World War I and the interwar period From 1915 to 1918, during the war, Gerlach did service with the
German Army. He worked on wireless telegraphy at
Jena under
Max Wien. He also served in the Artillerie-Prüfungskommission under
Rudolf Ladenburg. Gerlach became a
Privatdozent at the University of Tübingen in 1916. A year later, he became a Privatdozent at the
University of Göttingen. From 1919 to 1920, he was the head of a physics laboratory of Farbenfabriken Elberfeld, later Bayer-Werke A.G. working group on ship
degaussing and
torpedo physics. Other than his military research for the
Kriegsmarine, he worked closely with Hitler's nuclear research adviser
Rudolf Mentzel and other Nazi science policy-makers. On 2 December 1943, on Mentzel's initiative, Gerlach was appointed by the
Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer as head of the physics section of the
Reichsforschungsrat (RFR, Reich Research Council) ("the emperor of physics") and as the plenipotentiary of nuclear physics, replacing
Abraham Esau. He established himself with his deputy
Kurt Diebner in the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in
Berlin-Dahlem. Working within a budget of 3 million
RM for 1944, he was due to send monthly progress reports on nuclear physics to Mentzel as his superior. In April 1944, he founded the
Reichsberichte für Physik, which were official reports appearing as supplements to the
Physikalische Zeitschrift. From April to September 1944, he negotiated with
IG Farben a contract for the building of a
heavy water production plant, and thwarted the company's attempt to patent the process. In June 1944, he took steps to concentrate personnel and funds on the nuclear power project, which remained a top priority, in accordance with Speer's decree. He is known to have worked in the
uranium research laboratory in the basement of the
secondary school at
Stadtilm, where Diebner's team evacuated from Berlin in the autumn of 1944 and began to prepare a low-temperature experiment in a uranium machine
without the use of heavy water. This led to the supposed
nuclear weapons testing carried out in March 1945 at the
Jonas Valley near the
Ohrdruf concentration camp. As late as December 1944, he asserted to the
Chief of the Party Chancellery Martin Bormann that nuclear power could influence the outcome of the war and that Germany had a "considerable advantage" over the rival United States programme. On 22 March 1945, following the Ohrdruf experiment, he was sent by the SS
Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to Bormann to personally report that the
nuclear chain reaction had worked, but no immediate military breakthrough was forthcoming. His progress reports were seized by
Alsos Mission's
Samuel Goudsmit in Stadtilm on 12 April 1945. One of these mentioned the necessity of acquiring tons of uranium (for the uranium machines), which led Goudsmit to the erroneous conclusion that the Germans failed to understand the mechanism for an atomic bomb. Gerlach himself was captured by the American troops in
Bavaria by 12 May 1945. From May 1945, he was interned in France and Belgium by British and American Armed Forces under
Operation Alsos. From July 1945 to January 1946, he was detained in England at Farm Hall under
Operation Epsilon, which interned 10 German scientists thought to have participated in the development of atomic weapons.
Post-war era Upon Gerlach's return to Germany in 1946, he became a visiting professor at the
University of Bonn. From 1948, he became an ordinarius professor of experimental physics and director of the physics department at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, a position he held until 1957. He was also rector of the university from 1948 to 1951. From 1949 to 1951, Gerlach was the founding president of the
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, which promotes applied sciences. From 1949 to 1961, he was the vice-president of the Deutsche Gemeinschaft zur Erhaltung und Förderung der Forschung (German Association for the Support and Advancement of Scientific Research); also known in short as the
Deutsche Forschungs-Gemeinschaft (DFG), previously the
Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft. In 1957, Gerlach was a co-signer of the
Göttingen Manifesto, which was against rearming the Federal Republic of Germany with atomic weapons.
Other positions / Decorations / Honours • From 1935 – Chairman of the committee to appoint a successor to
Arnold Sommerfeld. • From 1948 – a member of the Göttingen, Halle, and Munich Academies of Sciences. • Civil Class of the order
Pour le Mérite. • 1970 – Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Stern
Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany == Literature ==