Hans-Joachim Born

Hans-Joachim Born (8 May 1909 – 15 April 1987) was a German radiochemist trained and educated at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie.

Up to the end of World War II, he worked in Nikolaj Vladimirovich Timofeev-Resovskij's Abteilung für Experimentelle Genetik, at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Hirnforschung.

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

Upon receipt of his doctorate, he was then an Assistent (Assistant) to Hahn, in the 1930s.

Born worked 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.

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.

What happened to Born after the Russians entered Berlin, at the close of World War II, is best understood in the context of his colleague Karl Zimmer at the KWIH, who also had a professional relationship with Nikolaus Riehl at the Auergesellschaft.

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

From 1945 to 1950, Riehl was in charge of a group at Plant No. 12 in Ehlektrostal', which had been assigned the task of industrializing reactor-grade uranium production.

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’.

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

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.

Born's family arrived in Ehlektrostal’ on 20 August 1946.

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.

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.

At the Sungul' facility, he again worked in a 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.

At Laboratory B, Timofeev-Resovskij headed a biophysics research department, in which Born, Catsch, and Zimmer were able to conduct work similar to that which they had done in Germany, and all three became section heads in Timofeev-Resovskij's department.

Upon arrival in East Germany in the mid-1950s, Born became the director of the Institut für Angewandte Isotopenforschung in Buch, Berlin.

He also completed his Habilitation at the Technische Hochschule Dresden, where he then also became a professor on the Fakultät für Kerntechnik.

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.

In 1957, he received and accepted a call to become a professor of radiochemistry at the Technische Hochschule München in West Germany.

Born was born in Berlin.

He trained and educated as a radiochemist under Otto Hahn at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie.