Gertrud Oppenheimer

Gertrud Oppenheimer (* 1893 ; † 1948 probably in California ) was a German chemist.

Life and activity

From 1922 to 1926 Oppenheimer worked as a chemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry in Berlin . From 1926 to 1933 she was director of the cell laboratory of the Berlin electricity works.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Oppenheimer emigrated. She initially worked as a researcher in Paris and at the University of Graz . In 1936 she went to Great Britain, where she worked at the Analytical and Synthetic Laboratory Ltd in London. Most recently, she worked as an assistant to Arie Jan Haagen-Smit at the California Institute for Technology (Caltech).

After her emigration, Oppenheimer 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 - which she suspected was still in Great Britain - put her on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who would be killed in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Islands by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupation troops following special commandos of the SS with special priority.

literature

• Annette Vogt: Scientists in Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes A – Z , 2008, p. 137.
• Displaced German Scholars. A Guide to Academics in Peril in Nazi Germany During the 1930s , The Borgo Press, San Bernardino, California 1993 (reprint of the List of Displaced German Scholars , London 1936), p. 23.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Oppenheimer on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .