Karl Krejci-Graf

Karl Krejci-Graf (born April 15, 1898 in Gmünd , Lower Austria ; † August 8, 1986 in Frankfurt am Main ) was an Austrian geoscientist , geologist and paleontologist .

Karl Krejci-Graf

life and work

Karl Krejci was born on April 15, 1898 as the son of Anton Krejci, city and railway doctor, and his wife Emilie, b. Graf was born in Gmünd, Lower Austria. He only adopted the double name Krejci-Graf when he made a name for himself with his publications and did not want to be confused; Krejci (Czech) is a very common name. After attending the elementary school in Gmünd he went to the humanistic grammar school of the Cistercian order in Budweis (today Ceské Budojovice / Czech Republic), which he had to leave in 1914 because of participation in the “Lot of Rome” movement. Then he attended grammar school in Krems until 1915. In May 1915, he volunteered as a war volunteer before he graduated from high school. He came to the kuk IR 49; in December 1918, when he was 20 years old, he was dismissed as a lieutenant in the reserve. In between he passed his school leaving examination in Budweis in 1916. He was deployed for two years on the Russian and Italian fronts, was seriously wounded and experienced the use of poison gas by the Italians when the Austrian troops withdrew. - These experiences of war, the dying of comrades right next to you, but also the shooting of opposing soldiers at the front, left behind an apparent indifference a deep disturbance in the personal sphere. He has received many awards, including the highest honor possible for his rank, the gold medal for bravery.

From April to May 1919 he was in a volunteer corps of the Leoben Academic Legion in Carinthia. In 1919 he began to study at the Montanistische Hochschule Leoben , from where Wilhelm Petrascheck recommended him to the University of Vienna because of his preferred interest in geology . There he received his versatile training from Franz Eduard Suess . He received a Finnish scholarship for the Swedish Academy in Åbo / Turku (Finland) from 1920-21, an aid from Finland for the Vienna students who suffered from severe food shortages in the post-war period. He made friends with his Swedish-speaking host family in Åbo - a relationship that would last a lifetime. He spoke many languages. 1921 Prospecting for sulphide ores in northern Sweden. After his stay in Finland he returned to the University of Vienna. At the end of 1922, in Berlin, he married the evangelical pastor's daughter, Hanna Hoppe, who was five years his junior and who was an important help to him for many years as a secretary in writing and drawing his publications. They had five children together. In 1923 he received his doctorate. phil. in Vienna (dissertation on northern German Miocene corals). He was later appointed a member of the German Geological Society in Berlin.

The couple went to Romania in 1923, where Krejci worked for the large Romanian oil company Steaua Romana in Cậmpina, near the Ploieşti oil fields, until January 1930 . Since 1927 he was a member of the Senckenberg Natural Research Society . He has published over 45 articles in their various magazine series. For decades he worked closely with the Senckenberg Museum , to which he also bequeathed many materials and beautiful showpieces.

From February 1930 to June 1933 Krejci was professor of palaeontology and mineral history at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong Canton / China, one of the three national universities. During this time he went on an expedition to Chinese East Tibet from May to December 1930. Krejci was also a member of the Geological Survey of Liang Kwang.

In 1933 he traveled back via Japan, Hawaii and North America. From June to December 1935 he was looking for ore in Kwantung (South China) for the Southwestern Council in Canton / China. In May 1936 he completed his habilitation in Berlin at the Technical University of Berlin, Faculty of Mining and Metallurgy, with the habilitation thesis Oil Geology as the basis of a methodical search for deposits . Once again, from June 1936 to April 1937, Krejci was looking for ore and coal for the central government in China (survey of deposits; mining consultant). He became a member of the National Resources Commission of the central government in Nanking / Nanjing and a member of the Geological Survey of Kwangtung & Kwangsi / Kongsi.

In the spring of 1937 he finally returned to Germany and worked April 1937 - August 1937 as chief geologist at the Prussian Mining and Hütten-AG (Preussag) in Hanover.

In August 1937 he succeeded Otto Stutzer as professor at the Freiberg Bergakademie in Saxony . and appointed director of the local fuel geological institute. In 1938 he was appointed full professor. At that time, he stipulated that he would retain his Austrian citizenship. He retained this when he was given German citizenship in 1953 on the occasion of his professorship in Frankfurt / Main. He brought his valuable collections to the institute in Freudenstein Castle (Saxony) and made them accessible to the public. He was a committed and capable teacher without any nationalist or racist reservations, who also attracted foreign students, including several Chinese. For him, theory and practice were inextricably linked in research and teaching. In 1938 he was commissioned to set up an institute for geochemistry in Berlin; the work ended with the beginning of the war. Krejci was a member of the Advisory Board of the Reich Petroleum Institute in Hanover (part of the Reich Office for Soil Research in Berlin).

As an employee of the Reich Office for Soil Research, whose president was SS-Obergruppenführer State Secretary Wilhelm Keppler , he was responsible for the petroleum work area (Geologists Archive Freiburg / Br. 20864) as part of the Keppler's four-year plan. From the spring of 1939 he was given leave of absence in Freiberg and worked in Romania for a German consortium, the Continental Oil AG. His representative at the Bergakademie Freiberg was Karl Alfons Jurasky . In April 1939, State Secretary Keppler gave him the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer as a "surprise and honor" (quote) after he had refused to join the NSDAP (declaration of 1946). In February 1940 he was delegated to the "service of the Reichsteile for soil research for the management of geological work for the German Reich in Romania". From May 1941 to 1944 he was a “consulting oil geologist” for the Continental Oil Corporation.

After the withdrawal of the German army, he wanted to hand over the oil fields in an orderly manner, was captured by the invading Russians in March 1944 and interned with Rudolf Richter in the Ghencea camp near Bucharest until January 1946 ( Erlend Martini ). As an Austrian he was released to Vienna by the Russians. The Americans arrested him there in March 1946 and kept him prisoner in the Glasenbach internment camp near Salzburg until July 1947 , although well-known scientists such as Rudolf Richter, professor and head of the Geological and Paleontological Institute in Frankfurt / Main as Vice-President of the International Union for Paleontology , as well as Alfred Bentz , Director of the Lower Saxony State Office for Soil Research and Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt , Geologisk Museum Oslo, testified that he was not a National Socialist and emphasized his "exemplary humanitarian sentiment" (Richter).

From July 1947 to December 1950 he was senior geologist and head of the scientific service of the Soviet Mineral Oil Administration in Vienna. He mainly worked in the northern Vienna Basin . Important geochemical studies of reservoir water originate from this time, which were carried out in collaboration with Friedrich Hecht . By combining dynamic, stratigraphic and regional geology, paleontology, mineralogy, geology and geochemistry, he was able to develop modern ideas about the origin of petroleum. His in-depth basic research has led to completely new insights into petroleum genesis, mother rock, migration and reservoir rock. These expanded into a general fuel geology.

In 1951 he went to Portugal on behalf of a Swedish company and worked there from April 1951 to July 1953 as chief geologist and technical vice director of the Companhia dos Petroleos de Portugal in Lisbon. In the years 1953 to 1955 he made several research trips to the Azores, Cape Verde and Madeira and published about their volcanism. In 1952 he became curator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Hydrobiology in Plön / Holstein.

In September 1953 he succeeded Rudolf Richter and became director of the Geological-Paleontological Institute at the University of Frankfurt / Main. He was a popular, dedicated teacher who was passionate about imparting precise, unbiased observation and a critical attitude towards all traditional theories to his students. He also supported them when they were critical of his own views. 1957/58 he was dean of the natural science faculty. In 1963 he retired at the age of 65, but had a room in “his institute” until his death, in which he continued to work every day.

Honors

• Carl Engler Medal of the German Society for Mineral Oil Science and Coal Chemistry "in recognition of his extraordinary services in the field of basic oil geological research" October 1, 1960
• Hans Stille Medal of the German Society for Geosciences 1964
• Honorary membership of the Austrian Society for Petroleum Sciences 1969
• Golden Dr. Diploma from the University of Vienna May 25, 1973
• Commemorative medal on the occasion of the “50 Years of Petroleum in Austria” anniversary of the Association of the Austrian Petroleum Industry and the Austrian Society for Petroleum Sciences June 1980.
• Awarded the Dr. of the Montanistic Sciences of the Montan University Leoben honorary December 1980
• Cretzschmar Medal of the Senckenberg Natural Research Society 1982.

A fossil discovered in southern Romania, a young tertiary land snail, Cepaea krejcii Wenz, and a 6095 m high mountain in northern Tibet, the Krejci-Graf-Peak, were named after him. In 1967 another fossil was named after him, the Anomoiodon krejcii. His hometown Gmünd posthumously named Prof. Krejci-Graf-Straße after him.

Publications

In total, Krejci-Graf wrote more than 200 scientific articles and books from the entire field of geology, tectonics, stratigraphy, sediment petrography and geochemistry, which made him internationally known:

• 1929: The Romanian oil deposits . In: Writings from the field of fuel geology . tape 1 .
• 1930: Geochemistry of petroleum deposits, explained using the Romanian deposits . In: Treatises on practical geology and mining economics . tape 20 .
• 1930: Basic questions of oil geology . In: Writings from the field of fuel geology . Issue 4. F. Enke, Stuttgart (Russian translation. Крейчи - Граф К. Основные вопросы нефтяной геологии Пер.с нем М. - Л. - Грозный - Новосибирск ОНТИ Главная редакция горно - топливной лит-ры 1934г..... 264 с., Рис. Твердый переплет. Обычный формат. Разворачивающиеся вклейки, рисунки, таблицы. Editor: NBW .jewitsch.
• 1935: The Salsen from Beciu-Berca (Romania) . In: Geological Character Pictures . Issue 40. Borntraeger, Berlin.
• 1936: The rocks of the Romanian oil regions in lithogenetic and oil geological lighting . In: Archive for deposit research . Issue 62.
• 1936: Petroleum: Natural History of a Raw Material . In: Understandable Science . tape 28 . J. Springer, Berlin (2nd edition 1956).
• 1956: Volcanological observations in the Azores . In: Frankfurter geographical booklets . Volume 30.
• 1961: Проблемы нефтяной геологии в освещении зарубежных ученых. 1. М., Гостоптехиздат, 1961г. 230 с., Илл. Твердый переплет. Обычный формат. Много иллюстраций. (Diagnostics of the formation of petroleum . In: Problems of petroleum geology in the light of foreign scientists) . Gostoptechizdat, Leningrad.
• 1966: Geochemical facies diagnostics . In: Freiberg research books . tape 224 .
• 1978: Data on the geochemistry of oil field waters . In: Geological Yearbook (=  D ). tape 25 .
• 1978: Organic deposits in lakes . In: Kurier Research Institute Senckenberg . tape 26 .

His planned comprehensive work on petroleum could not be published towards the end of his life for technical reasons. He bequeathed the relevant material to the Montan University Leoben in a will. It is stored there at the Chair of Applied Geophysics and in the archive of the university library.

Hobby horses

He was a great lover and connoisseur of Sherlock Holmes and felt very much in line with Sherlock Holmes / Arthur Conan Doyle in his convictions about the extraction and evaluation of scientific facts or about dogmatism in science, politics or religion . Here, too, he “dug for hidden treasures” (Krejci-Graf: The Philosophy of Holmes). He belonged "under the authenticated titular Investure of Baron Gruner, the Austrian" as the only one in the German-speaking area to the Baker Street Irregulars, BSI (New York) and was "authorized, in the purlieus of the Sherlockian world, to go everywhere, see everything , overhear everyone. ”For“ keeping green the master's memory ”he wrote a series of essays that oscillate between fiction and science, including: a. in The Sherlock Holmes Journal Vol. 10: “Giant Rats and the Road to Lhasa. Containing experiences of a traveler in Republic of China ”.

Salcia Landmann names him as the donor of some of the Jewish jokes she has collected. He knew how to tell jokes like that very well.

literature

• In memoriam Karl Krejci-Graf. In: From nature and museum. Senckenberg News. Vol. 116, Issue 12, 1986, p. 402.
• WE Petrascheck: Karl Krejci-Graf. April 15, 1898 - August 8, 1986 . In: Communications of the Austrian Geological Society . tape 81 . Vienna 1989, p. 259–260 ( online version; PDF file; 736 kB ).
• E. and I. Seibold: Alfred Bentz - petroleum geologist in difficult times, 1938-1947 . In: News from the geologists' archive (2002); Geologische Rundschau 91, 2002, pp. 1081-1093.

Web links

• Geologists' Archives, List of Legacies, GA 76

Individual evidence

1. ^ Professors until 1945. Bergakademie Freiberg, accessed on February 5, 2016 . 
2. ↑ Geologists Archive 20867, Freiburg / Brsg.
3. ^ Obituary In: Deutsche Geologische Gesellschaft , 1987, BD 37, pp. 1–3.
4. ^ DGMK German Scientific Society for Petroleum, Natural Gas and Coal eV: Carl Engler Medal 1960: Prof. Dr. phil. habil. Karl Krejci-Graf. (PDF file; 108 kB) (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on April 2, 2015 ; Retrieved January 13, 2010 . 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.  
5. ↑ German Society for Geosciences : Hans Stille Medal: List of Prize Winners. (PDF; 32 kB) Retrieved January 13, 2010 . 
6. ^ Certificate from the Montan University Leoben dated December 19, 1980. Signed. The Rector: Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Hein Stuewe. - The prerector: Prof. Herwig F. Holzer.
7. ↑ D. Ortlam: "Hammer blow seismic investigations in the high mountains of Northern Tibet". In: Geomorph magazine. NF 35, 19 ??, pp. 385-399.
8. ↑ D. Ortlam: Fossil soils as guiding horizons for the structure of the higher red sandstone in the northern Black Forest and southern Odenwald. In: Geologisches Jahrbuch 84, 19 ??, pp. 495-590.
9. ↑ Salcia Landmann: Jewish Jokes. dtv, Munich 1963, p.?.