Helmut Gröttrup | |
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 Gröttrup,c. 1977 | |
| Born | Helmut Gröttrup (1916-02-12)February 12, 1916 Cologne,Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire |
| Died | July 4, 1981(1981-07-04) (aged 65) Munich, West Germany |
| Citizenship | Germany |
| Alma mater | Technische Hochschule Berlin |
| Occupation | Engineer |
| Spouse(s) | Irmgard Rohe (married 1940-1964) Christine Storzum (married 1964-1981) |
| Children | Peter Gröttrup Ursula Gröttrup Johannes Gröttrup Bernhard Gröttrup Elisabeth Gröttrup |
Helmut Gröttrup (12 February 1916 – 4 July 1981) was a German engineer, rocket scientist and inventor of thesmart card. DuringWorld War II, he worked in the GermanV-2 rocket program underWernher von Braun. From 1946 to 1950 he headed a group of 170 German scientists who were forced to work for theSoviet rocketry program underSergei Korolev. After returning toWest Germany in December 1953, he developeddata processing systems, contributed to early commercial applications ofcomputer science and coined the German term "Informatik". In 1967 Gröttrup invented the smart card as a "forgery-proof key" for secure identification andaccess control (ID card) or storage of a secure key, also including inductive coupling fornear-field communication (NFC). From 1970 he headed a start-up division ofGiesecke+Devrient for the development ofbanknote processing systems and machine-readable security features.
Helmut Gröttrup's father Johann Gröttrup (1881–1940) was a mechanical engineer. He worked full-time at the Bund der technischen Angestellten und Beamten (Butab), a federation for technical staff and officials of the social democratic trade union in Berlin. His mother Thérèse Gröttrup (1894–1981), born Elsen, was active in the peace movement. Johann Gröttrup lost his job in 1933 when theNazi Party came into power.
From 1935 to 1939 Helmut Gröttrup studied applied physics at theTechnische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (nowTechnische Universität Berlin) and made histhesis with professorHans Geiger, the co-inventor of theGeiger counter. He also worked forManfred von Ardenne's research laboratoryForschungslaboratorium für Elektronenphysik.
From December 1939, Helmut Gröttrup worked in the GermanV-2 rocket program at thePeenemünde Army Research Center withWalter Dornberger andWernher von Braun. In December 1940, he was made department head underErnst Steinhoff for developing remote guidance and control systems.
Since October 1943 Gröttrup had been underSD surveillance. A report stated that he, his wife Irmgard, Wernher von Braun, and his colleagueKlaus Riedel were said to have expressed regret at an engineer's house one evening that they were not working on a spaceship and that they felt the war was not going well; this was considered a "defeatist" attitude. A young female dentist who was an SS spy reported their comments.[1]: 38–40 Combined withHimmler's false charges that they were communist sympathizers and had attempted to sabotage the V-2 program, theGestapo detained them on March 21, 1944,[2] and took them to a Gestapo cell inStettin (now Szczecin, Poland), where they were held for two weeks without knowing the charges against them. Walter Dornberger and majorHans Georg Klamroth, representative of counterintelligence at Peenemünde, obtained their conditional release so that the V-2 program could continue.
AfterWorld War II, Gröttrup refused to join Wernher von Braun who contracted US missile development together with 120 high-level specialists from Peenemünde. This was because family members had to stay in Germany. Instead, in September 1945, Gröttrup decided to work for the reconstruction and manufacturing of the V-2 rockets as head of theBüro Gröttrup[3] inBleicherode inThuringia within theSoviet Occupation Zone. Although most of the rocket specialists were retained by the US in West Germany, he was able to attract outstanding scientists for work in Bleicherode, among themKurt Magnus, Werner Albring, Johannes Hoch, Waldemar Wolff to reconstruct the development documents of the V-2 rocket and improve the control system based ongyroscope for theinertial navigation system.[4] In March 1946, he was appointed German head ofInstitut Nordhausen[5] and, in May 1946, General Manager of theZentralwerke which occupied more than 5,000 employees for the manufacturing of the V-2 rockets and included suppliers of the earlierMittelwerk, V-2 test sites andInstitut Berlin for the reconstruction of theWasserfall surface-to-air missile.[6]: p. 92-101 Gröttrup worked under the supervision ofSergei Korolev andBoris Chertok who reported to the Soviet military government of Maj. Gen. Lev Gaidukov andDmitry Ustinov, the Minister of Armaments.[7]
During the night on 22 October 1946, a selected group of around 200 German scientists and engineers - plus equipment - from the Zentralwerke were unexpectedly and forcibly (at gunpoint) moved to the USSR as part ofOperation Osoaviakhim by 92 trains with more than 2,300 German specialists including other domains of German technology.[8] From 1946 until September 1950, Gröttrup headed the more than 170 German specialists working inPodlipki in the north east section of Moscow as part of Korolev'sNII-88 and in Branch 1 of NII-88 onGorodomlya Island in Lake Seliger. The German team was indirectly overseen by Sergei Korolev, the "chief designer" of theSoviet rocketry program. In September 1950, Gröttrup was discharged as head of the German team because he refused to continue work on other Soviet projects, and was replaced by Johannes Hoch and later Waldemar Wolff.[4]: pp. 220-223
In 1947-48, Gröttrup and his team helped Korolev with the R-1 project, a recreation of the V-2 missile using Russian manufacturing and materials.[9] AtKapustin Yar, he helped Korolev supervise thelaunching of 20 rebuilt V-2 rockets and analyzefailure causes. In October 1947 they succeeded for the first time. As a reality check on Korolev's missile proposals, officialDmitriy Ustinov asked Gröttrup and his small team to design several improved missile systems, including the R-10 (G-1), R-12 (G-2),[10] the R-14 (G-4),[11] and the R-15 (G-5) which was similar to theA9/A10 long range missile von Braun designed during the war.[12][13][14] None of these projects went beyond the design stage. However, the theoretical work of the German scientists proposed improved solutions due to lack of material, and new ideas significantly contributed to the later success ofSoviet space program. Some ideas were incorporated in the R-2 and R-5 missile systems.[15] Thelauncher forSputnik 1's orbital flight in October 1957 was based onR-7 Semyorka with a bundling (packeting) of a total of 20 engines with conical rocket bodies, as already proposed by the German scientists in 1949 in Gorodomlja. For political reasons, however, the contributions made by the German collective of rocket scientists to Soviet missile development have long been considered insignificant by the public in East and West.[16]
For secrecy reasons, German specialists were not allowed to work on important missile technologies after 1951, but they were kept in the USSR for a 1.5 year "cooling off" period so they could not give timely information toBritish Intelligence orAmerican Intelligence. The majority of the Gorodomlya group was released in June 1952.Fritz Karl Preikschat, who managed the high frequency lab under Gröttrup from 1946-1952 on Gorodomlya Island, and several other specialists made it toWest Germany, and were interrogated as "defectors" by theCIA andMI6 (as part of the operation "Dragon Return" on theSoviet rocketry program.[17]
Gröttrup and twenty other German scientists (among themKurt Magnus, Karl-Joachim Umpfenbach)[18] were kept until November 1953, based on their knowledge and Soviet concerns that they would move to West Germany.[19] Gröttrup and his family returned toEast Germany on 22 November 1953, among the last group from Gorodomlya Island, and, within two weeks, escaped toCologne inWest Germany with the support of British and American Intelligence. In the interrogations he reported the details of German studies and concepts of long-range missiles R-12 (G-2), the R-14 (G-4).[20] The MI6 rated him as "the best-informed" of the German returnees from Gorodomlya and that he provided "useful pointers regarding parallel Russian developments".[17]: p. 224-225 which Korolev eventually demonstrated with successfully launching theSputnik 1 satellite to orbit in November 1957.
Again, Helmut Gröttrup refused to work for the US missile program and, together with his family, was immediately put on the street.[21]
From 1954 to 1958, Gröttrup worked forStandard Elektrik Lorenz inPforzheim. He participated in developing the ER56, the first fully transistorizeddata processing system in Germany. With this, he installed one of the first commercial applications ofdata processing for managing thelogistics ofQuelle's mail-order business. In 1956, he and the German informaticianKarl Steinbuch coined the wordInformatik when they developed theInformatik-Anlage[22] for Quelle's mail-order management, one of the earliest commercial applications of data processing. In 1959, he joined the Produktograph company of Joseph Mayr, which was later taken over bySiemens & Halske, for production data acquisition and monitoring. In 1965, he formed a company calledDATEGE in the data processing industry. In February 1966, he filed thepatent application "Identification Switch" for releasing a tapping process at a petrol station.
In February 1967, Gröttrup introduced the idea of incorporating anintegrated circuit chip onto a plastic carrier and filed the patent DE1574074[23] inWest Germany for a tamper-proof identification switch based on asemiconductor device. The parallel application DE1574075[24] described contactless communication via inductive coupling which became the basis for near-field communication (NFC) andradio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.[25] TheGerman Patent and Trade Mark Office has acknowledged these patent applications as the invention of the smart card.[26] The primary use of the invention intended to provide identification by individual copy-protected keys for releasing the tapping process at unmanned gas stations orID Card applications. In September 1968, Gröttrup, together withJürgen Dethloff as an investor, filed further patents for this identification switch, first inAustria[27] and in 1969 as subsequent applications in West Germany (DE1945777),[28] the United States (US3678250[29] and US3678250[30]), Great Britain (GB1317915[31] and GB1318850[32]), and other countries.[33]
In 1970,Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) took over DATEGE and founded theGesellschaft für Automation und Organisation (GAO). Gröttrup was managing director in charge of developing machine-readable security features to preventcounterfeit money together with half- and fully automated banknote processing systems (such as ISS 300 and ISS/BPS 3000). The Banknote Processing division (since April 2018G+D Currency Technology) has become the world market leader forbanknote processing equipment since the mid-1990s and has developed single note inspection systems for banknote printing companies. In 1979, G&D presented the first smart card which later became the basic product ofG+D Mobile Security.[34] Gröttrup retired in 1980.
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In the subpage, Gröttrup is named as the head of Institut Nordhausen (1946)
Steinbuch coined this expression together with Helmut Gröttrup, an employee from Peenemünde.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)| International | |
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