Career
From 1932 to 1933, Houtermans taught at the Technische Hochschule Berlin and was an assistant to Hertz. While there, he met Patrick Blackett, Max von Laue, and Leó Szilárd.
Houtermans was a Communist; he had been a member of the German Communist Party since the 1920s. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Charlotte Houtermans insisted that they leave Germany. They went to Great Britain, near Cambridge, where he worked for the EMI (Electrical and Musical Instruments, Ltd.) Television Laboratory. In 1935 Houtermans emigrated to the Soviet Union, as the result of a proposal by Alexander Weissberg, who had emigrated to there in 1931. Houtermans took an appointment at the Khar’kov Physico-Technical Institute and worked there for two years with the Russian physicist Valentin P. Fomin. In the Great Purge, Houtermans was arrested by the NKVD in December 1937. He was tortured and confessed to being a Trotskyist plotter and German spy, out of fear from threats against Charlotte. However, Charlotte had already escaped from the Soviet Union to Denmark, after which she went to England and finally the USA. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, Houtermans was turned over to the Gestapo in May 1940 and imprisoned in Berlin. Through efforts of Max von Laue, Houtermans was released in August 1940, whereupon he took a position at Forschungslaboratoriums für Elektronenphysik, a private laboratory of Manfred Baron von Ardenne, in Lichterfelde, a suburb of Berlin. In 1944, Houtermans took a position as a nuclear physicist at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt.
While imprisoned in the Soviet Union, a cellmate of Houtermans was the Kiev University historian Konstantine F. Shteppa. They would later write a book together, "Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession", under the pseudonyms of Beck and Godin to protect their many friends and colleagues back in the USSR.
At the Forschunsinstitut Manfred von Ardenne, Houtermans showed that transuranic isotopes, such as neptunium and plutonium, could be used as fissionable fuels in substitution for uranium. Houtermans sent a telegram from Switzerland to Eugene Wigner at the Met Lab warning the USA’s Manhattan Project of German work on fission: “Hurry up. We are on the track.”
During Houtermans’ employment at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR), he got himself into serious trouble as a result of his habit of being a chain-smoker and suffering great distress if he did not have a supply of tobacco. On official PTR stationery, he wrote to a Dresden cigarette manufacturer to obtain a kilogram of Macedonian tobacco, claiming the tobacco was "kriegswichtig", i.e., important for the war effort. When he had smoked the tobacco, he again wrote for more, however, the letter fell into the hands of an official at the PTR, who fired him. Werner Heisenberg and Carl Weizsäcker came to the rescue of Houtermans and arranged an interview for him with Walter Gerlach, the plenipotentiary (Bevollmächtiger) for German nuclear research under the Reich Research Council. As a result, Houtermans moved to Göttingen in 1945, where Hans Kopferman and Richard Becker got him positions at the Institut für Theoretische Physik and II. Physikalischen Institut der Universität Göttingen.
From 1952, Houtermans took a position as ordinarius professor of physics at the University of Bern. During his tenure there, he founded the internationally renowned Berner Schule, whose thrust was the application of radioactivity to astrophysics, cosmochemistry, and geosciences.
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