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5 unusual facts about Nikolaus Riehl


Alexander Catsch

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.

Günter Wirths

Wirths was a colleague of Nikolaus Riehl, who was the director of the scientific headquarters of Auergesellschaft.

Nikolaus Riehl

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.

Soon after being taken to the Soviet Union, Riehl, von Ardenne, Hertz, and Volmer were summoned for a meeting with Lavrentij Beria, head of the NKVD and the Soviet atomic bomb project.

Riehl, N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij, and K. G. Zimmer Mechanismus der Wirkung ionisierender Strahlen auf biologische Elementareinheiten, Die Naturwissenschaften Volume 29, Numbers 42-43, 625-639 (1941).


Hans-Joachim Born

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.

Leopold Koppel

Riehl, Nikolaus and Frederick Seitz Stalin’s Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb (American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundations, 1996) ISBN 0-8412-3310-1


see also

Hans-Joachim Born

After rescue from the Krasnoyarsk PoW camp, he initially worked in Nikolaus Riehl’s group at Plant No. 12 in Elektrostal’, Russia, but at the end of 1947 was sent to work in Sungul' at a sharashka known under the cover name Ob’ekt 0211.

Max Steenbeck

Riehl, Nikolaus and Frederick Seitz Stalin’s Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb (American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundations, 1996) ISBN 0-8412-3310-1.