Education and career Gustav Ludwig Hertz was born on 22 July 1887 in
Hamburg, Germany, the son of Gustav Theodor Hertz, a lawyer, and Auguste Arning. In 1913, Hertz was appointed Research Assistant at the Physics Institute of the University of Berlin. The following year, Hertz, along with
James Franck, performed
an experiment on inelastic
electron collisions in gases. In 1925, Hertz and Franck were jointly awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physics for their experiment. From 1914, Hertz served in the military during
World War I. In 1915, he joined
Fritz Haber's unit that would introduce
poisonous chlorine gas as a weapon. He was seriously wounded that year. In 1917, he returned to the University of Berlin as a
Privatdozent. In 1920, he became a research physicist at the
Philips Incandescent Lamp Factory in
Eindhoven, Netherlands. In 1925, he was appointed Director of the Physics Institute at the
University of Halle. In 1928, he became Director of the Physics Institute at Technische Hochschule Berlin (THB – now
Technische Universität Berlin). While there, he developed an
isotope separation technique via
gaseous diffusion. Since Hertz was an officer during World War I, he was temporarily protected from Nazi policies and the
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, but eventually the policies and laws became more stringent, and at the end of 1934 he was forced to resign from his position at THB, as he was classified as a "second degree part-Jew" (his grandfather,
Gustav Ferdinand Hertz, had been Jewish as a child, before his whole family had converted to Lutheranism in 1834). Hertz was part of ArbeitsGemeinschaft Cornelius (AGC) working group since 1939. To 1935 to 1945, he continued his work on gas discharges, electron-
atomic physics,
ultrasound, and basic research and development for a cyclotron circular accelerator for possible use in the research facilities in Heidelberg and Leipzig, but he eventually discontinued his work on isotope separation. In April 1944, he became Director of Research Laboratory II at
Siemens. He stayed at Siemens until 1945 when he departed to the Soviet Union.
Soviet Union "Pact to defect" Hertz was concerned for his safety and, like his fellow Nobel laureate
James Franck, was looking to move to the US or any other place outside Germany. So he made a pact with three colleagues:
Manfred von Ardenne, director of his private laboratory
Forschungslaboratorium für Elektronenphysik,
Peter Adolf Thiessen, ordinarius professor at the University of Berlin and Director of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in
Berlin-Dahlem, and
Max Volmer, ordinarius professor and Director of the Physical Chemistry Institute at THB. The pact was a pledge that whoever first made contact with the Soviets would speak for the rest. The objectives of their pact were threefold: (1) prevent plunder of their institutes, (2) continue their work with minimal interruption, and (3) protect themselves from prosecution for any political acts of the past. Before the end of World War II, Thiessen, a member of the
Nazi Party, had Communist contacts.
Soviet nuclear weapons program On 27 April 1945, Thiessen arrived at von Ardenne's institute in an armored vehicle with a major of the Soviet Army, who was also a leading Soviet chemist. All four of the pact members were taken to the Soviet Union. Hertz was made head of Institute G, in Agudseri (Agudzery), about 10 km southeast of
Sukhumi and a suburb of Gul'rips (Gulrip'shi). Topics assigned to Gustav Hertz's Institute G included: (1) Separation of isotopes by diffusion in a flow of inert gases, for which Gustav Hertz was the leader, (2) Development of a condensation pump, for which
Justus Mühlenpfordt was the leader, (3) Design and build a mass spectrometer for determining the isotopic composition of uranium, for which Werner Schütze was the leader, (4) Development of frameless (ceramic) diffusion partitions for filters, for which Reinhold Reichmann was the leader, and (5) Development of a theory of stability and control of a diffusion cascade, for which
Heinz Barwich was the leader; Barwich had been deputy to Hertz at Siemens. Other members of Institute G were
Werner Hartmann and Karl-Franz Zühlke. Manfred von Ardenne was made head of Institute A. Goals of von Ardenne's Institute A included: (1) Electromagnetic separation of isotopes, for which von Ardenne was the leader, (2) Techniques for manufacturing porous barriers for isotope separation, for which Peter Adolf Thiessen was the leader, and (3) Molecular techniques for separation of uranium isotopes, for which
Max Steenbeck was the leader. In his first meeting with
Lavrentij Beria, von Ardenne was asked to participate in building the bomb, but von Ardenne quickly realized that participation would prohibit his repatriation to Germany, so he suggested isotope enrichment as an objective, which was agreed to.
Research in Sukhumi By the end of the 1940s, nearly 300 Germans were working at the institute, and they were not the total work force. Institute A was used as the basis for the Sukhumi Physical-Technical Institute in Sinop, a suburb of
Sukhumi. in Moscow; he was given a design bureau to work on the production of
heavy water. In Institute A, Thiessen became leader for developing techniques for manufacturing porous barriers for isotope separation. In 1950, Hertz moved to
Moscow. In 1951, he was awarded the
Stalin Prize, second class, with Barwich. The same year, Hertz and James Franck were jointly awarded the
Max Planck Medal by the
German Physical Society.
Later life and death From 1954 until his retirement in 1961, Hertz was Director of the Physics Institute of the Karl Marx University in
Leipzig (now the
University of Leipzig). From 1955 to 1967, he was Chairman of the Physical Society of East Germany. Hertz died on 30 October 1975 in
Berlin at the age of 88. == Family ==