Jörn Lange

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Jörn Lange (born November 8, 1903 in Salzwedel ; † January 21, 1946 in Vienna ) was a German chemist ( physical chemistry ) and professor at the University of Vienna . For a long time he was a National Socialist and when he wanted to destroy valuable equipment at the university shortly before the conquest of Vienna by Soviet troops so that it would not fall into the hands of the Soviet troops, he shot two colleagues who wanted to prevent him from doing so. He was therefore sentenced to death in Vienna in 1945 and died by suicide shortly before the execution.

Career

Lange was the son of a lawyer and studied chemistry at the Humboldt University in Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1928 ( studies on the thermodynamic behavior of strong electrolytes ). As a post-doctoral student he spent two years with Johannes Ludwig Ebert at the University of Würzburg on a scholarship from the Liebig Society and later from the German Research Foundation , where he researched the cryoscopy of highly diluted aqueous solutions. In the 1930s he was on a Rockefeller Fellowship at Columbia University and the Agricultural College in Copenhagen . Returning to Würzburg, he did voluntary military service (flak helper) and joined the NSDAP in 1933 . From 1934 to 1940 he was the first assistant in the physical chemistry department at the University of Jena , where he qualified as a professor in 1934 ( on the physical characterization of dissolved ions ). From July 1940 he was again with Ebert as a lecturer in the physical chemistry department of the 1st chemical laboratory at the University of Vienna . The laboratory has been headed by Ebert since 1940. In the spring of 1942 he became a scheduled associate professor and deputy to Ebert at the 1st Chemical Institute. From 1940 he set up an internship for advanced students in physical chemistry with a focus on optical methods and in 1942 published a textbook on physical chemistry.

Murder at the Chemical Institute in the last days of World War II

During the Second World War, the so-called deep cellar of the chemical institutes on Währingerstrasse (which was not used and served as a ventilation system) served as a hiding place for dissidents, Jews in hiding, deserters and similar persecuted people. The Tomsk resistance group was active here . One of the people hiding there was the writer Johannes Mario Simmel , who described Lange as a staunch National Socialist in his novel about this time, We call you hope .

Shortly before the conquest of Vienna by the Red Army, the Vice-Rector of the University of Vienna Viktor Christian gave the order, based on an encrypted signal on the radio, to destroy all military equipment at the University of Vienna (ARLZ order or right of the Danube order ), which he did a little later changed into being rendered unusable to prevent evacuation by the Russians. The director of the 2nd Chemical Institute Friedrich Wessely passed the order on to Lange, who set about carrying it out in his area of ​​responsibility at the 1st Chemical Institute, leaving the details to him. Ebert had previously gone to the West with a number of devices and assistants, so Lange remained as head. In particular, he wanted to destroy the very valuable electron microscope installed there at the time, manufactured by Siemens with 40,000 times magnification and important in virus research. There were only two such electron microscopes in Vienna (the other was at the Technical University).

The resistance group "Tomsk" noticed this and some of its members opposed Lange on April 5, 1945, when he wanted to proceed to destroy the electron microscope. The group was founded by the later biochemistry professor Otto Hoffmann-Ostenhof and the assistant at the 1st Chemical Institute Kurt Horeischy (born March 25, 1913), who was the head of the microchemical laboratory, and it included around 15 institute members who built radios , Persecuted people hid in the basement and printed leaflets Horeischy had been a member of the Red Students since the 1930s and was discharged from the army after the attack on Poland because of a lung disease. They were in contact with resistance group O5 . Horeischy, Lange's assistant Hans Vollmar (born June 8, 1915), who did not belong to the resistance group but was a National Socialist, but who could be won over to participate in this action, the deserted police officer Maximilian Slama and the chemical assistant Ingeborg Dreher tried to contact Lange to prevent destruction. Horeischy was nervous and threatened Lange with a pistol. When he was inattentive for a moment, Lange drew his own pistol and shot him without warning. According to a memo at the Vienna People's Court, after a lengthy exchange of words, Lange first invited to discuss the further procedure in his study and, when he arrived there, opened fire on the group. When the angry, unarmed Hans Vollmar, who was even friends with Lange, rushed at Lange, a shot was fired in the scuffle and Vollmar also died in the institute, where the body remained in place for five days. Horeischy died a little later in the hospital, like Vollmar, of internal bleeding. The other participants fled. Lange destroyed the electron microscope and was soon arrested by the police. Since he appealed to an orderly emergency, he was initially released and continued his work of destruction. He was later interrogated by the NKVD after the occupation by the Soviet Union . In August 1945 he was indicted by the public prosecutor's office (attempted and committed murder and damage to state property) and, after five days of trial, on September 15, 1945, the Vienna People's Court sentenced him to hang for murder. During the trial, Lange stated that he shot Horeischy in self-defense, but did not shoot Vollmar. He later received support from his wife and the prison chaplain, who even suspected a miscarriage of justice and was therefore released. The court, on the other hand, saw him as a stubborn fanatic and did not believe him. A pardon requested on January 31, 1946 was refused, but Lange had still applied for a retrial, dated January 21. The day before the sentence was carried out, he committed suicide with a vial of potassium cyanide.

In 1947 a memorial plaque for Horeischy and Vollmar was placed at the Chemical Institute (entrance at Währinger Straße 42). The inscription reads:

On April 5, 1945, the assistants Dr. Kurt Horeischy and Dr. Hans Vollmar trying to save valuable instruments from being destroyed by the National Socialists .

The Horeischygasse in Hietzing is named after Horeischy .

Fonts

  • Introduction to physical chemistry, Springer Verlag 1942

literature

  • Stephanie Carla de la Barra: The Crime Without Justification: The People's Court Trial against Dr. Jörn Lange and how the University of Vienna deals with the victims Dr. Kurt Horeischy and Dr. Hans Vollmar, Master's thesis, University of Vienna 2016
    • Published as: The crime without justification: Murder of university assistants: The criminal trial against Jörn Lange in September 1945 and the politics of remembrance of the University of Vienna, Mandelbaum Verlag 2018, ISBN 9783854768234
  • Mathias Luger: The development of the chemical institutes of the University of Vienna in the 20th century, diploma thesis University of Vienna, 2011, online
  • Wolfgang Reiter, Reinhard Schurawitzki: Continuity across breaks. Physics and chemistry at the University of Vienna after 1945 - a first approximation, in: Margarete Grandner, Gernot Heiß, Oliver Rathkolb: Future with contaminated sites. The University of Vienna 1945–1955, Innsbruck 2005, pp. 236–259
  • Personal: JÖRN LANGE. In: Physics Journal. 4, 1948, p. 72, doi : 10.1002 / phbl . 19480040207 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life and career data from Lange according to Mathias Luger, The Development of the Chemical Institutes of the University of Vienna in the 20th Century, Diploma thesis, University of Vienna 2011, pp. 79ff
  2. ↑ Luger, Diploma thesis University of Vienna 2011, p. 76, with photos of the deep cellar and excerpt from Simmel's novel
  3. ↑ a b c d On the events on April 5, 1945 , (pdf), University of Vienna, accessed on January 28, 2020
  4. ↑ Hoffmann-Ostenhof was not present because he was with his wife in the hospital, where she gave birth to a child. Resistance at the Chemical Institute Vienna , 2018 (pdf)
  5. ↑ Luger, diploma thesis 2011, p. 79
  6. ↑ a b LG Vienna Vg 1a Vr 720/45
  7. ↑ Luger, Diploma thesis 2011, p. 78. The newspaper clipping shown there.
  8. ↑ Personal: Jörn Lange, Physikalische Blätter, February 1948
  9. ↑ The trial of Dr. Jörn Lange (1945) , Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance, DöW
personal data
SURNAME Lange, Jörn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Salzwedel
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 1946
Place of death Vienna