Heinz Pose

Rudolf Heinz Pose (10 April 1905 – 13 November 1975) was a German nuclear physicist who worked in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons.

He did pioneering work in nuclear physics which contributed to the understanding atom's energy levels.

He received his doctorate at Halle, in 1928, under the Nobel laureate in Physics Gustav Hertz.

From 1928 Pose was an unsalaried assistant and from 1930 a regular assistant to the physicist Gerhard Hoffmann, who was doing research in nuclear reaction measurements.

In 1929, Pose studied the nuclear reactions of aluminum nuclei bombarded with alpha particles.

His experiments showed the existence of discrete energy levels in the nucleus.

His pioneering work described for the first time the effect of resonance transformation in a nuclear process.

He continued to study these nuclear reactions in other light (low atomic number) nuclei through the 1930s.

On the basis of these works and his Habilitation, Pose was awarded a teaching contract for atomic physics in 1934.

In 1939, he was awarded an unscheduled/adjunct (außerplanmäßige) professorship at Halle.

During World War II, Pose was delegated to various organizations to carry on nuclear research and development activities.

From 1940, he worked for the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft's Institut für Physik (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics) on the German nuclear energy project Uranverein.

He worked with Werner Maurer on proof of spontaneous neutron emission of uranium and thorium.

From 1942, he was at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, where Abraham Esau was president, and also held the title of Plenipotentiary (Bevollmächtiger) for Nuclear Physics - as such, he controlled German nuclear research.

Some of the research was carried out at the Versuchsstelle (testing station) of the Heereswaffenamt (HWA, Army Ordnance Office) in Gottow; Kurt Diebner, was director of the facility.

The testing station is where Pose and Ernst Rexer compared the effectiveness of neutron production in a paraffin-moderated reactor using uranium plates, rods, and cubes.

Internal reports (See section below: Internal Reports.) on their activities were classified Top Secret and had limited distribution.

The G-1 experiment performed at the HWA testing station had lattices of 6,800 uranium oxide cubes (about 25 tons) in the neutron moderator paraffin.

Their work verified Karl Heinz Höcker's calculations that cubes were better than rods, and rods were better than plates.

In June 1944, he went to the Physics Institute of the University of Leipzig to work on cyclotron development.

Near the close of World War II, the Soviet Union sent special search teams into Germany to locate and deport German nuclear scientists or any others who could be of use to the Soviet atomic bomb project.

The Russian Alsos teams were headed by NKVD Colonel General A. P. Zavenyagin and staffed with numerous scientists, from their only nuclear laboratory, attired in NKVD officer's uniforms.

Pose was an early member of the Germany's Uranium Club but eventually participated in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons when he was appointed director of Laboratory B in Obninsk in Russia in 1945.

In the autumn of 1945, Pose was offered the opportunity to work in the Soviet Union, which he accepted.

He arrived in the Soviet Union, with his family, in February 1946.

He was to establish and head Laboratory V (also known by the code name Malojaroslavets-10, after the nearby town by the same name) in Obninsk.

The scientific staff at Laboratory V was to be both Russian and German, the former being mostly political prisoners from the Gulag or exiles; this type of facility is known as a sharashka.

(Laboratory B in Sungul' was also a sharashka and its personnel worked on the Soviet atomic bomb project. Notable Germans at Laboratory B were Hans-Joachim Born, Alexander Catsch, Nikolaus Riehl, and Karl Zimmer. Notable Russians from the Gulag were N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij and S. A. Voznesenskij.)

On 5 March 1946, in order to staff his laboratory, Pose and NKVD General Kravchenko, along with two other officers, went to Germany for six months to hire scientists.

Additionally, Pose procured equipment from the companies AEG, Zeiss, Schott Jena, and Mansfeld, which were in the Soviet occupation zone.

Pose planned 16 laboratories for his institute, which was to include a chemistry laboratory and eight laboratories.

Three heads of laboratories, Czulius, Herrmann, and Rexer, were Pose's colleagues who worked with him at the German Army's testing station in Gottow, under the Uranverein project.

(See below: Internal Reports.) Eight laboratories in the institute were:

Although many eminent German scientists went willingly to the Soviet Union, including Manfred von Ardenne, Heinz Barwich, Gustav Hertz, Nikolaus Riehl, Peter Adolf Thiessen, and Max Volmer, the Russians were not above intimidation and heavy-handed techniques.

It must have been highly intimidating to be invited to work in the Soviet Union by a uniformed (NKVD) officer of a conquering military force, especially in the wake of the devastation and brutality of the Battle of Berlin, one of the bloodiest conflicts in the closing months of the war and history itself.

On the other end of the spectrum, the heavy-handed techniques were clearly demonstrated on a large scale, such as in Operation Osoaviakhim in late 1946.

Since Pose was on the staff of the German nuclear energy project Uranverein, he had intimate knowledge of scientists who would be useful as staff and laboratory heads in his facility in Obninsk.

This included personnel such as Rexer, Herrmann, and Czulius, who worked with Pose at the German Army's testing station in Gottow, under the Uranverein project, and had co-authored a classified nuclear energy report (see below) with him.

From 1957 until 1959, he worked in Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna before settling for a professorship in Germany in 1959, eventually heading the Technische Hochschule Dresden.

Pose studied physics, mathematics, and chemistry at the University of Königsberg, the University of Munich, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Halle-Wittenberg.