15 Facts About Fritz Houtermans

Friedrich Georg "Fritz" Houtermans was a Dutch-Austrian-German atomic and nuclear physicist and Communist born in Zoppot near Danzig, West Prussia to a Dutch father, who was a wealthy banker.

Fritz Houtermans was brought up in Vienna, where he was educated, and moved to Gottingen when he was 18 to study.

Fritz Houtermans completed his Habilitation under Gustav Hertz at Technische Universitat Berlin, in 1932.

From 1932 to 1933, Fritz Houtermans taught at Technische Universitat Berlin and was an assistant to Hertz.

Fritz Houtermans was a Communist; he had been a member of the German Communist Party since the 1920s.

In 1935 Fritz Houtermans emigrated to the Soviet Union, as the result of a proposal by Alexander Weissberg, who had emigrated to there in 1931.

Fritz Houtermans was tortured and confessed to being a Trotskyist plotter and German spy, out of fear from threats against Charlotte.

In 1944, Fritz Houtermans took a position as a nuclear physicist at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt.

At the Forschunsinstitut Manfred von Ardenne, Fritz Houtermans showed that transuranic isotopes, such as neptunium and plutonium, could be used as fissionable fuels in substitution for uranium.

Werner Heisenberg and Carl Weizsacker came to the rescue of Fritz Houtermans and arranged an interview for him with Walter Gerlach, the plenipotentiary for German nuclear research under the Reich Research Council.

From 1952, Fritz Houtermans took a position as ordinarius professor of physics at the University of Bern.

In February 1944, Fritz Houtermans married Ilse Bartz, a chemical engineer; they worked together during the war and published a paper.

In 1955, Fritz Houtermans married Lore Muller, sister of his stepbrother, Hans.

Fritz Houtermans brought her four-year-old daughter to the marriage, and she and Houtermans had a son, Hendrik, born in 1956.

Fritz Houtermans authored a report which was published in, an internal publication of the German Uranverein.