Heinz Pose

Heinz Ferdinand Hermann Pose (10 April 1905 – 13 November 1975), best known as Heinz Pose, was a German nuclear physicist and a professor of physics at the Technical University Dresden (TU Dresden).

From 1957 until 1959, he worked in Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna before settling for a professorship in physics in Germany in 1959, eventually heading the faculty at the Technische Hochschule Dresden.

Background Roots and education

Pose was born in Königsberg in Prussia, German Empire, which is now known as Kaliningrad in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia, on 10 April 1905 . His family roots came from eastern Prussia; he was very familiar with Russian culture, customs and norms, and its language. and also mentioned in text written by Roger Stuewer in 2018. Nonetheless, he was known as Heinz Pose.

Career

Early years

From 1928 Pose was an unsalaried assistant and from 1930 a regular assistant to the physicist Gerhard Hoffmann, who was doing research in nuclear reaction measurements. In 1929, Pose studied the nuclear reactions of aluminum nuclei bombarded with alpha particles. His experiments showed the existence of discrete energy levels in the nucleus. His pioneering work described for the first time the effect of resonance transformation in a nuclear process. On the basis of these works and his Habilitation, Pose was awarded a teaching contract for atomic physics in 1934. He continued to study these nuclear reactions in other light (low atomic number) nuclei through the 1930s. In 1939, he was awarded an unscheduled/adjunct (außerplanmäßige) professorship at Halle.

In Russia Near the close of World War II, the Soviet Union sent special search teams into Germany to locate and deport German nuclear scientists or any others who could be of use to the Soviet atomic bomb project. The Russian Alsos teams were headed by NKVD Colonel General A. P. Zavenyagin and staffed with numerous scientists, from their only nuclear laboratory, attired in NKVD officer's uniforms. In the autumn of 1945, Pose was offered the opportunity to work in the Soviet Union, which he accepted. He arrived in the Soviet Union, with his family, in February 1946. He was to establish and head Laboratory V (also known by the code name Malojaroslavets-10, after the nearby town by the same name) in Obninsk. The scientific staff at Laboratory V was to be both Russian and German, the former being mostly political prisoners from the Gulag or exiles; this type of facility is known as a sharashka. (Laboratory B in Sungul' was also a sharashka and its personnel worked on the Soviet atomic bomb project. Notable Germans at Laboratory B were Hans-Joachim Born, Alexander Catsch, Nikolaus Riehl, and Karl Zimmer. Notable Russians from the Gulag were N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij and S. A. Voznesenskij.)

On 5 March 1946, in order to staff his laboratory, Pose and NKVD General Kravchenko, along with two other officers, went to Germany for six months to hire scientists. Additionally, Pose procured equipment from the companies AEG, Zeiss, Schott Jena, and Mansfeld, which were in the Soviet occupation zone. Since Pose was on the staff of the German nuclear energy project Uranverein, he had intimate knowledge of scientists who would be useful as staff and laboratory heads in his facility in Obninsk. This included personnel such as Rexer, Herrmann, and Czulius, who worked with Pose at the German Army's testing station in Gottow, under the Uranverein project, and had co-authored a classified nuclear energy report (see below) with him. Czulius, long after the war, remembered how an armed guard invited him to meet with an important Russian general in Berlin. When he got to Berlin, Czulius was told that the general was in Moscow, and he was sent there. When he got to Moscow, Czulius was informed that the general was busy, so he should get to work immediately, which he did.

While in Germany on his recruiting trip, Pose wrote a letter to the Physics Nobel Laureate Werner Heisenberg inviting him to work in Russia. The letter lauded the working conditions in Russian and the available resources, as well as the favorable attitude of the Russians towards German scientists. A courier hand delivered the recruitment letter to Heisenberg; Heisenberg politely declined in a return letter to Pose.

In 1947, Alexander Leipunski, scientific liaison of the Ninth Chief Directorate of the NKVD since 1946, was assigned to Laboratory V. He eventually became the scientific director of the Institute of Power and Power Engineering, which was founded on the basis of Laboratory V. The Reactor Section of the Scientific Council of the First Chief Directorate of the NKVD, in May, assigned Leipunski and Laboratory V the tasking to develop nuclear reactors with beryllium as a neutron moderator. Later, Laboratory V was charged with the development of a gas-cooled reactor using enriched uranium and beryllium as a moderator. Laboratory V was also assigned tasking for the studies of radiation biology and separation of radio isotopes, similar to the tasking given Nikolaus Riehl's Laboratory B in Sungul'. ), Dr. Hans Gerhard Krüger (formerly with Gustav Hertz at Institute G), Dr. Helene Külz, Dr. Hellmut Scheffers, and Dr. Renger.

In 1952, most of the German scientists left Laboratory V for a facility in Sukhumi, where they remained in quarantine until returning to Germany in 1955. However, Pose remained at Laboratory V until 1955, when he then went to the Laboratory for Nuclear Problems, now the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, in Dubna.

In East Germany In 1959 Pose returned to Germany and settled in Dresden, East Germany. In addition to continuing his teaching at the Technische Hochschule, he became the first director of the Instituts für Allgemeine Kerntechnik (Institute for General Nuclear Technology), whose chair for Neutron Physics of Reactors he also took over. At the same time, he became Dean of the Faculty for Nuclear Technology, which was created in 1955.

The Org and STIB had an interest in a chemist in Obninsk who Werner knew. When the chemist was allowed to go to Germany in 1955, Werner introduced the chemist to representatives from the Org and STIB. Unfortunately for Werner, the chemist had been recruited by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS, Ministry for State Security) of East Germany. This eventually resulted in Werner being arrested by the MfS when he tried to cross over into East Germany. Werner was tried in April 1959 and sentenced to six years in prison. F. Berkei, W. Borrmann, W. Czulius, Kurt Diebner, Georg Hartwig, K. H. Höcker, W. Herrmann, H. Pose, and Ernst Rexer Bericht über einen Würfelversuch mit Uranoxyd und Paraffin (dated before 26 November 1942). G-125. Heinz Pose and Ernst Rexer Versuche mit verschiedenen geometrischen Anordnungen von Uranoxyd und Paraffin (12 October 1943). G-240.

Selected literature Heinz Pose Experimentelle Untersuchungen über die Diffusion langsamer Elektronen in Edelgasen Zeitschrift für Physik, Volume 52, Issue 5–6, 428-447 (1929) Heinz Pose Messung einzelner Korpuskularstrahlen bei Anwesenheit intensiver Gamma - Strahlen, Zschr. Physik Volume 102, Numbers 5 & 6, 379-407 (1936) Rudolph H. Pose Vospominanija ob Obninske (Reminiscences of Obninsk) in History of the Soviet Atomic Project - 1996, Proceedings 2 (IzdAt, 1999)

Books Heinz Pose Einführung in die Physik des Atomkerns (Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1971)