Leopold Karl Pick

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Leopold Karl Pick (born November 6, 1875 in Bohemia ; † November 15, 1938 in Aachen ) was a German mechanical engineer and lecturer at RWTH Aachen University .

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The son of a Bohemian land manager studied mechanical engineering at the German Technical University in Brno and passed both his first state examination in 1897 and his second in 1900 with honors. After a year-long work at the First Brno Machine Works Company, Pick switched to the Friedberg Trade Academy as a lecturer in 1901. Two years later he worked as a designer in Saxony and from 1909 in Frankfurt as a senior engineer. After the First World War, where he earned the Cross of Merit for War Aid, Pick worked in the same position at Neumann & Esser in Aachen. Finally he enrolled at RWTH Aachen University, where he obtained his doctorate under Hermann Bonin in 1919 and from 1931 worked as chief engineer of the thermal power station and the machine laboratory under the direction of Paul Langer . During this time he was also politically active as a co-founder of the German People's Party (DVP). After his habilitation with the topic of the selection of the cylinder volume ratio in single-cylinder stage compressors in February 1933, he was finally given a position as a private lecturer in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering.

However, as early as the spring of 1933, denunciation measures by the student body began at RWTH Aachen University . The ASTA ( General Student Committee ) and the student leaders sent the denunciation committee specially appointed for this purpose, consisting of Hermann Bonin, Hubert Hoff , Felix Rötscher , Adolf Wallichs and Robert Hans Wentzel, about which of the lecturers and professors were not of Aryan descent and were supposed or actually had an undesirable political attitude. According to the law for the restoration of the civil service due to his Jewish origin, Pick was supposed to be together with the other non-Aryan professors Otto Blumenthal , Arthur Guttmann , Walter Maximilian Fuchs , Ludwig Hopf , Theodore von Kármán , Paul Ernst Levy , Karl Walter Mautner , Alfred Meusel , Rudolf Ruer , Hermann Salmang and Ludwig Strauss had their teaching permits withdrawn from September 1933. A petition from his incumbent rector Paul Röntgen to the Reich Commissioner in the Ministry of Education, Bernhard Rust , to allow Pick to continue teaching due to his conversion to the Protestant faith, his co-founding of the DVP and his war award, was rejected and Pick initially had to be on leave and a little later also dismissed as chief engineer . Despite these adverse circumstances, he stayed in Aachen, where he worked as a freelancer at the Aachen branch of the pump manufacturer Klein, Schanzlin & Becker AG , but died of a heart attack in 1938.

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