It is likely that Fuchs's espionage led the U.S. to cancel a 1950 Anglo-American plan to give Britain American-made atomic bombs. He was prosecuted by Sir Hartley Shawcross and was convicted on 1 March 1950 of four counts of breaking the Official Secrets Act by "communicating information to a potential enemy." After a trial lasting less than 90 minutes that was based on his confession, Lord Goddard sentenced him to 14 years' imprisonment, the maximum for espionage, because the Soviet Union was classed as an ally at the time. In December 1950, he was stripped of his British citizenship. The head of the British H-bomb project, Sir William Penney, visited Fuchs in prison in 1952.
Trial and imprisonment
Klaus Fuchs
Klaus Fuchs | Trial and imprisonment
He was convicted on 1 March 1950 of four counts of breaking the Official Secrets Act by "communicating information to a potential enemy. Espionage He was imprisoned for breaking the Official Secrets Act by "communicating information to a potential enemy. For breaking the Official Secrets Act by "communicating information to a potential enemy."
who headed up the manhattan project in britain
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James Chadwick
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who is he?
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He was a British physicist.
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what was he known for?
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His discovery of the neutron.
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can you describe this thing he discovered?
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It is a subatomic particle, symbol or which has a neutral (not positive or negative) charge and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton.
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why was the above project started?
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It helped initiate the effort to build the first atomic bombs in the United States during World War II, and helped carry it through to completion in August 1945 by supplying crucial expertise.
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any other scientist were involved in it?
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Sir Geoffrey Taylor, James Tuck, Niels Bohr, Peierls, Frisch, and Klaus Fuchs
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what field did the last scientist study?
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Mathematics and physics
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why was he sent to prison?
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It is likely that Fuchs's espionage led the U.S. to cancel a 1950 Anglo-American plan to give Britain American-made atomic bombs. He was prosecuted by Sir Hartley Shawcross and was convicted on 1 March 1950 of four counts of breaking the Official Secrets Act by "communicating information to a potential enemy." After a trial lasting less than 90 minutes that was based on his confession, Lord Goddard sentenced him to 14 years' imprisonment, the maximum for espionage, because the Soviet Union was classed as an ally at the time. In December 1950, he was stripped of his British citizenship. The head of the British H-bomb project, Sir William Penney, visited Fuchs in prison in 1952.
Klaus Fuchs | Trial and imprisonment
Through his unruly behavior during the trial, Fuchs had repeatedly forced his removal from court proceedings. On 26 February 2000, Fuchs was found hanged with the cable of his electric razor in his prison cell at Graz-Karlau Prison. The prison physician determined it to be a suicide.
Franz Fuchs | Arrest, trial and death
While imprisoned, he was friendly with the Irish Republican Army prisoner Seamus Murphy with whom he played chess and helped to escape. It was suggested by some that Fuchs had turned IRA leader Cathal Goulding into a Marxist but Seamus Murphy denied it by saying "Fuchs never tried to turn anyone – it was hard to get a word out of him!" Fuchs was released on 23 June 1959 after he had served nine years and four months of his sentence (as was then required in England where long-term prisoners were entitled by law to one third off for good behaviour in prison) at Wakefield Prison and promptly emigrated to the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Klaus Fuchs | Trial and imprisonment
Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of the hydrogen bomb. After his conviction in 1950, he served nine years in prison in the United Kingdom and then moved to East Germany where he resumed his career as a physicist and scientific leader.
Klaus Fuchs | Introduction
As a consequence, at the end of the war he was arrested by the Allied forces, and was incarcerated in Farm Hall with nine other German scientists, from July 1945 to January 1946.
Otto Hahn | Introduction
The court found him guilty of self-injury and assistance to self-injury. The death sentence of the previous trial had not yet been confirmed; the new sentence was six years in prison. On March 8, 1945 Kurt Fuchs was executed by a firing squad, 25 days before the Red Army began to take Vienna.
Kurt Fuchs | Life
In a show trial before the Volksgerichtshof on 8 August 1944, he was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out the same day at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.
Friedrich Klausing | Death
In May 1943 Fučík was brought to Germany. He was first detained in Bautzen for somewhat more than two months, and afterwards in Berlin. On 25 August 1943 in Berlin, he was accused of high treason in connection with his political activities by the "Volksgerichtshof", which was presided over by the notorious Roland Freisler. Fučík was found guilty and was sentenced to death along with Jaroslav Klecan, who had been arrested with Fučík. Fučík was hanged two weeks later on 8 September 1943 in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin (not beheaded as is often stated). After the war, his wife, Gusta Fučíková, who had also been in a Nazi concentration camp, researched and retrieved all of his prison writings.
Julius Fučík (journalist) | Trial and death
Klause's sentence was commuted to life in prison based upon his cooperation. Bröde hanged himself in his cell. As a result, only Matern was left to be executed by beheading on 22 May 1935.
Erich Mielke | Trial
He was acquitted in two cases because he was considered not at fault at the time due to "intellectual development errors". To this day, he remains imprisoned in the forensic clinic in Bedburg-Hau.
Kurt-Friedhelm Steinwegs | Arrest and trial
In the summer of 1975 the family moved to Berlin where Fuchs became a social worker in a church charity, one of the few work options for a political dissident. Following his protest against the deprivation of East German citizenship of Wolf Biermann, he was arrested November 19, 1976. Fuchs spent 9 months in prison of the East German secret service Stasi in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen (but he was not sentenced until 1982). Following international protests, Fuchs was released from prison and deported to West Berlin together with his family in August 1977. Fuchs was a victim of the Stasi's techniques, which he described as "an assault on the human soul".
Jürgen Fuchs (writer) | Biography
If they did not do that, it was their own fault if I had to shoot them."" (for the bank robberies) ""I was afraid that I would be captured, and yet had to shoot in self-defense"". (last murder in Nuremberg) The secret of the Midday crimes was also solved - Gossmann was not an early riser and needed the morning for his preparations.
Klaus Gossmann | Trial and imprisonment
His last words were recorded as ""Ich sterbe unschuldig, mein Urteil ist ungerecht. Gott beschütze Deutschland. Möge es leben und eines Tages wieder groß werden. Gott beschütze meine Familie."" ("I die an innocent man, my sentence is unjust. God protect Germany. May it live and one day become great again. God protect my family."). Albert Speer escaped the death sentence, but served 20 years at Spandau prison.
Fritz Sauckel | Trial and execution
Horst Korsching (12 August 1912 – 21 March 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.
Horst Korsching | Introduction
Neumann was sentenced to life imprisonment on 30 May 1963 for the double murder he committed. The trial attracted national attention. The painter Gerhard Richter based one of his paintings on photos of the trial. Neumann first served his sentence at Tegel Prison, then from 1991 at Bruchsal Prison. In Bruchsal he was considered a quiet prisoner; a first version took place in 1993. In March 1994, the District Court of Karlsruhe found that even life imprisonment no longer required further serving. However, applications for suspended probation (§ 57a StGB) have since been rejected on a regular basis because experts have certified it a negative social forecast.
Hans-Georg Neumann | Imprisonment
On 31 January 1951, the penalty was reduced to fifteen years in prison by the American High Commissioner John J. McCloy. The pressure was his bitterness strengthened against his former superiors. “ On 3 June 1953 Rose was the last of the in the doctors' trial to imprisonment condemned physicians to be dismissed from Landsberg prison. Rose's detention was accompanied by various efforts to his early release by Rose's wife and Ernst Georg Nauck, Director of Hamburger Bernhard Nocht Institute. on September 29, 1950 the Free Association of German Hygienists and microbiologists contacted John J. McCloy with a request for Roses release: His large professional experience and previous performance to be expected, "that he will give the science and humanity many valuable benefits when used as a last, after more five and a half year prison his profession and his work is returned " In the weekly Hamburg newspaper "Die Zeit" an article was published with the heading "Zu Unrecht in Landsberg.
Gerhard Rose | Prison and campaign to free
Fuchs was born in Princeton, where his father worked as a bank clerk. He went to Memmingen school (graduating in 1956), was trained as an electrician and mechanic, and then studied electrical engineering at the Munich Technical University as well as physics, mathematics and philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. With a dissertation on "Logical problems of classical mechanics and quantum theory", he received his doctorate in 1961. In 1962 he was business editor at television program of Bavarian Radio studios, and since 1965 he had headed the editorial of Applied Science and Technology. Fuchs spent his life in Munich and died at the age of 39 from cancer.
Walter Robert Fuchs | Life and work
During the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Gebhardt stood trial in the Doctors' Trial (9 December 194620 August 1947), along with 22 other doctors. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death on 20 August 1947. He was hanged on 2 June 1948, in Landsberg Prison in Bavaria. Two of Gebhardt's assistants were also tried and convicted at Nuremberg. Fritz Fischer worked in the hospital of the Ravensbrück concentration camp as a surgical assistant to Gebhardt, and participated in the surgical experiments carried out on the inmates. He was initially condemned to life imprisonment, but his sentence was reduced to 15 years in 1951 and he was released in March 1954.
Karl Gebhardt | Trial and execution
Fuchs arrived in England on 24 September 1933. Jessie Gunn was a member of the Wills family, the heirs to Imperial Tobacco and benefactors of the University of Bristol. She arranged for Fuchs to meet Nevill Mott, Bristol's professor of physics, and he agreed to take Fuchs on as a research assistant. Fuchs earned his Ph.D. in physics there in 1937. A paper on "A Quantum Mechanical Calculation of the Elastic Constants of Monovalent Metals" was published in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society" in 1936. By this time, Mott had a number of German refugees working for him, and lacked positions for them all.
Klaus Fuchs | Refugee in Britain
He was also producing work for the "Sciences department" of the party central committee. It was presumably at least in part because of the extent to which his academic career had been interrupted by "events" that Bernhard Steinberger had never completed a doctoral thesis. Now, while still in prison, he was able to take up research work in preparation for a doctoral dissertation. His written permission came in a hand-written one-word comment, "Einverstanden" (""Agreed"") dated 4 July 1957, from the man in charge at the Ministry of State Security (Stasi), Erich Mielke, himself. His allocated supervisor, Dr. Herbert Neumann from the Economics Department carefully guided him towards a firmly theoretcal topic that would require no contact with real-world East German state enterprises.
Bernhard Steinberger | Productive detention at a price
He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1946. The sentence was later commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, after a successful appeal by Sven Hedin . Falkenhorst was released from Werl prison on 23 July 1953, due to bad health. In 1968, following a heart attack, he died at Holzminden, West Germany, where his family had settled after fleeing from Lower Silesia. He is buried in the Holzminden Cemetery.
Nikolaus von Falkenhorst | Trial and conviction
He was held in solitary confinement for nine weeks while awaiting trial. He was permitted to communicate with his family or relatives who still lived in Germany. A letter he wrote to his uncle, in Stuttgart, was held back by censors.
Helmut Hirsch | Arrest and imprisonment
The Jewish community tried unsuccessfully to ransom him. After a heavily publicized trial during which no proof of his guilt were produced, he was sentenced to death. When his jailers demanded that he convert to Christianity, he refused. He was taken to the gallows on 4 February 1738, and given a final chance to convert to Christianity, which he refused to do.
Jud Süß | Joseph Süß Oppenheimer
From 1996 to 2002 he was successively Assistant Professor at the Institute for the History of Science at the University of Göttingen, visiting scholar at MIT, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg. From 2003 to 2005 he worked with a research grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft at the University of Bern and 2005/2006 at the University of Stuttgart in the Department of History of Science and Technology.
Klaus Hentschel | Life and work
Mayer, Mueller and Pagel each received 15 years, Schlosser for 12 years, and Schroetter for 10. Lucy Boehmler was sentenced to five years. Because their spying was undertaken before the U.S. entered World War II, Ludwig, Borchardt, and Froehlich escaped the death penalty and were sentenced to 20 years. Kurt Frederick Ludwig was sent to Alcatraz Island to serve out his sentence. He was released in 1953 and deported shortly afterwards.
Kurt Frederick Ludwig | Trial and conviction
His sentence was reviewed by the "Peck Panel" and reduced to 12 years in 1951. He was released in February 1953 and lived with his wife in the Garmisch region. He died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen on 25 May 1968.
Georg von Küchler | Trial and conviction
His early scientific peers included Oskar Heinroth, Werner Quenstedt and Heinrich Kuntzen and at university he was influenced by Werner Ulrich and Konrad Herter. During the war years he escaped conscription using the fact that he suffered a lung infection that he got during the compulsory Arbeitsdienst.
Günter Tembrock | Introduction
After the war, William Keppler was sentenced to ten years in prison following the Ministries Trial at Nuremberg in 1949. He was released in February 1951. Friederich Flick was also sentenced to seven years after the Flick trial, and released early in 1950. Oswald Pohl and Otto Ohlendorf were hanged for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials.
Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft | Post-war sentencing of group members
In September 1950 he was arrested by people working for the Ministry for State Security ("Stasi"). Four years of "pre-trial detention" ensued, most of which he spent in an underground cell at the Stasi Hohenschönhausen detention centre. In 1953 he found himself arbitrarily linked by the Stasi with the "group of conspirators" connected with Georg Dertinger who was arrested at the start of that year, and in June 1954 the Supreme Court of East Germany sentenced Brandt, during a secret trial, to ten years of imprisonment for working against the state (""staatsfeindlicher Arbeit""). The ten-year sentence was later reduced, formally, to eight years, though as matters turned out he remained in prison, apart from a few days in 1958 till 1964.
Helmut Brandt (CDU politician in East Germany) | Arrest and imprisonment
On 13 December 1945, Eisele was tried in the Dachau main trial for his participation in three executions for which he had issued the death certificates. He was sentenced to death. After commutation of the sentence to a life sentence on 11 April 1947, he was in the Buchenwald main trial, tried again and received together with twenty co-defendants the death penalty. However, the basic conviction against Eisele proved dubious and uncertain, so that four of the eight military judges submitted an application that the judgment be converted by the reviewing body to a ten-year sentence, which was granted. During his detention in prison for war criminals Landsberg, he wrote an extensive defense titled "Audiatur et altera pars" in which he denied the allegations and represented himself as a convinced Christian, who had always been a physician only for the sake of others.
Hans Eisele (physician) | Trials and punishment
He was arrested for speaking out against the government, but was held for only one month. Elisabeth married a fellow communist, Gustav Kittowski, with whom she had a child they named Klaus. Elisabeth and Kittowski were arrested in 1933, and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, but were freed at Christmas. Gerhard and his wife Karin were arrested in 1934, and spent the next two years in prison. Gerhard, Karin, Elisabeth and Kittowski established a car rental agency in Berlin, which they used to smuggle Jews and opponents of the government out of Germany. After Emil was arrested in 1933, Kristel fled to Zurich, where she studied education and psychology at the University of Zurich.
Klaus Fuchs | Refugee in Britain
On 26 July, Zech-Nenntwich returned to Germany and hid at his villa in Remagen. He later turned himself in to the Ministry of Justice of Lower Saxony on 7 August 1964, as he was afraid of being captured by Israeli agents. He was put on trial again for bribing a guard during his escape and was given an additional ten months to his prison sentence.
Hans Walter Zech-Nenntwich | Prison escape
On arrival at Berlin Schönefeld Airport in the GDR, Fuchs was met by Grete (Margarete) Keilson, a friend from his years as a student communist. They were married on 9 September 1959. In the GDR, Fuchs continued his scientific career and achieved considerable prominence as a leader of research. He became a member of the SED central committee in 1967, and in 1972 was elected to the Academy of Sciences where from 1974 to 1978 he was the head of the research area of physics, nuclear and materials science; he was then appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, where he served until he retired in 1979.
Klaus Fuchs | Career in East Germany
At this stage Fuchs had become highly paranoid. On 1 October 1997 near his residence in Gralla, he followed two women in a car whom he believed were observing him. When police attempted to question him on what they believed was a routine case of stalking, he produced another IED which he had kept in his car, and detonated it in his hands in front of the policemen. His suicide attempt failed, but he lost both hands, and also injured a nearby police officer. Fuchs was arrested without giving further resistance and, after a trial which many in Austria felt had fallen short of making all attempts to uncover deep details, was sentenced to life in prison on 10 March 1999.
Franz Fuchs | Arrest, trial and death
Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs (May 19, 1915, Munich – February 24, 1997) was a mathematician specializing in complex analysis. His main area of research was Nevanlinna theory. Fuchs received his Ph.D. in 1941 from the University of Cambridge, under the direction of Albert Ingham. He joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1950 and spent the rest of his career there.
Wolfgang Heinrich Johannes Fuchs | Introduction
Passersby detected Fuchs, reported him to the police and he was arrested again on October 24, 1944. The trial took place at the court of "Division Oo. 177". The defendant stated that he wanted to avoid a return to the "Strafbattalion" at any cost. But he also claimed to have had the intention to join elsewhere as a "free soldier". The court interpreted this to mean that he intended to wait out the war in Vienna. On December 29, 1944 he was sentenced to death. ″According to the court's opinion, the defendant is not to be seen any longer as a useful member of the German "Volk" and therefore it would be completely inappropriate to drag him along in times when countless fighters of best German blood have to give up their lives.″ Two months later, on February 20, 1945 Fuchs was indicted again, this time because of Wehrkraftzersetzung (undermining military morale).
Kurt Fuchs | Life
He did not think that Fuchs would make much of a teacher, so he arranged a research post for Fuchs, at the University of Edinburgh working under Max Born, who was himself a German refugee. Fuchs published papers with Born on "The Statistical Mechanics of Condensing Systems" and "On Fluctuations in Electromagnetic radiation" in the "Proceedings of the Royal Society". He also received a Doctorate in Science degree from Edinburgh. Fuchs proudly mailed copies back to his father in Germany. In Germany, Emil had been dismissed from his academic post, and, disillusioned with the Lutheran Church's support of the NSDAP, had become a Quaker in 1933.
Klaus Fuchs | Refugee in Britain
On 6 December 1956 Walter Janka was arrested on a charge of Counter-revolutionary conspiracy and held in the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Remand Prison. By March 1957 he had become one of six men arrested and held in respect of the alleged conspiracy. Janka remained in the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen prison for more than half a year before being charged in the Supreme Court, on 26 July 1957, with "being directly behind, and participating in, a counter-revolutionary group" (known as the Harich Group), He was sentenced to a further five years in prison, with "enhanced solitary confinement" (""verschärfter Einzelhaft""). The trial took place under conditions of tight security.
Walter Janka | Trial and imprisonment
The documents of the witness hearing provided the answer of Münch to the precise questions of the prosecutor during the main hearing of 1947: Münch was questioned about the medical experiments he had effected in Block 10. The questioning was stopped, when he demanded an expert colleague as interrogator. Professor Jan Sehn had prepared the Kraków Trial of 1947 as examining magistrate. He ordered Münch with the medical treatment of another inmate. He also sent the whole stack of files of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS in Raisko into his cell for "arranging". Then the files were kept by the Kraków journalist Mieczysław Kieta, who later on engaged himself with the most efforts for the exculpation of Münch.
Hans Münch | Study: Examination of the previous trials
Flesch appealed to the Supreme Court of Norway on procedural grounds and that the sentence was too harsh; however on 12 February 1948 his appeal was rejected. The sentence was carried out at midnight at Kristiansten festning on 28 February 1948. Right before the order was given to fire, Flesch shouted loudly "Heil Hitler".
Gerhard Flesch | Trial and execution
Fuchs was from Graz, where he was a bartender. He was drafted at the age of nineteen. In 1943 he was put of trial four times, twice because of unauthorized absence, and sentenced to six years in military prison. However, instead of putting him in prison, the Nazis sent him to Strafbattalion No. 17 to fight the Russians. During a brief stay at a military hospital, Fuchs successfully fled from the Nazi military authorities. He claimed to have lost his Soldbuch and was thereafter transferred to France, later on to troops in St. Pölten. On August 20, 1944 he reached Vienna and went AWOL again.
Kurt Fuchs | Life
He was sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital. His habitual abuse of alcohol was considered a mitigating factor, as it diminished his mental capacity.
Fritz Honka | Discovery and trial
During his studies at the University, he was an assistant to Dr. August Karolus, television pioneer, in the laboratory of the Physical Institute of the University from May 1929 to Feb. 1938. From March 1938 until May 1945, he conducted independent research in the same laboratory as physicist in the fields of television, high frequency and amplification technology. Aside from television, his major field of work was the origination of extremely constant oscillation through tuning forks and oscillating crystals. During World War II, he was twice buried in the rubble of bomb attacks on the Institute of Physics at the University of Leipzig.
Erhard Kietz | Life
The court sentenced him to fifteen years imprisonment: seven were to be spent in solitary confinement.
Georg Ulrich Handke | Nazi years
The trial went fast and most of the information regarding the case was not released by Pakistan and Germany to the international press. After serving his jail term, Finke has been monitored closely by intelligence agencies and was reported to have moved back to Pakistan with his family where he became a foreign professor of particle physics at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Peter Finke | Arrest and sentence to jail
In contrast, numerous witnesses of his crimes were former concentration camp prisoners, and sometimes even former SS members. But after another penalty reduction, Eisele, on 26 February 1952, was released from prison.
Hans Eisele (physician) | Trials and punishment
His execution was postponed so many times, he was able to survive until the Brandenburg-Görden Prison was liberated by the Red Army. After the war, he became head of administration in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin, but in 1948 he was dismissed from this position due to political pressure from the American authorities in West Berlin. He continued his scientific work in the institute until he got barred from his laboratory in January 1950.
Robert Havemann | Life and career
He claimed the putsch had been his sole responsibility, inspiring the title "Führer" or 'leader'. The lay judges were fanatically pro-Nazi and had to be dissuaded by the presiding Judge, , from acquitting Hitler. Hitler and Hess were both sentenced to five years in "" ('fortress confinement') for treason. "Festungshaft" was the mildest of the three types of jail sentence available in German law at the time; it excluded forced labour, provided reasonably comfortable cells, and allowed the prisoner to receive visitors almost daily for many hours. This was the customary sentence for those whom the judge believed to have had honourable but misguided motives, and it did not carry the stigma of a sentence of "Gefängnis" or "Zuchthaus".
Beer Hall Putsch | Trial and prison
After four years in the Buchenwald internment camp he faced a mass trial in the near Dresden. At the his turn lasted 30–40 minutes, before he was sentenced, along with another 3,400 internees processed in the space of a few weeks. He received a further twelve-year prison sentence. However, he died 1952 because of an outbreak of dysentery and flu at the Waldheim penitentiary.
Karl Wilhelm Fricke | Karl Oskar Fricke
A succession of interrogation sessions over the next fifteen months ensued at the "Investigation Jail" at Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. For most of that time Karl Wilhelm Fricke was held in solitary confinement and without access to any natural light. His interrogators were keen that he should name his illegal contacts in the German Democratic Republic, but they failed, according to Fricke, for the simple reason that there were none. After nineteen weeks his interrogators knew nothing of significance beyond what they had been told to know before their victim had even been kidnapped. "The guilty man [had] under the cover name "Student" undertaken extensive crimes against the German Democratic Republic." Having gone to the trouble of abducting and interrogating him, however, there was little logic in releasing Fricke, and in July 1956 he came before the Supreme Court in order to be condemned in a secret trial to fifteen years in prison for "Agitating for wars and boycotts".
Karl Wilhelm Fricke | Interrogation, verdict and sentence
Heinz Baumkötter (February 7, 1912 in Burgsteinfurt, Province of Westphalia – April 21, 2001 in Münster) was an SS-Hauptsturmführer and concentration camp doctor in Mauthausen, Natzweiler-Struthof and Sachsenhausen, who conducted medical experiments on concentration camp inmates. Baumkötter was tried in the Sachsenhausen trials by a Soviet military tribunal in 1947 in a trial held in the former city hall in Berlin-Pankow. Among his co-defendants were the former commandant of Sachsenhausen Anton Kaindl, the record keeper Gustav Sorge and the "Blockfuhrer" of the punishment block Kurt Eccarius. At the trial Baumkötter was asked what his duties were at the trial: Sentenced to life imprisonment at Vorkuta Gulag coal mines.
Heinz Baumkötter | Introduction
So he had to "admit" absurd charges such as having caused the death of Maxim Gorky by deliberately choosing "wrong methods of treatment" etc. Even in prison, he remained a scientist: In his cell he requested many books and monographs in order to continue research. Many of those were in foreign languages. He was sentenced to 25 years in jail and finally extrajudicially executed in 1941.
Dmitry Pletnyov (doctor) | Introduction
There were more than 12 trials before the People's Court. Of those, 15 were sentenced to death and 13 were executed. Two died while being interrogated. Havemann survived because his execution kept being postponed, due to intervention from the biochemists he had earlier worked with. His execution was postponed often enough that he was eventually freed by the Red Army. Georg Groscurth, Richter and Rentsch were executed at Brandenburg-Görden Prison on May 8, 1944. Other group members were indicted before other courts. In his farewell letter to his wife, written just before his execution, Georg Groscurth wrote, "Dear, good Anneliese, now it is time.
Anneliese Groscurth | Arrest and punishment
From 1963 to 1964, he was one of the members of the 2nd SS Cavalry put on trial for mass killings of 5,200 Jews at the Pinsk Marshes. He was found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison. However, he escaped from Braunschweig Prison on 23 April after being let out by Dietrich Zeemann, a prison guard who had met Zech-Nenntwich when both of them were at a Nazi labor service school in 1936, and fled to Egypt with Margit Steinheuer, his fiancée. While in Egypt he was interviewed by a Stern reporter. The West German government attempted to extradite him from Egypt, but President Gamal Abdel Nasser refused.
Hans Walter Zech-Nenntwich | Prison escape
At the Ministries Trial, one of the last of the twelve Nuremberg trials held between 6 January 1948 and 13 April 1949, he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
Emil Puhl | Nuremberg Trials
"I was isolated in a cell for three months and interrogated for 52 days before being tried in February 1995. The trial lasted only one day.I was warned that if I continued to defend my ideas, I would be executed. If not, I would be pardoned. A lawyer? Out of the question. The trial was conducted under the law of the mountain".
Osman Öcalan | Introduction
His research work was halted for the duration of his imprisonment. He was later set free in 1945 after it came to light that he was an Austrian. During his confinement, he went back through the observations and notes that he had assembled on the beliefs and customs of Nimar's Balahis, and later in 1950 in Vienna, published a book titled "The Children of Hari: A Study of the Nimar Balahis in the Central Provinces of India". After his release in 1945, he began studying the Gonds and Baigas, and resumed studies among the Korkus. Around this time, he also developed interest in the Bhumias of Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh in whose villages he oftentimes stayed for long durations of time.
Stephen Fuchs | Initial research
Having completed his studies, he was almost immediately appointed lecturer at the Institute of History of Art. Work on his doctoral thesis was interrupted by his arrest on 22 October 1950. Transported immediately to Warsaw in connection with the staged "British Embassy" Show trial and after lengthy interrogations, he was sentenced to ten years in prison in February 1952 for allegedly helping British and Vatican spies, as well as for extending his underground activities beyond the official date for disclosure, which, in any case, would probably have led to an earlier arrest. He spent five years and four months in prison in difficult conditions – firstly on remand in the cellars of the Ministry of Public Security in Koszykowa Street, and later in the infamous Mokotów Prison, both in Warsaw, and finally – after sentencing – in the prisons of Rawicz and Wronki.
Andrzej Ciechanowiecki | Imprisonment
Werner Krauss (7 June 1900 - 28 August 1976) was a German university professor (Romance studies). During the 1940s he became a political activist. In 1943 he was found guilty of preparing to commit high treason and condemned to death. Following the intervention of influential fellow-intellectuals the sentence was commuted to a five-year prison term in 1944.
Werner Krauss (academic) | Introduction
Owing to the lack of evidence it had appeared that the defendants were going to be acquitted, until two of the judges were summarily removed from the trial just before the final hearing. Even the Chief Justice was in favour of an acquittal. KESK lodged an appeal against the Criminal Court decision."
Education and Science Workers' Union (Turkey) | Imprisonment
Over the following days they were joined by Kurt Diebner, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck and Werner Heisenberg. All were physicists except Hahn and Harteck, who were chemists, and all had worked on the German nuclear weapons program except von Laue, although he was well aware of it. They were relocated to the Château de Facqueval in Modave, Belgium, where Hahn used the time to work on his memoirs and then, on 3 July, were flown to England. They arrived at Farm Hall, Godmanchester, near Cambridge, on 3 July. Unbeknown to them, their every conversation, indoors and out, was recorded from hidden microphones.
Otto Hahn | Incarceration
Heinz Felfe, Hans Clemens and Erwin Tiebel were all arrested in West Germany on 6 November 1961. Two years later their trial took place at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe from 8 - 19 July 1963, before a panel of five judges chaired by . It was determined that the trio had transferred 300 rolls of micro-film containing pictures of 15,000 secret documents created by Felfe and Clemens in the course of their work for the Federal Intelligence Service as well as reels of recording tape and information conveyed by radio message. Tiebel's contribution, as far as the court concluded, was restricted to his courier work.
Erwin Tiebel | Arrest
He was detained initially at Hay in New South Wales, then at the Tatura centre in Victoria in May 1941. Once his mathematical abilities had been recognised there, he was released on a guarantor program and was transferred to the Physics Department of the University of Tasmania in Hobart. There he had to assist the overloaded teaching staff involved in wartime military research in optics. In 1949, he received his doctorate from University of Tasmania. In 1956, he was awarded a D.Sc. from Imperial College London. From 1963 he was professor and head of the Department of Theoretical Physics in the Faculty of Science at the Australian National University in Canberra until his retirement in 1984–1985.
Hans Adolf Buchdahl | Biography
Erich Fuchs (9 April 1902 – 25 July 1980) was an SS functionary who worked for the Action T4 euthanasia program, and for the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. Fuchs was charged with war crimes at the Bełżec Trial in 1963-64, for which he was acquitted. As more evidence came to light, Fuchs was rearrested and tried at the Sobibor Trial in Hagen. He was charged with participation in the Holocaust and on 20 December 1966, found guilty of being an accessory to the mass murder of at least 79,000 Jews. Fuchs was sentenced to four years imprisonment.
Erich Fuchs | Introduction
Wachsmann was born in Munich. He graduated from the London School of Economics with a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree, from the University of Cambridge with a taught Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree, and from the University of London with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree. His doctoral thesis, which he completed in 2001, was titled "Reform and Repression: Prisons and Penal Policy in Germany, 1918–1939". In October 1998, Wachsmann began his academic career as a research fellow at Downing College, Cambridge. He was then a lecturer at the University of Sheffield. In 2005, he joined the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology of Birkbeck, University of London.
Nikolaus Wachsmann | Academic career
He was indicted at the Nuremberg IG Farben trial, convicted and sentenced to 6 years including time already served. The reasons for the judgment contain the statement 'Die Ausbeutung der Arbeit von KZ-Insassen ist ein Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit.' (the exploitation of concentration camp inmates is a crime against humanity). He served his sentence in Landsberg Prison and was released in 1951.
Heinrich Bütefisch | Indictment and trial
Also arrested as an enemy alien at the start of the war, Fuchs was interned on the Isle of Man and then in Canada; he was allowed to return to Britain and was released in 1941. Kuczynski and Fuchs got to know one another, and the economist persuaded the physicist to work for Soviet Intelligence. Kuczynski introduced Fuchs to his sister, who at the time was working for the Soviets under the code name "Sonya", and Sonya became Fuchs's commanding officer within the Soviet intelligence hierarchy. Over the next few years, Fuchs and Sonya met regularly in Oxfordshire, where she had moved in order to be closer to her (and Jürgen's) parents (also exiled from Nazi Germany).
Jürgen Kuczynski | English exile
A former inmate later recalled that the prison guards were outraged, but the prisoners reacted with deep satisfaction to the knowledge that conditions in the East German prisons had been described from personal experience to a western readership. On finishing school, he studied political Science and philosophy at Munich and Mainz, gaining his doctorate in 1967 with a dissertation on political theory. He tried to obtain a job with the "inner leadership" of the West German army, but his application was rejected in case he might constitute a security risk. On 1 April 1968 he took a job as a research assistant with the "Association for German Reunification", and in 1969 he joined the in Bonn.
Hermann Flade | Life after release from prison
Holzhey, without orders, had put up a red cross sign near the command post. The "Landgericht" (court) in Traunstein had initially sentenced Tolsdorff to three and a half years. The Federal Court of Justice of Germany overturned the decision in 1959 and ordered a retrial. On 24 June 1960, Tolsdorff was declared not guilty and cleared of all charges.
Theodor Tolsdorff | Criminal charges, trials, conviction, and acquittal
In August 1944, Fuchs joined the Theoretical Physics Division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, working under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of implosion, necessary for the development of the plutonium bomb. After the war, he returned to the UK and worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell as head of the Theoretical Physics Division.
Klaus Fuchs | Introduction
On June 9, 1943, the report on the completed Habilitation was given to the Reich Minister. On July 1, 2 and 3, 1943, he held a public trial lecture on the topic "Der Nutzen der mathematischen Logik für die Mathematik" () as a prerequisite for a civil service position as a lecturer. On August 18, 1943, he was appointed lecturer with the authorisation to teach "Mathematical Logic and Fundamental Research", all the while still being employed in Berlin as a "scientific assistant worker" at Pers Z S. Karl Schröter remained at the University of Münster from 31 December 1943 until his contract was up on 31 April 1945, when he was taken prisoner by the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC).
Karl Schröter | Personal life
I prepared a decision to refuse the general's [defense] evidence materials. I wrote it under the dictation of Wajsblech. I didn't decide as to whom, and how, I should interrogate"." Fieldorf was accused by prosecutor Helena Wolińska-Brus of being a "fascist-Hitlerite criminal" and having ordered an execution of Soviet partisans while serving in the AK. After a kangaroo court trial, he was sentenced to death on 16 April 1952 by the presiding judge Maria Gurowska. An appeal to a higher court failed, and the family's plea for a pardon was denied by then the communist leader Bolesław Bierut who refused to grant clemency.
Emil August Fieldorf | Arrests and execution
Hermann Flade remained in prison till 1960, being held in solitary confinement till 18 May 1954. He was held successively in the prisons at , Torgau and : it was in Torgau that he contracted Tuberculosis. His parents had fled to the west immediately following his trial and conviction. Flade turned down an offer from the Stasi that he might be released if he could persuade his parents to return to the German Democratic Republic. After his solitary confinement was relaxed he made contact with a fellow prisoner who was a Mathematics professor, with whom Flade began to work on his own mathematical skills.
Hermann Flade | Prison
He was not a single case in which a death sentence was passed. During the interrogation the prosecution put forward as evidence Roses letter to Joachim Mrugowsky of 2 December 1943. Rose then compared himself to a lawyer, who was opponent of the death penalty and insets in the art and to the Government for their elimination: "If he does not succeed, it will remain as still in the profession and in its surroundings there, and he can even be may be forced to utter such a death sentence even though he basically is an opponent of this institution."
Gerhard Rose | Defendant in the Doctors Trial
He was implicated in the Nazi human experimentation program, with the exception of the aviation experiments, which were conducted on concentration camp prisoners. Mrugowsky was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death in August 1947. He was executed on 2 June 1948.
Joachim Mrugowsky | Trial and conviction
Johannes Wilhelm Heinrich Juilfs, also known by the alias Mathias Jules, (15 December 1911 – 1995) was a German theoretical and experimental physicist. He was a member of the "Sturmabteilung" (SA) and then, in 1933, of the "Schutzstaffel" (SS). Prior to World War II, he was one of three SS staff physicists who investigated the physicist Werner Heisenberg during the Heisenberg Affair, instigated, in part, by the ideological "deutsche Physik" (German physics) movement. During the war, he worked as a theoretical physics assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. During the denazification process after World War II, he was banned from working as a civil servant in academia.
Johannes Juilfs | Introduction
In the analysis he was concluded to suffer from schizophrenia and avoided criminal charges. He was first locked in a high-security mental institution for therapy but he was transferred to a low-security psychiatric clinic in July 2010.
Viacheslav Datsik | Imprisonment
Of the other defendants differed Rose by his intellectual nature and his extensive medical experience. Based on his international experience he drew in his testimony between 18 and 25 April 1947 numerous comparisons between the tests in the German concentration camps and experiments that foreign researchers had carried out on humans. He had assumed that the experiments in the Buchenwald concentration camp "should be carried out to criminals sentenced to death." This was contradicted by the charged as a witness in Nuremberg former inmate Eugen Kogon (1903-1987): After one or two trials it became impossible to find volunteers in Buchenwald.
Gerhard Rose | Defendant in the Doctors Trial
Girzick was detained after the war. From the end of 1946, he had to answer to the People's Court in Vienna. He was finally sentenced on 3 September 1948 to 15 years in prison because he was involved in the deportation of Viennese Jews to Theresienstadt concentration camp and extermination camps. On 18 December 1953, he was pardoned, since his wife and two children were living in poverty. He then lived in Seewalchen am Attersee. Nothing is known about his life after this.
Ernst Girzick | Post-war
He was sentenced to life imprisonment on 3 March 1951 for killing children; many aged one to two, during the unloading of the transports notably, by grabbing them by their feet and smashing their heads against the walls of boxcars. Hirtreiter was released from prison in 1977 due to illness. He died 6 months later in a home for the elderly in Frankfurt.
Josef Hirtreiter | Trial and conviction
His imprisonment triggered international protests, including a letter by 650 American mathematicians addressed to the Soviet embassy. Henri Cartan brought the case to the attention of the participants to the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians, which was held in Vancouver. Amnesty International sponsored an International Day for Plyushch in April 1975, and Andrei Sakharov also pleaded on his behalf.
Leonid Plyushch | Trial and imprisonment
While reading a newspaper advertisement, taxi driver Tarek Fahd discovers an invitation to participate in an experiment, in which 4,000 German marks are offered to the participants of a simulation of a prison situation. The experiment is led by Professor Klaus Thon and his assistant, Dr. Jutta Grimm. He decides to join in. Tarek participates as a journalist while wearing a pair of glasses with a built-in mini-camera. After a car accident he suffers shortly before the experiment, Tarek meets a woman called Dora. She spends the night with him and Tarek keeps thinking of her, shown in flashbacks. The 20 volunteers are pronounced guards and prisoners, 12 prisoners and 8 guards, and are being observed by a team of scientists.
Das Experiment | Plot
Heinrich Plaza assisted in the executions using lethal injections. Plaza was never captured. In 1954, he was sentenced to death "in absentia" in France, but continued to live and practise as a doctor in Altötting (Bavaria). He died in 1968. Rohde was sentenced to death and was hanged on 11 October 1946 at Hameln (Germany).
Trial of Werner Rohde and Eight Others | Defendants' arguments and charges
but because I am thankful and moved by this proof of God's presence." Moltke was sentenced to death on 11 January 1945 and hanged twelve days later at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. In a letter written while in custody, he revealed his motivation for resistance to his two sons: "Since National Socialism came to power, I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for a change. In that, my conscience drove me – and in the end, that is a man's duty."
Helmuth James von Moltke | Arrest, trial and execution
Walter Robert Fuchs (March 18, 1937 in Princeton – 21 July, 1976 in Munich) was an American-German science communicator and science popularizer.
Walter Robert Fuchs | Introduction
He got both decorations for fighting against the Germans. Two weeks later the death penalty was annulled and his sentence was commuted to 10 years of imprisonment. In September 1945 he escaped from the prison in Wronki by taking advantage of the fact that he was working outside of prison grounds.
Franciszek Jerzy Jaskulski | Imprisonment
At the end of the war, in May 1945, Dylewski moved to Munich to evade justice and to conceal his real identity. Months later, he moved to Hamburg, and worked there as a laborer. In 1948, he continued his unfinished course in Humboldt University of Berlin, in the German capital under a false identity. After he graduated in 1952, he taught in a technical school in Düsseldorf, but after seven years, in 1959, he was arrested and later revealed his true identity as a former SS officer. He was released the same year for lack of evidence. In 1960–61, he was arrested and incarcerated for nearly four months, and was released again.
Klaus Dylewski | Auschwitz Trials
In 1991 he was appointed assistant professor at the Institute for the History of Science of the University of Göttingen. In 1995 he obtained his habilitation in Hamburg with the thesis, entitled "Zum Zusammenspiel von Instrument, Experiment und Theorie. Rotverschiebung im Sonnenspektrum und verwandte spektrale Verschiebungseffekte von 1880 bis 1960." (About the interaction of instruments, experiment and theory. The shift in the solar spectrum, and related spectral shift effects from 1880 to 1960). In the year 1995/1996 Klaus Hentschel was Fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology of Bern Dibner, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Klaus Hentschel | Life and work
However, it sentenced him to ten years imprisonment for the other charges. The court also reversed the acquittal of Ernst Röchling and sentenced him to seven years imprisonment. All the property of the convicted men was confiscated and they lost their civil rights.
Hermann Röchling | Post-World War II (1945–55)
Otto Bickenbach was arrested on the 17th of March 1947 and summarily deported to France to face trial. In the following interrogation, Bickenbach and his associate Eugen Haagen denied responsibility for the experiments and stated they were solely following the orders of Heinrich Himmler. Even so, it became clear that Bickenbach and his associates had free rein when it came to the methodology behind the experiments, and their parts in the crimes were found satisfactory enough to take them to trial. In January 1954, Bickenbach was sentenced to a life sentence of forced labour but was pardoned following a retrial in 1955, being found repentant and ideologically sound by a military court in Metz.
Otto Bickenbach | After the war
One instance giving rise to this was a statement regarding Dorschel's naivety: he had been asked to supply photographs of Hythe and Poole to his spymasters and had instead sent picture postcards. Fairbairn noted that "If this is how foreign espionage in matters as important as nuclear submarines is conducted, we have little to fear from it."
Peter Dorschel | Arrest and trial
The sentence was carried out, by hanging, on 24 February 1953 at 3:00 pm in the infamous Mokotów Prison in Warsaw.
Emil August Fieldorf | Arrests and execution
Erhard Heinz, Konrad Jörgens, and Jürgen Moser were among of his doctoral students. His sister Camilla Juliana Anna was the wife of mathematician Bartel Leendert van der Waerden. Rellich died in Göttingen.
Franz Rellich | Biography
In 1947 he was placed on trial by the Americans, partly for his role in the Katzenberger trial, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released in December 1956, aged 59, and died in Cologne in 1967.
Katzenberger Trial | Aftermath
Hanns Lilje writes in his autobiography that as Moltke stood before the "Volksgerichtshof", he had "possessed, in the face of clear recognition of the fact that the death penalty had already been decided, the moral courage for an attack on Freisler and the whole institution". In two letters written to his wife in January 1945 while imprisoned at Tegel, Moltke noted with considerable pride that he was to be executed for his ideas, not his actions, a point that had been underlined a number of times by Freisler. In one letter, Moltke noted "Thus it is documented, that not plans, not preparations, but the spirit as such shall be persecuted.
Helmuth James von Moltke | Arrest, trial and execution
The German authorities took him to the border of Holland and instructed him not to return to Germany, punishable by imprisonment. But, according to his nephew George Vaux, “By this time, he had developed another principle; namely that no one could tell him that he could not place his foot anywhere on the creator’s earth that he wished. Hence, early one morning before daylight, disguised as a day laborer and pushing a bicycle, but carrying still the two violins, he walked past a drunken sentry on the Belgium frontier and got back to Berlin. He was there for about two weeks before he was again discovered by the police, and rearrested.” This last time, he was not treated with the same restraint and was jailed as a political prisoner for the duration of the war.
Edward Holton James | Biography
He was sentenced to 18 years in prison, with a 2-year concurrent sentence and $2,000 fine for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He began his sentence in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, along with fellow German spy Hermann Lang. In 1945, Duquesne was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, due to his failing physical and mental health. In 1954, he was released owing to ill health, having served 14 years. His last known lecture was in 1954 at the Adventurers' Club of New York, titled "My Life – in and out of Prison".
Fritz Joubert Duquesne | Arrest and Conviction
Franz Rauscher received a ten month jail sentence for "sedition and high treason" (""Aufruhr und Hochverrat"") which he served in the . He also lost his job with the railways. It is not clear from sources whether Rauscher spent time in pre-trial detention between his arrest in October 1934 and the trial in March 1936. Any time already served would normally have been off-set against the sentence he received at the trial. In any event, those sentenced to jail terms at the in March 1936 were the beneficiaries of the political prisoners' amnesty in July 1936, meaning that Rauscher was released in or before July 1936.
Franz Rauscher | Years of political polarisation
When his protector, Karl Alexander, suddenly died on March 12, 1737, Oppenheimer was arrested and accused of various crimes, including fraud, embezzlement, treason, lecherous relations with various women, and accepting bribes. While some Jews tried to help him during the trial, others gave incriminatory testimonies against him. Most of the accusations could be refuted, and the charge of lechery was dropped in order to protect reputable women. After the heavily publicized trial, Oppenheimer was sentenced to death, without naming any specific crime. When his jailers asked that he convert to Christianity, he refused. Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was led to the gallows on February 4, 1738, and given a final chance to convert to Christianity, which he refused to do.
Joseph Süß Oppenheimer | Arrest, trial and execution
The former German Governor-General of Poland was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity on 1 October 1946, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. The death sentence was carried out at Nuremberg Prison on 16 October by US Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods. Journalist Joseph Kingsbury-Smith wrote of the execution:
Hans Frank | Capture and trial