Karl Theophil Fries

Karl Fries , also Karl Theophil Fries, (born March 13, 1875 in Kiedrich ; † September 6, 1962 in Marburg ) was a German chemist and professor.

Life

Karl Fries was born the second of three children to the secondary school teacher Theophil Fries and his wife Juliane Zanders and, after graduating from high school in 1894, first studied natural sciences and mathematics at the University of Marburg , where he made the acquaintance of Otto Hahn , who was four years his junior and, like him, a member of the country team Nibelungia Marburg became. From 1895 he studied chemistry at the TH Darmstadt , but returned the following year to Marburg and received his doctorate on "ketochlorides and methylenequinones of the stilbene series" ; his doctoral supervisor was Theodor Zincke . He did his military service as a one-year volunteer and in 1900 became a scheduled assistant at the University's Chemical Institute. There he completed his habilitation in 1905 and was appointed associate professor in 1912. In 1914 he was called up for military service. He was wounded in Flanders and ended the war as a company commander, Lieutenant d. R. and holder of the Iron Cross . In 1918 he was appointed full professor and head of the chemical institute at the Technical University of Braunschweig (today Technical University of Braunschweig ). In 1925 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

Fries was a member of the DVP and politically conservative. He was known to be an opponent of the National Socialists, who had been in power in the Free State of Braunschweig since 1930 and increasingly tried to influence the university. Until 1933 he supported the university management of the TH Braunschweig in their fight against the national education minister Dietrich Klagges . In March 1933, he still refused to give his consent to an attempt by the National Socialist assistants of the TH to hoist a swastika flag on the university building. Finally, he came into conflict with his long-time assistant Bodo Heinemann , who had meanwhile advanced to become the leader of the National Socialist Lecturer at the Technical University of Braunschweig. In the Ministry of Education, Fries was classified as "politically unreliable". In the so-called "Krauss case", in which the students of the chemical department went on strike to emphasize their demand for the dismissal of what they believed to be the incapable professor Ferdinand Krauss (an active National Socialist), Fries was again targeted by the National Socialist leadership and finally asked on March 4, 1938 to retire for health reasons. In 1940 he went back to the University of Marburg, where he received an unpaid teaching position in 1942. After the war, Fries stayed in Marburg and held lectures until 1950, when he was 75 years old. Since 1946 he was a member of the Braunschweig Scientific Society .

Work areas

He worked on the rearrangement of O -acylphenols into ortho -acylphenols, which was named after him as the Fries rearrangement or Fries shift . Other fields of work were aromatic amines and phenols, nitrogen heterocycles and the valence theory of aromatic polycycles ( double bond rule ).

literature

• Michael Wetter, Daniel Weßelhöft: Victims of National Socialist persecution at the Technical University of Braunschweig from 1930 to 1945 . Hildesheim 2010, ISBN 978-3487143590 , p. 122f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Otto Renkhoff : Nassauische Biographie: Short biographies from 13 centuries, page 210, issue 2, Historical Commission for Nassau, 1992.
2. ^ Berthold Ohm and Alfred Philipp (eds.): Directory of addresses of the old men of the German Landsmannschaft. Part 1. Hamburg 1932, p. 326.
3. ^ Louis Fieser, Mary Fieser: Organische Chemie , Verlag Chemie Weinheim, 2nd edition, 1972, p. 926, ISBN 3-527-25075-1 .
4. ↑ Lower Saxony State Archives Wolfenbüttel 12 New 16 No. 122, fol. 193f.