Hans König (physicist, 1910)

Hans König (born March 3, 1910 in Ansbach , † April 15, 2002 in Wedel ) was a German physicist and university professor .

Life

Hans König was born in Ansbach in 1910 as the son of the insurance inspector Kuno König. He attended secondary school in his hometown and graduated from high school on Easter 1929. From the summer semester of 1929 he studied physics at the TH Danzig . In December 1933 he completed his studies with a degree in engineering. Since October 1, 1933, he was an assistant to Eberhard Buchwald at the TH Danzig. He held this assistant position until April 1, 1940. In October 1937 he received his doctorate from the physicists Buchwald, Fromm and Kosel in Danzig . The title of his work was Magnetic Birefringence of Organic Liquids and Their Vapors. In April 1940 he also received his habilitation in Danzig.

From May 1941 he moved to the aerospace research institute Munich eV as head of the physics department. The physics department of the LFM was located at the University of Göttingen . König had a room in Robert Wichard Pohl's institute . He had no teaching duties and was able to devote himself entirely to research with his staff. He mainly dealt with crystal examinations using electron beams, later also with electron microscopy, in which he became a recognized specialist in preparation technology. On May 31, 1945, König was released from the LFM and the institute was dissolved.

Hans König had already joined the NSDAP and the NSDStB on June 1, 1929 and had membership number 163461. In the denazification process , he untruthfully stated that he had only joined the NSDAP in 1936. On the basis of this information he was classified as exonerated (category V) in March 1949. König, who was known in Göttingen as a supporter of National Socialism and who came to the institute in air force uniform until the end of the war , may have benefited from the fact that his patron Robert Pohl was on the denazification committee.

With the support of the Physics Faculty of the University of Göttingen, Hans König received a position as a scientific assistant at the III. Physics Institute. He eventually became senior assistant and lecturer. On November 1, 1951, he succeeded Hans Rau at the TH Darmstadt . He was appointed full professor for experimental physics in Darmstadt. A few months later, his colleague and friend from Göttingen, Karl Heinz Hellwege, was appointed to the TH Darmstadt.

Due to irregularities at König’s institute, he was given a temporary leave of absence in mid-1959. The proceedings initiated by the Darmstadt public prosecutor's office due to forgery of documents and fraud were initially inconsequential because personal enrichment could not be proven. An official penal procedure initiated by the TH Darmstadt in February 1961 finally led to retirement on February 28, 1962. In the course of calculating the pension payments , it turned out that König had given false information in the context of denazification in 1949 in Göttingen and in the 1951 personnel sheet to the TH Darmstadt. This prompted the responsible ministry under Ernst Schütte to have the pension payments ceased and the title of professor to be revoked. König appealed against this, but was ultimately unsuccessful at the Administrative Court in Kassel in March 1967.

As early as 1962, Hans König accepted a position at the Physics and Technology School in Lübeck-Schlutup . This institute, which was founded by Helmut Harms , who König knew well from the 1940s, after the Second World War , moved to Wedel in 1963 and was the nucleus of the Wedel University of Applied Sciences, which was founded in 1969 . König worked there until the mid-1970s.

Hans König was married to Elfried Dröge in 1935. The marriage had five children. In his second marriage he was born in 1956 with Mechthild König. Bone lied. From this marriage two daughters were born.

Publications

• Magnetic birefringence of organic liquids and their vapors. Gdansk 1937.

literature

• Gerhard Rammer: Göttingen physicist after 1945. About the effect of collegial networks. In: Göttinger Jahrbuch. 2003, pp. 83-104.
• Isabel Schmidt: The TH Darmstadt in the post-war period (1945–1960). Darmstadt 2014.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See also The Nazification and Denazification of Physics at the University of Göttingen (Dissertation, 2004) ediss.uni-goettingen.de