Leo Brandt

Leo (Wolfgang) Brandt (born November 17, 1908 in Bernburg (Saale) ; † April 26, 1971 in Mainz ) was a German high-frequency technician, engineer and state secretary in North Rhine-Westphalia .

Life

His father was a postal councilor, friends with Leo Löwenstein and was released by the Nazis in 1933.

Leo Brandt attended the Oberrealschule in Düsseldorf and passed his matriculation examination in 1927. He studied electrical engineering with a special focus on communications technology, first at the RWTH in Aachen , then at the TU Berlin-Charlottenburg , which he left in 1932 after passing exams as a graduate engineer with a focus on communications . However, there was no chance for the post career he was initially striving for due to hiring freezes.

While still in Aachen in 1927, when he was twenty, he founded the local branch of the German Republican Student Union , in which he also remained active in Berlin. His time there as its national chairman became his school of rhetoric.

Activity (until 1945)

In 1932 he entered the service of the Telefunken Company in Berlin, where in 1935 he was made head of the receiver laboratory for radio equipment. There he developed a series of device systems together with Wilhelm Runge . From the beginning of 1939 he was entrusted with the management of the device development and involved in the development of the telephony radio devices Michael and Rudolf as well as the first decimeter wave radar device FuMG  62 with the code name " Würzburg " and a range of almost 30 kilometers, which from May 1940 in Series production went. The further development was the fixed radio measuring devices FuMG 65 " Würzburg-Riese " introduced in mid-1941 with a range of over 70 kilometers.

During Operation Biting in February 1942, the British captured important parts of a FuMG 62 “Würzburg” and evaluated them. They found that there is no alternative frequencies were provided the devices so by discarded " chaff ", English chaff or Window called, were easy to disrupt. These were narrow aluminum strips, the length of which corresponded to half the wavelength of the German radio measuring devices. The first "Window" operation was on the night of July 25, 1943 during the heavy air raid on Hamburg called Operation Gomorrah , in which British bombers dropped 40 tons of "Window", which corresponded to around 92 million strips.

In order not to mistakenly shoot down the German aircraft registered with “Würzburg”, Brandt developed the Steinziege receiver for the FuG 25a “ Erstling ” identifier located on board the aircraft to supplement them .

The German "Würzburg" devices worked with a wavelength of 53.6 cm ( frequency 560 MHz) and that of the Allies with 9 cm (3.3 GHz), which provided much more accurate display images. At the beginning of the 1940s, the Allied radar was still completely undiscovered because there were no devices in the Wehrmacht that could receive such high frequencies. In February 1943, when a British night bomber was shot down near Rotterdam, an H2S radar device fell into the hands of the Germans; but only at a time when the Allies' air superiority was already enormous.

But almost a year passed before the full importance of this “ Rotterdam device ” was recognized. In order to catch up on the technological lead of the British, the “Rotterdam Working Group” was founded in 1943, with Leo Brandt as chairman until the end of the war. Together with Runge, he had reconstructed the British radar set in a very short time, but due to a mistake by a technician, the wrong dipole was used in the antenna mirror, which significantly reduced its performance. In addition, it was wrongly said that this device could only be used for navigation, but not as a radar. In contrast, it was possible to develop a receiver for the 9 cm signals from British radar transmitters for the German submarine fleet, which was also able to reduce its high rate of loss. For night hunters, Brandt is also said to have researched the development of a Barb panorama image device for displaying an electronic map that can also be recognized at night and in fog, which worked with a wavelength of nine centimeters and a range of two kilometers.

By the end of 1943, his working group had developed the Marbach fixed radio measuring device, which worked successfully in the centimeter wave range and had a range of over 200 kilometers. However, even this development could not prevent the air superiority of the allied bomber formations.

Work (from 1946)

After the end of the war, the Allied Control Council prohibited, among other things, all work on German further development of radio measurement technology (from now on referred to as " radar "). The Würzburg antennas became the most widely used radio telescope in radio astronomy.

The Mayor of Düsseldorf Walter Kolb , comrade from the days of the Republican Student Union, gave Brandt a managerial position in the vehicle fleet of the Düsseldorf public utilities. He quickly made a career as a transport manager and became general director of the Rheinbahn transport company, which is part of the municipal utilities . He became an early proponent and advocate of federal railroad electrification.

The success of Leo Brandt as General Director was noticed by Prime Minister Karl Arnold , who brought him to the Ministry of Economics and Transport in North Rhine-Westphalia. This was also responsible for monitoring the research restrictions, which did not cease to apply until “5.5.55”, when the Federal Republic became sovereign . On February 15, 1949, Brandt was appointed ministerial director and, from 1954, state secretary. It is thanks to him, among other things, that the speed limit for road traffic in cities has been in effect since 1957 .

Brandt stood up for the radio and broadcasting pioneer Abraham Esau , who after his acquittal (1948) from the charges of economic war crimes in the Netherlands had difficulty getting back into research and development.

The trauma of a German research backlog, which Brandt experienced from his work in the Rotterdam Working Group , was one of the driving forces that made him tirelessly promote the need for extensive research funding in politics and the public in order to overcome such backlogs . Brandt saw the work of the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee (BIOS) as an unjustified obstacle to research in Germany. This moved him to publish the multi-volume work Tasks for German Research in 1952 , which he - and soon others too - referred to as anti-BIOS reports , and which made him widely known as a research planner to overcome the research ban. At his suggestion, the Working Group for Research of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia was founded in 1950 , which was to become the nucleus of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and the Arts . With Erwin Simon he had tried to get a (therefore secret) German-Dutch-Norwegian reactor project off the ground before “5.5.55”, the plans of which led to Konrad Adenauer's chancellery and antechamber .

Leo Brandt is considered to be the founder of the Jülich nuclear research facility in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (KFA) , which is now the Jülich Research Center . He was very close to Rudolf Schulten , the developer of the nuclear power plant with a pebble bed reactor and father of the test reactor AVR (Jülich) . Brandt brought Schulten to RWTH Aachen University and KFA Jülich in 1964 . The AVR was put into operation in 1967 in close proximity to the research center. An operating company, including the Aachen and Düsseldorf municipal utilities, had commissioned it.

When the lawyer Franz Meyers became Prime Minister in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1958, Brandt increasingly lost its influence. In 1961 he became head of the newly founded State Office for Research. Nevertheless, in this function and as a far-sighted research planner, he founded numerous associations for the promotion of science and research and wrote or published almost 200 publications.

Honors

• 1969: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• Leo-Brandt-Strasse in Jülich
• 1970: Honorary Senator of the RWTH Aachen

The German Society for Positioning and Navigation (DGON) awards the Leo Brandt Prize "DGON Master of Navigation" named after Leo Brandt for theses written at German universities with a focus on positioning and navigation and the associated technologies .

Publications (selection)

• Tasks of German research ; from 1952
• Specialist lectures on ship radio location at the High Command of the Navy from March 9-10 , 1944 ; 1944
• Traffic as an essential factor in German reconstruction: Lecture given on July 15, 1949 on the occasion of the Conference "Rail Vehicles" at d. Technical University, Aachen ; 1949
• Traffic coordination: lectures / Enno Müller ; Leo Brandt
• Traffic on the Rhine and Ruhr in graphic representations ; 1950
• Transport technology and transport policy: selected chapters from a lecture at the Technical University in Aachen in the winter semester of 1949/50
• From the radio wave to the centimeter wave of the radar: [from 20 years of high frequency development]; Lecture ; Essen: Scientific. Association f. Transport eV, 1951
• Modern mass transit problems ; 1951, in Scientific Publications and Conference Reports / Ministry for Science and Transport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia; H. 14; with Enno Müller and Gustav Dilli (1892–1971; 1953 Vice President of the Federal Railway Directorate Essen, then to his old rank as head of the operations department)
• Rail and road: services provided by transport in the reconstruction of the German economy on the Rhine and Ruhr ; Dortmund: Verkehrs- und Wirtschafts-Verl., 1951
• Paths and goals of research in North Rhine-Westphalia: 3 lectures ; with Karl Arnold and Hermann Schenck
• About the share of Jewish personalities in the development of the German electrical industry ; in the general weekly newspaper of Jews in Germany
• Problems of traffic accident prevention ; 1951
• Navigation and air security ; 1952
• Tasks of German research in the field of natural, engineering and social sciences: attempt of a preliminary overview with additional information about research institutions and sponsors of German research ; 1952
• Contributions to discussions and reports on the committee meetings at the meeting of the working group for rationalization ; Working group for rationalization of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia; with Arnold, Karl; Frenz, G.
• Debates, lectures and contributions to discussions at the founding meeting of the Working Group for Rationalization on January 23, 1952 in Düsseldorf
• Research and rationalization as the basis for increasing productivity: Lecture given at the non-ferrous metal conference on July 2, 1952 in Düsseldorf
• Problems of modern road traffic: compilation of the lectures of the traffic science lecture series from 8th to 12th December 1952
• Contributions to sound location; 1 ; Lectures of the working group for sound location at the working conference in Bremen on October 19, 1953
• Minutes of the meeting of the Rotterdam Working Group: Committee on Radio Location. (1943-1944) ; 1953
• Industrial rationalization
• Research and economic future ; 1953
• with Karl Arnold: People and technology: people and their work in the company ; 1953
• The competitive situation of the Deutsche Bundesbahn compared to other modes of transport ; In: Wirtschaftsdienst, ISSN  0043-6275 , Vol. 33 (1953), 9, pp. 580-584
• Measurements of the power requirements of double-web chain conveyors: Research reports from the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Economics and Transport
• Great rationalization exhibition in Düsseldorf 1953
• Radio and sound location in international shipping: Status 1954; Bremen symposium 1954
• 18 new research centers in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia: reports ; 1954
• Contributions to international aviation law
• Problems of a protective shield over Germany from the perspective and experience of a high-frequency engineer: Lecturer. held in front of d. Bundestag committees f. Security and Interior ; Düsseldorf: Committee f. Radio location, 1955
• Contributions to ship radio location: Lectures and discussions of the working group for ship radio location at the workshop in Hamburg on March 3rd and 4th, 1955
• On the career of the working group for research of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia ; In: Festschrift of the Working Group for Research of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in honor of Prime Minister Karl Arnold on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Working Group for Research (1955), pp. 311-319
• Research and design. Speeches and essays 1930–1962

literature

• Post and Telecommunications History , Volume 7, p. 110
• Josef Meixner , Gerhard Kegel : Festschrift for Leo Brandt for his 60th birthday . Springer Verlag Heidelberg 1968
• International Biographical Archive 25/1971
• Bernhard Mittermaier, Bernd-A. Rusinek : Leo Brandt (1908–1971) engineer - science promoter - visionary. On the 100th birthday of the North Rhine-Westphalian research politician and founder of Forschungszentrum Jülich , Jülich 2008 (full text as PDF ( memento from February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of Forschungszentrum Jülich, limited preview in Google book search)
• Thomas Stamm: Leo Brandt ; In: Between Ruhr Control and Co-determination (1982), pp. 178–199

Web links

• Literature by and about Leo Brandt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Leo Brandt in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

supporting documents

1. ↑ Brian Johnson: Top Secret. Science and technology in World War II. Wiener Verlag, page 122.
2. ↑ http://www.hts-homepage.de/Wehrmacht/WMWehrmacht.html
3. ↑  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )
4. ^ Friedrich Seewald: State Secretary Professor Dr med. hc, Dr.Ing. Eh, Dipl.Ing. Leo Brandt on his 60th birthday. in: Festschrift for Leo Brandt zum 60. , pp. 13–32
5. ↑ Bernhard Mittermaier, Bernd-A. Rusinek: Leo Brandt (1908–1971) , Jülich 2008 ( PDF ( Memento from February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive )), p. 22
6. ↑ BIOS reports 1944–1947 ( http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd0001/2009/20090227001cl/20090227001cl.pdf )
7. ↑ Leo Brandt: "On the history of the working group for research of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia" , Yearbook for Christian Social Sciences 7/8 (1966/67) pp. 457–461
8. ↑ Bernhard Mittermaier, Bernd-A. Rusinek: Leo Brandt (1908–1971) , Jülich 2008 ( PDF ( Memento from February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive )), p. 14
9. ^ Last in 1971 - together with Wilhelm Fucks - the Society for the Promotion of Research into the Fundamentals of the Application of Methods of Mathematics and Natural Sciences to other subject areas
10. ↑ ( page no longer available , search in web archives: bibliography ) (PDF) at fz-juelich.de
11. ↑ http://gso.gbv.de/DB=2.1/SET=1/TTL=181/MAT=/NOMAT=T/CLK?IKT=1004&TRM=Brandt,Leo
12. ↑ Guidelines ( memento of August 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) for the awarding of the Leo Brandt Prize “DGON Master of Navigation” on the website of the German Society for Positioning and Navigation , as seen on May 19, 2012