Eugen Glueckauf

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Eugen Glueckauf (before 1947 Glückauf) (born April 9, 1906 in Eisenach ; † September 12, 1981 in Chilton , Oxfordshire ) was a German-British nuclear physicist.

Life and activity

Glückauf was the son of the Berlin raincoat manufacturer Bruno Glückauf and his wife Elsa, née Pretzfelder. After attending school, Glückauf studied physics at the University of Freiburg and the University of Berlin . In 1932 he received his doctorate from the Technical University in Berlin-Charlottenburg to Dr. Ing. He then worked for Alfred Reis .

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Glückauf was removed from civil service because of his - according to National Socialist definition - Jewish descent. He went to London, where he found a job at Imperial College London in South Kensington as a research assistant to Fritz Paneth with the help of a scholarship from the Academic Assistance Council in 1934 . In the following years he explored the stratosphere on behalf of the meteorological office of the Aviation Ministry. He also dealt with the study of helium to determine the age of meteorites.

In 1939, Glückauf moved to the University of Durham as a research assistant , where he stayed until 1947. This activity was interrupted in 1940 due to the outbreak of the Second World War by a five-month internment on the Isle of Man as a member of a hostile power, since he was still formally a German citizen. Thanks to Paneth's intercession, however, he was soon released to pursue his research. At the same time, he was a Royal Society scholarship (MacKinnon Research Student) from 1942 to 1944, then a Research Fellow in Durham. Shortly after the end of the war, it was naturalized in 1946.

After his emigration, Glückauf was classified by the National Socialist police as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who would be killed by one of the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Subsequent SS special commands were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

From 1947 to 1971, Glückauf conducted research as a department head for physical chemistry and radiation chemistry at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) in Harwell , where he worked on the British program for the use of atomic energy. Also in 1947 he changed his last name to Glueckauf. In 1952 he was appointed Deputy Chief Scientific Officer. After his retirement in 1971, he was a consultant at this institution until 1981. During his work at AERE he was mainly concerned with the problems of the storage and disposal of radioactive waste.

In the course of his career, Glückauf / Glueckauf published more than one hundred articles in specialist journals. In addition to nuclear research, he devoted himself to research in the field of the analysis of atmospheric gases, the theory of ion exchange and chromatography, and research into the distillation of sea water.

In 1951 Glückauf received a DSc degree from the University of London and in 1969 became a Fellow of the Royal Society .

Glückauf's estate is kept in the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. It mainly includes copies of his research publications as well as personal documents (certificates, certificates for awarded prizes, etc.) as well as a file related to his reparation proceedings.

family

Glückauf had been married to Irma Elise Auguste Trepper since 1934. They had a daughter Barbara (* 1938).

Fonts

Monographs:

  • About the course of the reaction between nitrogen oxide and hydrogen on contact with platinum , 1932. (Dissertation)
  • as editor: Atomic Energy Waste. Its Nature, Use and Disposal , Butterworth 1961.

Essays: A compilation of his more than 100 essays and sketches from Everett (see literature).

  • "About a new method for studying gas reactions with the exclusion of wall effects", in: Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie , Vol. 39, 1933, pp. 607-608. (in cooperation with Alfred Reis)

literature

  • DH Everett: "Eugen Glueckauf", in: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society , Vol. 30 (1984), pp. 192-224.
  • William D. Rustein / Michael Jolles / Hilary L. Rubinstein: The Palgraves Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History , 2011, p. 328.
  • 75 Years of Chromatography. A Historical Dialogue , 2011, p. 100
  • Numerous documents by Eugen Glueckauf in the "Eugen Glueckauf (1906-1981) Collection"

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Everett, Douglas Hugh: Eugen Glueckauf. April 9, 1906 - September 12, 1981, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (30) 1984, pp. 192-126; doi = 10.1098 / rsbm.1984.0007
  2. ^ Entry on Glückauf on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).
  3. ↑ [1]
personal data
SURNAME Glueckauf, Eugene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Good luck, Eugene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British nuclear physicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Eisenach
DATE OF DEATH September 12, 1981
Place of death Chilton , Oxfordshire