Walther Gerlach

Walther Gerlach (1889 to 1979) was a German experimental physicist, best known for the Stern-Gerlach experiment on spin quantization, who held the nuclear research brief of Nazi Germany late in the Second World War. On 2 December 1943 Albert Speer appointed him head of the physics section of the Reich Research Council and plenipotentiary of nuclear physics, replacing Abraham Esau; he worked from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin with his deputy Kurt Diebner and visited the uranium research laboratory at Stadtilm. Captured in 1945, he was held at Farm Hall in England with other German scientists. After the war he returned to a chair at Munich, was rector from 1948 to 1951 and was founding president of the Fraunhofer Society. He wrote about atomic energy for general readers, including Probleme der Atomenergie in 1948 and a 1955 work on the nature and meaning of atomic power stations, and he co-signed the 1957 Gottingen Manifesto against arming West Germany with atomic weapons.