Hans-Joachim Born (8 May 1909 – 15 April 1987), was a German radiochemist and a professor of chemistry at the Technical University of Munich who was one of the senior German nuclear scientists in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons, and later his research was used in the Soviet program of biological weapons.
Until the end of the World War II, Born was a professional colleague of Soviet biologist, Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky, where he investigated the genome and genetic structures. After taken into the Soviet custody and held in Russia where he first worked at the Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal’, but later posted at the Laboratory B in Singul' to work on radiation biochemistry under Timofeev-Ressovsky in 1947.
After accepting a teaching position in 1955, Born was returned to Germany and settled in Dresden (later Munich) where he pioneered studies in advancing the field of radiochemistry.
Biography
Born was born in Berlin on 8 May 1909, and attended the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin and University of Tübingen where he graduated with degrees in chemistry. He went on to attend the doctoral program in chemistry at the University of Jena under radiochemist Otto Hahn and did his fundamental research at the Kaiser Wilhelm for Chemistry. In 1935, he was awarded his doctorate in radiochemistry on the topics of the lead content of the North German salt deposits and its relationship to radioactive questions.Riehl and Seitz, 1996, 121.ZfK - 50 Jahre Forschung in Rossendorf, Zentralinstitut für Kernphysik
During his university years, Born was a supporter of the Nazi Party and member of its paramilitary wing, the Storm Troopers, and also held membership of the German Labour Front.
Career
In Germany
Born worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Hirnforschung (KWIH, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research)Today, the KWIH is known as the Max-Planck Institut für Hirnforschung, MPIH . After World War II, all of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were named after the physicist Max Planck. of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, in Berlin-Buch. At the KWIH, he was in Nikolaj Vladimirovich Timofeev-Resovskij's Abteilung für Experimentelle Genetik (Department for Experimental Genetics),H. J. Born, N. W. Timoféeff-Ressovsky and K. G. Zimmer Biologische Anwendungen des Zählrohres, Naturwissenschaften Volume 30, Number 40, 600-603 (1942). The authors were identified as being in the genetics department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Buch. a world-renowned department with the status of an institute. At the KWIH, Born examined the distribution of Radionuclides in the organs of rodents, and he also worked with fission products from research programs conducted under Nikolaus Riehl, scientific director of the Auergesellschaft, who was a participant in the German nuclear energy project Uranverein.
What happened to Born after the Russians entered Berlin, at the close of World War II, is best understood in the context of his colleague Karl Zimmer at the KWIH, who also had a professional relationship with Nikolaus Riehl at the Auergesellschaft.
At the close of World War II, Russia had special search teams operating in Austria and Germany, especially in Berlin, to identify and "requisition" equipment, materiel, intellectual property, and personnel useful to the Soviet atomic bomb project. The exploitation teams were under the Russian Alsos, and they were headed by Lavrenij Beria's deputy, Colonel General A. P. Zavenyagin. These teams were composed of scientific staff members, in NKVD officer's uniforms, from the bomb project's only laboratory, Laboratory No. 2, in Moscow. In mid-May 1945, the Russian nuclear physicists Georgy Flerov and Lev Artsimovich, in NKVD colonel's uniforms, compelled Zimmer to take them to the location of Riehl and his staff, who had evacuated their Auergesellschaft facilities and were west of Berlin, hoping to be in an area occupied by the American or British military forces. Riehl was detained at the search team's facility in Berlin-Friedrichshagen for a week. This sojourn in Berlin turned into 10 years in the Soviet Union! Riehl and his staff, including their families, were flown to Moscow on 9 July 1945. Riehl was to head up a group at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal’ (Электросталь"Электросталь" is sometimes transliterated as "Elektrostal". A one-to-one transliteration scheme transliterates the Cyrillic letter "Э" as "Eh", which distinguishes it from that for the Cyrillic letter "Е" given as "E". Transliterations often also drop the soft sign "ь".).Riehl and Seitz, 1996, 71-72.Oleynikov, 2000, 7.
In Russia
From 1945 to 1950, Riehl was in charge of a group at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal', which had been assigned the task of industrializing reactor-grade uranium production. When Riehl learned that H. J. Born and Karl Zimmer were being held in Krasnogorsk, in the main PoW camp for Germans with scientific degrees, Riehl arranged though Zavenyagin to have them sent to Ehlektrostal’. Alexander Catsch, who had been taken prisoner with Zimmer, was also sent to the Ehlektrostal’ Plant No. 12. Riehl had a hard time incorporating Born, Catsch, and Zimmer into his tasking on uranium production, as Born was a radiochemist, Catsch was a physician and radiation biologist, and Zimmer was a physicist and radiation biologist. Born's family arrived in Ehlektrostal’ on 20 August 1946.Riehl and Seitz, 1996, 2, 31, 71, 83, 89-104, 121-128, and 202.Maddrell, 2006, 179-180, 186, 189, and 210-221.Oleynikov, 2000, 11, 15-16, and Reference #151 on p. 29.Karl G. Zimmer Papers – University of Tennessee.
After the detonation of the Russian uranium bomb, uranium production was going smoothly and Riehl's oversight was no longer necessary at Plant No. 12. Riehl then went, in 1950, to head an institute in Sungul', where he stayed until 1952. Essentially the remaining personnel in his group were assigned elsewhere, with the exception of H. E. Ortmann, A. Baroni (PoW), and Herbert Schmitz (PoW), who went with Riehl. However, Riehl had already sent Born, Catsch, and Zimmer to the institute in December 1947. The institute in Sungul’ was responsible for the handling, treatment, and use of radioactive products generated in reactors, as well as radiation biology, dosimetry, and radiochemistry. The institute was known as Laboratory B, and it was overseen by the 9th Chief Directorate of the NKVD (MVD after 1946), the same organization which oversaw the Russian Alsos operation. The scientific staff of Laboratory B – a ShARAShKA – was both Soviet and German, the former being mostly political prisoners or exiles, although some of the service staff were criminals.Riehl and Seitz, 1996, 121-128, and 202.Oleynikov, 2000, 15-17. (Laboratory V, in Obninsk, headed by Heinz Pose, was also a sharashka and working on the Soviet atomic bomb project. Other notable Germans at the facility were Werner Czulius, Hans Jürgen von Oertzen, Ernst Rexer, and Carl Friedrich Weiss.Polunin, V. V. and V. A. Staroverov Personnel of Special Services in the Soviet Atomic Project 1945 – 1953 [In Russian] (FSB, 2004) .)
Laboratory B was known under another cover nameThe Russians used various types of cover names for facilities to obfuscate both the location and function of a facility; in fact, the same facility could have multiple and changing designations. The nuclear design bureau and assembly plant Arzamas-16, for example, had more than one designation – see Yuli Khariton and Yuri Smirnov The Khariton Version, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 20-31 (May 1993). Some facilities were known by post office box numbers, почтовом ящике (pochtovom yashike), abbreviated as п/я. See Maddrell, 2006, 182-183. Also see Demidov, A. A. On the tracks of one "Anniversary" [In Russian] 11.08.2005, which relates the history changing post office box designations for Arzamas-16. as Объект 0211 (Ob’ekt 0211, Object 0211), as well as Object B.Timofeev-Resovskij, N. V. Kratkaya Avtobiograficheskaya Zapiska (Brief Autobiographical Note) (14 October 1977) ."Я ПРОЖИЛ СЧАСТЛИВУЮ ЖИЗНЬ" К 90-летию со дня рождения Н. В. Тимофеева-Ресовского ("I Lived a Happy Life" – In Honor of the 90th Anniversary of the Birth of Timofeev-Resovskij), ИСТОРИЯ НАУКИ. БИОЛОГИЯ (History of Science – Biology), 1990, No. 9, 68-104 (1990) . This commemorative has many photographs of Timofeev-Resovskij.Ratner, V. A. Session in Memory of N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij in the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences [In Russian], Vestnik VOGis Article 4, No. 15 (2000).Izvarina, E. Nuclear project in the Urals: History in Photographs [In Russian] Nauka Urala Numbers 12-13, June 2000 . (In 1955, Laboratory B was closed. Some of its personnel were transferred elsewhere, but most of them were assimilated into a new, second nuclear weapons institute, Scientific Research Institute-1011, NII-1011, today known as the Russian Federal Nuclear Center All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics, RFYaTs–VNIITF. NII-1011 had the designation предприятие п/я 0215, i.e., enterprise post office box 0215 and Объект 0215; the latter designation has also been used in reference to Laboratory B after its closure and assimilation into NII-1011.Sulakshin, S. S. (Scientific Editor) Social and Political Process of Economic Status of Russia [In Russian] 2005.RFYaTS-VNIITF Creators – See the entry for УРАЛЕЦ Александр Константинович (URALETs Aleksandr Konctantinovich) [In Russian].RFYaTS-VNIITF Creators – See the entry for ТИМОФЕЕВ-РЕСОВСКИЙ Николай Владимирович (TIMOFEEV-RESOVSKIJ Nikolaj Vladimorovich) [In Russian].Penzina, V. V. Archive of the Russian Federal Nuclear Centre of the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics, named after E. I. Zababakhin. Resource No. 1 – Laboratory "B". [In Russian] (VNIITF ). Penzina is cited as head of the VNIITF Archive in Snezhinsk.)
One of the political prisoners in Laboratory B was Riehls’ colleague from the KWIH, N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij, who, as a Soviet citizen, was arrested by the Soviet forces in Berlin at the conclusion of the war, and he was sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag. In 1947, Timofeev-Resovskij was rescued out of a harsh Gulag prison camp, nursed back to health, and sent to Sungul' to complete his sentence, but still make a contribution to the Soviet atomic bomb project. At Laboratory B, Timofeev-Resovskij headed a biophysics research department, in which Born, Catsch, and Zimmer were able to conduct work similar to that which they had done in Germany, and all three became section heads in Timofeev-Resovskij's department. Specifically, Born examined fission products, developed methods of separating plutonium from fission products created in a nuclear reactor, and investigated and developed radiation health and safety measures.
In preparation for release from the Soviet Union, it was standard practice to put personnel into quarantine for a few years if they worked on projects related to the Soviet atomic bomb project, as was the case for Born. Additionally, in 1954, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic, GDR) and the Soviet Union prepared a list of scientists they wished to keep in the GDR, due to their having worked on projects related to the Soviet atomic bomb project; this list was known as the "A-list". On this A-list were the names of 18 scientists. Nine, possibly 10, of the names were associated with the Riehl group which worked at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal’. Born, Catsch, Riehl, and Zimmer were on the list.The A-list prepared by East Germany and the Soviet Union in 1954 had 18 names on it. These Germans were to be encouraged to stay in East Germany, as they had done work on the Soviet atomic bomb project. At least nine members worked in Riehl's group at Ehlektrostal’: Hans-Joachim Born, Alexander Catsch, Werner Kirst, Przybilla, Nikolaus Riehl, Herbert Thieme, Tobein, Günter Wirths, and Karl Zimmer.