Alexander Catsch

Alexander Siegfried Catsch (also Katsch; 13 March 1913–16 February 1976) was a German-Russian medical doctor and radiation biologist.

Up to the end of World War II, he worked in Nikolaj Vladimirovich Timefeev-Resovskij's Abteilung für Experimentelle Genetik at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Hirnforschung (KWIH, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research).

He was taken prisoner by the Russians at the close of World War II.

As early as 1938, Catsch cited his affiliation with the I. Medizinischen Universitätsklinik der Charité; Charité was a teaching and research hospital in Berlin.

No later than 1942, he was at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Hirnforschung (KWIH, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research) 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), a world-renowned department with the status of an institute.

There, Catsch conducted research on the effects of radiation on genetic mutations.

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.

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 uranium production group at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal’ (Электросталь ).

From 1945 to 1950, Riehl was in charge of uranium production at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal'.

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’.

Catsch, who had been taken prisoner with Zimmer, was also sent to the Ehlektrostal’ Plant No. 12.

At Ehlektrostal’, 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.

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.

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.

(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. )

Laboratory B was known under another cover name as Объект 0211 (Ob’ekt 0211, Object 0211), as well as Object B. (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. )

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.

Initially, he worked in Nikolaus Riehl's group at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal’, but at the end of 1947 was sent to work in Sungul' at a sharashka known under the cover name Ob’ekt 0211.

At the Sungul' facility, he again worked in biological research department under the direction of Timofeev-Resovskij.

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.

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.

When Catsch returned to Germany in the mid-1950s, he fled to the West.

He worked at the Biophysikalische Abteilung des Heiligenberg-Instituts and then at the Institut für Strahlenbiologie am Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe.

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.

While in Karlsruhe, he was also appointed, in 1962, to the newly created Lehrstuhl für Strahlenbiologie, at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe.

In West Germany, he developed methods to extract radionucleotides from various organs.

Catsch was half-German and half-Russian.

His mother was a sister of renowned Russian biologist Ivan Puzanov.

Catsch was trained as a medical doctor.