In 1913, Hertz was appointed Research Assistant at the Physics Institute of the University of Berlin. The following year, Hertz, along withJames Franck, performedan experiment on inelasticelectron collisions in gases.[6] In 1925, Hertz and Franck were jointly awarded theNobel Prize in Physics for their experiment.[7]
From 1914, Hertz served in the military duringWorld War I. In 1915, he joinedFritz Haber's unit that would introducepoisonous chlorine gas as a weapon.[8] He was seriously wounded that year. In 1917, he returned to the University of Berlin as aPrivatdozent. In 1920, he became a research physicist at thePhilips Incandescent Lamp Factory inEindhoven.[3] In 1925, he was appointed Director of the Physics Institute at theUniversity of Halle. In 1928, he became Director of the Physics Institute at Technische Hochschule Berlin (THB – nowTechnische Universität Berlin). While there, he developed anisotope separation technique viagaseous diffusion.
Since Hertz was an officer during World War I, he was temporarily protected from Nazi policies and theLaw for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, but eventually the policies and laws became more stringent, and at the end of 1934 he was forced to resign from his position at THB, as he was classified as a "second degree part-Jew" (his grandfather,Gustav Ferdinand Hertz, had been Jewish as a child, before his whole family had converted to Lutheranism in 1834).[9] The same year, he became Director of Research Laboratory II atSiemens. While there, he continued his work onatomic physics andultrasound, but he eventually discontinued his work on isotope separation. He stayed at Siemens until 1945 when he departed to the Soviet Union.[5][3][10]
Hertz was concerned for his safety and, like his fellow Nobel laureateJames Franck, was looking to move to the US or any other place outside Germany. So he made a pact with three colleagues:Manfred von Ardenne, director of his private laboratoryForschungslaboratorium für Elektronenphysik,Peter Adolf Thiessen, ordinarius professor at the University of Berlin and Director of theKaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry inBerlin-Dahlem, andMax Volmer, ordinarius professor and Director of the Physical Chemistry Institute at THB.[11] The pact was a pledge that whoever first made contact with the Soviets would speak for the rest. The objectives of their pact were threefold: (1) prevent plunder of their institutes, (2) continue their work with minimal interruption, and (3) protect themselves from prosecution for any political acts of the past.[12] Before the end of World War II, Thiessen, a member of theNazi Party, had Communist contacts.[13]
On 27 April 1945, Thiessen arrived at von Ardenne's institute in an armored vehicle with a major of the Soviet Army, who was also a leading Soviet chemist.[14] All four of the pact members were taken to the Soviet Union. Hertz was made head of Institute G, in Agudseri (Agudzery), about 10 km southeast ofSukhumi and a suburb of Gul'rips (Gulrip'shi).[14][15] Topics assigned to Gustav Hertz's Institute G included:(1) Separation of isotopes by diffusion in a flow of inert gases, for which Gustav Hertz was the leader,(2) Development of a condensation pump, for whichJustus Mühlenpfordt was the leader,(3) Design and build a mass spectrometer for determining the isotopic composition of uranium, for which Werner Schütze was the leader,(4) Development of frameless (ceramic) diffusion partitions for filters, for which Reinhold Reichmann was the leader, and(5) Development of a theory of stability and control of a diffusion cascade, for whichHeinz Barwich was the leader;[14][16]
Barwich had been deputy to Hertz at Siemens.[17] Other members of Institute G wereWerner Hartmann and Karl-Franz Zühlke.[18] Manfred von Ardenne was made head of Institute A. Goals of von Ardenne's Institute A included: (1) Electromagnetic separation of isotopes, for which von Ardenne was the leader, (2) Techniques for manufacturing porous barriers for isotope separation, for which Peter Adolf Thiessen was the leader, and (3) Molecular techniques for separation of uranium isotopes, for whichMax Steenbeck was the leader.
In his first meeting withLavrentij Beria, von Ardenne was asked to participate in building the bomb, but von Ardenne quickly realized that participation would prohibit his repatriation to Germany, so he suggested isotope enrichment as an objective, which was agreed to.
By the end of the 1940s, nearly 300 Germans were working at the institute, and they were not the total work force. Institute A was used as the basis for the Sukhumi Physical-Technical Institute in Sinop, a suburb ofSukhumi.[14][15] Volmer went to the Scientific Research Institute No. 9 (NII-9)[19] in Moscow; he was given a design bureau to work on the production ofheavy water. In Institute A, Thiessen became leader for developing techniques for manufacturing porous barriers for isotope separation.[14]
In 1949, six German scientists, including Hertz, Thiessen, and Barwich were called in for consultation atSverdlovsk-44, which was responsible for uranium enrichment. The plant, smaller than the American Oak Ridgegaseous diffusion plant, was getting only a little over half of the expected 90% or higher enrichment.[20]
From 1954 until his retirement in 1961, Hertz was Director of the Physics Institute of the Karl Marx University inLeipzig (now theUniversity of Leipzig). From 1955 to 1967, he was Chairman of the Physical Society of East Germany.
Hertz died on 30 October 1975 inBerlin at the age of 88.[7]
Hertz was a nephew of physicistHeinrich Hertz and a cousin of biologistMathilde Hertz. In 1919, he married Ellen Dihlmann, who died in 1941. They had two sons,Carl and Johannes; both became physicists. He remarried in 1943 to Charlotte Jollasse.[3]
Franck, J.; Hertz, G. (1914). "Über Zusammenstöße zwischen Elektronen und Molekülen des Quecksilberdampfes und die Ionisierungsspannung desselben".Verh. Dtsch. Phys. Ges.16:457–467.
Gustav HertzÜber das ultrarote Adsorptionsspektrum der Kohlensäure in seiner Abhängigkeit von Druck und Partialdruck. (Dissertation). (Vieweg Braunschweig, 1911)
Gustav Hertz (editor)Lehrbuch der Kernphysik I-III (Teubner, 1961–1966)
Gustav Hertz (editor)Grundlagen und Arbeitsmethoden der Kernphysik (Akademie Verlag, 1957)
Gustav HertzGustav Hertz in der Entwicklung der modernen Physik (Akademie Verlag, 1967)
^Gustav HertzÜber das ultrarote Adsorptionsspektrum der Kohlensäure in seiner Abhängigkeit von Druck und Partialdruck. (Dissertation). (Vieweg Braunschweig, 1911)
^Franck, J.; Hertz, G. (1914). "Über Zusammenstöße zwischen Elektronen und Molekülen des Quecksilberdampfes und die Ionisierungsspannung desselben".Verh. Dtsch. Phys. Ges.16:457–467.
^abHentschel, 1996, Appendix F; see entry for Hertz.
^Van der Kloot, W. (2004). "April 1918: Five Future Nobel prize-winners inaugurate weapons of mass destruction and the academic-industrial-military complex".Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond.58 (2):149–160.doi:10.1098/rsnr.2004.0053.S2CID145243958.
Albrecht, Ulrich, Andreas Heinemann-Grüder, and Arend WellmannDie Spezialisten: Deutsche Naturwissenschaftler und Techniker in der Sowjetunion nach 1945 (Dietz, 1992, 2001)ISBN3-320-01788-8
Barwich, Heinz and Elfi BarwichDas rote Atom (Fischer-TB.-Vlg., 1984)
Beneke, KlausDie Kolloidwissenschaftler Peter Adolf Thiessen, Gerhart Jander, Robert Havemann, Hans Witzmann und ihre Zeit (Knof, 2000)
Heinemann-Grüder, AndreasKeinerlei Untergang: German Armaments Engineers during the Second World War and in the Service of the Victorious Powers in Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker (editors)Science, Technology and National Socialism 30–50 (Cambridge, 2002 paperback edition)ISBN0-521-52860-7
Hentschel, Klaus (editor) and Ann M. Hentschel (editorial assistant and translator)Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Birkhäuser, 1996)ISBN0-8176-5312-0
Holloway, DavidStalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (Yale, 1994)ISBN0-300-06056-4
Kruglov, ArkadiiThe History of the Soviet Atomic Industry (Taylor and Francis, 2002)
Maddrell, Paul "Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany 1945–1961" (Oxford, 2006)ISBN0-19-926750-2
Mehra, Jagdish, andHelmut RechenbergThe Historical Development of Quantum Theory. Volume 1 Part 1 The Quantum Theory of Planck, Einstein, Bohr and Sommerfeld 1900–1925: Its Foundation and the Rise of Its Difficulties. (Springer, 2001)ISBN0-387-95174-1
Naimark, Norman M.The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Belknap, 1995)
Oleynikov, Pavel V. 2000.German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project.The Nonproliferation Review Volume 7, Number 2, 1 – 30 The author has been a group leader at the Institute of Technical Physics of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center inSnezhinsk (Chelyabinsk-70).
SIPT – Sukhumi Institute of Physics and Technology, on the website are published the photographs of the German nuclear physicists who had been working for the Soviet nuclear program
