting they'd detected the element
barium after bombarding
uranium with
neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Meitner, who had escaped out of Germany earlier that year and was then in Sweden. Meitner, and her nephew
Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being
nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. In 1944, Hahn received the
Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Some historians have documented the history of the discovery of nuclear fission and believe Meitner should have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn.
In
1946 he became professor of
inorganic chemistry at the
University of Mainz and
1948 director of the newly established
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. He later founded the Institute for Nuclear Chemistry.
In
1957 he was one of the
Göttinger 18, who protested against the idea of the
Adenauer government to force the Western German army with tactical nuclear weapons.
President Johnson honored Hahn, Meitner and Sraßmann 1966 with the
Enrico Fermi Award. The
International Astronomical Union named an asteroid after him:
19136 Strassmann.
On
April 22,
1980, Strassman passed away in
Mainz.
Internal Report
The following was 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'd 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.
- Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann Zur Folge nach der Entstehung des 2.3 Tage-Isotops des Elements 93 aus Uran G-151 (27 February 1942)
Bibliography
Fritz Strassmann: "Über die Löslichkeit von Jod in gasförmiger Kohlensäure", Zeitschrift f. physikal. Chemie. Abt. A., Bd. 143 (1929) and Ph.D. thesis Technical University of Hannover, 1930
Fritz Krafft: Im Schatten der Sensation. Leben und Wirken von Fritz Straßmann; Verlag Chemie, 1981
Hentschel, Klaus (Editor) and Ann M. Hentschel (Editorial Assistant and Translator) Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Birkhäuser, 1996)
Walker, Mark German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power 1939–1949 (Cambridge, 1993) ISBN 0-521-43804-7Further Information
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