Kurt Sitte

Kurt Sitte (1 December 1910 - 20 June 1993) was a nuclear physicist, originally from northern Bohemia.

As a result of frontier changes, he grew up, after 1919, in Czechoslovakia, and from 1938 found himself a citizen of an enlarged Germany. It was primarily because of his political activism that he was detained at the Buchenwald concentration camp between September 1939 and April 1944. Having survived this internment, his scientific skills opened up a range of career options internationally: between 1945 he lived and worked successively in Scotland, England, the United States, Brazil and Israel.

Kurt Sitte was arrested on espionage charges on 15 June 1960 and, as Israel's first convicted spy, Early release, in March 1963, resulted from his "good behaviour", He also presided over a leftist discussion group known as "Die Tat" ("the deed") back in Reichenberg and participated in the Sudeten German Anti-Nazi Resistance movement. At the time of the Sudeten Crisis (and shortly before the Munich Agreement), Kurt Sitte was a co-founder, on 18 September 1938, of the "National Council of all Peace motivated Sudeten Germans" ("Nationalrats aller friedenswilligen Sudetendeutschen").

At some point around 1938 Kurt Sitte married Kheda/ [Hedvika or Hedwig] Kraus, a nurse working in Prague who was also from Reichenberg. The marriage would end in divorce. Sitte was not Jewish, but his wife was, in part. Another beneficiary of their erudition was the concentration camp doctor, Waldemar Hoven who during this time obtained a doctorate with a dissertation entitled "Investigations into the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis through the inhalation of colloidal carbon" ("Versuche zur Behandlung der Lungentuberkulose durch Inhalation von Kohlekolloid"). It subsequently transpired that the dissertation had been compiled by Wegerer and Sitte.

As the end of the war approached, on 11 April 1945 Kurt Sitte was one of those freed from the Buchenwald concentration camp by members of the United States Army.

Starting in April 1947 Sitte appeared as a witness at the Buchenwald Trial. He identified examples of "processed" human skin from the camp. He testified that the principal processes had taken place at Buchenwald, based on intended uses decided elsewhere. His evidence affected the so-called "Buchenwald Commander", Ilse Koch, whose death sentence was subsequently reduced to a four-year jail term because no incriminating evidence was produced that she had selected prisoners for murder according to the tattoos on their skin, nor that she was in possession of any objects made from human skin. The US military tribunal which reduced her sentence in 1948 based its decision on various considerations, taking the view that her earlier conviction and sentencing had been excessively dependent on hearsay evidence. In this connection Sitte later found himself being questioned about his experiences at Buchenwald by an enquiry commission of the US senate. Even in the context of those times, the power to shock of the testimony Sitte was able to provide stands out.

In 1948 he relocated to the United States, taking a position as a professor of physics at Syracuse University. In the interrogation that followed Sitte admitted to his contacts with Czechoslovak diplomats. His sister and aging mother were still living in Czechoslovakia, and he testified that he had been keen to protect their positions, and that conversations involving scientific matters had simply involved the free exchange of information among scientists. The Israeli intelligence services reported that Sitte had been afraid that his research on cosmic rays as a potential energy source could lead to a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was in order to prevent such an outcome that he had divulged information to the Soviets. The actual trial was launched in the Haifa district court on 5 November 1960. The public were excluded, but it is known that the secret trial involved crimes against the Israeli National Security Act of 1957. He was also the author of numerous scientific papers.