Paul Rosbaud

Paul Rosbaud (born November 18, 1896 in Graz , † January 28, 1963 in London ) was an Austrian chemist and scientific advisor for the German Springer publishing house . Under the code name "Griffin" (griffin) he worked as an agent for the British secret service MI6 during the Second World War . Rosbaud had extensive contacts in Germany and provided MI6 with important information on weapon systems.

Life

Rosbaud was a brother of the conductor Hans Rosbaud .

He served in the Austrian Army in World War I between 1915 and 1918. After the war he was held in British captivity, where he discovered his love for England. From 1920 he studied chemistry at the Technical University in Darmstadt . He continued his studies at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. He submitted his doctoral thesis to the Technical University in Berlin-Charlottenburg . In 1928 Rosbaud took a position at the metal industry , a then new weekly magazine for metallurgy, as a scientific advisor. After Hitler came to power , he quit his previous job because the owner, Georg Lüttke, was a National Socialist.

With the help of the British agent Frank Foley , MI6 station chief in Berlin, he sent his Jewish wife Hilde and his only daughter Angela to Great Britain in 1938. Rosbaud was also invited to England, but refused and continued to try to undermine the Nazi regime there. With the support of Foley, Rosbaud helped several other families to flee the Nazis. Physicist Lise Meitner was one of them .

Through his work at Springer Verlag, Rosbaud knew most of the scientists in Germany, and as a supposed National Socialist he was able to provide the Allies with important intelligence information without arousing suspicion.

One of his first actions was the publication of Otto Hahn's work in the field of nuclear fission in the physics magazine "Naturwissenschaften" in January 1939. Rosbaud was apparently aware of the danger that this knowledge could be used to build an atomic bomb . Its publication alarmed the international physicist community and can be seen in direct connection with Albert Einstein's warning about a German atomic bomb in his letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt .

In his reports, he informed the British of the fact that Germany was producing rockets ( V2 ) and that Germany's nuclear bomb program was unsuccessful.

Many of his reports were smuggled out of Germany by couriers from the Norwegian secret service organization XU . Norwegian students at technical schools in Germany contacted Rosbaud and transported the secret information to occupied Norway , from where the reports about neutral Sweden reached England. One daring route involved a flight from Berlin to Oslo, with airport technicians at both ends helping to hide the microfilms on the plane.

After the war he was at the newly founded science publisher Butterworth-Springer in London (a joint establishment with Springer Verlag), which was taken over by Robert Maxwell and became Pergamon Press . Rosbaud held a quarter (Maxwell held the rest) and in 1951 he was the first director for the scientific publishing program, but left the publishing house after a dispute with Maxwell.

In 1961 he received the John Torrance Tate Medal from the American Institute of Physics .

Fonts

• About the structure of aluminum silicates of the type Al2SiO5 and of the pseudobrookite. Stuttgart: Swiss beard 1926; Berlin, Technical University, dissertation, 1926
• Tables for the determination of crystal structures. Leipzig: Joh. Ambr. Barth 1926; zugl .: Darmstadt, Diss., 1925

literature

About Paul Rosbaud:

• Arnold Kramish: The Griffin. The Greatest Untold Espionage Story of World War II . Houghton Mifflin, Boston MA 1986, ISBN 0-395-36318-7 .
• Arnold Kramish: The griffin. Paul Rosbaud - the man who let Hitler's nuclear plans fail . Full paperback edition. From the American by Gabriele Burkhardt and Ricarda Strobel . Droemer Knaur, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-426-03949-4 , ( Knaur pocket books 3949).

About Frank Foley:

• Michael Smith: Foley. The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews . Revised Edition. Politico's, London 2004, ISBN 1-84275-114-X , (Original edition: Hodder & Stoughton, London 1999, ISBN 0-340-71850-1 ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Rosbaud in the catalog of the German National Library
• ORF, battle over the Rosbaud file , last checked on Sep 29. 2007
• The Guardian, Spy left out in the cold: how MI6 buried heroic exploits of agent 'Griffin' , last checked on Sep 29. 2007
• Paul Rosbaud - "Der Greif" (PDF file; 1.3 MB), in: Steiermark Report Special of the Landespressedienstes Steiermark, (2003), pages 29–32. (queried on February 22, 2010)