Hans Frebold

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Hans Frebold

Hans Frebold (born July 31, 1899 in Hanover , † June 2, 1983 in Ottawa ) was a German geologist , university professor and polar researcher .

Life

Frebold took part in the First World War as a volunteer , passed the “war maturity test ” in 1918 and, through the mediation of his brother, the geologist Georg Frebold , came to a military geological unit in Stuttgart . After the war he studied at the Technical University of Hanover and the Universities of Marburg and Gottingen the subject Geology . In 1919 he founded the Hanoverian Wingolf in Hanover and one year later he became active in the Göttingen Wingolf . In 1924 he completed his studies with Hans Stille with a doctorate in Göttingen . This was followed by publications in Mesozoic paleontology , biostratigraphy and paleogeography before he became an assistant at the Geological Institute of the University of Königsberg in 1925 . He married Elisabeth Oster († 1971) there in the same year, with whom he subsequently had five children. After a short stay in Königsberg, Frebold became a private lecturer in 1926 and an associate professor at the University of Greifswald in 1931 . In Greifswald, Frebold turned to the Jurassic paleontologist.

In 1930 he led an expedition to Spitsbergen on behalf of Adolf Hoel , the director of Norges Svalbard- og Ishavs-undersøkelser . In 1931 he took part in Lauge Koch's three-year Danish expedition to East Greenland . He assigned a number of geographical names, especially in Wollaston Forland and Hochstetter Forland .

After the National Socialists came to power , Frebold took leave of absence from the University of Greifswald in October 1933 while continuing to pay his salary and moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he worked on determining paleontological collections. In 1935 there was a break with Lauge Koch when Frebold sided with Koch's opponents in a legal plagiarism dispute brought against Koch by nine Danish colleagues. After the outcome of the court hearing, which was unfavorable for Koch, he complained to the German Reich Minister for Science, Education and National Education about Frebold's interference, which led to the fact that in 1936 his salary from Greifswald was canceled and he was asked to return to Germany. Frebold did not comply with this request. With the support of the Carlsberg and the Rask Ørsted Foundation , he was able to continue his scientific work until 1940. After the occupation of Denmark, the Danish institutions could no longer support him because his critical relationship with the Nazi regime was known. On the advice of his Danish friends, he took a position at the newly founded German Scientific Institute in Copenhagen, where he headed the Arctic department from May to 1945. In 1943 he was drafted into the Navy as a geologist with the rank of corvette captain .

As a staff officer, Frebold deliberately campaigned for Danes persecuted by the Germans and obtained the release of some of them imprisoned by the Gestapo . He was able to save a Danish policeman from the concentration camp. During the last months of the war he acted as an unofficial mediator between the Danish underground and the German authorities to prevent the SS from destroying port facilities and public buildings in Copenhagen as they retreated. In March 1945 Frebold was the target of an assassination attempt by Danish underground fighters who did not know about his role. Frebold, who suspected the Gestapo behind the assassination, hid with his family with Danish friends until the end of the war.

After the war, Frebold tried unsuccessfully for a professorship in West Germany. He did not accept offers from Greifswald, Rostock and Jena for political reasons. From 1947 to 1949 he worked for a Danish-American prospecting company that looked for oil in Denmark . In 1949 he received an invitation from the National Geological Service of Canada (GSC) in Ottawa , which he accepted. There he became head of the Department of Paleontology and Stratigraphy in 1951 and a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 1954 . After a short time as visiting professor at the University of Oklahoma in 1964 , Frebold worked as a "Senior Research Paleontologist" until his retirement in 1968 and finally from 1965 as a "Principal Research Scientist" at the GSC.

In his second marriage, Frebold was married to Britta Pedersen (1912-2004), née Bohn, the divorced wife of his former colleague at the German Scientific Institute Alwin Pedersen (1899-1974), a polar researcher and author.

Awards and honors

  • Medal of Merit with Swords of the King of Denmark for his scientific work
  • The Frebold Bjerg mountain in East Greenland and the Freboldryggen ridge in Spitzbergen are named after Hans Frebold
  • Honorary Professor at the Universities of Greifswald (1945) and Kiel (1949)

Fonts

  • Phylogeny and biostratigraphy of the Amaltheen in the middle Lias of northwest Germany . Lower Saxony Geological Association, annual report, vol. 15, 1922, pp. 1–26 (dissertation).
  • Facts and interpretations on the geology of the Arctic . In: Medd. fra Dansk Geol. Forening . Vol. 8, 1934, pp. 301-326 ( PDF ; 1.4 MB).
  • The fortress profile on Spitzbergen IV. The brachiopod and lamellibranch fauna of the Upper Carboniferous and Lower Permian . In: Skrifter om Svalbard og Ishavet . Vol. 69, 1939, pp. 1-94. ( PDF ; 2.6 MB).
  • The fortress profile on Spitzbergen V. Stratigraphy and invertebrate fauna of the older Eotrias together with a description of other occurrences in Spitzbergen. In: Skrifter om Svalbard og Ishavet . Vol. 77, 1939, pp. 1-58.
  • Arctic geology . Volume I, Bornträger, Berlin 1945.
  • Geology of the Barents Shelf . In: Treatises of the German Academy of Sciences, Berlin, class for mathematics and general natural sciences . Vol. 5, 1950, pp. 1-151.
  • The Jurassic Fernie Group in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and Foothills . Geological Survey of Canada, Memoir 287, 1957 ( PDF ; 16.5 MB).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ List of members of the Göttingen Wingolf. Year 2007. p. 40.
  2. ^ Anthony K. Higgins: Exploration history and place names of northern East Greenland. (= Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin Vol. 21, 2010). Copenhagen 2010, ISBN 978-87-7871-292-9 (English)
  3. ↑ Britta Frebold , Fédération québécoise des sociétés de généalogie, accessed on August 26, 2014
  4. ↑ Arne Øland, Erik W. Born: Alwin Pedersen - grønland biologists of "forsvandt" . In: Tidsskriftet Grønland No. 1/2011, pp. 92-105
  5. ↑ Frebold Bjerg . In: Anthony K. Higgins: Exploration history and place names of northern East Greenland. (= Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin Vol. 21, 2010). Copenhagen 2010, ISBN 978-87-7871-292-9 (English), accessed August 26, 2014
  6. ↑ Freboldryggen . In: The Place Names of Svalbard (first edition 1942). Norsk Polarinstitutt , Oslo 2001, ISBN 82-90307-82-9 (English, Norwegian).
personal data
SURNAME Frebold, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German geologist, university professor and polar researcher
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover
DATE OF DEATH June 2nd 1983
Place of death Ottawa