Peter Paul Koch
Peter Paul Koch (born March 15, 1879 in Mainz , † October 1, 1945 in Hamburg ) was a German experimental physicist , full professor at the University of Hamburg and an active National Socialist .
Koch was one of Wilhelm Röntgen's students in Munich, where he received his doctorate in 1901 with a dissertation on pyroelectricity . From the winter semester 1903/04 to the summer semester 1919 he was Röntgen's assistant. from the winter semester 1907/08 he was also a private lecturer in Munich. Koch also remained an assistant to Röntgen, who judged him capable and hardworking when he was drafted into World War I. Since 1919 he was the first director of the State Institute of Physics at the newly founded University of Hamburg and professor for experimental physics. In November 1933 he signed the German professors' confession of Adolf Hitler . In the Institute of Physics he increasingly became an outsider because of his strictly National Socialist attitude. He denounced his colleagues, who among other things worked on nuclear research , to the Gestapo because of their neutral stance. Koch worked as a block leader of the NSDAP .
After the end of the Second World War he was immediately dismissed by the British occupying forces in 1945. Koch committed suicide with potassium cyanide in early October 1945 .
His work on X-rays gained importance when Arnold Sommerfeld theoretically dealt with X-ray generation at the anticathodes of X-ray tubes, building on the work of Koch and starting from the wave nature, in contrast to English physicists, who started from the corpuscular nature. In 1912 Koch constructed the first automatically registering microphotometer, which was an important development for the quantitative evaluation of photo plates in X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray structure analysis.
Fonts
- About measuring the blackening of photographic plates in very narrow areas. With application to the measurement of the density distribution in some X-ray slit photograms by Walter and Pohl // Annals of Physics. - 1912. - Vol. 343, H. 8. - pp. 507-522. - ISSN 1521-3889. - doi: 10.1002 / andp.19123430803 .
- On the scattering of light in photographic negatives and their influence on the measurement of blackening , Hamburg 1928
literature
- Monika Renneberg: Physics and the physical institutes at the Hamburg University in the “Third Reich” . In: Eckart Krause u. a. (Ed.): Everyday university life in the “Third Reich”. The Hamburg University 1933–1945 , Berlin 1991.
- Michael Schaaf: Heisenberg, Hitler and the bomb. Conversations with contemporary witnesses. GNT-Verlag, Diepholz 2018, ISBN 978-3-86225-115-5 (in it a conversation with Paul Harteck and others about Koch)
- Gerd Rosenbusch, Annemarie de Knecht-van Eekelen: Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. The Birth of Radiology , Springer 2019, pp. 123f
- Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 . P. 324.
- Walther Gerlach: Koch, Peter Paul. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 273 ( digitized version ).
Web links
- Literature by and about Peter Paul Koch in the catalog of the German National Library
- On the history of physics in Germany around 1945 (see note 13)
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Koch, Peter Paul |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Koch, Peter-Paul |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 15, 1879 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mainz |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 1, 1945 |
| Place of death | Hamburg |