Siegfried Hilpert

Siegfried Max Richard Hilpert (born March 18, 1883 in Strasbourg , then Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine , † March 3, 1951 in Brookline , Massachusetts ) was a German chemist.

The son of the imperial music director Friedrich Bruno Hilpert and his wife Alma Caroline Marie Hilpert, née Sering. He attended the grammar school in Strasbourg and until 1902 the Kaiser Wilhelm grammar school in Hanover . He studied chemistry in Berlin and received his doctorate in 1905 under Emil Fischer and Walther Nernst with the thesis "Chemical effects of light: About reactions of the 4-amido-2-nitrostilbene". 1905–1907 he was a private assistant to Emil Fischer. The habilitation followed in 1910 at the TH Berlin.

1909–1914 he worked as a private lecturer for metallurgy and inorganic chemistry at the TH Berlin. In 1909 he published an article on the use of ferrites as a magnetic core. With his "historical patent" from 1908 it became known that oxides can carry magnetic properties. After that he was head of department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim / Ruhr for a year .

From 1915 to 1926 he worked in industry, at Stinnes, the German-Luxembourgish mining industry and from 1921 as general manager of Koholyt AG in Königsberg. In 1919 he married Adele Bösener, with whom he had the children Heinz and Erika.

1922–1930 he was an honorary professor at the TH Berlin and then until 1939 at the TH Braunschweig o. Professor for chemistry and chemical technology, where he researched cellulose and the production of straw pulp. A new institute for agricultural technology was established. In addition, studies were carried out on the magnetism of iron oxides and oxychlorides as well as on sodium, silicon and copper ferrites. His assistant, the engineer Albert Wille (born October 13, 1909 in Salder) wrote his doctoral thesis in 1933 "On the connection between the structure and ferromagnetism of ferrites".

When he was on vacation in Switzerland in the summer of 1939, he traveled to southern France three days before the war began and was interned there until the end of the German campaign. The institute was orphaned under its representative Heinrich Hock . After reviewing his interrogation files, he was arrested again and sentenced to death before the Reich Court Martial in 1941/42 for treason and favoring the enemy, which ended his civil service. In August 1942 the sentence was commuted to imprisonment.

He turned down the Braunschweig institute, which was offered again after the war. 1945–1947 he worked at the Waldhoff pulp factory , then became Prof. emer at the TH Braunschweig. and moved to the USA.

In 1981 his widow set up a foundation from which grants for doctoral students at the Braunschweig Institute are awarded.

swell

• Anikó Szabó: eviction, return, reparation. Göttingen university professor in the shadow of National Socialism. Wallstein, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 978-3-89244-381-0 , here p. 579 ( online )
• 1863 - 2013: 150 years of the Institute for Technical Chemistry at the Technical University of Braunschweig ( Memento from April 24, 2014 on WebCite )