Heinz Schmellenmeier

Heinz Schmellenmeier in April 1989

Heinz Paul Philipp Schmellenmeier (born January 6, 1909 in Berlin ; † August 31, 1994 in Berlin) was a German physicist and temporarily rector of the technical college "Carl Schorlemmer" Leuna-Merseburg .

Life

He came from a middle-class civil servant family with a left-wing tradition. In 1927 he graduated from high school and studied German, history and physics. In 1932 he was a student trainee at Robert Rompe in the Osram Group , where he took part in conferences and discussions. He made friends with Friedrich Georg Houtermans , who was senior assistant to Nobel Prize winner Gustav Hertz .

He received his doctorate in 1935 and was imprisoned for several months on suspicion of illegal activity.

Since April 1941 he has been running a private defense technology development laboratory Dr. Schmellenmeier in Berlin-Lankwitz , Leonorenstr. 47. He founded the company to avoid draft as a soldier. Further employees of the laboratory were Bernhard Mrowka , Richard Gans and Klaus Gottstein .

At the end of March 1943, Houtermans reported on the reprisals that Richard Gans had to suffer from the National Socialists , as he was of Jewish descent. Thereupon Gans was declared indispensable because of its alleged important role in armaments projects. As a result of a report on a betatron from 1941 by Donald William Kerst , the idea of ​​building a Rheotron electron accelerator arose with Houtermans and J. Hans D. Jensen . They were sold to the Wehrmacht as a weapon for shooting down aircraft, this was supposed to pre-ionize the engines and thus prevent the engine from igniting.

At the end of 1944 Schmellenmeier succeeded in relocating his laboratory to Oberoderwitz, near the Czech border. When the Soviet army approached there, he fled on March 28, 1945 to Burggrub in Upper Franconia, where the Americans took over the equipment in mid-April.

At the beginning of 1946 he was back in Berlin and worked at the Central Administration for Popular Education , where he wrote supplements for educational films , among other things.

In 1953, Heinz Schmellenmeier discovered thin diamond films as the product of acetylene gas discharges at the University of Education in Potsdam .

From 1958 to 1961, Heinz Schmellenmeier was rector of the Technical University of Chemistry in Leuna-Merseburg , succeeding Eberhard Leibnitz . His successor in office was Elmar Profft .

Following this rectorate period, Schmellenmeier was appointed technical director of the Berlin light bulb factory Narva , and he later worked at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin. In 1969 he retired. In the same year he was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver.

Publications (selection)

• Measurements of the gradient of the positive column of noble gas low pressure discharges. Positive characteristic. In: Journal of Physics. 122, 1944, p. 269, doi : 10.1007 / BF01342756 .
• Studies on the radiation of the resonance lines of the sodium discharge and the creation of an absolute unit of light. In: Journal of Physics. 93, 1935, p. 705, doi : 10.1007 / BF01337856 .
• The influence of an ionized gas atmosphere on solid surfaces: the mechanism of reactions at the cathode of glow discharges. 1953
• About philosophical questions in modern physics. In: German magazine for philosophy. Berlin (East). 3. 1955, pp. 378-383
• Humanism and science. 1961
• Richard Gans - University professor in Germany and Argentina.
• Science Development Notes. 1985
• Defeated demons. New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1972
• Light and lighting: on the history of lighting technology, especially the German light source industry, a model case for the nature of modern technology; posthumously in honor of Prof. Dr. phil. Marcello Pirani . Physical Society of the German Democratic Republic / Working Group on the History of Physics, Berlin 1982
• Electronic component technology. Verlag Technik, Berlin 1970
• The natural sciences in the overall social system: demonstrated using examples from physics. Urania-Verlag, Berlin 1970

literature

• Horst Kant:  Schmellenmeier, Heinz Paul Philipp . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Death rays as lifesavers , p. 34
2. ↑ Biography of Klaus Gottstein's Academic Burse Göttingen ( Memento of the original from November 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Christophe Donnet, Ali Erdemir: Tribology of diamond-like carbon films: fundamentals and applications, Springer, 2007, p. 4
4. ↑ André Anders: Cathodic Arcs: from fractal spots to energetic condensation, Springer, 2008, pp 394
5. ↑ Neues Deutschland , February 21, 1969, p. 3