Hans Otto Kneser

Hans Otto Kneser (born July 1, 1901 in Berlin ; † March 30, 1985 ) was a German physicist .

Hans Otto Kneser came from a respected family of scholars who produced a number of mathematicians , his father was Adolf Kneser . He attended a humanistic grammar school in Berlin and passed the Abitur there in 1919. He then studied physics in Breslau and Munich . In 1926 he received his doctorate with Jonathan Zenneck . Kneser moved to Marburg University as an assistant , where he completed his habilitation under Eduard Grüneisen in 1931 . In 1932 he was a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley .

In November 1933, Kneser signed the declaration of professors at German universities and colleges about Adolf Hitler . In 1933 he joined the SA , in 1937 in the NSDAP and in 1938 in the Nazi lecturers' association . In 1938 he became an associate professor in Marburg. In 1940 he was drafted briefly. From 1940 to 1945 he worked as an associate professor at the University of Berlin.

In November 1947 he was publicly attacked by the young physicist Ursula Maria Martius , who had to leave the university as a Jew in 1942, for his behavior during the Nazi era. The President of the German Physical Society , Max von Laue , stuck to him. He worked at the Physikalisch-Technische Anstalt , which moved from Berlin to Braunschweig , had teaching positions in Göttingen and at the TH Hannover and received an associate professor in 1950. Professorship at the University of Tübingen . In 1952 he was appointed full professor of experimental physics to succeed Erich Regener at the TH Stuttgart . In 1969 he retired.

Kneser was an expert on sound dispersion in gases and on acoustic and nuclear magnetic relaxation phenomena . He wrote a chapter on sound absorption and dispersion in gases in Vol. XI of the Handbuch der Physik , published in 1960 . After Christian Gerthsen and before Helmut Vogel, Kneser edited the physics textbook Gerthsen Physik, which is widely used in the German-speaking area .

literature

• Dieter Hoffmann , Mark Walker (Ed.): Physicists between autonomy and adaptation. The German Physical Society in the Third Reich , Weinheim, Wiley-VCH, 2007, ISBN 978-3-527-40585-5 .
• Anne Christine Nagel u. a. (Ed.): The Philipps University of Marburg under National Socialism. Documents on their history , Steiner, Stuttgart 2000.

Web links

• Curriculum vitae in: Physikalische Blätter, Vol. 17
• Günther Laukien: Hans Otto Kneser 80 years , in: Physikalische Blätter, Volume 37, Issue 8 (1981)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ uni-marburg.de: Excerpt from the three-volume "Catalogus professorum academiae Marburgensis" ( memento of the original from January 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 31, 2014. 
2. ↑ data according to Nagel (see literature)
3. ↑ Christian Gerthsen, Hans O. Kneser, Helmut Vogel: Physics: A textbook for use in addition to lectures . 16th edition. Springer, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-540-51196-2 .