Reinhard Hellmann (engineer)

Reinhard Hellmann (born August 25, 1909 in Aachen , † August 22, 1995 ) was a German-American engineer.

Life and activity

After attending school, Hellmann studied engineering at the Technical University in Aachen , where he graduated as a graduate engineer with distinction in 1932, for which he was honored with the Springorum commemorative coin and the Werner von Siemens picture. In 1937 he received his doctorate from the same institution for Dr. ing. From 1930 to 1933 he was employed at this facility as Otto Blumenthal's assistant .

When the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Hellmann was ousted from the service of the TH Aachen for political reasons: he was accused by informers of being one of those university professors at the institution who professed Marxism during the Weimar period and "because of their sympathies and their friendship with Russian Bolshevism would not have made a secret ". Instead, Hellmann, who was considered a "full Jew" by the National Socialists, switched to the service of the Siemens-Halske central laboratory in Berlin, for which he worked until 1937.

In 1937 Hellmann moved to the United States, where he was naturalized in 1944. From 1937 to 1939 he worked there as a consulting engineer for the electronics department of Tris Sales Corporation. In 1939 he became assistant chief engineer with the Connecticut Telephone and Electric Corporation in New York, where he dealt with matters relating to military telephone equipment.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police officers classified Hellmann as an enemy of the state: in the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin - which mistakenly suspected him to be in Great Britain - put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who were particularly dangerous or important to the Nazi surveillance apparatus looked at why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, they should be located and arrested by the special SS commandos following the occupation forces with special priority.

In 1947 Hellmann began working for the Hazeltine Corporation in Little Neck, for which he worked as a senior engineer on the development of circuits for receivers of television sets before he rose to the position of assistant vice president and head of the engineering testing department of the electronics division (Electronics Division). In addition to engineering tests (test engineering), he was responsible for the management of the technical publications division.

family

On August 27, 1944, Hellmann married Ruth L. Payne, with whom he had a daughter and a son.

literature

• Displaced German Scholars. A Guide to Academics in Peril in Nazi Germany During the 1930s , (= Studies in Judaica and the Holocaust) 1993, p. 37
• World Who's who in Commerce and Industry , 1968, p. 606.
• Ulrich Kalkmann: The Technical University of Aachen in the Third Reich (1933-1945) , pp. 121, 125, 196f., 227.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Reinhard Hellmann on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London)