Professor Gustav Ludwig Hertz, c mid-20th century

Gustav Ludwig Hertz, born 22 July 1887, in Hamburg, Germany. Died, 30 October 1975. Hertz was a German atomic physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925 for discovering the laws governing the impact of an electron on an atom with James Franck. He studied at the Georg-August University of Göttingen (1906-1907) and hen Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich until 1908, and then the Humboldt University of Berlin until 1911. He then received his doctorate in 1911. He worked as an assistant to Rubens at the University of Berlin from 1911 to 1914. During this time Hertz and Frank performed their experiments which they would later win the Nobel Prize for. During WWI, he served in the military and in 1915, he joined Fritz Haber's chemical warfare unit. He was wounded in 1915, and returned to the University of Berlin in 1917. Hertz married Ellen Dihlmann (d. 1941) in 1919. They had two sons. In 1925, he became director of the Physics Institute of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. Then in 1928, he moved to the Technische Hochschule Berlin. As an officer veteran of WWI, he was temporarily protected from the Nazis, but eventually he was made to resign as he was classified by the Nazis as "second degree part-Jew" as his paternal grandfather had been Jewish before converting to Lutheranism in 1834. He then worked for Siemens in Germany, before leaving for the USSR in 1945. In 1950, he moved to Moscow, and in 1951, he was awarded the Stalin Prize, second class. He was also awarded the Max Planck Medal jointly with James Franck. During his time in the USSR, he worked on the Soviet atomic bomb project. Hertz then moved to the University of Leipzig in 1955. He was then the chairman of the Physical Society of the GDR (East Germany) from 1955 to 1967, and honorary chairman from 1967 until his death in 1975. He died in East Berlin in 1975, aged 88.