What happened to Catsch after the Russians entered Berlin at the close of World War II is best understood in the context of his colleagues Karl Zimmer and Hans-Joachim Born at the KWIH, who had a close professional relationship with Nikolaus Riehl, the scientific director of the Auergesellschaft, in Berlin.
However, in mid-May 1945, with the assistance of Riehl’s colleague Karl Günter Zimmer, the Russian nuclear physicists Georgy Flerov and Lev Artsimovich showed up one day in NKVD colonel’s uniforms.
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Since the plant was to be in the future Soviet zone of occupation and the Russian troops would get there before the Allies, General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project, recommended to General George Marshall that the plant be destroyed by aerial bombardment, in order to deny its uranium production equipment to the Russians.
Wirths was a colleague of Nikolaus Riehl, who was the director of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft.
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The HWA eventually provided an order for the production of uranium oxide, which took place in the Auergesellschaft plant in Oranienburg, north of Berlin.
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.
As head of the scientific-technical bureau, he was in charge of coordinating and pushing scientific work in the field of light bulbs of the three founding companies Siemens & Halske, AEG and the Auergesellschaft.