Leon Gruenbaum

Leon Gruenbaum (born March 30, 1934 in the Arrondissement of Forbach , today Arrondissement Forbach-Boulay-Moselle , Lorraine , † July 22, 2004 in Karlsruhe ) was a French physicist and whistleblower .

Gruenbaum was born in Lorraine after his Jewish parents had fled from Nazi Germany . The Resistance saved him from deportation to the extermination camps . After the war he studied physics in Paris, after a research stay in Israel went to Germany and received his doctorate in 1964 under Werner Heisenberg in Munich. In 1970 he received a temporary position at the Karlsruhe Research Center (now KIT), where Rudolf Greifeld, a former war administrator in occupied France, was managing director. Greifeld had been a staunch National Socialist and made anti-Semitic statements. With the support of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld , Gruenbaum uncovered Greifeld's National Socialist past. Greifeld had to give up his function in a Franco-German research council. Gruenbaum's three-year contract at the Karlsruhe Research Center was not extended in 1973. Gruenbaum died in Karlsruhe in 2004.

Gruenbaum received the Whistleblower Award posthumously in 2015 . In the same year, KIT distanced itself from Greifeld's previous appointment as KIT Honorary Senator for life.

literature

• Philipp Sonntag : Posthumous Whistleblower Award to Dr. Léon Gruenbaum. Eulogy. In: Dieter Deiseroth, Hartmut Graßl (ed.): Whistleblower revelations. US Ramstein Airbase and global drone war. Herbicide Roundup - Glyphosate as a hazard. Nazi victims in the Karlsruhe nuclear research center. Whistleblower Prize 2015. Former drone pilot Brandon Bryant, microbiologist Prof. Dr. Gilles-Eric Séralini, physicist Dr. Léon Gruenbaum. BWV Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-8305-3641-3 , pp. 129–140