Fritz Strassmann - Life and Career

Life and Career

Born in Boppard, he began his chemistry studies in 1920 at the Technical University of Hannover and earned his Ph.D. in 1929. He did his Ph.D. work on the solubility of iodine gaseous carbonic acid. Straßmann started an academic career because the employment situation in the chemical industry was much worse than at the universities at that time.

Straßmann worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem, from 1929.

In 1933 he resigned from the Society of German Chemists when it became part of a Nazi-controlled public corporation. He was blacklisted. Hahn and Meitner found an assistantship for him at half pay. Straßmann considered himself fortunate, for "despite my affinity for chemistry, I value my personal freedom so highly that to preserve it I would break stones for a living." During the war he and his wife Maria Heckter Strassmann concealed a Jewish friend in their apartment for months, putting themselves and their three year old son at risk.

Straßmann’s expertise in analytical chemistry was employed by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in their investigations of the products of uranium bombarded by neutrons. In December 1938, Hahn and Straßmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Meitner, who had escaped from Germany earlier that year and was then in Sweden. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, confirmed these results as being nuclear fission and offered the first theoretical explanation of the phenomenon. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. In 1944, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. (Some historians have documented the history of the discovery of nuclear fission and believe Meitner should also have been awarded the Nobel Prize with Hahn.)

In 1946 he became professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Mainz and 1948 director of the newly established Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. He later founded the Institute for Nuclear Chemistry.

In 1957 he was one of the Göttinger 18, who protested against the Adenauer government's plans to equip the Bundeswehr, Western Germany's army, with tactical nuclear weapons.

President Johnson honored Hahn, Meitner and Straßmann 1966 with the Enrico Fermi Award. The International Astronomical Union named an asteroid after him: 19136 Straßmann.

On April 22, 1980, Straßmann died in Mainz.